The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

Will Ahmed is the founder of Whoop, the fitness monitoring app worn by LeBron James and Serena Williams, and which goes toe to toe with Apple, Google and Amazon. Will is the classic example that business and entrepreneurial drive follow on from being obsessed with a problem. After repeatedly getting injured in his college sports career, Will became obsessed with understanding his own body. He read over five hundred medical papers and realised the product he was pining for didn’t exist, so he invented it. Will has one of the most original perspectives on how to bring your personality to your business that we’ve ever seen. Employees at Whoop get a bonus if their sleep is good, and the company is ruthless in its priorities to make sure it’s only focused on a couple of things at a time. All of this means Whoop has some of the best wearable tech on the market, despite only a fraction of the resources of its competitors. Follow Will: Instagram - https://bit.ly/3VX7chq Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. So two of our first 100 users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Fucking hell. A $3.6 billion company. Wearable health and fitness coach. The founder of Whoop. Will Ahmet. You know, Nike and Apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space. But when it comes to health monitoring, we're the best game in town. That really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. One of the reasons Whoop has been successful

is there were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that, Interesting, I shall steal that. It's worth emphasizing for your audience why that matters. So there was a phase in building Whoop where it was so much about the next milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine. If the company has a great day, you're feeling like a

rocket ship. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing. What's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see? I was super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And I remember I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they're like numb. I actually drove myself to the hospital and they do, you know, all these analysis on me

and like it turns out I had a... Without further ado, I'm Stephen Butler and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Well, as you look back on your life and you connect the dots that led you to do what you've done now with Whoop and your professional life. What are those dots? Well, I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. I was always into sports and exercise. I was a super active kid. My parents are very different. My dad's an Egyptian immigrant, very street smart, charismatic, came to this country with very little, rose the ranks in finance over time. My mom, very analytical,

very book smart. And watching how they approached life, I think was a fascinating way to grow up because they had very different, uh, tool sets to solve problems. And, uh, I was always playing sports. I was always exercising and that eventually led my way to Harvard. And, uh, and so I was a college athlete. I got, um, recruited to play squash at Harvard. And so I was a college athlete. I got recruited to play squash at Harvard. And over the course of my time there, I got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body, how I could understand what it meant to train optimally, how I could prevent overtraining, which was a problem that I had, how I could really understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising. And so that took me down this rabbit hole of physiology

research, which we can get into. But I read hundreds of medical papers while I was in school and then ultimately wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body. And then over the course of my time at Harvard, built up the confidence to start a company, which was a fairly crazy thing looking back on it. And for the last 10 years, I've been building this company called Whoop. We went through that very quickly, but a lot of those things are very, very unusual. One of the first unusual things is, I mean, we all train, we all, a lot of people train and work out and stuff, but we don't then fall into an obsession about how to optimize the performance of our training and ourselves. What is it about you? Have you been able to figure out

in hindsight what it is about you and your makeup that made you so obsessed with that particular topic? Well, it struck me as something that really didn't make a lot of sense. Like I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard exercising with no information about what I was doing to my body. And yet that's a school also that is totally obsessed with deeper knowledge. And so that in itself seemed like a, like a deep irony. And then I also was a pretty competitive person and I was someone who was overtraining, right? Where you see you get missing ingredient, so to speak. And I just sort of started pulling at that thread and it really took me down a rabbit hole. Overtraining. I've heard this term. Never been sure if I've believed it because I don't really know what it is. But for someone that doesn't know what that is, what is overtraining? The technical definition is it's a continued state of overreaching that

then leads to a period where your body's essentially in a depressed state. And what that will look like physiologically is essentially your body's run down. Activities that would normally feel somewhat easy are quite difficult. Psychologically, it makes you feel kind of lousy, run down, symptoms similar to being sick. And depending on how overtrained you are, it can last a week or it could last months. In my case, it normally didn't last longer than a couple of weeks, but it's kind of this ultimate betrayal, right? Because you're pushing yourself so hard to get stronger and fitter that you actually get to a place where you're completely broken down. Had I asked you at 14 years old, say 14, 16 years old,

what you were going to be when you grew up, what would you have responded? I don't know that I would have known. But if you looked at the things I was interested in, I was always playing with technology, which in hindsight, uh, it was quite predictive. Like I had the first, um, I had the first iPod in my sixth grade, uh, class, I remember. So we're about the same age. So you probably remember when the iPod came out and like how cool that thing was thick, but it was really thick and it had that like wild wheel. A little before that, I had a Palm Pilot, like a Palm Pilot 7.

It was like the original Palm Pilot that could get internet access. When I was around 12 or 13, I had one of the first voice recorders that you could speak into and it would type for you. Oh, wow. So it was like, you know, Siri, but 20 years ago. And it didn't quite work, unfortunately. But I had this real itch towards technology. And then I think somewhere between the ages of like 18 and 20, I also saw this huge convergence happening with smartphones, with the way that computers to me seemed like they were sort of seamlessly moving from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket to what I perceived to be eventually on your body or even in your body. I thought that was a natural evolution.

So I definitely had this pull towards technology, but I think throughout, you know, I was overcoming this feeling of whether I should go into finance because I grew up, my dad was, you know, in finance. In fact, after my freshman year at Harvard, so most undergrads do, you know, different internships and whatnot. After my freshman year, I did an internship at a hedge fund. My sophomore year, I did an internship at an investment bank. And my junior year, I did an internship at a private equity firm. So like I did, I was really flirting with going into finance, but I think, I think this is what I was supposed to do. From everything I've read, it's quite clear to me that you're a very curious person. And my brother's very interesting, my oldest brother. Whenever we,

when we were younger, he always wanted to understand everything. And when he became interested in something, he became obsessed in it. And he went like right down into the rabbit hole. As I read through your story on multiple occasions, whether it's meditation or others, or how the business came to be, or, you know, your journey to trying to figure out how to optimize the body. All of these struck me as a person that once they get interested in something, they go all the way down into the rabbit hole to find out the solutions. Is that accurate? I think it's fair. I think it also stems from this, uh, ability to throw myself out there. Um, you know, back to how your childhood influences your, your future. There's, there's a story. I don't know if I ever talked about this, but

a fascinating story where I was in fifth or sixth grade, middle school, and we're doing what's called a blue and gold day. So I went to a school called Greenvale. The colors are blue and gold. And you have this like fair essentially, which is all sorts of different competitions, races, that sort of thing. And there's a captain's race at the end of the day with like the four people four people representing their, their class, so to, so to speak the, the, to run the fast race. And I was a, I was a captain. So I was very anxious about this final race. And right before the final race was one of the longer races. Like, uh, I think it was three or four laps. And so, uh, you know, if you were to run that you'd be quite tired and that wasn't a race i ever ran but uh timmy all of a sudden was sick and so he didn't show up for for this race and i remember

peter zalum who's our science teacher he's walking around and he's yelling hey blue we need someone to run this race we need someone to run this race and i'm kind of like avoiding even making eye contact with this teacher because i really don't want to run this race and it was like he zeroed in on me out of a distance and just marched over and he said will you should run this race and i said no no i've got the captain's race i gotta do that and he's like well 90 of life is showing The other 10% is what happens when you get there. And like in that moment, I was like, okay, yeah, I'm going to go run this. And I don't even remember what happened in that race.

I don't even remember the captain's race, which in some ways emphasizes his point. But that whole thread of just showing up is something I think about all the time. Why do, and this is, I guess, a lesson for entrepreneurship, because you saw some, I was going to say, and this links to something in your story, I was going to say you saw an opportunity, but you didn't see an opportunity, did you? You were dragged by your obsession and interest.

In building Whoop? Yeah. I definitely saw an opportunity to continuously measure the human body. yeah i definitely saw an opportunity to continuously measure the human body and i also saw an opportunity that uh computing was getting to a size and and sort of sophistication where it could be smaller and smaller uh but the pull that got me to building this company and i think persevering over years was that it also was a personal obsession to really understand my own body. Yeah. Because when people typically recite

their stories of how they became an entrepreneur, you get this kind of like, they put, I don't know, a white piece of paper there and they're like, what is the opportunity in the market? And, and when I read the quote from you that said, you were an entrepreneur before you realized you were. Yeah, that's true. That bucks that narrative a little bit, which I think entrepreneurs sometimes try and sell because it makes them seem more intentional. I can't replicate your curiosity and interest that made you go off in that journey of optimizing the human body. So I just think in society and culture generally, entrepreneurs sometimes look back and try and make their story sound like really, really intentional. When a lot of it in your case, as is the case in mine, was like, I was interested in this thing. I just kept on going because I loved it.

