When most chief executives talk about margins, market share and product road maps, Maya Alvarez talks about slow waves, circadian timing and the quiet rhythm of a person’s nights. Her office, on the 22nd floor of a converted warehouse, smells faintly of eucalyptus — a deliberate choice, she says, because scent is one of the triggers people underestimate when they try to improve sleep. A whiteboard behind her desk carries sketches that look part-engineering blueprint, part-bedtime story: timelines of light exposure, mockups of mattress sensors, and a simple column labeled “humanity-first metrics.”
Alvarez runs Somnus Labs, a five-year-old company that makes a mix of hardware and software aimed at measuring and improving sleep for consumers and businesses. But she has never spoken about the company with the detached language of quarterly guidance. For her, sleep is not a feature or a wellness vertical; it’s a societal lever.
“Everything we build is downstream from how people sleep,” she tells me. “If you take sleep seriously — biologically, socially, economically — you start to reframe what a healthy life looks like. A lot of modern problems are downstream consequences of people being exhausted.”
Obsession or strategy? If anything, Alvarez’s fixation on sleep is both. It’s a product thesis and an ethical stance. Investors who were once skeptical — a CEO selling mattresses and sleep trackers wasn’t what many expected from a tech founder — now call it a prescient bet: demand for reliable sleep solutions has climbed as remote work, 24/7 connectivity, and the energy demands of modern life create new stressors on human rest. Corporations, from software firms worried about developer burnout to hospitals looking to reduce shift-worker errors, are licensing Somnus Labs’ analytics.
How she thinks about sleep is unusual for a tech CEO. Her calendar reads like a curriculum: mornings reserved for company strategy, afternoons for “human factors” sessions with designers and neuroscientists, and at least one full day a month for a cohort she runs of shift workers and gig-economy employees whose schedules often conflict with circadian rhythms. She reads sleep journals in the same week she meets with product engineers. She negotiates supply contracts and debates the merits of a 2 a.m. light-dimming algorithm over dinner.
The result has been an ecosystem approach. Somnus Labs sells mattresses and eye-masks, yes, but its real product is data that helps employers redesign schedules, city planners rethink night-time transit lighting, and architects plan quieter buildings. “We want to be more than a pillow company,” Alvarez says. “We want to give institutions the tools to stop designing lives that wear people down.”
That ambition comes with trade-offs. Critics worry about surveillance: sleep data is intimate, and when employers encourage workers to use “wellness” tech, the line between support and monitoring can blur. Alvarez insists on strong privacy defaults; Somnus anonymizes and aggregates employee data before sharing insights with managers, and users control what data they opt in to share. But privacy experts warn the risks remain, particularly if regulators don’t catch up with how sleep tech is woven into employment and healthcare.
There’s also a tension between commercialization and care. Sleep, for many cultures, is a private ritual. Packaging it into apps and subscriptions can feel reductive. Alvarez acknowledges this—and says she spends as much time on ethics as on engineering. Her company has an internal ethics council that includes a sleep clinician, a labor advocate and a philosopher. “We can’t just ship features and say ‘we’re helping people,’ ” she says. “We ask: who benefits, who bears the cost, and how do we avoid normalizing constant optimization?”
Her day-to-day leadership style reflects that concern. Employees describe a CEO who can be exasperatingly granular—prodding copy about whether a notification should say “sleep more” or “rest better”—and also fiercely humane. The company offers an unusual benefit: a three-month “circadian sabbatical” for employees who need to recalibrate their sleep because of new parenthood, medical treatment, or recovery from long-term shift work. It’s expensive, Alvarez admits, but she argues it’s an investment in retention and long-term productivity.
Clinicians and researchers also see value in Alvarez’s work because it blurs old boundaries. Traditionally, sleep research sat in academic labs and hospitals; now it is trickling into workplaces and homes. That’s risky — and potentially transformative. Small teams at forward-looking companies are using sleep analytics to redesign on-call rotas, or to craft lighting schemes that reduce circadian disruption for night-shift nurses. When done carefully, these changes can reduce errors and improve well-being.
So what drives a CEO to spend her waking hours on other people’s sleep? Alvarez shrugs and points to her childhood. Her family ran a bakery, where nights were long and days were hectic; she watched generations trade sleep for survival. “I saw what chronic sleep debt does to people—short tempers, missed milestones, diseases that stack up,” she says. “Tech gave me tools I never had in the bakery. Why not use them so fewer people have to pay that price?”
There’s a populist undercurrent to her pitch. Sleep improvement, by Alvarez’s telling, shouldn’t be a luxury for the privileged who can buy expensive mattresses and bespoke bedroom setups. In her roadmap are collaborations with public housing authorities and transit agencies to test low-cost interventions—lighting schedules at bus depots, quiet-window programs in apartment complexes near noisy corridors, community sleep education campaigns.
The skeptics remain, and the market will be the final arbiter. But for now, Alvarez’s leadership style—part data scientist, part ethicist, part civic planner—has put sleep on the corporate agenda. Whether that leads to healthier nights for millions or a new frontier of workplace techno-optimism depends on how the industry balances profit with privacy, and product with purpose.
When I leave her office, the eucalyptus scent follows me down the hall. Later that night, as the city hums and my phone buzzes with late emails, I find myself thinking of Alvarez’s whiteboard timelines and wonder: if more CEOs spent their days thinking about sleep, would our mornings be better for it?
