How I Built This with Guy Raz - WHOOP: Will Ahmed

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

As a Harvard squash player, Will Ahmed discovered his game improved when he focused on things like sleep, diet, and time spent recovering from training. He was convinced that granular health and heart data would become invaluable to other athletes if it could be bundled into a wearable wrist strap. In 2012, Will founded WHOOP, and after three years the company launched its first model, with Lebron James and Michael Phelps as advocates. But WHOOP struggled to gain traction with mere mortals, and spent years overhauling its business model and fending off big name competitors. Eventually it became one of the most popular wearables on the market, with a valuation well above $3 billion. This episode was researched and produced by Katherine Sypher and edited by Neva Grant, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our engineer was Patrick Murray.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail]. Sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com and on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. I'll never forget this investor I met, and he had all these reasons for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, you know what? You were going to fail.

You're going to fail because you don't listen. Wow. And I remember for months I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a good. college athlete changed the playing field for wearables by launching whoop, a device that tells you things only your doctor once new. You've heard me say this before. The hardest thing about building a consumer products business isn't actually building the product. It's building the brand. But sometimes both of these things are equally challenging, especially when you're trying to come up with a completely new kind of technology. Today's story is about a guy who spent many years trying to build a very, very complex product.

And then, many years trying to compete against some of the biggest brand names in the world, brands like Nike and Under Armour and Amazon and Apple. The founder, Will Ahmed, started working on his idea back in college, a new kind of wearable health tracker. Now, at the time, Fitbit was already out there, but Will wanted something more sophisticated, a device that could measure things you'd normally need a doctor or a lab for. For example, how your body recovers after training, or how your heart performs over time, or how well you sleep at night. And unlike other trackers, his was designed to be worn 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Now, there were plenty of moments when it looked like the whooped device wouldn't make it. But today, it's one of the leading wearables on the market, and it's become a go-to for serious athletes and fitness fanatics. As for Will, he grew up on Long Island in the 1990s and early 2000s. His dad was an immigrant from Egypt who worked in finance. His mom was a writer. And at Harvard, where this story really begins, Will played on the squash team. So interestingly, squash is a sport that is played around the world, but is best known for being huge in the Middle East. And actually, Egyptians are some of the best squash players in the world.

Wow. And so my dad was a very serious squash player. He got a racket at my hands when I was little. And I learned how to play growing up on Long Island. It ended up helping me get into college. Yeah. But what I always have loved about squash is that it's intensely cardiovascular. So it's one of the hardest minute-for-minute workouts that you can find.

And it's a fairly strategic sport as well where you have to think carefully about where you're going to put the ball and where your opponent's going to put the ball. And so, you know, I've always loved that. All right. You get to Harvard in 2008. You're an undergraduate there. And you're also an athlete. So I imagine that because you, I mean, sometimes people, you know, get into these schools and then they leave the sports team and just focus on school. But you state.

I mean, you must have consumed a lot of your time as a student athlete. Yeah, I mean, you spend three or four hours a day training. And I was just kind of burning it on all ends. So, you know, you work out really hard. You stay up late working or studying. And from what I understand, you're good. I mean, you're a good player, but you weren't a star player. You weren't right on the team.

Not to be, I hope I'm not like opening any wounds here, but you weren't right. Is that fair to say? Yeah, I was in the varsity lineup. There's nine players who make varsity. And, you know, I tended to be like a bottom of the lineup guy. You were the captain of the team. And sure enough, I was captain of the team. And that was a great leadership opportunity.

I ask about this and not, again, the fact that you weren't the best in the team. It's important because I imagine wanting to get better, you were probably trying to do things that you thought would make you faster or jump higher or, you know, move your fast twitch muscles. Yeah. Tell me what you were doing. Well, I was someone who would play extra games after practice or do extra court sprints or, you know, go to the gym or do interval training.

And so I kept pushing more and more. And to your point, like, yeah, I wasn't one of the most talented players on the team. So I wanted to make up for it by being one of the fittest players on the team. And for the most part, I was one of the fittest players. on the team, but not surprisingly, I was also someone who used to overtrain. And that's where you sort of go through this period of getting fitter and fitter and then all of a sudden you fall off a cliff and you don't necessarily know why. What is over, so overtraining is sort of a weird concept, right? Because obviously the definition is clear. You're training too much. But I think

most people hear that and think, well, what's wrong with that? I mean, you're doing a lot of exercise. You're moving your body. You're 20, 21 years old, 8 and 19. I mean, where you notice. seeing that you weren't improving? You get to a state where your body's not recovering relative to the amount of strain that you're putting on it or the amount of stress that you're putting on it. So typically what you want in a training cycle is to overreach for a period of time.

There's a distinction between overreaching and overtraining. Overreaching is where you're pushing your body a little too far, but in the days that follow, your body can bounce back. And overtraining is where you extend your body through such a long period of time that you actually then go through a period where you cannot recover. And you actually have a lot of the same symptoms

of being sick without necessarily having a cough or a sore throat. And so what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be flat in a match that you should win. You wouldn't have your bounce.

You wouldn't have your explosive steps. You'd feel tired in the second game when you should be tired in the fifth game. And the piece that we haven't talked as much about is really the other 20 hours of the day. And that's where I was actually failing more than on the training side. What do you mean by that? Well, when I thought about what it meant to be a college athlete, I realized there was so much focus on what are we doing during the three hours that were four hours that were at practice or were training. But there was really not a lot of discussion

around how you treating your body the other 20 hours of the day. And I was someone who was going to bed at inconsistent times. You know, I would go out to a party on a weekend and drink alcohol. I would stay up late to do school work. I like training and I was comfortable pushing myself very far, but I wasn't doing what needed to be done to recover properly. And so that got me interested in this whole concept around recovery. Got interested in the idea of essentially saying, well, what if we could know, like I can measure my heart rate, right? But what if I could I could, I could know like what my body was doing 24 hours a day, essentially. Yes.

