This conversation originally ran in Sports Business Journal on April 30th, 2025.
By Joe Lemire: You can’t have a discussion about sports technology today without including athletes in that conversation. Their partnerships, investments and endorsements help fuel the space – they have emerged as major stakeholders in the sports tech ecosystem. The Athlete’s Voice series highlights the athletes leading the way and the projects and products they’re putting their influence behind.
Ryan Hurley was an All-American swimmer at the University of Virginia who competed in the US Olympic trials and world championships and won a pair of silver medals at the 2007 World University Games, in both 200-meter breaststroke and the 4x100 medley relay. After graduating in 2009, Hurley went to work in NBC’s famed page program before moving to roles at NBC Sports and SportsEngine.
In 2021, Hurley left the business to become a founder, starting a pillow company called Lagoon. Customers take a short quiz about their sleeping habits and get matched with a pillow type. Lagoon’s brand ambassadors include professional marathon runners Emma Bates, Grayson Murphy, Dakotah (Lindwurm) Popehn and Keira D’Amato, and it signed its first team partnership with USA Bobsled and Skeleton. Lagoon also offers a Sleep Performance Program aimed at helping youth sports organizations tout the importance of sleep to young athletes.
On his early professional goal . . .
On getting started as an NBC page . . .
On moving into business development . . .
On SportsEngine . . .
On starting a pillow company . . .
Sleep as a category had always been something really interesting to me, and I traced that back to my days in swimming. Waking up at 4:15 in the morning, I just always placed a premium on sleep because it was something that I always knew I needed to treasure. I had some bad ideas in the sleep space that I won’t share, but I just got started thinking about pillows and how it was something that that everybody uses, that I know I had never made smart purchases around and thought that there had to be a better way.
On beginning Lagoon . . .
I have a little bit of imposter syndrome around how I started out because I didn’t have any background in textiles or consumer products. I was leaving a world where my experience was in media and B2B technology to try and create a physical product, but you don’t know what you don’t know.
This was very, very early days of Covid. I was ordering pillows from anywhere I could find them, and my dear wife suffered along with me as we tried no less than 50 to 60 different pillows from all the top competitors out there, just to see what options were available, what we like, what we didn’t like. And then from there, we started to come up with our own line — just the types of materials that we thought would work best. We started to build out a line to meet the needs of all different types of sleepers.
On meeting everyone’s needs . . .
Usually, the people that like the softest pillows are people that sleep on their stomach. Most people that sleep on their side or rotate are somewhere in the medium-soft [category]. And then some people do like something firmer, usually a side sleeper that stays in place. But there’s a million exceptions to that. That’s where having pillows that are adjustable — meaning you can add and remove the fill — really allows people to customize it.
On data-driven pillow-matching . . .
Probably the biggest differentiator and most useful piece of our business equation is easily matching somebody with the pillow that’s right for them. Our quiz is a two-minute quiz that you answer seven simple questions, but we have really good accuracy on the quiz, too. Our return rate is less than 5%, so I think we’re doing a pretty good job of matching people with the pillow that’s right for them.
