• Kate Hudson, 46, says her morning routine involves meditating and spending time in the sun.
• “I also try not to look at my phone during this time,” the actor said.
• At night, she likes to unwind with a book — but sometimes gets sidetracked browsing auction sites.

Kate Hudson, 46, says she spends her mornings outdoors and phone-free.

In an interview with EatingWell published on Saturday, the actor spoke about the habits that shape her mornings and nights.

“I wake around 6 a.m. and do some sort of meditation practice while I drink warm water with lemon. I also try not to look at my phone during this time,” Hudson told EatingWell.

“Then about an hour after I wake up, I’ll have coffee or tea and walk outside barefoot and do sun gazing, which is one of my new favorite things to do before my kids wake up,” she said. “Sun gazing is a great new thing I do in the morning: It’s beneficial for your circadian rhythm and sets your body up for the day.”

While staring directly at the sun is dangerous and can cause lasting eye damage, getting sunlight safely has proven health benefits.

Being out in the sun can boost serotonin, the hormone that helps regulate mood and promote feelings of calm and happiness. Sunlight can also aid in the body’s production of vitamin D, which helps your body absorb calcium.

Studies have found that spending time outdoors can also have a de-stressing effect and help reduce inflammation.

Hudson added that her go-to breakfast is a protein shake, and she keeps fresh fruits and vegetables on hand whenever she or her kids need a snack.

“In my refrigerator, I cut carrots, cucumber, jícama, and peppers in Mason jars with a little water at the bottom, and cut fruit such as mango, pineapple and berries, and when the kids want a snack, I tell them to open up the fridge,” she said.

At night, Hudson keeps things simple, although she says she has one guilty pleasure before bed.

“It varies, but I like to get into bed really early and try to read before I go to sleep. It’s hard sometimes because I’m obsessed with home furniture and looking at live auction sites — not to buy anything, but to browse and see what’s out there,” she said.

A representative for Hudson did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent by Business Insider outside regular hours.

Other Hollywood celebrities and business leaders have also shared their own morning rituals.

Disney’s CEO, Bob Iger, said he gets up at 4:15 a.m. and avoids looking at his phone until after his morning workout because it helps him clear his head.

“I think it’s vital, in terms of the ability to run a pretty complicated company in a very, very fast-paced world, to have the energy but also to have spent the time to organize one’s thoughts,” he said.

Cindy Crawford said she’s made it a habit to avoid checking emails or messages first thing in the morning.

“I listen to a Bible podcast or whatever. Every morning, they read a Bible verse, and then someone does a summary of it. That’s my first input while I’m doing my dry brushing and I’m putting body oil on. I don’t look at my messages or emails until I’ve taken that time for myself,” she said.

• Google’s VP of product says the “cult” of lean teams can cause great ideas to stall.
• “A lot of times I see teams just give up too early or underinvest in the product,” said Robby Stein.
• Stein’s comments come as startups and Big Tech obsess over a lean-team playbook.

Silicon Valley loves to preach the gospel of lean teams. But Google’s vice president of product said that mentality can kill great ideas.

Robby Stein said on an episode of “Lenny’s Podcast” published Saturday, that there’s a “cult of lean, scrappy, fast, throw away your product quickly” culture in the tech world.

“At some level, it’s true for internal conviction, but to build a product that works for a lot of people that is based on a technological breakthrough, a lot of times I see teams just give up too early or underinvest in the product,” he added.

Stein helped launch Instagram Stories before joining Google to lead its AI-powered search products. He said products weren’t built overnight, even for software. He pointed to the massive effort behind foundational AI models — projects that took years and hundreds of people — as proof that some breakthroughs require scale and patience.

Teams can sometimes take scrappiness too far, staying small for so long that their ideas never gain traction, Stein said. If a product doesn’t get good enough internally in a big company, “it just dies on the vine,” he added.

Startups don’t have the luxury of endlessly iterating with tiny teams. By the time they learn what works, it may be too late, Stein said.

He added that founders need to think early about what kind of team can build a strong version of their product, rather than clinging to the idea that two people can stay lean until they hit product-market fit.

Stein said there are two milestones that signal it’s time to invest and scale: internal conviction, when a team feels it’s found something special, and external validation, when real users — not just friends — keep coming back.

“Invest enough to make the best version of it or as good a version as you can to get it out the door and to ship it,” he said.

“You can only really do that with the right group,” he added.

Stein and Google did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

The Tiny Teams era

Startups in the AI era are proving that they can scale quickly, reduce spending, and thrive against competition with a handful of employees.

Some of AI’s biggest names have built upon tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the maker of coding copilot Cursor, which grew from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year with fewer than 50 employees, per private market research platform Sacra.

“We’re going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said last year.

Big Tech is also taking cues from the lean-team playbook. Meta’s superintelligence AI unit is led by a handful of star researchers and represents a fraction of Meta’s total workforce of over 70,000 employees. Many of its members, including leader Alexandr Wang, were hired from buzzy AI startups.

“I’ve just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small, talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research,” Mark Zuckerberg said on Meta’s earnings call in July.

Business Insider in May compiled a list of the highest-valued AI startups around the world with teams of 50 employees or fewer, according to PitchBook data.