Well, the first question I asked is how would you prevent overtraining? Because that was a very personal thing. And so that got me interested in this concept of like, okay, well, what is overtraining? Overtraining's a mismatch between the strain that you put on your body and how recovered your body actually is. If your body's super recovered, you can put a lot of strain on it. You're probably not going to overtrain. And I realized I didn't know that much about recovery.

And so I started just looking into, well, how could you measure recovery? And that very simple question is what took me down the next 13 years of my life. Right. Because this is a problem you have. And by the way, it is, it's interesting because most 19, 20, 20, year olds can recover quickly. I mean, it's just genetically, just your body where you are in life. You can recover much better than you can under 30, 40, 15 and so on. But you're getting interested in this idea of recovery. And that sets you down a

rabbit hole of like, wait, maybe could we continuously measure certain metrics in our body? How did how did you go from being focused on recovery to thinking about measurement? Well, the immediate thing that I realized is that to understand recovery, you have to understand all the time outside of training. And once you kind of opened your aperture to the that idea, you realize, well, maybe training is just a piece of this puzzle. You know, what is sleep? Oh, wow. Well, sleep is actually this hugely important component to recovery. So then I started researching sleep. And what I found from all this physiology research, and I probably read about 500 medical papers by the time I graduated, was that there were really

three pieces of technology that provided valuable data points. Unfortunately, those, pieces of technology, for the most part, were uncomfortable and not accessible. What were those pieces of technology? The first was the PSG machine, which is the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you are trying to figure out whether you have sleep apnea, your doctor might tell you to go get a sleep lab test. You go to a lab, they put a bunch of monitors on you, they put a mask on you or a breathing apparatus, right? Yeah, and you're going to be videotaped while you sleep, and it'll be the worst night's sleep of your life. That was a machine, though, that could really accurately measure not just how much time you spent in bed and how many hours of sleep you got,

but it could go deeper. It could understand of the sleep you got how much of it was restorative sleep, which is to say how much was slow wave sleep versus REM sleep. And it turned out as it pertains to recovery, restorative sleep was actually that magic period of time. So I got very interested in, okay, well, how could you measure restorative sleep? And then the second machine was the electrocardiogram, you know, $20,000 piece of equipment. And then the third piece of equipment was a consumer product, but it was a consumer product that was invented in the 80s. And that was the heart rate monitor or the chest strap. Right. You could run a treadmill, right? It was like a polar is a brand that does it. These straps you put around your chest. Yes. I mean,

the biggest thing I was focused on was if you could measure anything, what would you measure? And then the second order question became, is it possible to measure these things the way I want to measure them, which is continuously and non-invasively? Right. 24-7? Yeah. It's the difference of seeing a picture of someone and seeing the movie of their life. And I started meeting with engineering labs in Boston and in Cambridge. And so these would be like engineering for hire firms where you could go to them with an idea.

and they would prototype something for you. So, wait, you started to identify some of these labs, and you'd go in and say, hey, I'm Will. Like, what was, pretend like I'm at the lab. What would you say to me? Yeah, I would say, hey, guy, I've got this great idea to continuously measure the body. And here are the three pieces of technology that I want to largely replace in a small, continuous form factor, likely to be some type of a wristband. and I'm curious how you would approach this and whether you could help me with the engineering problem.

All right. So this is around like 2011-ish, I guess, when you start to kind of have these conversations. And just to put this in the context, at this point in history, there is a product called the Fitbit, which is out there. And it's a fitness tracker. And then there's another product that's starting to come out called the Jawbone. But those products were measuring mainly what? Steps. Steps. Mainly movement.

And my obsession was much more physiological or even medical, you could argue, which is I wanted to deeply understand what was happening inside the body. And I had a real aversion to steps, especially then in the sense that I didn't think that steps answered anything about the strain recovery equation that we talked about before, which is to say that how much stress you're actually putting on your body is a different question than how much you've moved your arm. So, all right, when you took this idea to some engineering labs to see if they could help you with a prototype, did any of them say, well, that's impossible. You can't measure those things on your wrist. It's just not possible to do all the things you want to do. That's why you have to go to a sleep apnea lab, for example.

Yeah, I would say probably two-thirds of them were dead ends, just in the sense that, like, I looked like a kid with a, you know, a science project. Yeah. There was an important qualifying question of that they all had before they went any deeper, which is, what's your budget for this project? To you have any money, right. Yeah. Because they'll do it. I mean, if you're like, hey, yeah, I got a couple hundred grand. They'll do whatever you want.

Yeah, sure. And you probably look like the dumbest guy in the room. Like, you know, here's a bunch of money to answer this question. No one's answered. So, yeah, for the most part, I was getting rejected. But I was just looking for believers at that point. And I had grown pretty convinced that this was going to exist. It was obvious to me that this is where the world was going.

Computers over the course of my lifetime had gone from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket. and inevitably, it seemed to me, they were going to become on your body. But how did you learn? What gave you the confidence that there could be an invention that could actually gather all of this data and information simply by being on a wrist? Well, when I met with some of these engineering labs, one of the techniques they suggested was using light. Light reflecting off the skin. Yeah, that was very exciting in the techniques called photoposmography. But that was very exciting because those sensors were actually very inexpensive.

