Meet the Founders - Jason Fritz

Hello Cloudcraft community!

My name is Jason Fritz. I am the youngest of 3 Fritz brothers who have worked hard to develop this sleep and recovery aide. If you have a couple of minutes for a quick read, I’d love to tell you a bit about myself.

My brothers and I were raised in Santa Rosa, California - a beautiful suburb of the San Francisco bay area, and a popular destination for wine drinkers. I earned my bachelor’s degree in Human Physiology, with minors in Business Administration and Biology, from the University of Oregon. I’ll always love my Oregon Ducks, although my wife and her friends being alumni of THE Ohio State University makes for some intense gameday competitiveness.

After graduating, I moved back to California for about 2 years, where I got my first taste of shift work as an EMT. I loved this time in my career. Still just a kid - driving around my hometown going Code 3, not knowing what the heck I was doing but always excited to throw on the blood pressure cuff and EKG leads. That said, it was during this time that I decided I wasn’t quite made for public service and field work, prompting my decision to move to Pennsylvania for a 25-month physician assistant program. I was lucky enough to make some amazing friends and meet my wife during this period of my life. 

After graduating with a M.M.S. in Physician Assistant Studies from Salus University (now part of Drexel University), I started my first job in a local emergency department. I figured this would be a great fit for me, since I loved emergency medicine when I first started as an EMT, and I still loved it during my clinical year in PA school. Unfortunately, the position that was available at the time was for a full-time nocturnist. 7 pm to 7 am. The hospital is a 40-45 minute drive from my house, so I’m out of the house for nearly 14 hours each shift. Add that to (hopefully) 8 hours of sleep, eating breakfast, showering, and taking my dog out… There isn’t much room for anything else!

On the nights I work, my wife and I only really see one another like ships passing in the night, since she works “normal” daytime hours. On days off, I try to adjust back to a daytime routine in order to spend time with her, visit our friends, and take care of other things I can’t do at night such as attend medical appointments or have my car serviced. I’m also much more of a morning person and feel more content during the daytime. This constant switching back-and-forth between days and nights has absolutely wrecked my circadian rhythm and turned me into a zombie for several days each week. I have started getting more frequent migraines, my anxiety has skyrocketed, I have become more irritable and overall have lost a lot of pleasure in my usual hobbies like hiking and playing guitar. These changes also followed me into the Hospital, accelerating the burnout that every provider experiences at some point or another. I tried various sleep aides and supplements I had heard about from coworkers or read about online, none of which seemed to really benefit my sleep or recovery or were too cumbersome to stay consistent with.

Then, one day when I was having a catch up with my brothers via FaceTime, they asked me if I wanted to join them on a project. That project blossomed and became Cloudcraft, the sleep and recovery tool I had been looking for. I feel that we bring with us a unique perspective, considering we are shift workers ourselves and have personally experienced so many of the difficulties associated with this lifestyle. As the product design has grown, so has my desire to continue learning and connecting with other people who experience these difficulties.