I think that's right. I also spent a lot of time like building the confidence to start the company. Like I really didn't know what it meant to start a company. And I mean, I spent two years doing physiology research. I then took another class that was around, if you have an idea, how do you write a business plan. And I was meeting with the MIT professor, a guy named Howard Anderson, who taught the class and was like a venture capitalist. And at that point, I wasn't even enrolled in the class. I was just working on this business plan. And he's like, he just sort of stopped and he said, well, at some point you have to ask yourself, is this a paper or are you starting a company? Right. It sort of puts you on the spot. Like, why are you doing all this work? And I think I, I think I did a ton of work to feel as prepared as possible to like have the

confidence to take the leap. And I'm so glad I did. But I, you know, when I meet young people, I try to encourage them to do as much work as they can to build up that confidence. And also to understand that there's a lot of things you aren't going to know in the process of building a company. But once you make that commitment, the learning's coming fast, right? And I'm sure you've experienced that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I see it all the time, especially in young people who, they're using perfectionism as a way to procrastinate because they don't feel competent or ready yet so you'll have people that you know come come up to you and say i've been working on this idea for two years three years and they're making all these assumptions which they could quite probably figure out in a week if they just went to market to but it's a guise for fear i think sometimes it's a guise of like I actually don't feel ready or I

don't know I don't have the answers so I'm just preparing more wait for that perfect moment I think overcoming a fear of failure is a really critical step in life and there's a lot of methods to think about for that. I think for me, it was doing a lot of work. I think it was following my passion. In some ways, the reason I feel like I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was, it was that it almost became an inevitability that I was starting the company, unless so at choice. Because it was like all I was thinking about in my free time, you know, the things you do, the things you think about before bed or in a shower, you know, the quiet moments throughout life. I think those are pretty telling. And what role has that played that obsession with the, with solving the problem and solving that challenge and your general

interest in it? What role has that played in your hardest times? As in when things get really fucking difficult and it's easy to quit. If you're someone that's authentically driven and authentically curious about that thing, must make it somewhat easier to carry on. I think for sure. It pulls you through, like the obsession of solving a problem pulls you through I mean I struggled though for years uh with building whoop it was it was really really painful and I think an important thing for any entrepreneur but especially it was for me was to disassociate my own identity from that of the companies. If you're, and you've been a young entrepreneur, so you know this. Like as a young entrepreneur, I think a lot of your identity all of a sudden gets tied up in that thing you're creating.

And for me, that meant if Whoop was having a good day, I was having a good day. If Whoop was having a bad day, I was having a good day. If Whoop was having a bad day, I was having a bad day. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing. And that's a very unhealthy association, but it's also not true. Like literally you can be taking great steps to improve as a leader or as a manager or even as a recruiter.

And certain things will happen that may put your business sideways. And conversely, I'm sure you and I have both met founders, entrepreneurs who have watched their company go like this, but meanwhile, they're spinning out of control, right? And I think the faster that I could separate those two identities, my own and Whoop, the easier it actually became to build a successful company.

Is part of the reason you're so, our identity becomes attached to the company, because I was thinking about why that was, that was definitely the case for me. And the answer was because my entire net worth was, was this thing as well. So coming from a background where I didn't have money, my family didn't have money, my entire net worth was this thing as well. So coming from a background where I didn't have money, my family didn't have money, my entire net worth was this thing that was going well. So you can see how if the company starts to struggle, it's like Steve's actually poor again. Well, I had that too for what it's worth. In some respects, I still have it today, just like given the nature of the value of the business. The key, at least for me in building the business, was finding ways for myself to manage stress, to manage the difficulties that come with building a company without finding myself on that yo-yo of the company's performance. It can't be that if the company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship.

And if the company's having a bad day, you're feeling down. And so a lot of my, I think growth as an entrepreneur has been figuring out how to have a steady hand and how to, you know, sort of stay calm through the chaos. Yeah. How have you done that? A few different things. Um, I think the first, uh, and probably the most profound for me in general has been learning how to meditate. So in 2014, so I was about 24 years old, the company was maybe,

I don't know, 30 or 40 people. I think I had raised maybe $20 million, something like that, which certainly felt like a lot of money. And I felt like I was really failing as a leader. I was super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And I remember having, what I would later learn was a panic attack. And I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they like are a little bit numb and you have this taste in your mouth. I actually thought I'd been food poisoned because the feeling was so unusual and outrageous. And, uh, and so I drove, I actually drove myself to the hospital and I checked into the hospital and they do, um, you know, all these analysis on me. And like, it turns out I just had

a panic attack, but the fact that I ended up in the hospital from panic attack, I was like, all right, wait a second. Like I got to really reset how I'm building this company and growing. And, uh, two days later I signed up for this meditation course, Transcendental Meditation. And I've been doing it like every single day since then about, yeah, about eight and a half years later. When I sit here with CEOs who, many of which have had panic attacks, funnily enough, and they talk to me about meditation. I always seem to get a similar response, which is, I can't meditate, my head's too busy for that. Well, I think the busier your mind is,

the more you need to meditate. So I learned how to meditate in 2014. And I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well. There's sort of a four-week check mark. I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well. There's sort of a four-week checkmark. I think there's like a four-month or maybe a one-year checkmark. And then there's four years plus, which is fortunately where I am today. And the fascinating thing is what you first observe in meditating,

and I should just sort of clarify what kind of meditation I'm doing. So I spend about 22 minutes every morning doing this. And you literally are, you're breathing, but then you start repeating a mantra. And the idea of the mantra is to start clearing your mind out. And you're just focusing on the mantra. But what inevitably happens is thoughts start to drift in as you're saying the mantra and you get to have this moment where you get to decide do I want to think about the thought or do I want to pass it along by going back to the mantra so just right there in that moment you start to realize that you can filter your thoughts you also get to choose to sit with certain thoughts, right? Think how often in your

life you might have thoughts coming in. You feel like you can't really control what you're thinking about, right? You almost like don't have that focus. So that's the immediate benefit that you get, that you feel while you're meditating. The more powerful benefit, and this is what I meant about feeling certain stages of having done it, is at least for me, it started to feel like I had a third person, you know, sort of watching me. And I would hear this voice in my head suddenly, like when I was about to get angry or when I was about to be upset. And it was sort of all of a sudden you're able to sense what you're about to do or say before you do it. So the immature version of me as an entrepreneur might find himself saying things and being angry and reacting and then sort of almost catching up to the emotional state that I was in and trying to reel it back. Whereas the more meditated version of me, I think has been able to recognize when I'm about to say something before I say it or feel something before I feel it. And

that, it feels like a superpower. Did that grow over time, that third person ability with your transcendental meditation practice? I think so. I mean, it's, I imagine that learning how to breathe and meditate is like any other skill. And if you refine it for weeks versus months versus years, it, it gets better. And it's, it's, it's basically becoming conscious, isn't it? Of what's going on in your mind. You're becoming more conscious of your thoughts and that their choices and you're not them. Yeah, exactly. I think it's at least helped me stay more in control of, of my actions, my feelings, decisions I'm making. And, and I really recommend it to anyone. Like I think it's, I think it's a game changer. 2014, you cite in a few things you've spoken on as being a very difficult year. That's

when you had, as you said, 20 to 30 employees, you'd raised 20 million. Things were pretty crazy. In those early years, did you have doubt? Because when I think about the Whoop story, its competitors set are all massive fucking juggernauts. And I've, I've like from afar, obviously when I got, I got my week two months ago, I remember thinking, how the fuck have they done that in a, in a, in an environment where you've got these big, you know, Steve jobs founded companies and this company, and they've all got billions and 200 billion in the kitty. I'm like, how did they get on my wrist? How did they pierce and get, you went into an incredibly competitive market. When you did that, when you raised that 20 million, did you have doubts about yourself?

I think I developed doubts, um, in managing the company. Like I always believed in the vision, uh, of what we set out to build. I mean, dating to 2011 or 2012 when I was doing all the research, it was almost a straight shot from 2011 or 12 to today. The paper I wrote in 2011 was titled The Feedback Tool Measuring Intensity, Recovery, and Sleep. And literally today, our three main metrics are strain recovery and sleep. So in terms of having a strong perspective on what the world should look like when the technology is built and actually measuring all the things it needs to super accurately, I think building Whoop was more of a straight line than the average company. Where it was all kinds of zigs and zags and chaos is learning one, how to be a CEO and run the company. To your point, learning how to navigate competition,

and we can talk more about that. We've had some interesting experiences in that category. A big theme was actually being able to raise capital in part because of the competition, right? Like it was hard. First of all, for a number of years, we were building the technology before we ever were really generating revenue. And that's, that's just a hard business to build. And it also took us a lot longer to get the product to market than we thought it would. Right. And so you're in this scenario where, you know, you're, you're saying to investors, well, we're, we're getting there, we're getting there, we're getting there. And so the, you know,

the first seven years of the company, I would say, were enormously hard from just a technology development standpoint, from a capital raising standpoint, even from a business generation standpoint, because we, you know, we were seven years in and then completely changed our business model on its head, which was a bet the company moment, you know? And so there were just a lot. It was a lot. Yeah.

