WHOOP Podcast - Getting Back to Work With WHOOP

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

WHOOP is ready to help you get back to work. Our Chief Business Officer, Deborah Poole, makes her WHOOP Podcast debut to talk about how we’re helping businesses, sports leagues, and organizations around the globe keep their employees as safe as possible by providing them with 24/7 health monitoring. Deborah and Will discuss the origins of WHOOP Back to Work and our partnership with the PGA (4:14), why temperature checks don’t keep employees safe (7:08), tracking respiratory rate (8:33), rethinking employee benefits (11:50), a groundbreaking partnership helping the University of Tennessee get back to campus (13:26), why WHOOP is being worn at the world’s largest construction site (15:07), how smokejumpers are fighting forest fires with WHOOP (17:47), the importance of 24/7 health monitoring (21:34), how privacy is core to our mission (24:19), why WHOOP pays employees to sleep (27:00), and the documented health benefits of wearing WHOOP (30:12).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

Hello, folks. Welcome to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. We build wearable technology across hardware and software and analytics that's designed to better understand you. We also more recently have been publishing research around respiratory rate, which is a very important metric that we measure, that we've been able to to show can help predict COVID-19 in this crazy moment in time. I'm very excited for this podcast with the phenomenal Deborah Poole, our chief business officer enterprise. Deborah has an unbelievable background in building businesses in general management. She oversaw $400 million business at Wayfair before joining Woop in December of this year. And Debra and I get to talk about a new business unit that we are launching at WOOP, which is WOOP back to work. That's right. Using WOOP to help your team, and we're talking a lot of different teams, to go back to work.

And Debra and I are going to touch on how WOOP can be applied in an athletic setting. We talk about some of the partners there, an academic setting, so helping schools go back to work, government setting, military, industrial. We talk about a big construction site that Woop is operating on and a number of different businesses that Woop can be used in. I think if you're interested in how Woop can make teams more effective, you're going to enjoy this podcast. And I think if you're also interested in whether or not Woop might be right for your team,

you're going to like this podcast. It's been fascinating for me to just see all of the different business leaders reach out to us at this time and realizing, you know, a lot of these are WOOP members who are realizing that they could use this technology to help their teams. And it's been humbling for me to get to meet a lot of these CEOs, a lot of these commissioners, these leaders of various important organizations. And for me, personally, it feels a little full circle because I remember being a college athlete where I was inspired to start Woop and thinking like, gosh, I wish my whole team had this technology, had this way of understanding one another to be more optimal and to hold

each other accountable and, you know, to ultimately win, right, and be the best version of ourselves. And to get to see Whoop work across all of these different sectors, all of these different industries right now, for me, it's just, it's been really awesome. It's been really humbling. And we're doing everything we can to help. The team's working incredibly hard here at Whoop to support a very rapidly growing business. You can learn more. about WOOP back to work by going to WOOP.com, W-H-O-O-O-P dot com slash back-to-work. And you can read a lot about our new business unit. Without further ado, here is the very talented Deborah Poole.

Deborah, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Thanks. It's so nice to be here, Will. So tell me, how did Woop Back to Work come to be? Where did this idea come from? Sure. So we've been working on our enterprise business for some time now, really since before I even joined the company in 2019. And the origins of that story are actually member-based. A lot of our members are high-performing individuals, which is not a huge surprise when you think about who wears whoop. And we have a lot of executives, a lot of CEOs, a lot of leaders of different kinds who are big whoop fans. And a very common refrain we hear is, I've been wearing whoop for a while. It's changed my life.

