Cameron van den Dungen, Sleeptite: From F1 racing and business to the future of sleep technology

and we are live under ceoism podcast with Cameron Van Den Duncan happy to have him on it's quite early in Australia hope that you slept well Cameron uh we're gonna talk about sleep today we're gonna talk about Cameron's background which is quite interesting so apparently he popped the shoulder at the 6K swim race um so pretty brave uh folk right there uh he knows Spain that's for

sure Cameron nice to have you on the bike and you shortly introduce yourself and tell us about sleep tight yeah thank you very much Charles and yes it is very early here in Melbourne but as you said swimming's a good thing you get up nice and early and do lots of kilometers but my background is uh uh I've owned and run many many businesses over the years

mainly in and around the bedroom uh my father started the business that became Australia's number one betting retail chain for for American listeners and viewers we kind of like the Mattress Firm of Australia um and off the back of that business the global financial crisis hit I came back in to help him out with that business and then realized it could be done so much better better

and the the bedroom of the future was evolving and I thought uh what does the connected bedroom look like in the connected home of the future and here we are in 2023 and the the world has connected homes and it has connected bedrooms and I've spent the last six years developing technology for connected bedrooms and in the meanwhile you were racing supercars and having your own radio

show I've heard yeah I I didn't write Pat that was well before I came back into the family business uh didn't make it to the levels I wanted to and uh had to retire at the right old age of 27 and uh that was when I went fully into business but that was actually a really good um beginning for my career in business because uh it takes a lot of money to run a race car a race team and a career there and yeah yeah I still commentate Formula One in Australia and Singapore I have a radio show in Australia and I was on a Netflix documentary that I know is massive around the world and that's called drive to survive so if you watch episode one season one you'll hear an Australian accent and

that's me I love that that uh Tilly Series so I'll watch it again just to hear your Australian accent um yeah that that Siri right like it's I mean you've been in the weeds of of that business but it's such Fierce competition and I just love seeing athletes in their natural environments you know in their true form um how has been that life for you what have

you gained from that life as a as a driver and what have you learned from very high level at athletes like uh Lewis for example when you were commenting uh so so I'll draw it back to business because a lot of people that would be listening in here watching on here are probably looking for inspiration tips advice information relating to to their careers particularly for starting up

businesses or scaling up businesses one thing about motor racing in particular is an understanding of having almost no shame in going out and opting for the close going out and asking for the deal going out and asking for sponsors and when you're selling a product it's quite easy after you've spent years trying to sell yourself as the product so it's quite um it's quite a confronting process

so people have spent years in Motorsport particularly drivers understand business they understand it deeply but when you're also developing technology which again a lot of people that will be watching this are in the middle of doing um there's a lot of engineering that goes into Motor Racing shock horror it's cars trying to make them go fast but what they don't realize is the driver input to engineering

and understanding engineering parameters and sometimes you can be in a spot with a car you think is good but occasionally you just have to go and try something outside the box just to see if there's a better way of doing it and so having that mentality of constantly testing checking measuring and sometimes this is one that probably stood out the most to me working with a lot

of fundamental researchers when I was trying to translate some research into a commercial product there's a lot of fear out of the lab on you know they want to make it perfect before they actually put it out into the real world sometimes and particularly in Motorsport the background is the car is not very fast when it's in the workshop you need to put it out on a

track at some stage and I've said that to my my researchers time and time again we have to put this out and see what happens in the real world I know it's not ready yet I know it's not perfect but we have to find out because there will be things that we do not foresee in a workshop that immediately become apparent once it goes out into the real world 100 what if you're not making good times and you're it's lap after lap and you're realizing that the window to potentially winning a Podium is getting smaller and smaller what do you do as a driver and what you do as a driver's coach so from a driver's perspective you actually you're on the radio because a lot of the time uh in that you're running with

a lot of emotion and if you're not uh performing to what you believe you can you actually have this guilt that you're letting people down because a lot of money a lot of time a lot of effort um you have Workshop uh you have you know just race staff mechanics that'll work 24 hours sometimes on your car just so you can go out and compete it's a lot of guilt from a driver so a lot of the time they'll have a race engineer or even sometimes a sports star psychologist that will be working with them and a lot they'll have tips and tricks one is a reset Point around the circuit just to reset your brain and focus on the process ahead and that's essentially what you try and train yourself to do forget about

