How much would you pay to help your employees have a good night sleep?
Last year, the CEO of AI startup Factory took an unusual talent management tactic: buying everyone pricey sleep tech.
Factory has grown rapidly since its 2023 founding. Factory now has 120 employees and raised $150 million in April, backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Blackstone.
CEO Matan Grinberg shared on "20VC" that he gave every employee a $3,000 Eight Sleep mattress cover when the startup had 30 employees. "The decadence of startups, right?" he said.
Eight Sleep's mattress covers use internal liquid to cool and heat a bed. The system can also split down the middle of a bed, allowing different partners to have different bed temperatures. Newer models include elevation features to lift and lower.
In a follow-up interview with Business Insider, Grinberg compared his employees to professional athletes. Like NBA players, his engineers need rest, he said.
"I want to make sure everyone is squeezing out every ounce of brain power they have," he said. "To do that, you need to get good sleep."
Grinberg said he also limits processed sugar at the office because of his concerns that it isn't good for focus. Instead, he shells out on better, more expensive snacks, like protein chips and canned matcha.
He's not trying to be like Google in the 2010s. Grinberg spoke against the "give everyone a bouncy castle" era. (Those days are long over, as Big Tech pulls back its lavish benefits.) Those perks were "unrelated to work," he said.
But Grinberg also isn't a fan of what he sees in his competitors: "grindslop," or flexing how hard you're working and touting your 996 schedule.
"We're not running a daycare," he said. "I don't need to mandate certain hours."
The pricey mattress covers, he said, were the right style of benefit. He hasn't yet gifted the Eight Sleep products to Factory's new employees, he said, but said he was considering making them a "standard issue" — or at least a comparable health stipend.
Though they typically lack the deep pockets of established tech giants, startups have long embraced decadent benefits to attract talent or make their employees more productive. Series CEO Nathaneo Johnson told Business Insider that he hired a private chef — and that it was more beneficial than a chief of staff.
Other CEOs have also prioritized sleep. The CEO of the wearables company Whoop said in 2024 that he gave employees $100 a month whose "average sleep performance is 85% or more."
In the post-pandemic wellness boom, many have made getting better sleep a priority. Consumers are buying mouth tape and Oura rings to ensure they get the best rest possible. There's a word for this online: "sleepmaxxing."
Grinberg didn't know exactly how much more productive the Eight Sleep products made Factory's employees. He knew that they enjoyed them — and that he didn't want to be "too big brother."
"We joke at the office: Imagine measure, 'Billy didn't sleep well, so don't trust his code today,'" Grinberg said. "We haven't gone that far."
Still, he trusted that good sleep correlated with good work.
"They're going to be better," he said of his employees on the podcast. "They're going to have more of their wits about them. They'll be sharper."