3 Things: Counteract Drinking Effects on Sleep, Crunchbase for Web3, 3D Printer for Kids Toys

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Counteract Drinking Effects on Sleep

• Crunchbase for Web3

• 3D Printer for Kids Toys

1. Counteract Drinking Effects on Sleep

While having a few cocktails or glasses of wine might help you fall asleep, it’s been widely studied and concluded that drinking has extremely negative impacts on sleep. Alcohol acts as a depressant, affecting the central nervous system and slowing down brain activity which creates sedative effects (hence the falling asleep faster part) but then has ramifications on the natural sleep cycle for the rest of the night. In particular, it causes the body to not experience the normal length or quality of REM sleep which is where deep sleep and dreaming occurs. When you consume alcohol, it gets absorbed into the bloodstream and eventually makes its way to the liver where enzymes metabolize the alcohol. As alcohol is slowly metabolized during the night, it creates an imbalance between slow-wave sleep and REM sleep which normally occurs in 90-minute cycles. This imbalance causes shorter sleep duration and increased night disruptions which dramatically reduces overall sleep quality.

There has been an explosion of wearables over the last few years with products like the Oura ring or Whoop band whose primary goal is to help demystify and improve an individual’s sleep (Whoop would argue that is not their main function but most people I know who have one use it for this!) When I ask people what has the most dramatic affect on their sleep, the answer is alcohol 100% of the time. The main takeaway from doctors, apps, wearables, and the media is just don’t drink or if you do, keep it to 1 drink. While that is a great aspiration, what if you could create a pill that just counteracted alcohol’s negative effects on sleep? From a biological perspective, alcohol acts on gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), a neurotransmitter that inhibits impulses between nerve cells and has a calming effect. When blood alcohol levels are high, it has the sedative effect that puts you to sleep, but as levels drop, the brain counteracts and shifts into overdrive causing disruptions and tossing and turning. If you could create a way to avoid the rebound and have some kind of time-release supplement that also acts on GABA, you could have a product that would sell like hotcakes. Think of how many anti-hangover products exist. That is only targeting people who are drinking heavily, but if you could counteract the impact on sleep quality for the casual drinker, you have a gigantic market. It would need to be classified as a “supplement” (like Melatonin) which has way less regulation by the FDA (they are regulated as food and not drugs).

2. Crunchbase for Web3

Crunchbase, which was owned by TechCrunch, was founded in 2007 by Michael Arrington to track the startups TechCrunch was featuring in articles. It serves as a database to find information about both private and public businesses including details on investors/funding, founders, key executives, acquisitions, major news, and more. The data is acquired through 4 different methods: their Venture Program (where VCs partner to provide information on their portfolios), machine learning, an in-house data team, and the Crunchbase community who can submit data for review and inclusion in the site. I’m pretty sure they also scrape public filings where they can get fundraise intel. In 2015, Crunchbase actually spun out from TechCrunch (and technically AOL who owned TC at the time), raised a round of funding, and launched Crunchbase Pro, their premium product. They’ve gone on to raise subsequent rounds of funding and have launched additional paid products.

While I use Crunchbase all the time to get information on startups, look into competitors, or see how much a company has raised (and from who), it is far less useful when it comes to web3 companies. I want to know info like; are they operating as a DAO? Do they have a token? If so, what is the supply, distribution, tokenomics, etc? Someone can take the exact same concept of Crunchbase but focus solely on web3 companies. You could classify companies in different areas of web3, show founders/ key contributors, funding, token metrics, governance proposals, and major announcements. It would be cool to provide on-chain data as well where it’s applicable and since so much more is public in web3, you’d have a ton more useful data on things like transactions, users/customers (based off of which smart contracts are interacting with other contracts or wallet addresses), and TVL.

3. 3D Printer for Kid Toys

Now that I’m a parent, I’m getting tons of fodder for this newsletter as there are SO many things about babies/kids that could use some optimization ;-) One area that is top of mind right now is toys. The average family in the US spends over $300 a year per child on just new toys, and my guess is that number is 3-5x or more among wealthy families in major cities. The sheer number of plastic toys that we have in every corner of our house right now is astounding. I feel like I’m in an endless loop of “resetting the stage” each night where I put the toys back in their places; stack up the stacking toys, put the nesting boxes back together, hang the rings on their rod, and pick up the colored shapes that go in a little purse. My daughter seems to get bored with each toy after approximately 2 days so I’m constantly going through the kitchen and closets looking for items that she might find entertaining, or buying/acquiring new toys from friends of Facebook groups.

A few weeks ago, my husband 3D printed a really fun plastic fidget cube that our daughter absolutely loved. It took under 2 hours to print and became the favorite toy for a few days. That got me thinking… since 3D printers have gotten so cheap (you can buy a very decent one for about $200), you could sell kits for families that includes a printer, a subscription to the filament, and the files for toys that could be tailored for different ages and interests. Similar to how Lovevery focuses on developmental stages, each month you would get baby-safe filament, cards with suggested prints, and information on what each toy is meant to teach. While typical 3D printing materials aren’t recyclable by most municipal recycling plants, you can easily recycle the filament using a shredder and extruder, so the company could collect all the old/no longer used toys and recycle them into new filament to reduce costs and provide an environmentally friendly product. As kids get older there can be tutorials helping them learn how to 3D print themselves and become an early STEM tool.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine