danielzkim
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I'm a founding PM at Nightfall, a Khosla Ventures-backed sleep startup where I work directly with Dr. Matthew Walker — the neuroscientist behind Why We Sleep. Before this, I was at Somnee (sleep wearables), Lekko (developer tooling, acquired by Rippling), and Beats by Dre. I hold two degrees from Berkeley and a master's from Georgia Tech.

My through-line is simple: I study how humans work, then build things that make them work better. That's not a tagline — it's the lens I use on every product problem. What does the human actually need here? What's the gap between that and what they have? How do you close it?

Outside work, I train MMA, skateboard, and play a lot of chess. I went from 1000 to 1600 Elo in four months, which sounds impressive until you lose to someone who's been playing since age six. I made Top 20 in the US in Clash Royale, which I mention because it required more strategic thinking than most people assume and I have data to back that up.

Skateboarding taught me that failure is data. You don't land a nightmare flip the first time. You don't land it the hundredth time. You study the fall pattern and adjust. Most of the skills I've developed in product work came from physical pursuits first — the discipline of doing something hard in public until it clicks.

I care about human performance at its edges. Sleep, cognition, neurotech, the weird territory where biology meets technology and neither side fully knows what they're doing yet. That's where interesting products get built.

Nightfall is the most personal professional thing I've done. Sleep isn't just a health metric to me — it's the foundation everything else rests on. Getting to build products at the intersection of neuroscience and sleep, with someone who wrote the book on it (literally), is not something I take lightly.