what the other drivers are doing go back to your marks where's your break point where's your turn in point and try and become absolutely perfect at what you do and by focusing on that you actually reset yourself mentally and you're able to get yourself back into that optimal window but sometimes with the days as a driver you realize you just don't have the car you might have

either driven it and you've just got to get through the race again it goes back to that psychological element of just resetting your brain and trying to make sure you do the things that you can control and try and get yourself get some form of salvage some sort of result that makes you feel confident for the next time you get back in the car and is it

fair to say that the guy on the radio telling the driver or giving indications to the driver he's trying to go for you stress which is just enough stress to get the driver moving or waking up but not too much oh it's you're actually is that really interesting you thought you said that many many years ago I went to the Australian Institute of sport for motor racing

and we worked a lot with sports psychologists because it's a it's a very mental sport um and they they talked about finding your optimal Zone getting into the zone now this might be slightly outdated Theory or they might have built on it now but it stuck with me because I had immediate experience the next time I went to a racetrack I used to feel that when I

went to go out in the car I needed to pump myself up I needed to get myself excited and get myself into a knot I thought into the Zone ready to convey and compete and and do uh you know basically combat door handle or door handle but um what I found after going through this process is I'm naturally I sit naturally high up on the on the uh the I guess you'd say energy level and I needed to calm myself down in order to compete at my best so I went from listening to AC DC to psych myself up into a into a race to listening to people like Bob Marley and Frank Sinatra just trying to calm myself down into the zone and I actually found that if I fell asleep in the race

seat before I went out and competed I was actually in the right Zone and I used to do that quite regularly and my team would go oh he's asleep it's going to be a good race because it just meant I was calm and I was back in control but that's not for everybody because I had friends that were naturally laconic that actually did need to pump themselves

up it's just having a bit of a self-awareness about what you personally needed okay before I move forward you need to tell me how you're getting asleep on command I can still not do that I learned to meditate myself to sleep this year but like sleeping on command before race how do you do that you don't you just naturally got yourself into a psychological there's a lot

of drivers you'll hear Formula One drivers talk about the fact that they'll actually be asleep in the hour before a race um it's almost like that zen-like state that meditation-like state I mean sleep is the ultimate meditation isn't it um I wish I could tell you there was a trick to help yourself go to sleep on command but things like meditation are critically important there's all these

different elements to the environment within which you sleep the surface on um there's a lot there's a lot that goes into sleep and what's really interesting is around the world people are actually starting to pay attention to the quality of their sleep now I'm up at 5 30 in the morning but I went and I made sure I went to bed a couple of hours earlier last

night just to make sure I didn't compromise on my quantity of sleep my quality of sleep was okay very hard to measure quality of sleep and that's what I'm working on with sleep time what does a good night's sleep look like from a data set point of view but um it's a it's an interesting thing meditation helps breathing exercises yoga those sorts of things are actually really

good tools and and helpers when it comes to getting uh getting getting decent sleep and being able to fall asleep and don't even get me started on diet and what people put in their bodies before they go to bed I'll get you started uh give me a couple seconds though I want to pitch a startup idea to you so um the other day I had this compression boot sky from New Zealand come on my pod actually he's in Singapore now and gave me the idea to try these compression boots which is really surprising as an athlete I really I never tried these I tried them the other day and I'll almost fell to sleep so I would take this invention further and it would be a full body like robotic kind of massage plus the

headphones plus the the the Eye blinds do you think that would get me to sleep in a couple of minutes there is some emerging technology you don't even need to go through that much accessories there's um some technology that I'll spend a bit of time at the Consumer Electronics Show at the beginning of this year went straight into the JP Morgan Healthcare conference in San Francisco and

then rolled across to New York for another conference I did three conferences in two weeks in New York in January this year now one of the big things that I'd already been exploring in Australia as a a device that'll help people go to sleep it's not so much a device and I'll I'll on some stage I'll talk about the difference between a nearable and a wearable and