And in summer of 2012, one of the first things that the group of us did that was sort of hacking around with this idea was we bought these little light sensors from the internet that you could put on your fingertip and could kind of get at your heart rate while you were resting. And so that was like a big eureka moment where it was like, okay, wow, this is. isn't this isn't totally crazy like this this isn't defying physics so to speak there was one other thing that i think is important to the the sort of college student turned entrepreneur uh i took a a class at mit's business school called new enterprises where you go in with an idea and they essentially teach you how to write a business plan and um that business plan was you know became this like 75-page document that I wound up being quite proud of. And it also allowed me when I met with people I was trying to recruit to work with me for the summer, like a very talented computer

scientist or an engineer. It gave me some credibility to be able to show up with a business plan and a physiology paper. And it's like, here's what we're going to do and here's the data that's going to take. Got it. Okay. And that business plan, Was the idea that you were going to create something designed for athletes? Was that the original idea? The original idea was we were going to start with athletes and then eventually we were going to build a product for everyone. And then eventually we'd go into medicine. All right. So this is 20, I think 2011, which is your senior year, 2011 and 2012. You basically set up an LLC or some kind of business.

I think already in 2011, which was called My Bobo, but it becomes Bobo. analytics. Yeah. And so this is your second semester of your senior year and you've got this business name and you've incorporated it and you've decided that you are going to go out and seek some money from friends and family. Why did you, I mean, this is kind of nuts, right? You're a senior in college. You've no track record. You're not even a technology. You're very smart guy obviously, but you're not a technology guy. And you're going to go ask people for money to help you start this thing. I mean, that's pretty bold is not exactly the word I want to use.

It's kind of, yeah, an affront in a sense. What did you, who did you ask money from? And what did you promise them in return? I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing that anyone who backed me saw was a deep commitment. This was not like a side hustle. This was the hustle.

And the advantage to betting on a 22-year-old is they don't have a lot else going on. No. You went to your, I'm presumably to your dad and your. Yeah, I went to my parents, my best friends, former bosses that I worked for. And look, I was met with more rejection in a short period of time, you know, to call it the first six months of telling the world I was going to do this, then I had experienced in my entire life.

And all these people are like, this is a bad idea. Like you are pitching a very complicated concept. you are not a doctor, an engineer, a computer scientist, a designer, essentially all the things that it takes to build this business, you are not. And by the way, around that time, there were rumors that Nike was entering the space and Apple was entering the space. Right. I mean, this is 2012, and you already have the Fitbit. You've got Jawbone, which would become one of the biggest kind of eventually, it was raised $900 million. over time. It's a massive Silicon Valley company that had gone from like Bluetooth speakers to wearable trackers. And you're like obviously smart guy, but who are you? Right. That's a fair question to ask in 2012.

Very fair question. And I was asked it a lot and I was confronted with it a lot. And most days my belief system got me through it. And other days I was just kind of feeling like a loser. And I think that's the pain of being an entrepreneur is you can feel pretty crazy sometimes. All right. You managed to convince enough people to give you $300,000 to start this company. And the idea was, of course, you're going to start to build the technology to enable this, which is really a shot in the dark because there's no guarantee this could work. And one of the people that you recruited was a fellow student.

Why did you want him to work with you? Yeah, there were three people that in the sort of summer of 2012 really mattered, and they would go on to matter a lot to whoop. John Caprolupo, Orillian Nikolai, and Martin Oberhauser. And John Capulupo was 19 years old and taking, at the time, one of the hardest math classes in the country. Wow. He was really smart, and he's somebody that you wanted somebody with a lot. that kind of brain working with you. Yes.

I wanted that kind of horsepower. And his father was a professor of exercise physiology. Perfect. That's like a bonus on top. Right. And then about a week or two into our summer. And I should say that we were working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is important to the story because so many people that we ended up getting, so many people that I

cobbled together to work on this at summer were Harvard students. and John was living, you know, just off campus. And I was saying to him, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could, you know, prototype some of these ideas we're having for heart rate monitoring. And he was like, yeah, you know, it's funny. There's this really talented mechanical engineer. He's like living on my couch. He had a job somewhere.

He's Romanian. Something didn't work out. But he's like literally living on my couch. And the Romanians were kind of their own entity at Harvard because every, year there was like two or three of them that would get in, which meant they were like the smartest students out of Romania. And I said, yeah, hey, let's bring him on down. And so Aurelian Nikolai shows up at the Harvard Innovation Lab and reveals to me all of his 3D printed prototypes. Of what? So he had built like a whole structure, like a mechanical arm that could pick things up

with little 3D printed parts. And so I could immediately tell that this guy was, a total whiz at 3D printing and the exact answer that we needed to this prototyping problem. All right. Let me add some context here because there was this thing you mentioned, the Harvard Innovation Lab. And I think that it was started around this time. I guess it was designed to help kids like you who had cool ideas. And they, in this setup, like, it's not like they were like, like, sure, but we need like

5% equity in your business. It was just like, yeah, great, come and work here. Yes. Now, the third person I want to give credit to is, is a guy named Martin Oberhouser. And Martin Oberhouser is a very talented designer. And there was a belief that I had from the earliest days of building this company, which was that the way that we were going to visualize the data

was actually going to end up becoming one of the most important characteristics of the business. And I did what everyone else would do as a sort of 22-year-old looking for a designer. I went to Google and Googled Best Information Graphics Designer in the world. And the second link in 2012 was this profile of a guy named Martin Oberhauser. And I called him. And, you know, Martin in not so many words said he's already working with a few other companies. Since we're based in the States, it makes it harder. Yeah, where was he based?

He was based in Hamburg, Germany. And, you know, he essentially just blew me off. And so the next day, I called him back again, and I said, look, if I flew to Hamburg, would you just meet with me for an hour? Sorry, can I just pause? This is that first summer that you're starting at? And at this point, it's just you, John, and John was going to be the chief technology officer. Aralian, this Romanian student, was going to, he was like a mechanical engineer type. Again, just kind of crazy.

Like, why were you fixated on this one guy who was going to be? so expensive. I think if there's something I've learned in building this business, it's that you have strong moments of intuition. And if they have a good track record, you have to trust them. When I got on that plane to Hamburg, I knew that this guy was going to be our lead designer. All right, but you got amazing. You get to Hamburg. How did you convince him to join you? Well, I think it's worth saying that I got a lot of credit for getting on the plane. You know, when someone shows up to your doorstep like that with that much sort of hootspah, if you will, there is a credibility moment with it.

And so I think I passed a certain test in his eyes, which was that I was pretty serious about this. And I was a little bit crazy, you know, in a good way maybe. But I was going to do things. When we come back in just a moment, how Will launches Whoop and then reaches out to two of the world's best athletes to help make a name for it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2012. Will has just graduated college, and he's assembled a team to build the device that will become Whoop. Yeah, we started working out of...

the innovation lab, and the first prototype was a ridiculous-looking product. Was it a wrist-band thing? Yeah, it had to connect to a computer, and then it had a long wire that connected to a box, a sketchy-looking box, and then it had another wire that came out of it that eventually connected to a goofy-looking wrist-based sensor. And it's got a big box. It says bobo on it and a cord coming out of it. Okay.

That box was the interface between the wristband and the computer? Yes, that box did a lot of the processing. The breakthrough with that box was that it could measure heart rate and heart rate variability under certain circumstances. It was still very much a prototype. Now, look, what was the point of the prototype? The point of the prototype was to prove to ourselves as much as to anyone else that it actually doesn't defy physics, this idea that you could measure the human body accurately from a wrist-worn thing. And so that was a big breakthrough for us in this feeling of it's possible.

And at that time, I had also now gotten pretty far along in the design process of what this is going to look like when all the data shows up. Why was HRV heart rate variability so important? Why did you think that that was the measurement. And by the way, I'm assuming the other products, at least at this point out there, were not doing that. So why was that so important? I can go into much more detail about heart variability.

But the punchline is if you can measure this thing and baseline it to a human, you could understand in any given moment the state of their body. Is your body at peace? Is it recovered? Is it stressed? And it also became obvious if you could measure heart rate variability during a control. a control being under the same circumstances every day, you could then get a really good sense for the person's state of recovery. I mean, you start working on this in the summer of 2012, right?

And you were going to basically end up working out of this innovation lab at Harvard for 18 months, probably to the end of 2013. When did you start, when do you remember starting to see encouraging signs that actually the technology you were working on, was promising. I think it was a stage in which I had gotten very focused on what each successive prototype needed to be able to demonstrate to help us raise capital. I think that it was pretty obvious to me that this was a business that actually was much more capital intensive than I had realized. And so I was in what I would call a perpetual state of fundraising for the first 12

months of the business, which probably was a horrible way to raise capital. Yeah. But it was clear to me that I needed to be able to hit proof points to be able to show that it was possible. And so one of the hardest things about building this company was we were building software and hardware, like on complete islands. Just with the design and with the software, I was always assuming the hardware was going to arrive, so to speak.

And so that's where the first prototype being able to measure hurry variability helped. that's where the following prototype, which came, you know, maybe six months after that, and we'd raised another $400,000, that prototype was able to do it without all the shenanigans of a wire and, you know, a computer attached to your arm and so forth. You got a wireless version of this. We got a wireless version of it. Now, it had a four-hour battery life, and it was totally unclear whether it could be manufactured at scale, but we believed it would be, of course.

onwards. One of the things that I think a smart advantage you had was you could take this once you got a Bluetooth version you could ask athletes at Harvard, particularly the squash team, to try it out, right?

And you could kind of use them as guinea pigs. Yeah, college athletes, recreational athletes, but I mean like data collections, you know, where you put a whoop on a wrist and you put a chest trap on them and you get them to go exercise. Yeah.

But athletes have very different body types. Athletes are diverse. And then a lot of sports happen outdoors, and a lot of sports have what's called non-periodic motion. So you can think of running and walking as having periodic motion, which is like your arms are moving in a certain rigid way. Whereas a sport like basketball or squash, your arms are kind of moving all over the place.

Anyway, I bring all these things up because the challenge to heart rate monitoring is the darker the skin, the harder it is, the hairier the skin, the harder it is, and the more non-periodic motion, the harder it is. And if you're outdoors, that's harder than indoors. Sorry, that's because of the light? Yeah, it's because of the light. I'll give you a simple way to think about it, which is the technique of photoposmography is essentially shining light underneath your skin, which is reflecting off of your capillaries. And the free-es, the free-es-froximography is, With which that returns to a photodiod can be interpreted to be your heart rate or even estimate other physiological metrics. So essentially the light, wow, I mean, that's interesting.

So the light based on, because it's reflecting, right? And it's, but it's affected by skin tone? Yeah. So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally from other products, which were like looking at, you know, 30 white men walking on a treadmill. indoors and we're like each one of those is the easiest thing right whereas if you took people with darker skin outdoors playing basketball you'd have a much harder data set to reconcile and our advantage although at the time it felt much harder was that we built an algorithm with the foundation for the hardest conditions and and it also forced us to collect a lot more data than

other products because we had this high bar for accuracy. And by the way, there's a lot of disadvantages to doing that. It requires more battery life. It means you have more data to send. It means there's a lot less things you can do. We didn't have a high resolution screen in part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection. So basically, you had to solve all these problems. You have to figure out, well, how is this going to work on, you know, an athlete who's darker than an athlete who's lighter. Like, you had to solve, these are not insignificant problems you had dissolved, given, you know, that there are all kinds of athletes. Totally. And it was a great example of the more you learn about something, the less you know.

