The number one thing I hear when I ask people what gets in the way of their rest is temperature. I now track my sleep obsessively with the Oura ring, and it’s been interesting to see how very subtle shifts in internal and external temperature make a huge difference in my quality of sleep. Women in particular go through constant hormonal fluctuations that cause internal temperature shifts. I couldn’t hear one more person tell me that temperature is their main problem and not work on solving that.

This fabric is really exciting for a few reasons, one of which is that it’s cool-to-touch. We’ve leveraged Pima cotton — which is beloved for its strong fibers, breathability, and light weight — and engineered it to have more attributes. By bringing in ceramics and knitting it in certain ways, we’ve created a fabric that can dissipate your sweat more, which creates better evaporation, keeps the fabric cool against your skin, and reduces the true temperature you feel. We saw as much as three degrees difference in how people show up on the heat map. Imagine adjusting your thermostat down three degrees. That’s a very big difference!

It’s such a challenge. I don’t have the perfect answer to this yet, but I’ll tell you that sometimes I wonder if we’re doing a disservice to people by making it sound like you can do everything. We’ve said, “Anything is possible,” but the subtext that nobody is talking about is, “as long as you don’t drop any of the balls and you don’t really care about the enjoyment of life.” It sounds a little dark, but I see this incredible tension between wanting to be there for your kids and needing to be there for your business with many of the entrepreneurs I invest in who are mothers. There were phases in the business where I couldn’t sleep at all and just worked all the way through the night. And it made me even more convinced of our mission of the importance of rest because I have been to the deep, dark places of insomnia, and it takes all the joy out of life.

I don’t mean to say that people should never start businesses. It’s more that you have to be real with yourself from day one about your life and what you want for your life. Being a parent is a full-time job, and then there’s having a full-time job, and then there’s running a business, which is like doing four jobs at the same time. Do you have the support structure in place — can you afford to hire people? Do you have a spouse who can play the primary role with the kids? — that will enable you to be successful in your business? What are the sacrifices you’re willing to make for this to work?

For me personally, I don’t think it worked. Yes, I have a business, and yes, I have kids, but if enjoying my life in that chapter is part of the equation, that was what I sacrificed. But, where I am now is so exciting because we brought on a CEO, my kids are older, my business is bigger and more stable, and it’s not just about what I can do anymore because I have a team. That’s been a major unlock.

Be realistic going in, set yourself up for success, and define success. People approach business methodically. We start with a value proposition, a mission, values, the problem we’re solving and how we’re going to approach it, but we don’t think about life like that. Taking the same lens with which you approach your professional life to your broader life and then making sure that the decisions you’re making in your professional life fit into it will lead you to a more successful outcome.

We’re getting ready to expand  into thinking about rest more holistically. We’re going to do that with content and with Rest Shop. In my quest for rest, I’ve come up with favorite products, rituals, and practices that have really helped me reset myself, and Rest Shop will make those available to our customers. For a lot of people, rest is the thing they need, and I think that launching Rest Shop will allow us to speak more broadly in a way that will really help a lot of people.