The founders of Eight Sleep — part of YC’s summer 2015 class — set out to solve a problem that resonates with just about everybody: they wanted

Lessons on building hardware from the founders of Eight Sleep

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2024-05-08 18:30:08

The founders of Eight Sleep — part of YC’s summer 2015 class — set out to solve a problem that resonates with just about everybody: they wanted better sleep.

Not just more sleep. Better sleep. That real, deep, wake-up-happy sleep that most people only get when the stars align just right. A huge part of that equation, as anyone who has woken up at 2 a.m. to throw the blanket off could tell you, is temperature.

So Eight Sleep’s founders built the Pod, an intelligent mattress cover loaded with tech that learns the temps that you sleep best at and heats/cools itself accordingly throughout the night. People love it.

“Hardware is hard” is a saying for a reason, but Eight Sleep has gotten incredibly good at it over the last ten years. With the team launching an entirely new version of the Pod this week — the Pod 4, read more about that here — I asked co-founders Alexandra Zatarain, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, and Matteo Franceschetti to share some learnings that might help the future hardware founders of the world.