I mean, just as you kept going deeper, there were all these things you'd uncover. You know, people with tattoos are harder to measure and so on and so forth. Well, while, I mean, again, you're doing this very patiently, very methodically. and meantime, Fitbit is exploding, even though it's doing a somewhat different thing, but, you know, in the minds of most consumers, they were probably saying, oh, if you met somebody, they were just assuming you were building another fitness tracker. You've got Fitbit, you've got JobO. And then you learn that, like, the biggest companies on Earth, like Nike, for example, are pursuing their own bands, their own wristbands that track different metrics. I think the Nike fuel band comes out in 2013. You guys are still working on just the underlying technology here. Didn't that stress you out? Considerably.

And it made it much harder to raise capital and to recruit employees. And essentially it made it much harder to get people to buy into this story I was saying. Right. Because when you would go to investors, they would say, well, I mean, come on Nike. He's working on this. How are you going to compete with Nike? Totally. And in a way they were right and in a way they were wrong.

They were right in the sense that the story I was actually telling when you really unpacked it was we were going to build a brand like Nike and we were going to start with the world's best athletes. And then we were going to go to consumers using the story that we had built a performance brand. And the idea that I was going to literally use the playbook of the company that was launching a competitive product is pretty hard to wrap your head around. So I could get why a lot of people struggled with that. I'll never forget this investor. I met my spring of my senior year, because at that point it actually had been announced that the Nike fuel band was coming.

And I confessed to him that Nike was going to enter the space. And he had all these reasons for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. We should just try to build software. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, you know what? You are going to fail. and you're going to fail so badly.

And I'll tell you the number one reason you're going to fail. You're going to fail because you don't listen. And I remember for months I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn. So knowing that Nike was going to come out with its own band,

which it had for, I think it was out for five years, a fuel band, how did you convince him? anybody to give you money. So you remember how I said they were right and away and they were wrong in a way? Yeah. The way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing was that Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use.

It was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology. And the strategy that Nike, in my opinion, should have taken was much more similar to Whoop, which was, no, we're going to do the hard work. We're going to measure the hard things. And then we're going to tell this story from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and LeBron James on down. And that would have been, I think, successful. And so I had so much relief the day I tried the Nike Fuel Band because it was just another step counter.

And it was a huge missed opportunity, I thought, for, by the way, a brand that I have admired since I was five years old. Nike is the company that actually taught me what a brand was. You know, like I, you wear a white cotton t-shirt that's blank versus a white cotton t-shirt with a Nike swish. Why do I feel different in the one with the swish? And it's because the swish stood for something. And that's a brand. A belief. And I thought that was so cool.

Yeah, I thought that was so cool. And it did influence a lot of how we built the company. All right. So you are, you're aware that the big sort of sports brands are getting into this thing. But you're really just keeping your head down and focusing on what you're going to offer. And I think it was around 2014 when you changed the name to whoop. You go from Bobo Analytics, call it whoop. Just briefly, what, what's the, how did you come up with that name? whoop was a word that in college all of my friends and I would say to express energy or excitement people would say like oh how are you feeling and you respond oh I got whoop I feel good and it was this like upbeat word that

people would say it made them smile and there was a certain virality to the word that was hard to explain when other people heard it they then wanted to say it but I wonder before you even had a product right because it wouldn't be three years like it wasn't a

until 2015 when you actually had something that was ready for, you know, ready to put it out into the world, which we'll get to. But three years, right? And of course, you're building something very complex. But meantime, all these competitors are coming out with products. Do you remember a feeling of just really just anxiety about wanting to get something out there? Oh, I mean, it was probably the most anxious period of my life when I look back on it. I was I was totally upside down physiologically, which is sort of ironic because I was trying to build a product that improves your sense of balance. But I, yeah, I was drinking too much coffee. I was tired all the time.

I was stressed all the time. I was drinking too much alcohol. I was strung out. And at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them. Yeah. But you managed to attract some investment. I mean, it's not insignificant, you know, $6 million in, you know, June of 2014 and then a bit more by the end of that year. I mean, there were clearly people who were believing you, but still compared to your competitors, you're vastly, you know, being vastly outspent.

Yeah. We had raised $10 million probably total by the end of 2014. And then we had probably raised $25 million total by mid-2015. Got it. Okay. So you have in 2015, I think it's the end of summer, 2015, you have the first version ready for launch. And the game plan here is we're not going to launch this as a mass consumer product. We're going to launch this as a product for athletes. For college athletes, professional athletes, what data would an athlete have access to if they wore this? Because it was initially, it was going to be expensive. It was. It was going to be expensive. It was. was going to be a thousand bucks per player. We'll get into the business model in the sec. But what was the offer here? What would you get by wearing it?

You'd get strain, sleep, and recovery measurements with a certain level of depth behind each metric. So with sleep, you'd get sleep staging and time in bed and hours of sleep that you got. With recovery, you'd get a score 0 to 100 percent, red, yellow, green. You'd know your resting heart rate, your hurry variability, sleep quality. And just to be clear, you would see this on your iPhone. It was a band that had no interface, no screen, but it was tethered by Bluetooth to your iPhone and you would see it on your phone. That was the initial model. Yes.

