This Week in Startups - Whoop CEO Will Ahmed on the “Quantified Self” movement, product design & more | E1786

Episode Date: August 1, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. TWiST listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com/twist CLA. Innovation takes balance. Our CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at CLAconnect.com/tech Notion just launched Notion Projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com/twist. * Today’s show: Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed joins Jason to discuss Whoop’s journey (1;50), the driving paradigm behind Whoop’s innovative product designs (31:38), the future of wearable tech (41:26), and more! * Time stamps: (00:00) Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed joins Jason (1:50) The “Quantified Self” movement and features that set Whoop’s product apart (4:04) How the device interprets health data and obtains consistent results (7:24) Whoop’s customer base (8:52) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (9:59) The decision to pivot to a subscription business model (14:31) Amazon turning from potential investor to failed copy-cat competitor (20:09) Incorporating new strategies into the business (24:49) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (26:21) Developments since the product’s inception (31:38) Whoop Body and the driving paradigm behind the product design (40:00) Notion - Try Notion Projects for free today at notion.com/twist (41:26) What lies ahead and the future of wearable tech (44:47) The ability to share the recorded health data (47:20) AI utilizing large health datasets and the Whoop Journal * Follow Will: https://twitter.com/willahmed Check out Whoop: https://www.whoop.com * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

I know there's a lot of founders that have trouble raising capital. And Woop was one of those businesses. I mean, there were so many years, Jason, where it was very hard to raise capital. You know, that sort of period of like 2014 to call it 2018 or 19, it was very hard to raise capital. And the business almost went bankrupt in 2017 and 18. And then you fast forward a mere few years later and, you know, a multi-billion dollar company. And so it's just, I can't understate. how important resilience is to your founders and this idea of just keep going.

This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC2 report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's C-L-A's C-P. PAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up.

Get started now at CLAConnect.com slash tech. And Notion just launched Notion projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome back to the program. I'm really excited to talk about the quantified self. We've all been wearing these watches and Fitbits, but there is one device that all of the quantified self people in my life will not shut up about.

That's the Whoop. So I invited Will I'm Ed on the program today. Will you're the founder of Whoop, yeah, and the CEO? Correct. All right. So why are all these quantified self people obsessed with Whoop when the Apple Watch exists? I was on Fitbit forever. I thought that these devices were going to get commoditized,

but apparently there's a reason why you exist, and it's a high-end consumer who's obsessed with this product. What is the magic behind Woot? Well, we have a big focus on really helping people improve health and performance. I think that the product does a good job taking an enormous amount of data in a given day we collect about 100 times as much. data as a Fitbit or an Apple Watch when it pertains to your health. So we take a lot of data and we're able to simplify it into a few key things that you need to know. So that might

be how recovered you are. You know, red, yellow, green, are you ready to work out? That might be how hard a workout was or what your stress is in any given moment. That may be how much sleep you need for tonight to recover for tomorrow. And we're able to quickly help our members improve their health and performance through a pretty non-invasive wearable product. And it doesn't look like a watch. It just looks like a strap. It's a band. So do people, you know, it doesn't have apps on it or anything.

What's the sensor array in there? And how is that sensor array different than, say, like, do typical Fitbit or Apple Watch? Well, you make a good point in that whoop is not, it doesn't have, you know, 100 different apps associated with it. It doesn't allow you to do phone calls and, you know, flag and Uber and all these emails and notifications. It's really entirely focused on your health. And as a consequence, I think we've become very good at health monitoring.

We've become very good at telling people what they need to do next and creating a product in turn that people don't take off. So one thing that, while we didn't invest in, say, a screen or a bunch of apps and a bunch notifications, we did build, for example, a modular charger that allows you to charge a whoop without ever taking it off your body. So that would be an example of, you know, one area where we leaned in and other folks want a different direction. What's the sensor array in there? Because it does seem like you're recording at either a high, you said you're recording more often, but is it recording at a higher fidelity as well? I would assume that since this is made just to do quantified

itself just to record health tracking, you can do some things, maybe some other devices can. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the list of physiological data points that we collect is pretty long, ranging from heart rate to heart rate variability to everything about your sleep staging, respiratory rates, skin temperature, more as it pertains to your fitness and BMI than other products, a lot around stress and specific performance measurements. So the product itself is collecting a lot of data, although I think in part what people gravitate to is the accuracy of those readings and then the way that the product's able to simplify the information. Just because you collect 100 times more data doesn't mean that you should show that much information. You have to figure out a way

to tell a story back to someone and hopefully guide them through it. Yeah, the Apple Watch, I was a Fitbit guy for a long time and loved it for steps, heart rate, sort of. Then I went Apple Watch, because somewhere around version 5 or 6, it wasn't terrible. But I just went for a run, where I did a hike and then a little run at the end. And when I went for the running part, I got none of the heart rate. It just doesn't record it consistently. Why does the Apple Watch suck at that?

And how does yours work better? Is this like a consistent problem in terms of getting consistent heart rate on the wrist is just challenging? Or is it that they're trying to do too many things? What's the magic there? It's a combination of it being hard and the product likely being designed for a lot of different use cases and health and fitness being one of, say, 100 of them. One advantage that we had, I mean, it was a challenge, but it's an advantage from an accuracy standpoint, is that we started working with high-performance athletes. So, you know, I found a whooping 2012, so I've seen a lot of ebbs and flows to what people might call the wearable space or the quantified health space. And the initial vision was really to work with the world's best athletes.

Now, athletes are very diverse, you know, skin color, wrist size. hairiness, sweat complicates things, movement complicates things. So we actually picked by far the hardest use case for measurement. And that meant that a lot of our foundational algorithms for things like heart rate were built on a wildly diverse data set. And we needed the product to work on a wildly diverse data set in order for it to be successful. And we also had a very high bar for what success looked like because we were giving feedback back to these, you know, superstar athletes who are used to some of this information,

albeit in a much worse form factor like a chest strap. So that created, I think, a powerful foundation. And what do people use it for today? When you talk to your, who is your ideal customer today? And then what are they using it for? Is it for elite athletes or is it for just the sort of next tier down of individuals? How many people are? are using it now? It's funny. The company's mission for 10 years now has been to unlock human performance. But I think over that time frame, our definition of human performance has widened a lot.

So initially, human performance was winning a gold medal or an NBA championship. And then as we answered the consumer market, it became to your point about elite athletes, understanding hardcore training, understanding recovery for the first time. Today, our audience on WOOP is much wider. And I would say that the key attribute that holds someone together on Woop is this notion of being motivated in your life. So yes, we have very motivated, fitness-oriented members. We also have, you know, people who are motivated in their daily lives, their careers, their students, their executives, their lawyers, doctors. And they want to better understand their body.

maybe they want to understand travel. Maybe they're too stressed. Maybe they need to get more sleep. And whoop is the best product for them to take their fill in the blank to the next level. If you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud, then you need to be, uh, SOC2 compliant. You knew that from a third party. And you need that third party to close big deals.

And if you want to get compliant easier and faster, you need to use, V-A-N-V-A-N-E. T-A, Vanta makes it so easy for you to get and renew your SOC-2. On average, VANTA customers are SOC2 compliant in just two to four weeks. Compare that to three to five months without Vanta. And Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of manual work and up to 85% of compliance costs. This is a total no-brainer. And Vanta does more than just SOC2 compliance. They also automate up to 90% compliance for GDPR, HIPAA, and more.

You can't afford to lose out our major customers. We all know that. Listen, it's a hard year. last year was hard. You can't lose those major customers because you don't have your compliance dialed in. Just work with Vanta. Get your compliance automated and tight and tight is right. Lock down those big deals. Here's the best part. Vanta's going to give you $1,000 off. That's 10 hundies. Get $1,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for $1,000 off your sock, too.

It's an interesting business model. I notice you're not trying to compete on hardware anymore. So instead of buying a $600 watch or a throwaway fit bit that costs $100 bucks, it's 30 bucks a month. Is that right? You just do charge a one or two year subscription for folks. Talk about how you came to that business model. Yeah, I think you'll appreciate this. I mean, in building a startup, I think you want to be careful how many things you actually

try to innovate around. And I never thought our business model was going to be one of those innovations. But it actually turned out to be one of the most important changes that we made to the company. So it was 2017 that we first launched to consumers. We were a $500 high-end hardware, and we found that the people who bought whoop were staying on it for a long time. So we didn't have the same drop-off rates that you had experienced with, say, maybe a Fitbit or a Jawbone sort of challenges that face those businesses. But we had a different problem, which is that not that many people were buying Whoop. So we started to ask ourselves, is there a different business model here that's more product first?

there were a few other things going on at that time. One was that Fitbit was a public company and a really brilliant distribution business, right? Like year over year, they were 5xing the number of units that they sold. But in many ways, they won the wrong game because people would take them off and wouldn't put them back on. And so they weren't as product or retention oriented as I thought they should be. at the same time there was an up-and-coming business called Peloton, which was, you know, a subscription business along with hardware. And that business was getting valued at 10 or 20 times their revenue, I realized, whereas Fitbit was

getting valued at say one or two times their revenue in the public markets. So do you want to grow up to look more like Peloton or FitBib? Do you want to grow up to look more like a subscription business or a hardware business? Along with that, there was this question of, is a one-time, fee even the right way to think about health monitoring. If you think about someone's life, it evolves a lot. The reason that you may buy a health product or a fitness product today could be quite different in three months or six months or 12 months. And so we thought that also the best way for a product to meet a customer's needs would be to evolve over time alongside that

customer. So all of those reasons led us to whoop being a subscription. And we essentially launched WOOP as a subscription in May of 2018, and it created this pretty amazing growth engine for the company. Now, today, you can sign up for WOOP in a few different ways. One is you can buy an annual membership for $240, so that's the equivalent of $20 a month. And to be clear, the hardware is included, and we make continuous software and analytics updates. So, you know, six months ago, someone signing up for Woop had no idea that they were going to get a stress monitor that was going to show them how their stress evolved in real time. They had no idea they were going to get a strength trainer that was going to measure the muscular load of workouts.

But those are features that we launched in the last six months to our members as part of their subscription. Right. So no one charge on that and just you get it. You get it. Yeah. And so it's made us a better business too. And I would say a company because it puts us in this position of constantly releasing new features and analytics at a really rapid cadence, whereas products that we're competing against, in my opinion, are making a mistake of holding back their innovation for 12 months from now or 24 months from now so that you buy the next hardware. Right? Yeah. So we're in a continuous cycle of improvement and they're stuck in an annual cycle of improvement. And so I think it's an advantage to our business. And then of course, we now have this recurring revenue, which is

much more attractive. Yeah, and you have an idea of what you're going to make next month. If the economy stalls, you don't have to worry about selling some $800 device and people going, maybe I'll push that out six months and I'll buy it later. They're paying a buck a day or in the case if they buy a two-year membership or a one-year membership, they're probably paying 75 cents a day. Seems kind of reasonable if you care about your health or if you're in any way, sort of one of these optimization people.

Now, you had Amazon wanted to invest in the business. They decided to compete against you. How did that wind up going? It's a good setup question. I know this story, but I wanted to share this story because this is particularly important for, I think, founders who listen, and it's a majority of the audience to understand, like, hey, it can be pretty scary when a big 800-pound gorilla decides they want to, you know, jump in the ring with you. But, you know, they also don't have the same level of focus or maybe not the right business models. So maybe you can tell that story. Well, Woop was in a pretty fragile period around 2017, 2018.

I mean, as I highlighted, we were five or six years into building the company and then pivoted the business model pretty profoundly. And at that point, had raised tens of millions of dollars. So we were vulnerable as a company. And that was also around the time that Amazon reached out being interested. to invest. And, you know, there's reasons to think that's a good thing. This is a company with enormous distribution. This is a company with AWS. That's a partner. This is a company that, you know, could open doors. And so we spent a lot of time with them and we shared a lot information with them. And they didn't invest in WOOP. And then a few years later, they came out

with a direct copycat of the product. So much so that one of the product managers working on what was called the Amazon Halo like tweeted out. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Whoop, there it is, on top of the product announcement. So basically taunting you after they jerked your chain. Yeah.

Now, yeah, I don't know whether that individual was involved in the other part of it or the investment company. It's a bad look. I mean, it's a bad, bad love. But it was very obvious that they copied us, right? And so I put out some sort of public information about why I thought the product would fail after reading things about it. And it was a productive rally and cry internally, too. So much so that we put on, as we were building our next technology, we put on every circuit board, don't bother copying us, we will win.

and the inside joke being to us, like if you actually were able to find that circuit board, it was because you were taking the product apart to obviously figure out what's inside and probably copy us. I love it. So that felt pretty good. And then, you know, sure enough, two years later, they discontinued the product because it had failed.

Yeah. I mean, the truth is big companies, well, you know, they do have a lot of resources. They do have distribution. What they don't have is, the passion or mission to understand why they're doing a certain thing, right? And so they can go off on these little adventures

scares the heck out of the investors in a company. But this is why I really tell my founders to not get involved in corporate VC if I had been on your board and we'd been approached. I'd be like, anything but this, please. Because if they're interested, it's for nefarious reasons. And I literally have a company that just got offered, a valuation that doesn't make logical sense by a strategic.

And I'm like, well, what do you think they're, if they have X, I wouldn't say how many billions, but if they have large amounts of billions in the bank, what do you think their motivation is? Like, we're not going to increase their cash position. This is a company that prints money. So why are they doing this? Like, they're doing it to block other competitors from buying us and to get information and to, you know, this is the problem with strategics.

when Facebook came out with their strategic fund and they were going to meet with all the Y Combinator companies in some partnership I was like, you're crazy if you let company in the incubator stage meet with Zuckerberg and Facebook like are you not paying attention to the scorp? It's a setel, the scorpion and the frog.

I think that's the very like tactical advice to take from it which is to be really skeptical of corporate investors. The reflection I have is, is also the importance of resilience for a team. And I think it's kind of like maybe the top two or three things that a startup team needs to have or company needs to have as resilience because like so much stuff happens and goes poorly. And it's really how you rise to the occasion and move past it. The other thing I'll just say is I know there's a lot of founders that have trouble raising capital. And whoop was one of those businesses.

I mean, there were so many years, Jason, where it was very hard to raise capital. You know, that sort of period of like 2014 to call it 2018 or 19, it was very hard to raise capital. And the business almost went bankrupt in 2017 and 18. And then you fast forward a mere few years later and, you know, a multi-billion dollar company. And so it's just, I can't understate, like, how important resilience is to your founders and this idea of just keep going. Yeah, as with the mission and grit is what it's all about.

