When Pat Connolly was approaching the end of his 40-year career in business development and marketing at Williams-Sonoma, he met the folks behind ResMed, a company that creates products to help people with sleep apnea. They talked about how many people in the world were not sleeping soundly; it got Connolly thinking about his own relationship to sleep. “I also realized that I was not sleeping well,” Connolly tells Forbes. “I always believed you could sleep when you’re dead. I was drinking a lot of coffee in the afternoon and waking up in the middle of the night and taking an Ambien. It really got me thinking about my own health.”