It would send data to an app via Bluetooth. And then we also built a web app that was designed for coaches. So the coaches could see how their players were recovering and arresting and et cetera. Yeah. Yeah. But my biggest focus was really trying to get the world's best athletes. Who did you want? Who was your like Barbie Dreamhouse athlete that you wanted to get this on? LeBron James and Michael Phelps were the two. Okay. How are you going to get to? I mean, first of all, those guys have huge endorsement deals, millions and millions of dollars.

Like how are you going to get to them? And even if you do get to them, they're going to say, presumably, well, do it, but you got to pay me a million dollars or five. million, whatever, or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like, how would you do that? So those two people had a lot of infrastructure around them. And you're right, they had a lot of offers and these things. And the secret to getting to them, just to say it, was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. It turned out in 2015, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them and spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron,

like Mike Monsias, was his longtime personal trainer, still is today. And he started wearing whoop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron. So that's how you started. You got him on the wrist of the personal trainers just so they could try it out. Yeah. I mean, Michael Phelps and LeBron James were among your first 100 users. I mean, we're not talking about really good athletes. We're talking about the greatest athletes in their sport. I mean, first of all, let's just talk about LeBron for a sake. I mean, he's a Nike athlete.

They had a product that arguably was a competing product. Like, I guess it's LeBron James and he can do whatever he wants, but wasn't that complicated? Didn't that create friction? Well, the way that it didn't was that we had no relationship with him. We had no relationship at the time with Michael Phelps either. and many of these athletes. I mean, they were essentially just a buyer of the product. You charged them for this or you gave it to them?

I'm assuming you would give it to them. Well, in the case of the trainers, we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it. And again, because we believed that the product was valuable. And at the end of the day, it's kind of obvious whether someone likes whoop because wearing something 24-7 is like, it's really hard. It's just really hard to do. It's just hard to build a product that people wear 24-7.

And so if they're actually still wearing it 24-7, they like it. And so our engagement metrics became the lifeblood of our story. And I remember there was a year where LeBron and his old team were wearing it, and it came out that they were wearing it in games. And that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA. It wasn't allowed by the NBA. Yeah, it wasn't allowed by the NBA. And so that created this whole scandal around,

loop. And ironically, created more interest from other sports leagues. And so shortly thereafter, we did this very cool partnership with Major League Baseball, and we grew in the NFL. And so there was, it did turn out to be true that if you start with literally the very best athletes in the world, there is a massive trickle-down effect. And was there, even then at that point, you know, once, let's just say a year in, in, you know, when the Apple Watch is becoming more and more popular, I mean, you've got a screen, a screen-free device here. I mean, it's measuring different things and more things, but there's no

screen, right? And a screen is like a shiny, this sort of the shiny object sort of screaming out there. I have to imagine, even at this point, you had investors saying, okay, when are you guys going to do a screen now? Yeah, a lot of it goes back to the origin of wanting to create a product that you wear 24-7 and wanting to create a product that has super accurate data. And it turned out, as we really unpacked it, that having a screen was not going to help either of those. In fact, it might hurt it. So what do I mean?

Well, first of all, this idea that you wear it all the time, if you put a screen on the product, then it's a watch. And if it's a watch, then you can't wear another watch, right? And if you're having to decide which watch to wear, you're going to take whoop off sometimes. And furthermore, as we started to unpack the watch capabilities, you kind of quickly start saying yes to a lot of functionality. First, it's saying, well, maybe you should know when your phone's ringing or, you know, push notifications or emails. And next thing you know, you're building a smart watch, right? And one of the ways that we built a product that people use is by just discarding the notion of having the most features.

We were not going to have the most features. In fact, we were going to have very few features. We were going to be singularly focused on fitness and health monitoring. Got it. Okay. So you have this product that's doing well with athletes and they like it and you're ready to put out a version for consumers. This is in 2016. And again, for people who aren't familiar with whoop, I think a lot of people listening are,

it's basically a strap. I mean, it looks like, I mean, it looks like a, you know, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a. cloth strap around your wrist. It's very simple. When it was ready for consumers, right, it didn't quite take off initially as maybe you had expected it to or maybe you didn't. I don't know. But were you surprised that it was sort of slow to get mass adoption? I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I was doing. I mean, there are moments in the history of whoop where looking back on it, I'm reminded that this is my first full-time job, let along the first company I've started. So I think launching to consumers was one of those wake-up calls.

The bet at the time was, hey, we've built this brand with professional athletes, the world's best, and a bunch of fitness enthusiasts are going to want the product that's used by the pros. Yeah. But one of the challenges was that we weren't paying athletes. So we didn't technically have the rights to likeness and image, right? But you couldn't do advertising with them. But we weren't doing advertising with them. And by the way, we also didn't really know how to do marketing yet.

And maybe most importantly, we were selling the product for $500. So compared to like a Fitbit, which is like $100 or $150, that was a lot. Yeah, it was a lot. More than an Apple Watch at the time. well more than an Apple Watch. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have expected to sell a lot. But look, we observed two things. The first was that people who wore Whoop, which is to say they bought it and then they put it on, would wear it for a long time. And this user engagement was unique. I mean, it was a market, the wearables industry,

just to say it, is a market that's been plagued by engagement, which is to say someone buys a Fitbit, and then three weeks or three months later, it's in a drawer. They were just really cheap, and that was it. People would buy them and use them and then stop using them. Yeah. And so we didn't have that engagement problem, but we had a big problem, which was that people weren't buying it. Yeah, that's a big problem. Now you start to look at the incorporation year of Woop, and you start to look at how much money we've raised, and you know, you start to squint a little bit. Like, why hasn't this business figured out how to generate revenue at a material level.