If you can get through those hard times, and the great thing about being a subscription business is that it becomes so predictable. I think that the business model pivot, I'm sure you got massive resistance to it. I'm sure consumers were confused. Why don't I have to pay this, yada, yada, yeah. So maybe talk a little bit about the courage and the grit, the resiliency to get through that business pivot, because I'm sure investors and other folks may and probably people internally probably a little voice in your head was saying like is this the right thing to do well there's a theme I come back to

which is if something's broken you have to take a pretty drastic action and if something is you know a little off okay you can iterate and test your way maybe through it but um you know we we had a bit of an existential crisis where it was like hey we've been built this innovative product that people love and no one's buying it. Like, we need to take a huge reset on this business model. And this is our best shot on goal at what that business model should look like. And funny enough, when we first launched it, it was $30 a month. And even today, it's still anchored at a $30 monthly rate if you want to pay month to month. There's cheaper options if you pay on an annual membership. The other thing that we

did more recently, which I think you'll find interesting, is we launched this notion of free trials. So you can literally sign up for WOOP for free for 30 days. And at the end of 30 days, you can decide whether you want to be a member or you send us the device back. And it's a pretty powerful acquisition tool now for us. And again, you're entirely leading with the product first, right. And so I think that's been our orientation all along is to be really very product focused. Yeah. And the people who are using it, how much of it is sleep? I know we were early investors in calm and sleep wasn't even on the table. It was just mindfulness and meditation. Sure. But something happened in the last five or six years. I don't know if it was Trump and the

stressed Trump call people, cause people, or then followed by, you know, COVID and people having anxiety about that, or just a general mental health and anxiety and also screens and devices, doom scrolling, so all thing, just got people acutely aware of sleep and how important that is. So how much of, and that was probably something you were not originally working on or was it? And then how much is sleep a driver of subscriptions and usage today? Well, we always believed sleep was going to be core to the experience. I mean, the physiology paper that I wrote in 2011 was the feedback tool measuring intensity recovery and sleep. So there was like this core idea that those would be the metrics that Woop would develop. I think that there's a certain awareness that has gone, you know,

mass market around, one, the importance of sleep and then two, the technology that's now available to measure it. On the awareness front, I think that people have realized that it's this essentially black blocks third or quarter of their lives. You're going to have a whole third of your life and you're just going to have no idea what happens during it. Yeah. Like that's sort of, that's a pretty weird phenomenon when you actually stop and think about it. Yeah. And, And then, you know, you've got a lot of papers coming out about how sleep is, you know, lack of sleep is linked to all sorts of different disorders and, you know, early death, Alzheimer's, all these different problems. And on the flip side, longer sleeps linked to all these positive benefits, happiness, etc. And so I think that that as a drumbeat has really resonated. I think that people have also realized that Steps was, you know, essentially a fake metric. And so, in a way, Steps has become the new sleep. Pop culture moved on from steps and they needed something new to talk about,

so sleep filled that void. And then the technology piece is very real. I mean, you know, Woop built its technology off of a PSG machine, which is essentially like a sleep laboratory you go to and you have nodes all over your body. And the idea that you can get a similar quality of sleep staging from a sensor that's about the size of your thumb as you could from going to a sleep laboratory. I mean, that's a pretty amazing sort of moment in time for technology, right? Yeah. And so I think that the technology being in a place where it can now measure it is part of the reason people are now

interested in it. All right, everybody. Stephen Estes is a principal at CLA. Clifton Larson Allen. This is a professional service provider that specializes in CPA, tax consulting, and wealth advisory. Welcome to the program, Stephen. Thank you for having me. So you specialize in VC-backed, high-growth startups. What's an overview of how you advise these companies in the early stage? And then what typically gets complicated as you go? First and foremost, I'd say CLA exists to create opportunities for our clients, our people, and our communities. And we do so by taking an industry specialized approach, becoming experts in our respective industries. And that really enables us to identify those kind of opportunities and spot issues before they become problems. We work with a variety of

companies in the tech space, right, from incubator all the way up to IPO and through the exit. So we generally will come alongside them and partner with many of the early stage companies right when they come out of an incubator and then kind of expand that relationship as those companies scale and grow. And we come alongside and assist for like fractional CFO work, audits, M&A assistance, international. We really just kind of help those companies throughout out their entire life cycle. It's our promise to know you and help you that really enables us to transition from being just an accountant to a trusted advisor. Get started right now at CLA connect.com slash tech. Let them know your boy, Jake Howell sent you. CLA connect.com

slash tech to get started right now. What have you added to the product in terms of either new sensors or with software that has connected with users. I know recovery time seems to be. I was like, you have an incredible subreddit, by the way, that you must. Yeah. Where people are just like, I drank electrolytes. I'm in a sauna. I did strength.

