Hi,

It’s been a year since I started Rhythm - I wanted to take this moment to share my thoughts and feelings on this past year of bringing the hardware product of my dreams to life, and why it matters so much to me.

A year ago was when I left my job as a mechanical design engineer to work on a mission I became obsessed with - helping people get the light they need to feel happy, healthy, and well.

Thank you for being here. I’ll be waxing poetic below, but if you’d like an abbreviated version, please check out my summary here.

Imagine if every person woke up to a beautiful sunrise in their room instead of snoozing a blaring alarm. Imagine how your relationships might improve if you could show up as your best (most awake!) self for your friends, family, community, and coworkers. Imagine if people could get through long, dark winters without dipping into seasonal depression.

I started this project in my garage, four years ago during the pandemic, as a way to battle my own seasonal depression. It took me years of tinkering, trying out prototypes, and interviewing people about their struggles with this problem to really believe that I was the person meant to solve it (and work on this full-time in the process). When you have an amazingly fulfilling engineering career, it’s hard to give that up for a massive amount of uncertainty, career risk, and personal monetary risk. I cashed out all my savings (goodbye Robinhood account, goodbye index fund brokerage, goodbye rainy day fund, goodbye paycheck, goodbye 401k/HSA, goodbye health insurance!), spending into things like R&D engineering, intern salaries, designers, inventory, office space.

The opportunity cost of not following my dreams was just too big to ignore - I knew the lingering feeling of “what if I really tried?” would never go away. I definitely wouldn’t want to be on my deathbed feeling regretful about something like this.

Over this year, we’ve done some miraculous feats, at a miraculous pace, and at miraculous quality and integrity. I am so proud and grateful for everyone who has helped make it happen.

Me and three interns (Saad, Giselle, Adrian!) designed and engineered an entirely new thermal system, revamped the industrial design, and launched a new product from scratch in just four months. Stephen Bannick, an incredible talented friend from Stanford, was building out his graphic design portfolio, and generously offered to help with a brand revamp. Rachel Leou, a recent graduate of Stanford’s design and engineering program joined as founding engineer, staking her career on Rhythm’s mission. We found an amazing design partner, BEBOP Designers, who helped bring beauty to the intensely engineered object we’d created. We were able to do this at Humanmade’s hardware accelerator, which was a grant-funded nonprofit program.

We did this all without any certainty of success - the world has not seen any product like this. Would people like it? Would we be able to justify the eye-watering price tag that was necessary to ship a piece of crazy engineering like this? How might this change peoples’ lives?

We launched the product with the new brand, and within another four months, made more revenue than I would’ve ever dreamed of in our first launch (without spending a single cent on marketing or advertisements). Within another four months, we’re making deliveries of a world-class product, straight from our workshop, to customers like you that truly believed in our mission.

Some other miracles have happened. I sent a cold email to Bryan Johnson, a millionaire famous for finding the world’s best health and longevity products, and he decided to try out our product. He loves it, has bought several units for his home and office, and uses it every morning in his official protocol. He’s been one of our biggest proponents, and I’m so grateful for his belief in our mission and product.

That’s when we knew this might get big - and we needed to prepare. We knew we couldn’t continue making these one-by-one in San Francisco. We recently went to Shenzhen, to a trusted contract manufacturer my friend has worked with for many years, to engage with their services to scale Rhythm, where I gave an hour-long presentation on Rhythm’s mission, product, and engineering in Chinese to a room full of manufacturing experts. We’re currently working on translating our work in the Rhythm workshop to a mass-manufacturable, truly scalable production platform with our partners.

Lastly, in September, I was invited to The Pitch Show, where I pitched Rhythm in front of a live panel of venture capitalists. There, I painted the full vision for Rhythm - a future where we had units in every home, office, classroom, hospital room - every indoor “obligated-to-be-there” space people spend unhealthy amounts of time in. A future where everyone has their “Light Score,” telling them how in-tune their circadian rhythm is, enabled by data-driven modeling of people’s circadian systems and melatonin levels through ambient light sensors already widely available on people’s iPhones and smart devices. We got some commitments that I’m really looking forward to partnering with.

If you’ve read all the way down here, thank you for sticking with me. It’s truly been an amazing year, and incredible journey. I feel so blessed with the gifts and miracles that have come my way.

After this amazing year of building our Rhythm’s business, I’m raising our first round of funding - if there’s anyone you think I should talk to, please do let me know. I would be grateful for your help with Rhythm’s next miracle.