The tl;dr is that the need for sleep care has never been higher, while at the same time the awareness about sleep performance is ubiquitous with sleep tracking and wearables. This presents new opportunities to offer modernized sleep medicine and coaching delivered in new and innovative models.

It’s exciting that sleep monitoring and tracking are now ubiquitous consumer behaviors. Between Whoop, Oura, Eight Sleep, Garmin, FitBit, and Apple Watch nearly 25-30% of Americans track their sleep.

Among this group, there is a set of sleep diehards, I’m one of them, that realize sleep is the single biggest lever to improving health, happiness, and longevity. Beyond tracking, they are absolutely fanatical about the behaviors and data that drive better sleep.

But on the flip side, 50-70 million Americans are tortured by sleep disorders. Yesterday, I caught up with a former Special Ops combat veteran who described to me in excruciating detail his sleep struggles. At the end of the call, he told me he just wanted to sleep from 10-6.

Both sides of this market have the same basic need, just manifested differently. The sleep obsessed see sleep as a way to improve on an already healthy baseline. The sleep tortured are desperate for anything to solve their sleep issues.

What would it look like to offer both of these markets tools and resources to be world class sleepers? More interesting, how would health and human happiness change if more people slept better?

I see two ways to attack this opportunity:

1. Build a vertically integrated, tech-forward health services practice focused on sleep - “the One Medical of Sleep.”
2. Create a managed service organization that helps physicians launch sleep medicine practices, with a focus on digital care, at home sleep studies, and coaching.

Six years ago I subscribed to Whoop. I immediately became obsessed with understanding how today's actions influence tomorrow's performance.

I tried an Eight Sleep. I began watching my glucose levels. I dug into bloodwork and became an armchair sleep scientist.

These experiments left me wanting more. More access to coaching. More knowledge. More protocols. More facilities currently reserved for the pros. I became fascinated with places like the Red Bull Performance Center:

I know I'm not alone in my search as other serious athletes are looking for the physical and digital resources to be their absolute best.

What doesn't exist today is the perfect blend of expert coaching, community, and digital resources that bring a pro-level experience into the real world: a place where I can train like an athlete, play like an athlete, and recover like one too.

And so I believe an opportunity exists to build a high-performance membership club for modern athletes. It takes the Soho Farmhouse vibe and blends it with the the best of expert coaching, cutting-edge recovery tools, and structured competition, all within a physical space designed to foster community and optimize performance.

Building a club like this has the potential to transform the way modern athletes train, compete, and connect.

Creating A Pro-Level Ecosystem for Everyday Athletes

One way to think about the club is Strava for the real world. A place where people can compete, build community, and train like true athletes.

It includes:

1. **High-Performance Training Facilities:**State-of-the-art gyms equipped with the latest technology to support strength, endurance, and skill development.
2. Recovery Centers: Access to cold plunge sauna and other modalities to maximize physiological and psychological performance.
3. Expert Coaching: Personalized training plans and guidance from elite coaches who understand how to translate data into actionable insights.
4. Structured Competition: Leagues, tournaments, and team-based training programs that bring the camaraderie and intensity of high school and college sports into adulthood.
5. Community: A curated membership of like-minded athletes who share a commitment to excellence and a willingness to push themselves and each other.
6. **A Performance Dashboard:**Aa digital playing card to track goals, performance metrics, game statistics, and club ranking.

What Makes This Unique

The insight here is that no one has successfully integrated the digital and physical worlds for athletes in a way that fosters both individual performance and team competition.

Most fitness solutions focus on one or the other: digital tools for solo training or physical spaces for generic workouts. Here we are bridging the gap by creating a vertically integrated experience that combines the best of both worlds.

Building A Network of Serious, Amateur Athletes

In five years, the Soho House for Sports could have clubs in every major city, hosting national leagues and producing the next generation of elite athletes. But the vision goes beyond physical locations. This is about creating a global network for high-performance athletes—a place where the best train, compete, and connect. It’s a movement that redefines what it means to be an athlete in the modern world.