Had I told you at 22, the next, was 22 when you founded the company? Yeah. If I told you at 22, the next seven years would look like that do you think you would have done it i think i would have done it yeah i mean it was painful but i knew i was doing the right thing like i knew i was i knew i was in the right storm you know what i mean like um there were a lot of feelings of being like my back against the wall.

There were a lot of feelings of doubt. What were those feelings of doubt? You know, are we going to get this thing to market soon enough? Are we going to figure out what the right way is to sell it? Are we maturing as a team? Are we going to be able to attract more capital? I mean, again, back to raising capital. We've raised about $400 million in capital today, but that's still sense when you look at the companies we've been competing against to get to this stage. And so I was, I was nervous about that piece of it. And especially again, as a young entrepreneur who's, who's raising capital

for the first time. You said team and we there, co-founders. Yeah. How important is that in hindsight? Cause I feel like you don't find out the answer to how well you've chosen your co-founders until a couple of years in. Yeah. Look, I had a great, um, CTO. I had a great lead mechanical engineer. We built the business together for 10 years. My CTO just transitioned to new projects. But it's been an amazing ride. has, you know, through a variety of different third parties, been credited as being most accurate, wearable in the market, speaks to the technical chops of the founding team. And I don't take credit for that.

So I think it's a remarkable accomplishment. And I think it's also important when you're building a founding team to have a fairly clear set of responsibilities. I get a little nervous when I hear of a founding team to have a fairly clear set of responsibilities. I get a little nervous when I hear of a founding team and they're both like the business guy or they're both like the technical guy and kind of do the same thing. The advantage that we had in starting the company was each category of thing that we were trying to do was so hard, like inventing a wearable that could measure heart rate variability as accurately as an electrocardiogram or raise capital at a time that, you know, Nike and Apple and, you know, a dozen other companies were entering the space. Like if I struggled with raising capital, like I wasn't going to have a partner giving me a hard time. If he struggled with building the technology, I wasn't going to give him a hard

time. Like we just knew it was hard. And we also knew that the other wasn't going to be better at it. So I think that there was an element of complimentary skill sets that's helpful. If you were giving someone advice on how to pick a co-founder in terms of the character traits that you look for in that person, what would you suggest that they look for? Because it's a question I get asked all the time about co-founders. It's probably some combination of commitment, intensity, and humility. The commitment piece is really important because you're going to have a lot of very difficult things happen in the first six months, let alone the first six years. And so you want to know that this person's committed to doing this and it's going to be hardcore. And no matter what happens, we're going to get through it.

You know, I think startups really only fail if the founders quit or you run out of money. So like if you can overcome those two things, you've got a pretty good shot. And so commitment's critical. And then intensity and humility, that's what I just generally look for in anyone that I work with. You want hard driving people. You want people who recognize that it's going to take an enormous amount of work and discipline to develop whatever product or service it is that you're creating for the first time. But you also want along the way to have people who recognize that with that intensity and with that intelligence, with that depth, they have the humility to recognize that they may not have all the answers. And in particular, when you're building a company and a small company at that,

that has a lot of different departments that intersect. And in the case of Whoop, I mean, hardware, software, analytics, data, regulatory, design, marketing, whatever. You could have a meeting with four different departments and it's really just four people. And all of a sudden there's this massive collision around how we're going to send data from a whoop strap to an iPhone. And like the product person has their own perspective.

The iOS engineer has his own perspective. You know, the Bluetooth expert has their perspective. The engineer has, the mechanical engineer has their own perspective. And so there's this natural collision of how should we solve this problem? And I think when you build teams with high humility, they tend to come out with the answer that's best for the company, not like I came up with it. So that would, I think that's a pretty good starting point, commitment, intensity, humility. When you think about the most difficult time, so I know that you would have been through many,

many difficult times, but when I say that, when I say the most difficult time, maybe a day, maybe a piece of news you got, an email, is there something that comes to mind as the most difficult day, time, moment? Well, there was a period of time of about 18 months where Whoop never had more than three months of runway. Of cash in the bank? Yeah. So picture that, right? Because, you know, so much of building a business is having the runway to strategize and grow and recruit. And, and I, the company had gotten into a weird moment where we were still doing innovative things, but we hadn't found the next investor to sort of carry the company through to the, to the future, uh, to a future round or, you know, give us two years of runway, which is sort of what the company through to the, to the future, uh, to a future round or, you know,

give us two years of runway, which is sort of what you'd want for any capital injection. And we were making some deals happen. There were, there were compelling things happening in the business. And so we were able to stitch along a number of, uh, investments, but never enough capital. And so I just felt this enormous weight on my shoulders, man. Like it was, it was so intense. And, and it also was a, it was a company size that, you know, it's one thing to say, okay, 18 months and you never have more than three months of runway. It's one thing to say that when you're like a 10 person team, like we were like a 50, 70 person team, something like that. So, you know, that you feel a lot of responsibility as well when you're operating through a period. And essentially it got to the point where, um, if we didn't get, uh, uh, essentially a term sheet signed,

uh, on a Wednesday, we were going to go bankrupt on that Friday or file for bankruptcy on that Friday. So imagine like two days from it all going away. And I remember writing, like even writing a note to all of our investors about what a journey it had been and thank you. Like I felt all the feelings of the company had failed without the company having failed and fortunately was able to get the deal

done on that day and uh you know so god I did I've been there I've been there for multiple payrolls I tell this funny story about it being payday on that day and the bank not our bank at the time not releasing the funds. We have 200 people and them saying they'll only release the funds on that Friday when everyone's expecting payment if I get a contract signed by one of our clients. So I'm in London having drinks with this client and we get to like, you know,

a certain point at lunchtime, like you wouldn't mind signing this contract, send it off to, but multiple times, especially running a B2B agency business that was growing. Cash is always 60 days away. You've got to pay your bills today, but what's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see? Well, I look back on that whole period with like immense gratitude because it being able to overcome that and being able to essentially pull through in a

circumstance where I think almost any other business would have failed. It just, it reframed for me going forwards, what it means to be facing a challenge. Like that was a real existential challenge. Like this whole thing's going away. We're all going home. The technology is worth nothing. Right. That's like poof. And so now it's like, okay, the sales were lower this month than the last month or this great person on our team got poached by that company or this epic competitor came out with this product. Like there's, there's some level of perspective that comes with all of those, you know, big challenges because I just remember being able to work through the, what I deemed to be one of the biggest challenges. Did you get anxiety through that period? Totally. But I, I also like, I was able to build a whole lifestyle and process to approach stress. And I do think that success may come for people when they overcome a level of stress that would break most people. of how pop culture likes to talk about stress, which is if you're stressed, take on way less of it, right? And that may be true in small doses,

but what we really want to learn is how to cope with stress and how to manage through it and how to overcome it. And I think also, if you're stressed about something, it's also a signal that it matters to you and it's important. Right.

So, look, it was that period of time was enormously stressful, painful. I felt like I had to keep some of it to myself versus burden, like a larger team with it, you know, so that there's certain burdens. I do think that CEOs or leaders or entrepreneurs carry, or you're almost compartmentalizing something and, you know, you're going to have to, to feel it. I'm sure you know what that feels like. Yeah, of course. I think, you know, I did that for my entire career. And then I think the shift I've seen in culture with leaders was COVID when a lot of companies, the facts were clear. Like we have to close down if you're a high street brand, for example, we have to close the doors. So that's when I think a lot of CEOs started being more honest

with the state of play with their team members and would say things like, listen, we're going to have to let half the team go. And this is how much money we have in the bank. If we don't get here, then we're going to have to close down. I saw a big shift then, and it inspired me a lot about being transparent with my teams. But I mean, for the whole of my professional career, yeah, I just, I just, brave face. It was like, you would have no idea if it was the best day or the worst day because my face was the same. So you got good at holding it in? A hundred percent, but my business partner didn't and he became an alcoholic. So he, as he's talked about many times, he turned to alcohol. So we lived in the same house together

and he would, there were times when I went downstairs at 3am and went into the laundry room and he was there drinking. And, you know, so we were, we were both coping in different ways. I was kind of compartmentalizing and kind of just, I called it a video game mindset where it's what you've talked about. I was holding the controller. I think my business partner was inside the game. Yeah. You know what I mean?

