GoKawiilKey Takeaways At 22, Gestetner built a $100 million company but wrecked himself along the way.
He discovered that body temperature is the single most controllable variable in sleep quality and launched an AI mattress cover to personalize it for each person.
Orion’s point of difference is price, a sleep test that personalizes from day one and obsessive customer support.
For most of the last two decades, sleep was something founders bragged about not getting. Four hours a night was a flex. The less you slept, the more you supposedly wanted it. Elon Musk humblebragged about sleeping minimal hours on the factory floor at Tesla back in the day.
That story has flipped. Sleep is now the thing high performers want to optimize. A new generation raised on Whoop bands and longevity podcasts chases a good night’s sleep as a badge of honor not a mark of shame.
Harry Gestetner, 25, is one of the new sleep-better generation. Three years ago, he admits to “working like a dog and neglecting every other area of my life” creating his company Fanfix. The company scaled fast and was acquired by SuperOrdinary for $100 million plus, but it came with another price: Gestetner developed vertigo severe enough to take him out of work for a long stretch.
“I was forced to learn the hard way that as a founder I needed to start taking my performance seriously and thinking of myself like an athlete,” he says. “Athletes do a lot of work off the court so that they can perform when they’re on the court. Whereas as founders, we tend to only think about being on the court.”
He got obsessed with longevity and started tracking his sleep. The data told him to spend more hours in bed, but that wasn’t an option. He was in bed; he just wasn’t sleeping. What he wanted was a way to hack his sleep to get more of it.
The turning point was meeting Dr. Michael Breus, a leading sleep specialist. Breus kept hammering the point that body temperature is the single most controllable variable in sleep quality. If Gestetner could develop a product that measured a person’s temperature throughout the night, he reasoned, he could use AI to nudge their sleep environment toward the ideal state, boosting deep sleep and REM while cutting down on wake-ups.
“I wanted to build something actionable that not only gave me the data, but also actually did something to improve my sleep,” he says.
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