I want the same thing for my physical fitness and wellness. I wear a Whoop and love the data it provides. I weigh myself most mornings on an analog scale (Whoop has a Withings partnership but I haven’t bought the scale). Occasionally, I’ll test my body fat as a benchmark for overall health, a better metric than weight or BMI.

The data support that placing wellness data in one dashboard could be helpful for large scale behavior change.

At a high level, I’d want to track key markers like heart rate, heart rate variability, macros consumed etc. Here's an example of a baseline dashboard:

In terms of biomarkers, I like what Function Health has built. They are tracking 100+ biomarkers, displaying them in a simple to use dashboard and accompanied with actionable suggestions for food and supplements. Curated supplementation, and nutrition suggestions are something I’ve been interested in for a while.

A Playing Card For Health

One way to take health and wellness data and make it fun and actionable is to combine it into a playing card style format. Some data would be private, while other data could be shared as determined by the user. Ultimately, humans love competition and allowing people to use health and biomarker data in a way that is fun, playful, and built around community will be valuable. I imagine this to exist in three tiers:

1. Sports data: Stats and other fun metrics from any sport you play. Including Strava data, Peloton, and sports you might play.
2. Wellness data: HR, HRV etc.
3. In depth biomarkers: i.e. the Function health dashboard.

Lastly, this all needs to be automated. API integrators like Terra and Apple HealthKIt exist to ingest data from wearables and lab tests. The next phase will be to use agentic AI to easily put together summaries from data and provide coaching. The AI could be supplemented by a care team as well.

Ultimately, I imagine in the near future each human will have a virtual, AI powered health coach that knows what you ate, the activities you performed, your blood work levels, and your supplements to help achieve peak health.

In his essay on How To Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham says, “The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It’s to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself.”

I typically start and end with excitement about solving my own problems. But what I'm learning is that any idea has to have a component of the unknown. This is the thing the Founder knows that is unique and differentiated - the kernel of truth that will give the idea an advantage.

I'm particularly biased towards finding ideas in my passion and hobby areas, which happen to be pretty crowded consumer markets like food and wellness.

Now, as I think through ideas I'm more often considering what is contrarian.

In that same essay, Graham goes on to say:

“The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they’re something the founders themselves want, that they can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way.”

I'm keenly focused on finding ideas where others don't think they are worth doing - it's why I'm excited about things like The Soho House for Athletics and The Stripe Dashboard For Health.

For now, the best these owners can do is rely on software and smart spreadsheets to build workflows that match their needs.

In theory, AI will enable every small business to create a custom software stack. This could include bespoke POS systems built on top of payment infrastructure or online ordering flows spun up in hours using a chatbot sophisticated enough to understand customer needs, design a software implementation, and push it to production.

This is already happening in the enterprise. It presents a major existential crisis for legacy software providers and will completely rewrite the SaaS landscape.

In SMB SaaS, the order of magnitude shift will take longer; however, most local brands will be able to emulate Crumbl: building their own tech stack completely customized to their business needs.

Farms, manufacturers, and restaurants see the value in robotics technology to increase efficiency, but cost and retrofitting are obstacles to adoption.

Chef Robotics and Miso Robotics have adopted a SaaS model. Instead of upfront cap ex investment, they charge annual fees for maintenance and training.

This is a key opportunity with design partners like Chef Bombay, Amy’s Kitchen, and Sunbasket. Chipotle, Sweetgreen, and Kernel are benefiting from robotics in food services as well.

Chipotle’s partnership with Vebu Labs to deploy the Autocado has shown promise. The device can process an avocado in 26 seconds, much faster than a human.

Sweetgreen’s Infinite Kitchen are proving to be more profitable and effective than traditional stores.

Steve Ells, the Chipotle founder, has fully committed to plant-based cuisine at Kernel, his mostly automated restaurant concept for which he raised $36 million.

Robotics will greatly impact the food supply chain. Access to this machinery and innovation is the next step in food tech, whether a brand buys, builds, or rents.