Building a startup means founders have to do anything they can to keep their business afloat. For Jeff Kahn and the founders of Rise Science, that meant texting 300 pound football players in the middle of the night to go to sleep.
Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing activity that exists
Rise Science, a Chicago startup that provides personalized sleep coaching for college and professional athletes, works with major sports organizations like the Chicago Bulls, Jacksonville Jaguars and the Tennessee Volunteers football team to help players get a better night's sleep and perform at their best. The startup's technology creates a tailored sleep schedule for every player, sending automated messages when it's time to wind down and go to sleep.
But Rise Science's platform wasn't always so sophisticated. Kahn, along with co-founders Jacob Kelter and Leon Sasson, founded the company as undergrads at Northwestern University and launched their pilot with the NU football team in 2013. Having done extensive research on sleep and its impact on athletic performance as students, the group wanted to see if they could create personalized sleep schedules for each athlete and help them get the right amount of sleep, and get to sleep at the right time.
After taking into account things like a player's schools schedule, age and genetics they determined the right amount of sleep for 20 different NU players. Then, they created a calendar and literally texted each player when it was time for them to hit the sack.
"We were up super late at night texting guys at all different times, and we’d set up our calendar to notify them. It was insane," Kahn said. "And then we saw that after 8 weeks, it was super effective."
Each athlete needs a different amount of sleep to play at their highest level, Kahn said. For example, some players need seven and a half hours, while some need seven hours and fifty minutes. Everyone has unique sleep patterns largely based on genetics, he said.
Their research found that for every extra hour of sleep players got, they reacted 8% faster on the field. Coaches would measure execution rates on the field and found that players who hit their sleep goals were more likely to perform well on game day, Kahn said.
"Sleep is the most potent performance enhancing activity that exists," Kahn said. "There's no drug, there's no routine, there's no activity that we’ve seen that comes close to the type of impact that sleep has on a wide-ranging set of human functions."
"(Northwestern) had never seen anything like this before in terms of that impact," he added.
Eventually, Rise Science started working with Twilio, a service that lets you automatically send text messages, and they no longer had to manually text players to remind them to go to bed. And they built a comprehensive sleep coaching platform that uses sleep sensors placed under a player's bed and an app that shows athletes their sleep insights based on their specific sleep data. Rise Science also offers teams 1-on-1 sleep coaching with a live human for more complicated issues, like how to get a full night's sleep with a two-year-old at home. (Kahn said he's been on the phone with wives of Pro Bowl football players on how to optimize sleep with a crying baby in the house).
Coaches can then see how much better their players are sleeping, and examine in a measurable way how that increased sleep impacts performance.
"(Coaches) have never been able to do anything to help players improve sleep behaviors," Kahn said. "We come in and (we show how) we’re going to be able to increase sleep by over an hour and solve your players' sleep problems, and here’s what that's going to do for their reaction time, execution, and reducing injury rate. That's the sort of thing they've never had before."
Along with working with the Bulls, Jaguars and Volunteers, Rise Science has partnerships with the Miami Dolphins, West Virginia University, and other teams Kahn declined to name. Rise Science charges teams between $35,000 and $150,000, typically signing season long, multi-year agreements, Kahn said.
Kahn said that Rise Science exclusively works with elite athletic programs but acknowledges that sleep has performance impact beyond sports, like for people with bi-piloar disorder who need the right amount of sleep to prevent a manic episode.
Rise Science, which is now based in Cards Against Humanity's co-working space, has raised what Kahn called a "pre-seed" round, and counts Chicago Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners and IDEO among its backers.
Images via Rise Science