And they're just like, you know, it's pretty obsessive. Yeah. This quantifies help people get a little obsessive. That was, I was talking to Chamatha about it. We love them. We love them. And he had to stop using the glucose monitor because he said he was getting too obsessive with what he would eat in terms of glucose monitoring.

But what have you added in terms of either sensors or software that wasn't there in the beginning that is connected with people? Because I notice these devices are now automatically detecting. I don't know if you have that feature. We automatically detecting what people are doing. And then, you know, obviously recovery time. So how much of what you're doing at WOOP has to do with algorithms and software versus hardware and the sensors?

Yeah, I mean, the hardware we release every two, even in some cases, three years over the company's history. So a lot of that's just a foundation. And it's the software and the analytics and the algorithms and increasingly the AI that's taking that to a new level. And, you know, I mean, just in the last six months, we released two pretty innovative features leveraged on top of our hardware. I'll describe the strength trainer because it ties this notion of hardware and software together. Two years ago, we acquired a company called Push, which was a startup that built a big following in the sort of elite weightlifting community because it did a good job quantifying what lifting weights was doing to your body or your muscular load. Essentially, if you bench 100 pounds

versus 200 pounds versus 300 pounds or squad or whatever and do it for a certain number of reps at a certain pace. This is the muscular load that we can measure on your body. Now, historically, wearables have never measured muscular load, so we thought that was a pretty interesting use case. So we acquired the company,

which had its own hardware product, and mind you, this is after we'd already launched our latest hardware. And we took that suite of algorithms and software and figured out how to map their hardware, hardware to our existing hardware. And then on top of that, we built a whole software package that allows you to choose exercises and build an entire workout.

You know, that would be the equivalent of you working out in a gym or in a hotel or whatever. And, you know, entering reps and weights and all these things. And then we launched this feature on top of everyone's existing hardware. So what for every other hardware company, a thousand percent would be a new hardware launch, Whoop did as a software upgrade and a firmware upgrade just over the air. And so then all of a sudden strain for whoop went from being just cardiovascular, so based on your heart, to cardiovascular and muscular in certain circumstances when you had

weights or, you know, strength training. So, you know, that I think hopefully, hopefully, encompasses or gets into question. Yeah, no, when you calculate the strain, it knows your heart rate, it knows your skin temperature, I guess it knows your breathing or some approximation of your breathing and then can use that. And then if you're telling it, hey, I'm doing squats or kettlebells or whatever, it can put all that together to say, hey, here's your general strain level.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, like a running workout, for example, would primarily, our strain metric would primarily be based on the time that you spent in different zones of your max heart rate. So, simple math, if you're, you know, max heart rate's 200 and you're at 190 beats per minute versus 170 beats per minute, when you're at 190, you're putting more stress on your body, right? And so the longer you spend at higher zones, the more strain credit that you get. So you could do a very long workout at lower intensity or you can do a shorter workout at higher intensity and you may end up with similar strain. Now that was a primarily cardiovascular measurement. Yes, it uses skin temperature,

respiratory rate, but a lot of what you're getting credit for is these elevated heart rate zones. On the flip side, if you do a workout like weightlifting, and this is why I've been critical of step counting as well, like it's not giving you enough credit for what you've just done. under your body from a strain standpoint. So now Woop is able to use our accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure how you're lifting all sorts of different exercises. And we're getting the input from you on how much weight it was and exactly what your reps were. And it does all the rest to measure the tonnage of that workout and what the as a consequence muscular load effect is on your body. And that was based on years of research. And then there's this WOOP body feature that you

have now, so you're putting a sensor into clothes to do other types of cardio activity? Explain that. So we have a principle just to zoom up for a second. Like, we have a principle that wearable technology should either be cool or invisible. And a lot of wearable technology is kind of stuck in no man's land in the middle of those two phenomenons. And it looks something like a piece of plastic on your wrist with a, you know, a time and a step counter or something like that. And or some of the smart watches on the market. They aren't super desirable things to wear, and they're also very present. And so we wanted to stay away from that.

We wanted to be either in Cool or Invisible. And Cool is creating a product that aesthetically resonates for you. It's hard to understate how much of a commitment it is to wear something 24-7 and how much it starts to say about you if you wear something 24-7, right? How many things in your life do you wear 24-7? Not much. Right. So we needed to create an aesthetic that could resonate for people.

And then as a consequence, we designed a product that's infinitely customizable. So we have about 70,000 different bands and collections that you can wrap this little sensor with. And you can swap them in and out in a pretty seamless fact. And as you can see, the product's mostly material. In fact, we've tried to almost take the tech out of the product. No, I mean, it's so subtle. It's so elegant that, you know, It doesn't look like you're wearing,

it looks like you're wearing something, you know, somebody gave you on the ply of Burning Man and was like, hey, here's a cool wrist. Right. It doesn't look like it's electronic in any way. That was the thing that I was like, where's the display?

