According to Forbes, Aaron Spivak co-founded the weighted blanket company Hush Blankets and sold it to Sleep Country Canada for $48 million CAD (about $35 million USD) in November 2021. The deal happened just four years after launch, when the company was on track for $48 million CAD in annual revenue and was valued at a 9x multiple of EBITDA. Spivak and his co-founder Lior Ohayon started by working on the business from 5pm to 1am while holding other jobs, hitting $300K CAD in pre-orders within months. Post-acquisition, Spivak faced significant mental strain, losing hair and 35 pounds, leading him to hire a Navy SEAL to live with him for 90 days. He has since launched the Founders Club, a networking group with 1,000 members, as his next venture.
The Grit Before The Glory
Look, the $48 million exit is the headline, but the real story is the decade of grind that came before it. This wasn’t a Stanford MBA with VC connections. Spivak’s origin is pure, scrappy hustle: a party bus business at 15, then a cold-pressed juice company with his brothers where they slept on air mattresses in their mom’s basement. That’s a wild foundation. It gave him a tolerance for pain that most founders simply don’t have. When he and Lior started Hush, working those crazy night shifts after their day jobs, it was just another day in the life. They weren’t afraid of the work because they’d already done harder things. That’s a massive, underrated advantage. How many founders today would juice for 24-hour shifts? Probably not many.
Manifestation As A Tactical System
Here’s where it gets interesting. Spivak talks about visioning and manifestation not as woo-woo magic, but as a “tactical operating system.” And he took it to an extreme that would make most people uncomfortable. Putting the future buyer’s logo in the office on day one? Writing fake emails from them? Telling his co-founder “we made it!” every single day? That’s next-level psychological programming. But here’s the thing: it worked. It forced them to reverse-engineer the exact metrics their ideal buyer, Sleep Country, valued—EBITDA and profit margin over sheer revenue growth. They didn’t just hope for an exit; they built the business to the precise specifications of the acquirer they had already chosen in their minds. That’s not delusion; that’s a strategy. A weird one, but a strategy nonetheless.
The Dark Side Of The Exit
This is the part most exit stories gloss over. Spivak is brutally honest about the aftermath. Selling wasn’t a victory lap; it was one of his “darkest moments.” His identity was the company. When it was gone, he deflated. The pressure of running a division within a large, public company like Sleep Country was a different beast entirely—judged every 90 days, with no room for a bad month. The physical toll (hair loss, drastic weight loss) is a stark reminder that a big check doesn’t solve mental health. His solution? Hiring a Navy SEAL to essentially be a live-in habit coach. It’s an unorthodox move, but it underscores his core belief: you become who you surround yourself with. After building hardware for better sleep, he had to rebuild his own foundation from the ground up.
Building The Next Thing
So what do you do after you sell your “baby”? For Spivak, the answer was to build a community to solve the loneliness he felt. The Founders Club is his attempt to systemize the magic of connection—like the member who got a product into Target because someone in the mastermind was best friends with the head buyer. That’s powerful. He’s essentially productizing networking, and at 1,000 members, it’s clearly filling a need. The key shift he mentions is profound: “This time, I am not optimizing for EBITDA – I don’t want to sell.” He’s building for legacy and impact, not just a multiple. It seems like he’s applying the same intense focus he used to build Hush, but now the product is human connection itself. And maybe that’s the ultimate hack.