And you're five years in now. Oh, yeah. I imagine you had enough faith in the product that you thought this is going to be fine, but still, like, I'm sure there were people maybe not so subtly asking you that question. Okay, you're five years in here. You're not, your sales aren't great. What's going on? So there was a period of time in 2017 where we were asking ourselves the same question.

Like, what Israel? like why aren't a lot of people behind this? When we come back in just a moment, Woop changes its business model and another massive company enters the wearables market, Amazon. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017, and Woop has had some pretty big wins.

Michael Phelps and LeBron James are using the device, which is huge. the problem is that's not translating into sales, but eventually Will starts to figure out what's wrong. It took us some time to realize that we had the wrong business model. Perhaps we were totally wrong to be selling this as a one-time fee. And so then we started playing with this idea of, okay, well, what if the hardware cost X and the subscription cost Y? And you started unpacking that. And the more time that I tinkered with the idea, the more I got obsessed with the idea of,

what if it was just completely a subscription? The whole thing was a subscription. The hardware was just included. And you're signing up for the data and the platform and the insights, the coaching. But the band is free. The whoop strap is free. And I fell in love with that idea. And I became convinced that that was going to save the company.

And the engagement data would suggest that I was right. But it was still pretty unproven. It was a company that wasn't yet good at marketing. And to your point, we're five years into building it, didn't have a big revenue stream. It wasn't like competition was gone, by the way. We still had all these companies in the space. At this point, now they were more tech companies, actually, than fitness companies.

So, you know, 2012, 13, 14, 15 were kind of defined by Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma, entering the space. Now Apple was heating up. They had seen success with their first watcher two. Samsung was entering the space. Microsoft was entering the space. And at the same time, my conviction level that we were onto it, we were just one turn away, my conviction level was at an all-time high. And so that was a very painful 18 months. In some ways, you were actually really lucky that you were under the radar, right?

Because no one, I mean, when people talked about fitness trackers, WOOP wasn't in the conversation in 2016, 2017. They were talking about these other companies you mentioned, the apples and Samsung's. Fitbit and so on. And of course, that would change eventually. But in some ways, you were kind of lucky that you were under the radar and perceived maybe by those other companies as like, oh, well, this is really more of a medical device for professional athletes because they weren't working on, I guess they weren't really focused on offering the same data. I think that's right. But I do think that by having the first launch kind of be such a snooze Fest, it gave us a chance to launch again for the first time. You know, I meet hardware founders,

and they talk a lot about how their first product's going to sell 100,000 units in the first year. And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer market to just teach you what's the state of play and buy you some time to get to that second or third iteration. The worst thing that could have happened to whoop and would have killed the company ironically was selling 100,000 units in 2014, 15, 16, even 17 probably. Because we weren't ready for that big a number of people to come on and for all the challenges that would come with it.

And there's a sort of like gradual infrastructure that you need to build as a hardware company. You need to get in lockstep with your manufacturing line. And you want to have the infrastructure to support customer support and membership services and these sorts of things. And so, yeah, we probably weren't ready for that in 2016, but we got ready for it. All right. Let's talk about 2018, right? Because this is an important year. You get, I mean, you're still kind of under the radar, right?

I mean, you're raising money and you're showing promise. You know, that year you attract money from the NFL players. League Association. But one interesting thing happens at year, which is your approach by Amazon, they have a fund called the Alexa Fund. And they come in to talk to you about maybe investing in you, which must be really exciting because it's Amazon. I mean, if Amazon is going to be an investor, well, you know, it's like next stop, you know, the moon, right? I mean, so when they came to you, you must have been pretty excited. Totally. And look, we had a distribution problem. And so you know, who's bigger than Amazon

when it comes to distribution. What did they say? They said we're interested in making an investment. Yes. Yep. Yeah, and they did a lot of diligence on Woop and it started with their deal team. They came in to really go into your, they went into your data room, really kind of

looking at your numbers and technology. Yeah. Were they talking about a possible, like, dollar figure of what they might invest? I don't remember the exact dollar figures, but I can tell you, that in 2017 and 18, I was trying to raise probably $10 or $20 million. And so they would have probably been a candidate to take all of that or lead that.

Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them. And they included their product team in the diligence. And then they ultimately did not invest in WOOP to our surprise. Why? What was the reason? This may be a disappointing answer, but I've had so many investors pass on Woop in the last you know, 13 years, that all the answers kind of blur together. Yeah.

And so I don't remember what their reason was for not investing, and it could have been a dozen things, frankly. Do you remember caring that much about it or just being like, okay, whatever? At that point, I had gotten pretty numb to people passing on whoop or, as it often felt to me, rejecting me because I spent so much time as the sort of front man for these pitches. And that 18-month stretch of like beginning of 2017 to mid-2018, Woop was on fumes. I mean, we never had more runway than three months for an 18-month period of the company,

which is just, it's hard in hindsight to figure out how that ended up being possible. But we just were continually on life sport. We would continually find a little more capital or a couple good things would happen and people would get a little more excited. and I was perpetually fundraising and getting told no and a lot. Well, during that time, I mean, this is, it's just so fascinating, especially now that we know what the product is today, which we're going to get to, and how just how it's triumphed. But at that time, I mean, you were raising, like, there's this kind of conventional wisdom about raising money now. You'll hear founders say, raise money when you don't need it because that's when you have the most leverage.

but here you were raising it because you really needed it. Totally. And I imagine that, you know, you had to accept terms sometimes that were hard to swallow. You know, remarkably in the company's history, we've never done a down round. And it's hard to actually explain how that's possible when I think back on it. But we had people who were using the product who were quite euphoric about it. But the irony was that the unlock for the business, was going to be moving to a subscription.