As in like, there was a cord between me and what was going on. Did you develop any like lifestyle hacks? I've got to be honest, not at the time and now i think i have more but at the time no i was just trying to get to the next day and i think i have a natural sort of predisposition to in the worst moments ever just purely focusing on what i can control part of me which by the way is a big deal yeah yeah i i only know this in hindsight because i wonder why and on our if i told you ever just purely focusing on what I can control. Part of me, which by the way is a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. I only know this in hindsight. Cause I wonder why on our, if I told you about the worst

day we ever had in the business years later, my business partner says, why were you so calm on that day? Well, I had very few choices. So the worst day we ever had in the company, my choices were so small and they were so obvious as they often are. It's like, if the room's on fire, like the doors over there and the button's there. I think about that all the time. It's like, are you controlling all the controllables? And often if you are, or even just, you know, setting down in your mind

or even putting on paper, hey, what are all the things I control about the situation? What are the things I don't? That can be a very calming exercise. It's very focusing yeah even talk about that day when we had the cash flow problem i knew what my objective was get this guy to sign this piece of paper what's there to worry about i have no time to worry so um so yeah that was a but you developed lifestyle hacks to help you

we talked about meditation which was a big one um exercise big one uh i got into hot cold transitions gratitude's a big one so take me through your day then because i think this will reveal a lot of your habits? Sure. So let's take a given day in Boston. Yeah. The day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a, uh, a framework for, you know, the next day. Um, a few days a week I work out with a trainer early in the morning. So I'll actually pack everything up for that. Well, I've got my workout clothes out. I'll have what I'm going to wear to work the next day. I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm going to focus on the next day.

And then like sleep, because, you know, building Whoop, you think a lot about sleep. I, you know, I sleep in a really cold bedroom, a really dark bedroom. Why cold and dark? It's just shown to give you higher quality sleep. Yeah. And I try to go to bed at a somewhat consistent time. This is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed at a somewhat consistent time. This is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed a little earlier, but, uh, so I'll probably go to bed

between, I don't know, 1130 and midnight. And then I'll wake up at around 630. Controversial question about your wife then. Does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed? It doesn't because we have, uh, we've got good intimacy. Like we've got good bed cuddle habits, you know, it's like a- Cuddle and tan. Yeah, yeah. We've done a good job coexisting

in a bedroom environment. Although that's an interesting thing you can track on Whoop. So if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner, you can literally record that in the Whoop journal in the app. So in a second, I want to hear what's in your Whoop journal and what you're tracking against.

So cold room, consistent bedtime. Yeah. And then I wake up and I'm like out the door, really quick shower, workout clothes, got my stuff. I always give my wife kisses before I leave. That's like a nice relationship hack while she's sleeping. And then I work out for an hour with my trainer. I'll do a steam room after that, freezing cold shower. I do a breakfast that's mostly like egg whites. It's mostly proteins like egg whites, like avocado, bacon, that kind of stuff. Two points there. So the first was working out in the morning. Yeah.

Is there any like data or science around that being advantageous? So back to being able to control the controllables, I like to work out in the morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to. What I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning and I'm supposed to play like squash that evening. And then a couple of things come up around 6 PM and all of a sudden I realized I'm not going to really get out the door. And so then, you know, you know, you don't exercise. So the nice thing about working out first is like, okay, I've checked that box. And then the other thing was this, the cold water. Cold water. Yeah. Talk to me about why you do that and how that helps.

So there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy, even if in the moment they're a little painful. And for me, being in the cold is one of those things. Like, I feel a huge jolt of adrenaline from it. It also forces me to breathe properly. And I think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces you to breathe properly is good for you. And then I feel kind of happy after doing it, like this little injection of happiness. And so I end a hundred percent of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible, the colder, the better. And then the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect depending on where i am is uh i mean there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a sauna a few days a week it is likely to increase longevity i would say i like the cold more than the hot but anyway i'd say I'm the opposite. My girlfriend is a breathwork practitioner, breathwork coach.

So obviously you understand what comes with that. And cold water is a big part of what she encourages on me. So she jumps in these ice baths and I'm like, I'm trying not to feel emasculated. I'm like putting my toe in and I'm like coming up with reasons. But no, she's got me into it. So what kind of breath work do you do? Um, I didn't even know the name of it. She's got her own method. She teaches classes. She's doing classes in London at the moment, big groups, one-on-one sessions. She's doing, um, she does sessions with lots of people that come on this podcast, in fact, because they end up getting,

getting to know her. So, but yeah, I don't know what type of breath work it is but it's an hour in a room like the yeah the double inhale yeah game changer just learning that we don't breathe I think it's amazing yeah that's a huge industry that's that's it feels like a wave coming into shore because this word breath work showed up like 18-24 months ago over here and now it's everywhere with like Wim Hof that's a good point I mean Wim's everywhere with like Wim Hof. That's a good point. I mean, Wim Hof. Yeah. I think Wim Hof pushed a lot of it, especially around the cold. And look, I think it's taking off for good reason in part, because again, back to controlling things you can control, you can literally control your breath in a second. And there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability.

And heart rate variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system. It's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. So it's a little confusing, but if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating the heart. So it's a little confusing, but if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating every second. Like it might be 0.7 seconds and then 1.3 seconds and then 0.6 seconds and 1.4 seconds. And it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing because it's a sign that your body's able to regulate in its environment. And your autonomic nervous system literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity.

Now, sympathetic is activation. So that's heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. Often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising, right? Now, parasympathetic is all the opposite. Hurry down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. But where this all comes back to breath work is literally inhaling.

That's sympathetic. That's parasympathetic. So just by controlling your breathing, you can decide whether you want to be sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant. You can increase your heart rate variability. You can decrease it. And that's something that's in your control. And heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a lens into how restored your body is. I noticed that because my friend Logan sent, he went up for a night out. He got drunk. It was a wedding. Yeah. And then he screenshotted his, his whoop dashboard the next day and put it into our chat and went, fuck, because everything was red. And, and he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important,

but I couldn't quite understand. Um, and I remember trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important but i couldn't quite understand um and i remember trying to trying to read about why it was important but i knew you were coming here so i thought i'd ask you myself because you i've heard you talk about the importance of heart rate variability i understand now what it is but why is it such an important indicator and what are the things that we do that make it plummet? So the fascinating thing about heart rate variability is it's been measured since like roughly the eighties. And the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that Olympic power lifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift. So based on whether they had a low or a high heart rate variability in the morning, and they'd get hooked up to an electrocardiogram.

Like this is an intense thing. And then they would go decide how much they were going to lift based on what their reading was. I was like, that's kind of interesting. Turned out cyclists were doing it in the 80s. The CIA was using heart rate variability for lie detection tests. Doctors, cardiologists were using heart rate variability to predict whether former heart failure patients

were going to have a heart attack again. So I'm thinking to myself, this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of that feels like everyone should be measuring. And so that's really, that was one of the core insights in building WHOOP was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously. And in particular, it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's readiness and how well you're sleeping. So those are two ways that WHOOP is primarily using heart rate variability. Things that decrease heart rate variability, dehydration, bad diet. We just talked about alcohol, heavy exercise, you know, heavy psychological stress. Often people are surprised how just the wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep

out of whack or their heart rate variability out of whack. So it's a very powerful statistic. It's a fascinating statistic. And I'm mostly glad like a lot more people are measuring it. It seems to know us before we know ourselves. It's a nice way to describe it. One of the things I would say in building whoop is feelings are overrated. There are things happening in your body that you can't feel. And I think heart rate variability is one of those key indicators where for most people it would be very hard to know what their heart rate variability was saying in any given moment.