why I believe nearables will surpass wearables very very quickly but um there is actually a uh A vibe a vibration and I want to say um frequency but I'll have the wrong terminology my my researchers will kill me for it but there is a certain vibration that if you expose the body to it or certain parts of the body it will naturally put you to sleep now

there's a paper out of rmit University in Melbourne in um in Australia that's probably about four or five years ago did a research study into Road accidents and Road safety and they they found this frequency that when the body was exposed to it in a car seat it put you to sleep so it actually led to more accidents on the road I looked at that and went

how do we take that frequency and put it into a sleep environment and there's companies now doing it there was some Scandinavian companies I saw at CES there's a cool little American company that I saw there working with sleep number and doing some things there but they're all playing with this vibration and trying to minimize it and put it into a um you put it into a

place that is uh is relatively easy to deliver and we've identified that actually around the back side around you around your um your lower back and your your almost your hammies your hamstrings if you if you expose that part of the body that's enough to put you to sleep but there's also some theories around the neck just if you can just deliver that frequency at the neck

but still relatively early in in research but that that's probably playing in that same space that your your friend out of New Zealand and Singapore is looking at because there's a lot we can start doing I know you said compression compressions are challenging itself just because when you try and sleep you can have heat you can use another element which is why you want to to Really

minimize what people have to wear or interact with and try and deliver it through surfaces like mattresses or chairs well okay let's do on back here but before we do maybe yeah let's tell the audience about 40 wings um uh.com dot EU Au that I am checking right now and sleep tight so sleep tight is like a sub company as part of 40 Wings well they're very

separate so I'm a part owner of and the director so I'm on the board of 40 Winks um that's very much focused at middle Australia as I said before it's like a mattress firm in the US or a dreams in the UK whether the biggest um mattress specialty retail store in the and so we've got stores all over Australia and every state and territory but sleep tight

was my own passion project and I I created that outside of the 40 Wings ecosystem um mainly that business has a focus on uh aged care so helping identify and uh and deliver technology into a bedroom in an aged care setting that's not my complete end goal but it's a very natural starting point from a commercialization journey for some very cool technology which is about data extraction

off mattress protectors fascinating um my first question is like how you and your dad still stay the father and son in the business and did not chill off one another because my dad's also an entrepreneur and I wouldn't have made a no I I do not make a good match with him it's quite funny so what we do is he's in America at the moment with my sister who's a senior exec at Apple so they're currently in the Mojave Desert I think when he gets back he then goes off to Europe when he gets back from there we send him to Southeast Asia and we basically keep him away from the office um no look my father and I have a great relationship of what we had to do early on so our relationship extends

to the 40 weeks business sleep tight's completely separate he has nothing to do with that business but um sporty Winx was he was one of the founding members of that group so so yeah that's his baby he once said to me it's his life's work um and it's very hard to step on someone's toes and tell them that they're doing something wrong with their life's work so

we had a lot of clashes early on while I was younger and much more immature than I am now I'm still immature but a lot a lot more in mature previously um I I had to set boundaries with him very clear ones ago this is my section of the business this is your section of because we realize whenever we we clashed it was those crossover points so we just had to set very clearly defined boundaries and they we still crept over every now and then but it was actually much more controlled than uh probably the eight times he sacked me previously in the 47 times I resigned hahaha oh that's funny um and not funny at the same time this must have been pretty uh painful and I can relate um so much you're in

a really cool Niche right like I've been a biohacker for the last seven years my first company was a nootropic and yeah sleep has probably been the number one biohack that I started with and it's gone in less important nowadays because I feel like kind of mastered it um the Sleep Quality but I'll never like fully reach it up obviously and with sleep tight you're in an

even cooler Niche which is mattress for seniors you're also taking a research aspect which is fascinating um so tell us about the niche and also tell us in the process about the case studies that we've seen in America with Casper and nowadays eight sleep yeah eight slave's a really interesting brand I've been tracking them and following them for quite some time I think Casper was the Forerunner

for that bet in the Box theme it what it did for the mattress industry was said the customer's convenience is actually one of the most critical important parts of the buying purchase and so Casper reinvented the delivery process making it simple making the what is a a painful process buying a bed as simple and convenient as possible that's been replicated around the world and delivered a great

