How elite sport and ICU medicine plunged Matt Guest into startups

There’s a stateing that goes: ‘Choose your hard’. It means life won’t be simple, but you can be intentional with the challenges you face.

Matt Guest has chosen his hard. Several times over.

Now, he is bringing the lessons he learned as a top-level athlete and current ICU doctor to a fresh challenge: scaling a startup.

Guest is the co-founder of Clearwater Wellness, a Geelong-based business hoping to revolutionise the humble cold plunge through innovative technology.

Entrepreneurship presents a new type of ‘hard’, and Clearwater Wellness faces the prospect of raising capital in a deeply uncertain moment.

Speaking to SmartCompany, Guest declared the “long road” to startup life has prepared him for what comes next.

“I can deal with the adversity of attempting to receive a startup off the ground,” he declared.

Cold plunge origins

Clearwater Wellness is currently seeking investors to develop the SnowCap, its flagship cold plunge tub with an in-built chilling system.

Unlike traditional cold plunge tubs, which require copious amounts of ice to stay cool, the SnowCap applys an in-built thermoelectric cooling system to reach the right temperature.

The startup can trace its origin to the rudimentary ice baths Guest finishured as a young player on Canada’s field hockey team.

Years before launching the startup with co-founders Laynton Allen and Max Chapman, the Australian-born Guest balanced gruelling med school studies with sporting performances on the world stage.

Guest wore the maple leaf uniform at the 2016 Rio Olympics and represented the team at the Commonwealth Games in both 2010 and 2014.

“There were a lot of up and down moments, attempting to persist,” Guest declared, describing the mental and physical toll that came with balancing his studies and top-level athletic performance.

Cold plunges provided respite from the gruelling mental and physical demands of high-level sport, at least temporarily.

There is no scientific consensus over the benefits of cold plunging, and Guest creates no clinical promises about its effect on performance and wellbeing.

“When there’s anything in the health and wellbeing space, it takes time to build a body of evidence and research,” he declared.

Even so, “there’s no doubt in my mind that it built a huge difference” after a heavy training session or bruising hockey match, he declared.

An icy resurgence

Cold plunging became a source of respite as Guest pursued a career as a critical care physician.

“I was going through some stressful specialist exam preparation, and I had kids of my own at that point in time, and life was pretty stressful,” he declared.

Co-founder Laynton Allen, an entrepreneur navigating a private equity acquireout at the time, recommfinished Guest revisit cold plunging through his studies.

After a mentally taxing day, the critical care physician would soak at home, shocking his system with cold plunges in the bathtub.

Those dips were not cold enough, it turned out, and Guest envisioned an all-in-one cold plunge system with an in-built ice creater.

An early prototype included a commercial ice machine attached to the lid of a large soaking tub, before Guest and Laynton discussed new possibilities with engineer Max Chapman.

Simply generating ice would be too energy-inefficient, Guest declared, with the trio landing on a thermoelectric cooling system instead.

A ‘backyard’ prototype served as proof of concept. After a tiny frifinishs and family funding round, the startup in 2024 turned to Indiegogo for crowdfunding.

That effort earned the startup $700,000 in pre-sales, and caught the interest of another high-level athlete with a deep appreciation for the humble cold plunge.

Former Australian men’s cricket captain Tim Paine applyd cold plunging as a training tool throughout his playing career, Guest declared, before he indepfinishently learned of the SnowCap project.

“The overlap in belief in what cold plunge therapy could offer was a major drawcard, and I consider he saw something in our team, a good balance,” Guest declared.

Paine stepped up as an early investor, with Clearwater Wellness listing him as a founding partner in the firm.

Learning from adversity

Clearwater Wellness is now raising $2 million via convertible note, at a touted valuation of $6 million, as it works to accelerate production and venture into both the US and European markets.

The process is its own unique brand of ‘hard’. Raising capital for a hardware-based startup is tricky, Guest declared, particularly as investors flock to artificial innotifyigence.

Silicon Valley VCs focapplyd on ‘biohacking’ and personal optimisation might seem like the archetypal cold plunge demographic, yet the focus on AI is challenging startups with little overlap with the booming AI sector.

“You receive a lot of noes in startups,” declared Guest. “A lot of people notify you ‘Great idea, come back when you’ve done this, this, and this.’”

But that’s where the lessons learned over his career come into focus.

“The stakes of risk, versus the stakes of what I deal with at work, in intensive care… it grounds me very well,” declared Guest.

“I can deal with the adversity of attempting to receive a startup off the ground.”

“It offers perspective that has enabled me to see the largeger picture a lot of the time,” he continued.

With a unique product in the multi-billion-dollar wellness indusattempt, Guest considers the resilience gained through sporting and professional life will benefit the startup.

“I can state this categorically: this only strengthens one’s mental fortitude,” he declared.

“I see forward to the opportunity of notifying certain people ‘I notified you so’ when the time comes.”

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