how do I get my team on it? And sometimes my team is my military unit. Sometimes my team is my athletic team. And sometimes my team is, I mean my corporate team. That had been in the works for a long time at this point. And we've got some really sort of innovative and progressive companies that have already been working with us. And then the world turned upside down. And when the COVID pandemic hit, whoop was really on the forefront of some of the most innovative research that was happening around what you could learn about the body and what you could learn from biometric data if you had a 24-7 continuous wearable on. And we were in the process of publishing some really explicit and detailed research when a very public real-life example occurred, right? And that is the Nick Watney

story, which you've probably heard us talk about, or maybe you've read about at this point, which is Nick Watney, the pro golfer on the PGA tour, who tested negative on a Tuesday for his, when he took a COVID test, woke up on a Friday morning, looked at his WOOP data, and he'd been a WOOP member for about a year at that point, and he looked at his Woop data and he saw an elevated respiratory rate, which is exactly what our research was on as well. And he thought, hey, I have, I'm seeing patterns and I have been following along with Woop. I need to go get a COVID. test. And he went and he tested positive. And what happened in that moment was he became the anecdote that explained to the research. And the truth is, Nick Watney is not the first person wearing whoop to see an elevated respiratory rate and realize that it could be a signal of an early COVID infection. But he was certainly the most public pro athlete who did that. And we get anecdotal data like that all the time from our members telling us about this. And that really changed something for us as an organization. And we said, whoop is not just about a powerful tool in the workplace.

It's also going to help employers go back to work. Because this is a really crazy time in the world. And employers have never spent more time thinking about this question, how do I keep my employees safe and healthy and keep my business thriving? And suddenly with the pandemic, those are really hard questions that don't have easy answers. So we're watching these offerings come out in a very piecemeal way. And to be honest, a lot of them feel like they protect the office more than they protect the people. That could be plexiglass in your office or machines that beep at you to keep employees further apart from each other. But the truth is employees are three-dimensional people who live 24-hour-a-day lives and they're not just in the office. And even testing,

which adds an enormous amount of value, is not something that most people have access to on a recurring regular basis. And so we ask employers, what are you doing on the off days? If someone's not getting a test, how are you helping them monitor their bodies, recognize the secrets that their bodies are trying to tell them, and become really strong advocates for themselves during COVID-19? Yeah, well, you described it really well. It's really amazing to think about how primitive it seems like some of the solutions are that we're using, well, not WOOP, frankly, but how primitive some of the solutions are that businesses are using right now to return to work safely. Is a temperature check before you walk in really all that effective? You know, at that point, don't you already

know you have symptoms? You know, so to me, I think we forget sometimes at Woop, the workplace, just how innovative we are. We started using red recoveries in early March. March to determine whether or not someone should come into the office. And if you had a red recovery, you know, you shouldn't come into the office. The thinking being, hey, either you're getting sick or your body's run down and you're susceptible to getting sick. And of course, that's a policy that we've held on to through this pandemic and through COVID-19. Yeah, it's amazing to think that that policy existed at Woop before we had a pandemic. And, you know, I've heard you say this before, and it's a little bit of a joke in the office, but it's true when you say,

hey feelings are overrated. Why don't you use the data available to you about your own body to make the smartest possible decisions? And these are really uncertain times. So I don't know about you, but I'd rather have more data that helps me make the right decision for me and for my family and for the people I interact with. Yeah. I mean, the respiratory rate discovery for us with the research partners that we worked with and then seeing that play out, for example, on the PGA tour as a case study, it really opened my eyes how impactful who could be right now in this moment to help teams think about coming back together safely. Yeah, one of the things that I'm really impressed by in the PGA example is that the PGA tour actually behaved like an innovative tech company. Once they got this information and suddenly had a player very publicly test positive and explain where he got the insight and where the information that caused him to get the test came from, which was his whoop data. They responded quickly, and they responded comprehensively. And they responded honestly, fairly democratically as well. And by that, I mean, they didn't say, hey, we should

probably go get whoop, but only for our most elite people, right? It's not just the players who need to get on whoop, right? It's the caddies. It's the staff at the PGA tour. It's the media who travel with them, right? So if you're actually serious about offering an innovative solution, you can't pick and choose. You actually blanket it across a population because that's actually how you keep an organization healthier and stronger. And that kind of behavior is exactly what you expect

and hope to see out of some of the most innovative leaders across different industries. Well, I think Jay Monaghan and the whole team at the PGA tour have really done a phenomenal job with it. I've been to a couple tournaments. I was just at the memorial tournament and inside the bubble. And, you know, you have to get testing before you can go in there. You're looking at your respiratory rate every day with whoop.

