Jeff
Kahn
He woke up tired one too many mornings, read the science behind it, and built Rise Science around the answer.
What he is actually working on
Rise Science makes an app called RISE, and Jeff Kahn runs the company as co-founder and CEO out of Chicago. The pitch is deceptively small: it does not want to grade last night's sleep with a score. It wants to tell you, in advance, when your energy will peak and when it will crater today - and what to do about it.
That distinction is the whole thesis. RISE is built on two numbers Kahn keeps coming back to: sleep debt, a running tally of the hours you have missed against what your body genetically needs, and circadian rhythm, your internal clock. Sleep researchers call this the two-process model. Kahn calls it the only two dials most people need to watch.
It is a contrarian position in a market obsessed with REM percentages and deep-sleep bar charts. Kahn's view is that a pretty sleep-stage readout you cannot act on is a distraction. Sleep debt and body-clock timing, on the other hand, you can move.
What happened when sales teams slept
The workplace study
Fortune 500 sales teams using RISE to sleep more and plan around their circadian rhythm.
Source: Rise Science. The same product had already been road-tested on pro and collegiate athletes across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS and NCAAF.
It started as a class project
At Northwestern, Kahn was studying health systems engineering with a schedule crammed tight enough that he woke up exhausted most days. Low mood, low output. The ordinary student move is to accept it and drink more coffee. Kahn went and read why.
The reading led somewhere unusual. He and Leon Sasson - a computer science and industrial engineering student who, by his own account, did not think sleep mattered until Kahn talked him into it - set up an independent study with Dan Brown, a clinical professor at the Segal Design Institute. The goal was human-centered: take real sleep science and design a product a person could actually use.
Then the referral that changed everything. The Northwestern football team heard what the two undergrads were doing and invited them in to improve players' sleep, and therefore their play. That is not a business plan you can write in a pitch deck. It is the kind of thing that only happens when the work is good enough to travel by word of mouth. From there it spread across professional and collegiate sports, then into Fortune 500 sales floors, then to the public in the summer of 2020.
Kahn and Sasson co-founded Rise Science in 2015, the same year Kahn finished his master's in engineering design and innovation. They were later named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Kahn's research has since surfaced in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and on ESPN, NBC, CBS and Fox Sports.
The receipts, in order
- 2013Earns a BS in Health Systems Engineering from Northwestern University.
- 2015Co-founds Rise Science with Leon Sasson and completes his MS in Engineering Design and Innovation.
- 2015 - 2019Works with pro and collegiate teams across the NFL, MLB, NBA, MLS and NCAAF to improve sleep and performance.
- 2020Launches the consumer RISE app publicly; downloads later pass 1 million.
- 2021Closes a Series A round; total funding reaches $15.5 million.
The gospel, condensed
"Sleep is the foundation for all human functioning: mental, physical, emotional."
ON WHY IT COMES FIRST"Your sleep 'need' is a genetic trait, just like your height or eye color."
ON THE MYTH OF EIGHT HOURS"Light is the most powerful circadian 'cue' there is."
ON THE BODY CLOCK"Sleep is as important to our functioning as water, food, and air."
ON RANKING THE ESSENTIALSKahn, unabridged
"Better Sleep and Rise Science with CEO Jeff Kahn" - Finding Genius Podcast.