Like, how do I see my heart rate? Right. So, do people complain about that? Because I like to see my heart rate when I'm working out. Is that like something you guys suffer over a bit? We get it, but there's enough,

our opinion is there's enough screens in the world. So whether it's your phone, whether it's the machine that you're working out on, whether it's your iPad, maybe one day even it's your smartwatch, Wupple send the data there. Right? And so you can find a way to see it. Because for most of the rest of the hours of the day, having a screen is actually an inhibitor, in our opinion, to wearing it 24-7. Now, let's go back to Invisible in your question.

So the other paradigm is that the technology just disappears. and you still get the value of the data. And our initial shot on goal at making whoop disappear is whoop body, which is a line of clothing that allows you to put the sensor in different locations that aren't your wrist. So I take it off my wrist and I put it in my shorts. Yeah, so we'll do this demo for those of you who can see this video. And I'm just taking the sensor apart. And now, voila, I've got this tiny little sensor.

and I can put this in these different locations. So key thing is the same exact sensor, but I can now wear it on my upper arm in a shirt or under a bicep sleeve. I can actually wear it around my waist in boxers or shorts or underwear. Yeah, here's a good demo of this. Yeah. We've got leggings where it can slip around the cap. So a big focus on having this technology ability to disappear.

and you'd be surprised by how many people are using it in their sort of daily lives. You know, people just saying, oh, I'm going to just wear it in my boxers from now on. So you put it in your boxers, but does it still touch my skin then and I still get all the skin ratings and heart rate readings? Or do I lose something by putting it into the, you know, intimates or my shorts? Great question. We validated the sensor from all these different locations. So we have something called Whoop Labs, which is where we invite people essentially off the street, and we do these data collections every day, and people wear body suits of sensors all over their bodies, and we've identified certain locations, and then we've built algorithms that make all those locations

tell you the same thing. So if you were wearing six whoops at the same time in all these different locations, you'd get the same readings. And so, you know, think about different use cases. like there's the obvious sports use case. So Patrick Mahomes, you know, wore his whoop under his sleeve during the Super Bowl. That's pretty cool. He wouldn't have been able to wear it on his wrist, but because he can wear it in different locations, he was able to wear it during, you know, high-impact sport.

You think about jujitsu, wrestling, even racket sports, people may not want things on their wrists, anything high-impact, even in certain weightlifting situations. So there's a lot of like sports-specific. reasons to not wear something on your wrist. And then there's the daily life use case, which actually has a wider range than we realized, but it turns out like doctors and nurses, for example, can't wear anything on their wrists often when they're in a waiting, you know, in an operating room. You know, you think about maybe a woman going out to a party and she doesn't want to wear

something on her wrist or she's got jewelry on both sides or, okay, all of a sudden, it can now be, it can now disappear. Yeah, that's brilliant. You know, this all happened because I started this new coaching service. I don't know if you've heard of Fount, F-O-U-N-T. I haven't. Fountain.O-Bio, it's just like a guy who trained Navy Seals. And so the first thing he said is like, do you have a whoop?

And I'm like, no, I lost like 40 pounds and now I'm trying to get in shape. And he's like, all right, we got to get you on a move. That's a big deal. Let's take a pause on that. Where to go, Jason. Well, the first 20, well, I got, I used to run marathons. basically 1,65, and then I went up to 2.13. I got married, I had kids.

I gained three pounds a year for 20 years, or two to three pounds a year for 20 years. All of a sudden, I woke up, I was 40 pounds overweight, and then I did 20 pounds just using Kevin Rose's Zero app. I don't know if you know that fasting app. It's really cool. Fasting, yeah. So I did the intermittent fasting, which Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose put me on to. Then, and I did hiking, lost 20 pounds. And then two years ago, I was listening to Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss talk about OZemping.

And I immediately got back from Italy two years ago and got a prescription for OZempic. And I wound up losing the next 20 pounds on and off doing Wivovian OZempic. And so now I'm 170, 172, 40. Almost to your fighting weight. Look at that. Almost to my fighting weight. If I get to 165, that's when I used to run the New York City Marathon every year just for fun. There you go.

Not competitively in any way. But anyway, now I got this new quantified self-coach. So it's like for executives. And so I'm 52 and I'm just trying to super optimized to be, you know, around for a long time for my daughters, be the best CEO investor I can be. And just be in great shape again. And they were like, we got to get you on a whoop. And then I'm going to give, I'm going to share that information with my coach. So the coach will see my, you know, wait every day from my Fitbit scale, my whoop data and whatever else.

I share with them. So I'm getting kind of stoked for it. And then I got a Peloton tread. And I got the tonal machine. So I got the whole battery of stuff. And then I did the whole, you know, when you look at this stuff, I think economically, what does it cost to be part of Equinox now? It's like 200 a month or something, 250.

It's crazy how expensive it is. And see, that's like whatever it is, $2,500 a year, $3,000 a year. And then you put a bunch of, you. of, yeah, so it's 3,000 a year. And I was like, well, my wife and I join, that's 6,000 a year to be part of like a really good gym. 6,000 a year over 10 years or 60,000. I'm like, you could buy every smart device in the world and the subscription. And it wound up being a third of the price for half the price.