But it has turned out to be a good embodiment of what whoop does, which is that feelings are overrated. I say that because I remember looking at my heart rate variability and seeing it was orange or red, I can't remember. And then asking myself why and I go, Oh yeah, I know why. Cause I was really, I think I was really stressed that day. I hadn't slept. And then I hadn't slept because we had a back to back to back schedule. So I was going to sleep at 4am and waking up at 8am for like three days in a row. And my heart rate variability just seemed to plummet. And I was going to sleep at 4am and waking up at 8am for like three days in a row. And my heart rate variability just seemed to plummet. And that was when I speak to my assistant,

I go, listen, we need to, no meetings before 11, cause I need to sleep. And it knew me before I, and it's funny because it, yeah, it, it changed my life by telling me something that maybe I wasn't listening to. It changed my routine by telling me something that was clear maybe from an objective objective standpoint but I clearly was ignoring thinking that I was invincible well I think COVID-19 was a big wake-up call for people in that category right of um of feelings are overrated because here you have a virus that you can get that you don't feel. You're not even sick. And yet you give it to someone else and they get deathly ill. We had a fascinating relationship with COVID-19 and being able to measure it because we detected a statistic called respiratory rate

being super elevated. But I can't tell you how many screenshots and messages I've gotten over the last two years of people seeing this huge spike in their respiratory rate two, three days before ultimately testing positive for COVID. And it reaffirmed in a lot of ways the founding story of the company, although in a different direction. It wasn't about not knowing that you should train today or rest today. It was about not knowing that you should train today or rest today. It was about not knowing that you were sick. It speaks to the potential of health monitoring and why it's so exciting. Another conversation I've been having recently with a friend is about blocking out certain types of light. I heard you do that. Yeah. So, uh, blue light, um,

essentially what emits from a cell phone, a television set, an iPad. I mean, blue light's frankly all around us and blue light essentially tells your brain to stay awake. And so one way to offset that is to not be on devices into the evening. But, you know, I'm still, I think, largely optimizing my life around being a great entrepreneur or CEO. So for me, that doesn't quite feel like an option yet, or I haven't quite built that level of maturity. But what I do do is I wear these blue light blocking glasses, which have a red tint to them. And it's like a get out of jail free card for using devices into the evening. And, uh, and then they start to make you sleepy. It's probably the single biggest thing that's boosted my REM and slow wave sleep on whoop

is, is wearing blue light blocking glasses. It's worth emphasizing for a second, like for your audience, why that matters. So if you spend like seven hours in bed you're not actually getting seven hours of sleep right and if you think about the seven hours you spent in bed it's divided up of time in which you're awake you're in light sleep you're in slow wave sleep or you're in REM sleep and awake and light sleep as stages go really are kind of irrelevant. Like they don't do much for your body physiologically. They're not restorative, but REM and slow wave sleep, that's like where all the magic happens. So REM sleep is when your mind is repairing cognitively. It's when you'll have deep dreams. So people who say they don't remember their dreams or they don't

dream, they probably aren't getting enough REM sleep. So for human beings, REM sleep is like critical, right? Because that's cognitive repair. Slow-wave sleep, that's when your body produces about like 95% of its human growth hormone. It's deep sleep on whoop. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, people think they're getting stronger going to the gym, right? Really, you're just breaking down your muscles when you go to the gym.

You actually get stronger when you go to bed during slow-wave sleep because you're producing all your human growth hormone. So just to zoom out, if you're someone who's spending seven hours in bed, it might be that you get a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow-wave sleep of those seven hours. It could also be that you get like five and a half hours out of those seven hours. And often when you talk to people about sleep, they're like, oh, I just don't have time, blah, blah, blah. We're not even talking about more time. We're just saying, how do you take the seven hours that you're in bed and make them way better? And so for me, blue light blocking glasses was one of those things. There's a couple others, but yeah. This was the thing that made me fall in love with my whoop. I remember

getting eight hours sleep, waking up and feeling great, looking at my whoop and it said you'd had three hours REM sleep and me going, man, I smashed it. That's nice. Yeah. And then a couple of days later or the next day getting eight hours sleep, waking up and feeling like shit, looking at my whoop and it said, oh, you've got a 30 minutes or something. And me going, ah, there is it. Cause you think, oh, I spent eight hours in bed. So I must've had, yeah, as you say, like eight hours sleep, but it's when you, once you see that you can't unsee it. It's like this whole 29 years of my life, I've been like, I've misunderstood something so foundational about my entire life. And the fun thing is you can optimize it.

Like once you measure it, you can manage it. Yeah, I kicked my girlfriend out of the bed. I said, goodbye. Well, you don't have to be that extreme. But it's, yeah, I do think it's empowering. And like sleeps about a third of your life. Be good to take care of that third too. Just the difference I see on a day where I've just had

bad REM sleep or bad deep sleep versus the days when I've had good, like my performance, my mood, everything is so different. It's a completely different human being. Well, so there's a fascinating phenomenon too, as it relates to stress. So research shows that the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala responses, right? Amygdala is like fight or flight, right? And so if you get a ton of REM sleep, it essentially softens your amygdala. It makes it less active. Funny enough, I did a podcast with Alex Honnold.

Do you know who that is? I don't know. So Alex Honnold's the famous rock climber who did Free Solo. You know that documentary? So he scales this crazy, you know, slab of mountain without a rope. And he also happened to wear a whoop. And so I was talking to him about risk and fear and all these sort of different concepts, stress. But it turns out that he gets like four and a half to five hours of REM sleep a night on Whoop. And I was thinking like, how perfect is it that a guy who literally can rock climb and risk dying every single day has this like unbelievable outlier also ability

to get REM sleep. Of course. And could those two things be related? The other term that I wasn't familiar with until I got a week was this idea of strain. I am going to be honest. I, we talked a little bit before we started recording about my little fitness group. Yeah. The way the fitness group is designed is that it's, you is that it's like a league table. It's rewarded on consistency. We call it the fitness blockchain. So there's 10 of us in it. If you lose, you get kicked out of the group

and someone new gets put in every month. It's quite vicious. You get put into another group. You have to wait for three months before you get one chance of getting back in. If you don't, you go into what we call chump hell. Long story. It's like a hardcore fantasy football.

Yeah, it's crazy. We track a lot of things you have to submit your workouts every day as well and then someone verifies etc um strain currently in that group you're rewarded for working out every day is that a good thing Well, the way that we think about strain is to balance it alongside recovery. So the average amateur exerciser, let's call it the weekend warrior, probably has workouts that look too consistent in terms of intensity or too consistent in terms of strain. So WHOOP has a scale from zero to 21. On WHOOP, that might look like a 12 or like a 13. So every time they work out, it's a 13. And the reality is when your body's run down,

maybe you don't want to do anything or maybe you should go for a walk. Just let your body recover. Give yourself the permission to catch a breather. But if your body's peaking, go crush it, right? Take on a 16 or a 17 or an 18. And I should also say that strain is essentially looking at the amount of time that your body is in an elevated heart rate zone. So we're talking about a primarily cardiovascular measurement of stress that you're putting on your body for any period of time. But back to your question, like you probably don't want to do a high strain every single day unless your body's freakishly recovering. And there are people who do that, but they're mostly like professional triathletes or whatever. And you also want to try to vary the strain level. So if you're at a 50% recovery, maybe you're doing a 10. If you're

at a 75% recovery, you're doing a 16 or a 17 or an 18. And a lot of this goes back to in building the product, we wanted to make it actionable. A lot of wearables, maybe V1 wearables sort of told you what happened. We were very focused on telling you what to do next and how you can get better. On that point of recovery then, if I'm training a lot um how can i improve my recovery outside of sleep well a lot of it would be diet hydration uh potentially supplements if you're taking them making sure you're taking the right ones um because if you're taking the wrong supplements that's actually a lot worse for you than taking none uh you know I think some type of mindfulness or meditation or breath work speeds up recovery that's that's my own bias we certainly see sleep consistency so that's less about what you're doing

during sleep but actually more just routine so going to bed and waking up at similar times even exercising at a similar time may help you recover faster because your body's getting used to it. Of all the metrics that are tracked on the WHOOP, is heart rate variability the one you love the most? Well, on a personal level, it was the thing that jumped off the page to me, you know, 10 years before it became even remotely mainstream. So I feel some relationship with it in the sense that like I does now measure a lot of different things very well. So I don't want to say that any one statistic is the silver bullet. I think a lot of it is collecting all of this information in a form, in a format, by the way, that you're willing to wear 24 seven, which has its own challenges we can talk about. And then creating scores or creating messaging to an end user that gets them to change behavior, gets them to improve health.

That to me is the, if you think about the pyramid of, you know, sort of challenging things, the tip of the pyramid is a product that is changing your behavior and improving your health. Your company, the business you've built, I heard that your employees at Whoop get a bonus if their sleep is considered to be good on their Whoop. How much truth is there to that? It's a fun employee perk that we came up with. So everyone on Whoop is on a team together and you can opt into what's called the sleep bonus. And if you get 85% sleep performance on average throughout the month, you get a hundred dollar bonus, like on your pay stub. And so it's, it's mostly, it's mostly a fun thing, but it does speak to our culture,

which is using the data we have in front of us, promoting sleep and good habits. Actually, during COVID, we also came up with the red recovery policy, which was, because we had a lot of people actually coming into the office during, even during the peaks of COVID, because we we built hardware, accessories, supply chain, things that you kind of have to do in person, very physical things. And so the red recovery policy was that if you had a red recovery, you actually needed to stay home because either you were getting sick or you were at risk of getting sick because your body was run down.