And what's the problem with a subscription? You get far less money up front. And so it was the only way out of this problem was to have more capital on the balance sheet. Right, because instead of charging 500 bucks for it, you were now saying, okay, it's going to be free, but you're going to get, it's going to be like 30 bucks a month or whatever it was going to be, which is much more affordable for somebody to sort of try it out. Totally. All right, I want to turn back to the Amazon story because they were sort of toying with the idea of investing and they decided not to. And that goes away. And, you know, you keep working on new iterations, new versions of your product and the WOOP 2.0 and then 3.0 comes out. And then Amazon announces they're making a monitor strap, a wearable band. that you feel looks quite shockingly similar to the whoop. Well, the first thing, I actually found out because so many investors had hit my email up with it when the announcement came out.

So it was like that, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're looking at your phone. And all of a sudden I've got like six emails from shareholders being like, Will, have you seen this? And it was really a bit of a condolences message, too, because everyone believed Amazon, which had unlimited distribution and unlimited resources if they entered the space was going to be quite problematic for whoop. Would crush you. And you could do an image search of this. It looks pretty much like a whoop. They knocked the product off. There's no question.

And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the leaders. The lead product manager from Amazon when it came out posted on Twitter, whoop, there it is, announcing the new Amazon Halo. Wow. Which just was like a sickening level of like we're above the law, so to speak. And look, you know, it's sad to say this, but they were above the law. Like, we weren't going to go after them legally. You can't sue them. They have endless resources to fight that lawsuit.

We were going to win in the court of public opinion and with consumers. But you would lose so much money trying to fight that case. Yeah, we didn't touch it. But it became a rally and cry internally. I had already seen how Nike and Adidas and Under Armour and Puma and Microsoft and Apple were supposed to be the death of Woop. And this was another company that, at least in my opinion, at that moment in time, was not going to beat us. It was also around the time that we were designing the circuit board of our next generation product. And so I wrote on every 4.0 circuit board, don't bother copying us, we will win.

In tiny letters on the circuit board? On the circuit board, yes, along with every engineer's initials. And the joke was if anyone actually found this message, they probably had nefarious reasons because they were opening our hardware to look at our circuit board. And they were going to see this message. And that made us so happy. It's interesting because, of course, Amazon is, you know, one of the greatest brands in modern history. It's an incredible company and has sort of changed the way we live.

But they have, you know, they've, from time to say they tried a smartphone didn't work. They tried this in, and for anyone who doesn't know, it doesn't exist, the product was discontinued, the halo eventually. But it's interesting because on the one hand, you could have gone down the path of saying, all right, we're just going to go after them and try and sue them. but that probably could have destroyed your company because you would have spent years in litigation, tens of millions of dollars trying to fight this. And for Amazon's rounding error, I mean, they can fight you and certainly make the case that this is not a copy. Or you can decide to lean further into your brand and just say, you know what? Forget about them.

We're just going to focus on building and doubling down on brand and really making sure that people see that what we're offering is we believe. believe a better product. Yeah, I think my sort of personal philosophy is you can only control what you can control. And if you're stressing about things that you're not in control of, you've lost the plot a little bit. And I think it's a pretty good company strategy, too, which is to say, like, if you spend too much time looking at what the competition is doing or letting the competition dictate your strategy, you've probably also lost the plot. You know, I'm curious about, again, going back to the athletes.

I mean, initially it was like, hey, we're offering this really cool thing that will give you a competitive advantage. But now, you know, now you've got, I mean, Michael Phelps, I think does endorsements for you and Rinaldo. And so I imagine that some of these athletes, if not many of them, are investors in the company now. Yeah, we have an amazing roster of professional athletes that have invested in the company. Patrick Mahomes is in there and Eli Manning. Rory McElroy, Christiana Rinaldo, Virgil Van Dyke,

Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald. And for me, like I've gotten to make friends with a lot of these, you know, global superstars. And they've offered a lot of good advice to me personally

and also to the business. You know, and I don't always say this in a show, but because I want to be neutral, but you have a great product. Thank you. And it offers great information, but it's one product, right? It's the band. It's the wearable. And is there a future where, you know, you've got seven different products or, you know, or other things that you're selling just to kind of diversify? I mean, is that a concern? Is that a necessity for you guys or maybe not? I think we'll add products to our portfolio to the extent that they contribute to that core mission,

which is to unlock human performance in health span. You know, a challenge with the definition of lifespan is it just means how long do you live. But what we like about health span is it really reflects the quality of how long you live. I mean, I get, you know, I get messages every single day from people who talk about how whoops improved their life or increase. You know, probably at least once a week now, whooped saved my life. And it's just hard to find a mission that feels that valuable. Well, when you think about, you know, the journey you've taken where you are now, because, I mean, there have been a lot of close calls where you guys could have gone under. And here you are, a really established, super well-respected brand.

How much of where you got to now do you attribute to that hard work and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky? I think there's certainly a resilience that the companies had or I've had over the last 13 years. I think there's been a lot of near-death experiences. I think there's been a lot of moments where quitting may have seemed responsible. I think I benefited from being young and naive for a lot of it. And I do think at its core, the idea was right. and in some ways I'm still trying to fulfill the vision that I had as a 21-year-old. I mean, that's pretty cool.

That's Will Ahmed, founder of Woop. By the way, while Woop is probably best known for helping you track the strain and recovery from doing sports, it also tracks your response to other things, like acupuncture, circus arts, commuting, cuddling with a child, cooking, and eating. even public speaking. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at gairoze.com or on Substack.

This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer with music composed by Ramtina Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Chris Messini, Jacey Howard, Sam Paulson, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.