job the next Evolution though needed something to be able to fight back because the big mattress Brands like Tempo Sealy um International gym inserted bedding I know they're going through their troubles now but they've been a power out for however long globally they fought back the retailers fought back and all of a sudden convenience wasn't a winning Factor anymore so eight sleep took that and went further

and went okay we need technology we need to better understand what is happening during that sleep and deliver a an adjustable easy to almost like a set and forget system where we can deliver the right support to the body every night whether or not you add 10 kilos lose 10 kilos gain a partner lose a partner whatever happens in the you know the 10 years that you

will often own a mattress for so where I started and why I bring that up I guess and why it's relevant to this this part of the conversation is please type was born out of that exact um Insight so I looked at these bed in the box companies I looked at what was happening in the bedroom and I went hang on a second why do we need to make people fit a bed why don't we make beds fit people because we literally walk into a bed store or we jump online and you look at it and you see all these mattresses and you're like well well I don't really know what's right for me and what's right for me today is not going to be right for me in two years it's not going to

be right for me in five six seven years women go through menopause there's various different requirements that happen to the body there um men gain lose weight have different Fitness levels have different focuses different stresses in their life lots of different things that come in so for me the biggest thing was I saw a lot of Hardware coming out but what I didn't see was people understanding

and interpreting data that actually showed what a good night fleet was and to this day you know I I have wonderful conversations with people like Philippe Khan at a full power AI he's in the Bay Area in um up in San Francisco uh incredible guy he's doing a massive amount of work I think he holds 270 patents for sleep-based algorithms for feeding this Hardware you know phenomenal

business then you look at um sleep number again they hold you know several hundred patents they've just taken the chief clinician out of Phillips sleep and they've now made in their cheap clinician so there's a lot of work going there but no one really knows genuinely no one knows what a good night's sleep actually looks like they can tell you how much REM sleep you had they

can tell you how much you tossed and turned they can but they can't tell you whether it was good enough I genuinely can't because we haven't gone through and said this much REM sleep is actually really good for you we believe that the more REM sleep you have it the better it is so I set off on a journey going well how do we extract that data and actually work out what is a good good night's sleep look like from a from a data point of view now I'm not the only one doing it we're all racing to find that um that that that I guess algorithm of of what it looks like and how you feed the hardware but I mean that's the arms race of the Sleep game right now now I found

a natural output as I was on that Journey whenever you build a company you want to make revenue streams well I do anyway I'm not a big one for raising being a a family-owned business if you ever have to raise Capital you generally see it as a failure of your business model I know it's very old school thinking but it's actually quite um quite popular right now

particularly amongst PE I can tell you but um the critical component for me was how do I monetize each stage of my development on my ultimate long-term pathway fascinating you know it's maybe a mirror telling you in the morning dude you look like or uh camera just looking how quick you move uh when you get out of bed you know do you get straight up out of

bed there's like the Sleep Cycle there's this Aura ring there's this Apple watch maybe a correlation between all the data it's just a fascinating field and I suspect um that there's a lot to do with the gut as well with your digestion that's a no an underlooked aspect that I feel research should look in fascinating interview Cameron um one last question like at your busy successful guy

how do you sleep at night uh I prioritize it so I sleep really really well by using Apple watch I use the same one or a ring shout out to them they do the hard yards very good product and they do the research behind the scenes but um I I've mainly focus on uh duration time in bed so I can't control quality of sleep due to external pressures stresses other elements that are that are we in my life I diet by the way just to finish that point the second brain which is your stomach that is a massive area that people need to better understand massive area I still don't do the right thing by mine at times especially when I stay up too late um but it realistically it just comes down to for

me duration of time in bed and I monitor that through my Apple watch um and at the moment I think I'm running it at an average of eight hours 28 minutes of duration time in bed and I'm finding that it just makes my stress levels lower makes my decision making better and it just makes me a happier person overall cam thank you so much where can people

find out more about you uh jump onto LinkedIn search my name through these details but also just check out flightsleeptop.com I've filed National Affairs uh filing of my patents in all markets including the us but I'll be spending a lot more time