So again, fun ways to use the data in an actionable way and, you know, build it into the culture. When you talk about why your company has done so well, and it has won, you talk about there being a more scrappy kind of nature to the team, which sounds more like innovation. How does one go about, as your company grows, keeping that innovation that's so central to you winning? Because with growth often becomes like, I don't know, things move slower. Bureaucracy, people are waiting for Jenny to come back from annual leave. What are you doing from a culture standpoint? I think one of the reasons Whoop has been successful is we had a pretty clear perspective on what we were building and why. And the consequence of that is also what you're not building, right? Like Whoop is great at all the things that it does for all the things that it doesn't do. We are not a smartwatch we don't allow you to download a bunch of apps we don't receive phone

calls you can't flag an uber with your whoop right but uh when it comes to health monitoring uh we're the best game in town and that really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. And it's carried us through to today. There were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that Whoop is not a watch. And I can't tell you how many people have asked for Whoop to be a watch. And the reason it's not a watch is there's a few different reasons, but just by putting the time on it,

all of a sudden you've created this enormous competitive landscape. And competing with watches is hard. Like there's a lot of beautiful watches. There's also a lot of watches that serve different functions. Watch also says a lot about your identity. The other thing about a watch, and you'll notice this from every technology company, is the second there's a screen, there's this enormous scope creep that occurs for what the product's actually meant to do. And very quickly, you're in a product

meeting where you're talking about email notifications and different screen colors and various ways to tell the time and whether or not you're going to be able to give it voice memos. And all of a sudden, you're talking nothing about health monitoring. And so if I look back over the last 10 years, we made these decisions. We made a decision to not be a watch and not have a screen on it. We made a decision on the flip side, though,

to invent a modular charger where you could charge your Whoop without ever taking it off. And that was super expensive and you made the product take way longer and cost a bunch of venture dollars. But again, it was back to that identity of health monitoring needs to be 24-7

to be the most effective. And if you take it off, all of a sudden it's not 24-7 to be the most effective. And if you take it off, all of a sudden it's not 24-7, you might not put it back on. So that was something we did that other people didn't do, right? Everyone was measuring steps. We didn't think steps was physiologically relevant. So we tried to stay true to our identity. And I think that helped us navigate a competitive landscape where a lot of people were copying each other or where companies may have had even too much resources. And those resources got them down, you know, into this very expansive place without being great at anything. Focus and first principles is what I heard throughout that.

What you said there, the first principles point about 24 7 monitoring yeah that's like a totally first principles thought because you said well heart health is a 24 7 thing so we have to create a solution where you don't take the watch off convention says no you just get a charger and you take it off at night you put it by your bed and you stick on so that approach and that conviction towards like thinking for yourself about this problem is much easier said than done for companies. Like I feel like people, one of the, you know, in all facets of our life, whether it's our relationships or intimacy or friendships or building companies or how we construct teams, thinking for yourself is what I heard there. You say it so easily, but it's why it's impossible for people to do, especially when

they're thinking about innovation. Because, you know, you had all those moments where, why doesn't this have a screen on it? It's also why I love it. It's probably also why the battery lasts longer. It's also why I'm so committed to it as you've identified. But those are all like first principles that came from Whoop. I think what's different about your product is also what makes it special. And I think that true innovation often comes from a level of focus or discipline that's really uncomfortable. Like having said everything I just said, I still think about Whoop as a watch on a near daily basis because it's, it's something that pulls at me, you know, because I can see a world in which

it is a watch, but it's not a watch and I'm not building it as a watch. You know what I mean? So there is this, you know, sort of painful level of discipline that has to occur, I think, to be able to continue marching forwards. And we actually went a different direction where we've looked at invisible as a more compelling landscape. So obviously you can wear it on your wrist, but you know, take it apart. And depending on what garments you're wearing, right? So you take this clasp off. You can now put this sensor into different places on your body. Oh, really? So, yeah.

So we've come out with shorts, boxers, bras, underwear, shirts that have it in your arm sleeve. And so you can just tuck this into a little pocket that allows you to wear it in different areas of the body. I didn't know that. So I could put it in my boxer shorts lining. Yeah. Oh, that's dope. Yeah. Now also kind of crazy to start a wearables company and realize you're designing boxers, but that goes back to your first principles point, I suppose, right?

Yeah, exactly. Why would you design boxers? Well, because you need to create a way for them to wear it 24 seven. Something else you said, which I've never had anybody say before, but it's so unbelievably true is when people have bigger budgets, when six, like with success comes greater temptation to be and do everything and become everyone. And that's often when companies lose their way. It's because of

their success. Everyone goes, well, why don't we do, we've got these customers now, so why don't we do a this and a that and a this? And why don't we do a da-da-da-da and a five of them? Have you felt that temptation? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's, that's probably the biggest way that success is a bad teacher, is the degree to which it makes you think you can go into a bunch of things and abandon the level of intensity or focus that you took in building the original thing to be successful. So, but you know, that doesn't stop me from dreaming of ways that the company can go in totally different directions. You just, you have to check yourself. Like you really do have to

check yourself and make sure you've got the right level of focus if you're going to go into it. That's been one of my biggest mistakes is we become successful. I then come up with new ideas. I then think more about the reward of the new ideas versus the actual cost. The cost of like mental time for the whole team. The cost of like everyone waking up and being in the shower and thinking about a different problem. And then we had a recent incidence

where we spent, I'm going to say nine months planning something. Big, big new thing in one of my companies Offered someone a job to be the seer of this this new company And then I don't know what it was something in my gut says you're doing it again steve. You're losing focus Cancel it all And it's funny because my team was so excited jack was so excited We're all so excited about but when I had that conversation with everybody about why we were canceling this, because I know we should be focusing, there was this weird, Jack goes, do you know what? I was so excited, but now I'm relieved. And we all knew, we all knew

we'd got carried away with thinking more about the reward of disfocus than the cost of disfocus. I don't think disfocus is a thing. But has that happened to you when you've like ran too far down a path with a new idea and then range yourself back in because you realize the cost of focus? Yeah, I think there's been certain aspects of product development, you know, go to market strategies where you know it's the right thing even, but you're, again, you're not dedicating the right level of focus to it or the team doesn't have the bandwidth for it or the timing's not quite right. Like, yeah. I mean, focus I think is probably one of the most underrated skills for any leader. And not, and I don't mean that just for them. It's more important that they create an environment of focus.

How does one do that? If I, if I join Whoop, how am I going to learn on the day before I join, the day I join and thereafter every day, why I'm here, this, this vision, the focus, how are you, how are you teaching me that? Well, a lot of it comes back to the core mission of the company, right? Which is to unlock human performance, to improve health. A lot of it comes back to being really deliberate about the hardware that we build and why, the accessories we build and why. A lot of it comes back to the fact that Whoop is a subscription, right? We haven't touched too much on the business model, but transitioning the whole company and the whole business model to being a subscription versus a one-time hardware sale changed a lot for the company. But one thing that it really changed for the better is the DNA around launching new features, launching new analytics.

You're no longer trying to get a customer on an 18-month cycle where you come out with a new widget or 12-month cycle where you come out with a new widget. You're trying to keep your customers every day, right? Because every day they have a choice to cancel. And what in turn that does is it makes you very focused on releasing new features that are adding value. Now, you could have a conversation that's two or three depths deeper than this, which is around, well, should we go down the path of releasing these features or those features?

Do those features feel less focused than these features? But all of a sudden, at least we're two or three levels down in terms of focus. And so that's where a lot of the debates are taking place is within the lens of our already focused mission and areas of innovation, should we pursue different categories or different features? And I like to think it's very customer-centric

because we have this deep relationship with our members where they're wearing the product 24-7. And I think rightfully so, we have to earn their subscription every month. Competition. You've got some big competitors. I mean, I saw apple's recent announcement that sleep is now going to be part of the apple watch one of the new apple watches maybe

on the apple watch 8 or something how do you think about competition and what role is that that played in motivating you terrifying you all of these things yeah so when whoop was starting uh nike which is a company i looked up to with great admiration, was just coming out with the Nike Fuel Band. Adidas was coming out with the Mee Coach. year or two later was going to spend a billion dollars, spend a billion dollars acquiring three different companies in the space. They were coming out with their own wearable. They bought a running company, a company called Endomondo, a company called MyFitnessPal. So they had a whole strategy around health tracking. There was a company called Fitbit, which was about to go public for many billions of dollars. A company called Jawbone, which had raised a billion dollars. It was rumored Apple was entering the space. It was rumored Microsoft was entering the space. So competition was always in this backdrop,

but I never found myself that swayed by what the competition was doing. In fact, if there's any company I'm most critical of their strategy in the wearable space, it was Nike. Because Nike is, I think, one of the best brands in the world. And they built that brand. Have you read the book, Shoe Dog? I haven't. I haven't. It's a great book. Anyway, it's Phil Knight's book. But they built that brand by storytelling and authenticity. And the authenticity being the people who wore their shoes ran faster and jumped higher. And so that was the company I was the most nervous about because I was afraid

