Portland Man Launches Corporate Napping Consultancy, Charges $500 Per Hour to Watch Executives Sleep

On a drizzly Tuesday morning in the Eastside office of a logistics company whose name Young is contractually prohibited from disclosing, Stephen Young sat perfectly still in a Fjord Office chair he brought himself, watched a 54-year-old chief operating officer sleep for 47 minutes, and invoiced the company $391.67.

"That was a short one," Young said afterward, sipping from a thermos of single-origin Ethiopian pour-over he'd prepared at home. "He's a light napper. We're working on it."

Young, 39, is the founder of Executive Naps, Portland's first and, as far as anyone can determine, only professional corporate napping consultancy. For $500 an hour, Young will come to your office, prepare the environment, sit silently beside you while you nap, monitor the quality of your rest using a proprietary observational framework he developed over three years, and provide a written debrief afterward. He is booked through 2027.

"I'm not a sleep coach," Young said, with the measured intensity of someone who has made this clarification many times. "I want to be very clear about that. Sleep coaches interact with clients before and after. I observe during. It's a completely different discipline."

Young grew up in New Jersey and moved to Portland in his late twenties, initially working in marketing and technology consulting. He describes the origin of Executive Naps as a gradual realization rather than a single moment of inspiration.

"I kept reading about how critical rest was to executive performance," he said. "And I kept noticing that nobody was actually holding space for that rest. There was no accountability. CEOs were napping alone, in the dark, with nobody monitoring the quality of the experience. It felt like a gap."

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The gap, as Young describes it, was also a business opportunity. His initial rate was $175 an hour, which he raised to $280 after a writeup in a local wellness newsletter, then to $500 after being mentioned, briefly, somewhat skeptically, in a Forbes contributor piece about unconventional executive coaching. He has not lowered it since.

His clients, most of whom declined to be named, include three executives at companies with more than $500 million in annual revenue, a well-known Portland venture capitalist who asked to be described only as "deeply committed to optimizing recovery," and the general manager of a craft brewery in the Pearl District who said the sessions had "completely changed his relationship with the 2 p.m. hour."

"I was skeptical," the brewery GM told WW by email, declining an in-person interview. "But there's something about having someone present, someone professional, that creates a kind of permission. Like, yes, this is a real thing I am doing right now. This is legitimate."

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Young conducts between four and six sessions per week, which he says is the maximum sustainable volume for someone working at his level of observational intensity. He does not multitask during sessions. He does not take notes during sessions. He does not, under any circumstances, look at his phone.

"The presence has to be total," he said. "Clients can feel it even while they're asleep. There's something energetic happening in the room. If I'm distracted, they're distracted. Even unconsciously."

When asked how clients can feel his presence while asleep, Young paused for a long moment and said, "That's a great question," before pivoting to describe his post-session written report, which he calls the Nap Report and which runs between two and four pages depending on nap length and quality.

A sample Threshold Report, which Young shared with WW with identifying details removed, included sections titled "Entry Quality," "Depth Indicators," "Environmental Disruptions," and "Threshold Achievement," the last of which appears to measure whether the client fully crossed from wakefulness into sleep rather than hovering in a drowsy intermediate state. The report concluded with a section called "Recommendations," which in the sample read, in its entirety: "Fewer screens after 9 p.m. Consider a weighted blanket. The room was too warm."

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Not everyone in Portland's wellness community has been enthusiastic about Young's practice. Dr. Renata Ohlsson, a sleep medicine physician at OHSU who has not worked with Young and reviewed his methodology only from his website, said she found the clinical framing of his services "difficult to evaluate."

"There's no peer-reviewed literature I'm aware of on the benefits of having a paid observer present during a nap," Dr. Ohlsson said. "That doesn't mean there's no benefit. It just means we don't know."

Young is unbothered. "Western medicine has a very narrow definition of what constitutes evidence," he said. "My clients are sleeping better. Their teams are reporting improved afternoon performance. The results speak for themselves."

When asked if he had data on improved afternoon performance, he said the data was proprietary.

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Young lives in Northeast Portland with his partner and their dog, a one-and-a-half-year-old rescue named Lana who Young describes as "a gifted ambient sleeper, which frankly is more than can be said for most of his clients" and who occasionally accompanies him to sessions, though only for clients who have signed a supplemental animal-presence waiver.

He is currently developing a group offering he calls "Witnessed Rest," in which up to four executives nap simultaneously while Young observes the room as a whole. The rate for Witnessed Rest has not been finalized but Young says it will be "meaningfully less per person than the individual rate, while still reflecting the complexity of multi-subject observation."

He is also in early conversations with a boutique hotel in the West Hills about a potential residency program, and has been approached by a private equity firm in San Francisco interested in licensing the Executive Naps methodology for national expansion.

"I've thought a lot about scale," Young said. "But the core of this work is presence. And presence doesn't scale easily. So we'll see."

He finished his pour-over, capped the thermos, and checked his watch. He had another session in forty minutes, across town, in the office of someone he described only as "a significant regional figure in Pacific Northwest finance." He had already confirmed the room temperature. He had already checked the blackout curtains. He was, by his own assessment, ready.

"This city needed this," he said, pulling on a rain jacket. "People act like rest is something you just do. It's not. Rest is something you practice. And like any practice, it's better with someone watching."

Happy April Fools' Day. Executive Naps is not a real company. Stephen Young is a real person who does not watch people sleep for money, as far as we know. St. Johns Sentinel regrets nothing.