And you own it all. And so I have a small gym at home. It's not like super fancy. But I'm just dialing it in. And I'm really excited to use. It was one of the reason I wanted to have you on was because I'm, I'm starting to use it. I am using Notion as I speak.

I use Notion all day long. My entire company runs on Notion and Notion is perfect for project management. And I got a lot of projects going on and I want them to go at this point in my career perfectly. I don't have time for mistakes and nonsense and low performance. Well, part of being a high performing organization is to use project management. We use Notion all day. long to do important events in our lives, right? So when we do something like a project like the All In Summit or we're doing, you know, the parties at the All In Summit, we have a sales pipeline.

We have AV checklist. We have schedules, all this stuff. Well, guess what? Notion isn't just about documents. It is about project management. And they have crushed it. Today, I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion projects, which includes new, powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge-based, and AI,

so you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them too. So do your most efficient work with Notion projects. You can try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. That's all lowercase letters. Notion.com slash twist.

When you use our link, you're supporting our show, go right now to notion.com slash twist. Give us an idea of what's humming. What do you think about? Because I know that Tim Cook's been obsessed with glucose level, and supposedly there's going to be some way to maybe be able to tell your glucose through your skin. I don't know if that's possible or not, but I know he's obsessed with that. We have an investment in a company called Nutrisense that does glucose monitoring, etc. What do you think

the future is for you guys? I think glucose monitoring is interesting, albeit not, I don't think it'll be in a convenient form factor on the time frame that it's being written about. I think I also am a little bit skeptical of its mass market appeal. So, you know, folks with diabetes need to wear a continuous glucose monitor, and about 30% of them do it. And it's, you know, I think it's been pitched in the last two years, at least in the startup ecosystem, as being, like another category, and at least I've certainly heard this pitch of, yeah, we're like whoop,

but for nutrition or we're like whoop for continuous glucose monitoring. And I think of it a little bit more like a DNA test where it's, you do it once and you kind of have a sense now, but the idea that you're going to wear a continuous glucose monitor in that form factor forever is kind of hard to imagine. And so there's a number of categories that we're pretty excited about. I think that what you're going to see is over time this shift from being able to improve people's lives pretty dramatically with their health to ultimately saving people's lives on a fairly regular basis. I think it's going to be like almost like a chat GPT moment,

you know in this last, you know how like all of a sudden this thing came out and it was like. It went from being a toy to being like it actually worked. Yeah. I think it's going to be pretty binary like that where all of a sudden you realize that you're detecting people are going to have heart attacks before they have heart attacks or strokes or disease states or illnesses. And to me it's obvious that continuous health monitoring will get to that level. Right.

You know, we're in this mode of we want to build a 24-7 life coach for you. And you can interact with it and learn everything about your body from it. And it'll put you on different plans and tell you when something's wrong. Is it starting to give advice or is it up to me to interpret the results? Like, is it tell you like, hey, by the way, you know, your sleep sucked, you're, you know, you haven't been working out. Here's some ideas for you tomorrow. Or here's some things you could do today to get back on track.

Is it coaching you now at the product? We think of the product very much as a coach. and that's a fairly deliberate, that's a deliberate word because there's other ways to think about health monitoring. And I think over time, it will certainly be able to, you know, I don't want to say too much, but it'll be able to tell you pretty deliberately what you need to do next based on your goals or tell you things that you don't know to ask about, which of course is what a great coach does. Yeah, that anticipating what I should do based on my weight, my recovery time, my heart rate, etc., my age, you're going to just have so much information. It's going to be amazing. Are people now sharing it with their doctors, do you have that multiplayer mode built into it yet? Or am I just going to have to get my same password to my coach over at Fount?

Well, you can certainly create a team where you can share information with other people. in your life, family members, friends, your doctor. So that's built into the product today? Yeah, it is. That's awesome. You can also export your data as a PDF for certain time intervals, and you could say, hey, doc, I'm coming in next week, here's my last 30 days of all my WOOP metrics. And that might be a little bit more of a raw readout of, you know, of numbers and whatnot.

But I don't think we're that far from there being a layer. that sits on top of this information that can do a lot of what that doctorate visit would have done. Yeah, that's so clear to me because so many doctors, they're not using whoop. They're not up on the latest science. They're not listening to Tim Ferriss or whoever. They're just not up on it. That's what I keep finding is the general practitioners are out of shape themselves that they don't know the latest science.

And so I'd rather get my information from whoop. And, you know, what I really would like to see is I'm doing my blood draw next week. I'd like to see some, you know, whatever, Quest Diagnostics, whoop. And then I just did- Data sources. Yeah, and then I did my Pronova scan. Have you done one of those yet? The full-body scans.