if they could build a wearable that their world's best athletes actually wore, they could then tell that story to the masses and be successful. But they took a huge shortcut. And that shortcut was they just built a product they thought the mass market would like. And so it wasn't a product that LeBron James was going to wear or Serena Williams or Tiger Woods. I mean, they had all the best athletes in the world. And so the clue to me that that product was going to fail was that it didn't stick to their identity. They didn't have the story at the top. They didn't have any of their top athletes wearing it. And on the flip side, the opportunity I saw was if we could get the world's best athletes to wear Whoop, we could in turn build our own brand around performance and around an aspirational product. And if you go back and like looking back on it,

that was a, that was a very stubborn perspective, like, and, and, um, you know, even a little bit arrogant to say, uh, that no, we're going to build this technology and the world's best athletes are going to pay us for it because it's going to be that good. I also though think it was a fairly rational perspective because if you build a product that someone needs to wear 24 seven and they don't love it, there's no amount of money you're going to be able to give them to keep that thing on their body. Let's be honest. And in many ways, I saw that with the fuel band. On the flip side, if you can really deliver value around sleep or recovery or these measurements that at the time a professional athlete had never had, they're very likely to pay for it because that's a huge value add in their overall performance.

So that was our very early go-to-market strategy. And it was also part of the way that we differentiated ourselves from other products. The last thing I'll say about this is, and again, inspired by Nike, the idea that you could build a brand or a product that says something about your identity, like the difference between a cotton shirt that's plain versus a cotton shirt with a swish on it. Like the person who's wearing the swish feels something different. The person who observes the person wearing the swish thinks something different. That was a phenomenon that resonated for me at a very young age. But when I looked at the health monitoring landscape, to me, it felt like health monitoring was actually definitively not cool.

And wearing a health monitor, there was almost a stigma associated with it, unfortunately. So how can you build a technology that people wear 24-7 that has a positive identity associated with it? And that goes again back to the professional athlete strategy. If we can get the world's best athletes to authentically wear it, then we can tell a story about how health monitoring is aspirational. It's interesting because I sat here with Scott Galloway earlier on,

and Scott talked to me about how once upon a time, maybe 30 years ago, because of the way we learned about products and the lack of trip advisors and review sites and Amazon reviews, the big companies could sell a fairly mediocre product based on just pumping advertising at like traditional advertising, like TV and stuff. So you'd go out and buy the Procter and Gamble soap or whatever, just because you'd been overwhelmed

with advertising from it. In the modern era, when we're all, we have social media accounts and we have, you know, ways to broadcast from the palm of our hands and we have WhatsApp so we can speak to our friends about ideas and products and stuff. He was saying to me, it's become more about the product and actually being great than the advertising dollars spent. So he said, it's no surprise that the biggest companies in the world, like the Teslas, they don't advertise. It's about you telling me about how much you love your Tesla. And the way that I came to learn about my whoop was my friend Ash a year ago, raving about it. Like you'd paid him. I think you paid him. The way he was going on about it was like you had paid him personally. That's great. And then obviously, you know, and then he eventually gets me into it and we have a fitness group. So we start talking about it. You can't pay for that.

It's a better product. And I think now more than ever, that's become much more important to the consumer. I think that's right. I think there's a certain authenticity that consumers gravitate to, whether they're intentionally recognizing it or not. And yeah, for us, that's been core to our identity.

We've had very unusual relationships with athletes. And I think in large part because we've been able to build the technology that they get value out of. LeBron James is one of them that's often cited as being a whoop wearer. That must have been pretty surreal to see him wearing it. So two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Fucking hell. And this was like end of 2014, early 2015. And it was also a very difficult time for the business

as we talked about earlier. But I remember I was sitting at home with my parents. At this point, I think the jury was out in their mind whether me starting this company was a good idea or not. Like a couple of years in, like I had raised money, but you know, uh, was there a business? And this amazing thing happened where a commercial came on and it was LeBron James in a Kia commercial wearing a whoop strap. And I thought, isn't that the coolest thing? Like he wouldn't even take it off for a Kia commercial. And, uh, and it also made me feel good in front of my parents.

Did they accept that it's a real business from that point onwards? I think it helped marginally. Have they accepted it yet? But interestingly, it was, uh, it was something that for a couple of years did buy us time for, for like building a real business was the fact that we could get all these really high profile athletes to wear the product without endorsing them. It demonstrated, I think to investors or others that, okay, there's something real about this technology that's different. On that point of investors, you've raised 400 million in capital,

roughly. Yeah. $400 million in capital. How important is it when it comes to picking your investors to pick the right ones? Because I've seen this kind of make and break companies. I think it's really important that you're aligned with the investors on what the purpose of the company is. And, you know, as a consequence, also what the purpose of the capital is. We certainly had investors along the way

who wanted to put money into the business, but wanted it to go in a different direction than what I thought was the right direction. And so I'm grateful that I never took that capital. I think it gets more complicated when you've got a believer and that believer invests in you and your business. And then whatever you're building takes longer or the revenue hasn't quite come in yet. And all of a sudden the believer starts to become a non-believer. That's where you start to learn who your investors really are. You know, I think that's when you start to learn how functional a board of directors is. Like when are bad, how's everyone behaving? And so it's super important in

the selection process, certainly with investors. And I think reference checks are really important. And I think alignment on what you're trying to do with the capital, what your identity is as a company. But I think equally important is learning how to manage your board and your group of investors when stuff isn't going well. We have something in common, which is you don't like networking. It's my idea. That's good research. That's how I know you're good at this. I fucking hate networking. And then when I read you didn't like networking, I thought, ah, that makes two of us. Yeah, I think it's overrated. It's often advice too that's given to young people.

I think if you find a particular problem, industry, like fill in the blank, something you want to solve, a passion of yours, it pulls you into meeting the right people. And that's where showing up is really important. That's where going to the thing that you're half invited to, you need to go, you know what I mean? Versus being invited to something that you're not sure about or whatever. Pulling yourself into those environments is critical. Another piece of advice you gave to CEOs was this, which I found fascinating,

which is there's a difference between hearing and listening. What did you mean by that? So back to some of the earlier stages of the company, I mentioned it was hard to raise capital for the business. And, you know, I heard no a lot, like I was rejected a lot in building this company and the coping mechanism for that, especially when I would, I would say I was rejected a lot in building this company and the coping mechanism for that, especially when I would, I would say I was a slightly more immature leader. The coping mechanism for that was to kind of put up a wall to negativity to the point where I wasn't listening to it and I wasn't hearing it. Right. It was like it wasn't there. And that was an effective and highly, it was an effective coping mechanism

for a very short-term period that would not at all have allowed me to scale a business. And I had an advisor and really mentor at the time who said to me, you know, Will, you don't have to listen to what people say, but you should just hear it. And that was a helpful and very simple way for me to just reframe the way that I thought about negative feedback. Like, okay, this person disagrees with me. I'm going to absorb that. I'm going to sit with it. I'm going to wrestle with it. And interestingly, now over the course of 10 years, you know,

disagreement's almost a source of excitement for me because it allows me to ask myself this question of how do I know what I know? Why do I feel so strongly about something? And it really makes you again, wrestle with it and hopefully debate it with someone who's smarter than you is going to prove you wrong. I mean, that I think is what's so exciting about building a dynamic team and, you know, taking on whatever challenge you've got. That speaks to the importance there of humility again, doesn't it? And why that's such an integral thing

when you're hiring or picking co-founders. You know, I've also heard you say that customers are really great at telling you what's wrong, but not very good at telling you the solution to what's wrong. I think that's important. I think it's a very helpful framework. I mean, back to starting the company, I went out and met with all these coaches and athletes

and asked them, okay, if you could have any technology improve your performance, what would it be? And they were all super focused on exercise type equipment. Could be measuring stress, could be GPS analysis, could be video analysis, form analysis. It was hyper-focused on the thing, the sport, the exercise. But when I asked them, what are your biggest problems managing a team or being an athlete? It almost always came back to some form of availability. So injury or overtraining, like not being optimal on the day you needed to

be optimal. And so I thought there was a huge mismatch between the solutions they were asking for and the problems they were describing. And for me, that's something I just try to think about when I'm listening to customers or when I'm thinking about products is, do I clearly understand what the problem is or am I focused too much on what a solution could be? Am I hearing too much of the solution or am I hearing the problem? And if you hear the problem, then all of a sudden you're building something pretty different interesting you hear the problem and then you can kind of first principles up to solve the problem versus accepting probably the convention-orientated solution i thought the best way to solve problems around athlete performance was measuring the other 20 hours of the day and at the time that

was super counterintuitive. That, again, that word counterintuitive seems to be come up over and over again when I read your story about being a contrarian and being counterintuitive. And this goes back to the point about innovation and thinking for yourself, because when you don't think for yourself, you just accept convention. That seems to be a really consistent thread throughout your whole journey. Not easy to do. Not easy to do, especially when things get tough and everyone goes, see, convention was right, Will. I think it's important to develop a process for conviction and then to really sit with something that you're convinced about and pressure test it and bat it around and even

let other people pressure test it. But if you have a track record of that conviction working out then you really have to you have to stick to it because it's ultimately what's going to make you successful sometimes i worry about that but you know you can you can be you can win so many times in a row that you might stop listening and you might, you know. Well, it's worth noting that the level of conviction that we've talked about on certain things is not a level of conviction that I feel like all the time about a lot of things. You know what I mean? And I think it's worth, it's really worth emphasizing that like in building this company,

I've had doubts about an enormous number of things. So it's important not to look at any entrepreneur and think, oh, that person has all the answers. Like I haven't met that person yet. I just think it's a really useful process to figure out what are the things that you feel the most strongly about in the product or service that you're building.