Yeah, I actually haven't done that, but I'm going to. That's pretty cool. Do Prinovo. It's really cool. And then I guess Daniel Eck from Spotify now is investing in a company that's going to do really cheap body scans. And then I just took a cancer test. That's $1,000.

And it's a blood test, just to see if you have cancer in your bloodstream. It's not perfect yet. But these things I think are going to become in the future, and there's going to be like a battery of things you can do and then connect it all. Like, if I could, if you had my blood work plus what you have from the Wu, plus pro-novo, there's something there that is going to be the massive. Yeah, that's going to just be the game change world. And then it's like these doctors, I don't think these doctors know how to interpret it,

but AI will figure it out over time. AI will do a much better job over time because you're going to put together, three or four colossal data sets. I mean, that's the exciting thing for me is if you all can get coordinated and put this data set together and put AI against it, whoof, sky's the limit, right? Yeah, and we will. And I think that the other advantage that we have over even a doctor or trainer or coach like in your real life is like their sample size might be tens, hundreds, maybe even

a thousand people, like best case scenario. Whereas, you know, we're building data sets on millions of people, right? And so it's just the number of people that look exactly like you on our platform is pretty profound. Yes, you'll have X number of 52-year-olds in America with my BMI and my height. And nobody's going to have that information. And there's a whole behavioral layer to it. We didn't talk as much about this, but Woop has a journal inside of it where you can add different behaviors and track them. So alcohol consumption is the one everyone does because they

realize how much alcohol affects their sleep and their recovery in these things. But maybe you're going to try a new supplement or meditation or, you know, fill in the blank. Like your doctor prescribes a drug. Like, what is this new thing doing to your body? And so you can actually do like a little A-B test on your body. Okay, when I do it versus what? when I don't. This is how it impacts my recovery. Oh, run experiments. And so Woop will tell you right back, okay, when you do this and not this, this is what happens to your body. And this is the perfect formula for you. And then, oh, by the way, there's a bunch of people who look just like you who are doing this thing and it's going really well. You should do this thing, right? And so that's where

it goes. Where does your community coalesce? Is it in the app or is it just on Reddit or Facebook groups? Like, because they must be pointing you in this direction. It would be really powerful to be able to say, like, yeah, this group of 50-year-olds is, you know, that is going to run this week and drink a glass of wine. This group's going to run the same three miles, but not drink the glass of wine. Yeah. I mean, we have communities, I would say, in a number of different places. And admittedly, some people on whoop want to play a very single player game, which is their data with whoop. And we have, I think, a lot of encouraging privacy principles for those folks.

Like we have a strong principle that we're not going to sell your data to third parties, which is something I don't think most big tech companies could authentically claim. Yeah. But I mean, if you gave me a would you share anonymously into this group and then give to get, you know, the old give to get concept of like, I give my data. I can get the average of 50-year-olds in the system and benchmark myself. One of the nice, that was one of the nice things about Peloton I liked was when you were doing the workouts. It would be like, hey, here's where you stand versus people in your cohort. Yeah, that's cool. Gamsmanship, but it was just a lot of fun.

You guys raised at a large valuation, so companies got to go public at some point, I guess. You want to be a large independent company's the goal? Yeah, I mean, I think that we've built the business to be a standalone business. And so I think an inevitable evolution of that is taking the business public in the coming years. Yeah, that makes sense. We've raised about 400 million in capital. And, yeah, fortunately, we've been able to ride through the last couple years and continue growing. Yeah, I mean, it's tremendous.

Well, listen, I'm ordering it today as part of my get healthy in my 50s. And I really appreciate that you're working on it and you didn't give up. And you didn't sell the business to some strategic to your success with it. It's really amazing what you've done. And it seems like the price is coming down a bit. So if you buy it over two years, you can get down to what, like $20 a month? Well, you can sign up now for $20 a month if you sign up for a year. It's pretty good.

I mean, like, I think there's probably like somewhere between $20 and a Disney Plus subscription is the mass market. So it's still a high end product. But it's not that high. It's not absurdly high end. I think that was the only criticism I heard about the product was it was too expensive. I think it used to be $40 a month, right? Or it was a little bit more.

The highest we ever got was 30 bucks a month. Oh, okay. So, yeah, that's pretty high, but if you get down to 20. It's interesting, though, like you think about, you did all that math on Equinox, but you can just look at, like, fitness classes, you know, one fitness class is 40 bucks, right? Having a personal trainer is 120 bucks an hour. Like, there's a lot of data points on health and fitness that point towards it being inexpensive to be able to continuously measure your body.

Yeah. I mean, and well worth it. I mean, that's at the end of the day, 20 bucks, 30 bucks a month. Like, you just cook a... And you can now try Woop for free, so you got nothing to lose. Yeah, try it for free. It's all good. If you don't like it, you send it back.

All right, listen, continue success. I really appreciate you coming on the program. Thanks for not giving up. I will report back to you what I think of the product as I go on my little adventure here with my executive coach and getting in the best health of my life. And we'll see you all. next time on the student starvation. Bye-bye.