Because when you figure those specific things out and then you dig your heels in on them, a lot of magic can happen around it. What's something you think you're wrong about with Whoop? Or you might be wrong about? Have you got a creeping suspicion that there might be something fundamental to Whoop that you might have been wrong about in terms of your hypothesis? Well, I think a lot of the answers to that are also things that we're actively working on and building. So it's a little bit, sort of a little bit closer to the secret sauce, if you will, than maybe your

question intended. I'm more than happy for secret sauce. There's a natural tension that occurs when you grow as fast as Whoop has over the last, call it three years, four years, and where your market goes from being a certain level of elite athletes to fitness enthusiasts to everyone, where you have to ask yourself, how much are you designing the product for everyone versus one of these segments? And so there's certain aspects of the rate at which we would help someone who's trying to lose weight versus someone who's trying to improve sleep

versus someone who's trying to run a marathon versus someone who's training for the World Cup. Like the rate at which we're curating the whole experience to that individual experience. I think that's an aspect that I ask myself a lot about. How are you thinking about that at the moment? I believe it should get much more personalized. And even the degree to which certain statistics that you see or don't see may evolve depending on your core goal. So that would be an example of, you know, an area that we're working through and wrestling with. I have no doubt that people have approached you to buy Whoop. No comment. So I'll tell you a story. In 2000, and we talked a lot first investing in the company, but then they also got interested in potentially acquiring the company.

And we weren't interested in selling the business at the time, but in the process of evaluating an investment, we shared a fair amount about the company, right? And certainly information that you wouldn't want to share to a potential competitor slash Amazon. And fast forward two years later, they came out with a product that was a direct knockoff of a whoop strap. That's not like Amazon. Yeah. Well, you know, you feel it differently when it happens to you. That's for sure. But look, it goes back to some of the resolve of the, of the company and the, and the, I think that the culture at whoop where we do feel kind of David versus Goliath, we are comfortable with people coming after us and we're not threatened by

competition because the day they announced that it was almost like a running joke within the office, it wasn't, okay, we're screwed. It was, that's going to fail, you know, and we're going to, we're going to see to it that we succeed. So in any way, it was like almost energizing that, uh, that they did it. And of course, it's nice now to see that the product, I think, hasn't quite been as successful as they would have liked. Or maybe I don't think they're releasing a future version of it. When your team said that's going to fail, what gives you that conviction? What is it about what you see in your walls and knowing about what's going on in their walls that makes you go, do you know what, we're still going to win? I mean, I don't want to be critical of Amazon. I think Amazon is a pretty amazing company and I'm sure has an enormous number of amazing people. I think what inspired Whoop in that moment is the same thing that inspired us for 10 years, which is that we see things a little differently.

If someone is going to try to copy everything that we've done before, they're still not going to have the special sauce for what we're going to do next. And even when we created our Whoop 4, on the circuit boards, we um, don't bother copying us. We will win. And it was this great, it was this great call out to the engineering team. And in fact, every single engineer who worked on whoop for their initials are on the circuit board. Oh, really? So real sense of ownership. And the funny thing, of course, about putting a line like that on a circuit board is the only person who's ever going to see that circuit board is someone who's trying to copy you. So, you know, I think there's, I think there's ways to roll with these things and,

um, you know, challenges ultimately are what help you find your identity. What is the end then? What is the end goal for you? You're an entrepreneur, you've done this for more than a decade now. Entrepreneurs start thinking about taking money off the table, about selling, about, you know, going and working on some other challenge in the world. Where is your brain? I know this is a difficult question to answer and I know why it is, but you've got team members and investors and, but where are you at? What can you tell me? I think one thing that's potentially unique for Whoop versus other businesses that I could have started

or an entrepreneur might start is that it's actually gotten exponentially exciting as it's grown. Like I'm as energized today running the company as I've ever been running the company. And I've met founders who for no fault of their own are actually just in a different place with that. Like they're 10 years in or even six years in

and they kind of feel like they've hit their peak of the mountain and it's time to bring someone else in and they'll stay involved as a chairman or maybe it's the right time to sell it. For me, it's really as energizing a time as I can remember building it. As you have more and more

people on the product as well. It creates, I think more and more momentum for it. It's also a product that you see people wearing all the time. So like everywhere I go, I now see whoop, which is pretty, like pretty amazing just given that, uh, once upon a time it was an idea on a piece of paper. And so I still find that energizing. I've got an amazing team. And the future for health monitoring I think is really to be able to predict something about your health that you otherwise couldn't feel that is either going to improve your life or it's going to save your life. Like I think health, the potential of health monitoring is so profound that, uh, you know, it determines a full-time, my full-time attention for now. We have a, um um tradition here where the previous guest

asks a question for the next guest um they don't know who they're asking the question for and i don't know the work of the question until i open the book the question that's been left for you is this is kind of funny um they maybe didn't realize your age when they wrote this, but they said, what would you tell your 25-year-old self? I'm going to change this to, what would you tell your 22-year-old self? Keep going. You know, it's going to work out.

I think learn to separate gratitude from complacency. I think there was a phase in building Whoop where it was so much, or even just growing as an entrepreneur, where it was so much about the next milestone and getting to that next milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine. Right. And you tell yourself, okay, getting to this milestone is a really big deal and you're going to be really happy when you get to this milestone. And that has a, that has a, an important physiological effect in that it literally creates dopamine because you're anticipating this thing. But then when you get to that thing, if it's not the thing that you thought it was going to be, there's this huge letdown. And so in the process of living on that sort of dopamine wheel,

I learned that you really need to introduce gratitude and be appreciative of all the steps and people and products that are happening along the way. And I think there's a misperception for entrepreneurs, at least I think there was slightly a misperception for me, which is like, okay, if I stop too much to appreciate where I am or this moment or what's happened, I'm not going to have the drive to get to the next thing. And that's actually not true at all. Like you can be very appreciative of where you are today

and still entirely driven to get to the next milestone in your mind. So I suppose to re-answer the question, it would be learning how to, uh, to balance, uh, gratitude with drive. And that makes the whole journey sustainable. Totally. Yeah. That's how you can go for like multi decades and still not get burnt out. That's how you sprint the marathon. Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for making a product, which is just exceptional. And you know, it probably sounds like I'm kissing ass where i'm like making this up because you're here but i genuinely i mean you can check my account by the way we don't check accounts i

know privacy is like number one for you but it's just a joke no thank you for being on whoop and i appreciate the way you do this you do a nice job no i'm so unbelievably curious and um it was such amazing timing that we got to have this conversation shortly after I became obsessed with my week because I have so much to ask you, not just about the watch, but about building a company

that has taken on these incumbents and done such an unbelievable job of it. And I think now I know, I finished this conversation understanding why. And it's about that focus on the vision. It's about having really clear principles that are driven from a real, real sense of like authentic curiosity, obviously hard work and all of these things and great people are huge factors, resilience,

grit, and all those things. And then it's again about the innovation that's behind me, which comes from those principles, which has allowed you to continually think from first principles because the, the WHOOP is very different. And so that, that for me is clear, like a, like a book, like Harry Potter, it means it's come from a very singular vision of the world. It couldn't have been, this is not the by-product of huge amounts of consensus. That's fair. Yeah. See what I mean? Because a group of people would not have thought of this. That's right. They would have put a screen on it with a thing.

But so it's really remarkable to meet you and I have no doubt that, you know, this company is going to continue to go from strength to strength. So thank you for being here. Thank you.