They have all kinds of mask measures in place. The staff is briefed. The media is briefed. Everyone's following a very clear protocol. And I think they're demonstrating a case study on how you do this effectively. So it's been really great to work with them and super impressed with what they've done with whoop as well. So we're proud to be working with them so closely. Now, who else are you seeing Debra reach out to you about using whoop to go back to work? Yeah. So I would say at the highest

level, there's two categories of organizations that are interested in wearing whoop and they have very different characteristics. The first group are people, they tend to be tech companies, financial services, institutions, consultancies that have been very effective about quickly going to an all-work-from-home environment, right? So these are people who, these are companies that are not concerned with office protocol because no one's in the office anymore. But instead, what they're focused on is, how do I keep my employees healthy and sane and safe and productive at a time where we've completely changed every variable in their life? And by the way, Maybe we don't need to worry about them getting COVID in the office, but they actually are still worried about getting COVID because these people need to leave their homes. People still interact with their families, right? Just because you're not in an office doesn't mean you're suddenly immune or fully protected. And so it is viewed as probably the most powerful and relevant employee benefit you could offer to your employees at this time. And so we've had a lot of folks reach out and say, actually, there's a lot of stuff we used to offer that's really irrelevant right now. of the perks in our employee kitchens, some of our employee lounges, right? These are things that

are unused or empty or whether we're either never going back or we're not going back for a long time. These are, first of all, costs I no longer incur as a business and also things I don't offer my employees. And this is what I want to offer my employees instead, is something that can help them monitor their own health, check their respiratory rate every morning and take care of their families and their professional lives in a better way. So that's kind of one camp. The other camp, which has, frankly, a much broader set of challenges associated with it, are all of the industries where people, in fact, are going to continue to interact with each other. And that cuts across a pretty wide swath.

So, you know, you start with the PGA tour or any professional league, right? For sports to be played, there is going to be some degree of interaction based on the sport. And so these are very public examples of folks who are interested in either wearing whoop are interested in wearing whoop to keep to keep themselves in the healthiest state and have that monitoring. These are populations also that get the benefit of testing very regularly that most average people just don't have access to. But they still want something to protect them and something that they can monitor on all the days in between tests. So that's one organization. And then the logical extension of that is actually when you move on to campus, right? This

has been an incredibly complex conversation that's playing out across the country right now is how do we reopen college campuses in the fall and what does that look like? And schools are taking different approaches and a lot of them are actually still ironing out their plans right now. But we were incredibly pleased to announce a partnership with the University of Tennessee that's putting whoop on every single member of their athletic department, right? That's hundreds and hundreds of student athletes across a huge array of sports who are all going to be wearing whoop at the same time. And we're very pleased to see that. And we think that's a really smart part of the overall strategy to empower the healthiest and most resilient student athletes

possible or the entire campus. Well, that one's full circle for me because in a lot of ways I started who because I was a college athlete who felt like he didn't know what he was doing to his body while he was training. And now, and I've always thought like every NCAA athlete should be on whoop because it's it's a group that is training really aggressively they have trouble sleeping because they're trying to keep up with the demands of school and being a student and you know hell you're 20 years old you're going out too right so there's there's a lot just going on in that person's life and it's been awesome to see the unbelievable amount of outreach we've gotten from athletic departments and even schools that are interested in using whoop

to help them go back to campus. And my guess is it'll be much longer than just using it this year. I think this is going to be a solution that is deeply integrated within athletic departments going forwards. Now, one of my favorite industries for whoop is construction. Yeah. Talk about that because that's got enormous challenges. Right. Absolutely. So construction is by definition, a full contact activity that requires a lot of humans moving around a confined space doing challenging and dangerous work. And we are incredible incredibly proud to have partnered with the largest construction site on Earth. That is the construction site in Dubai of the 2020 World Expo. Now, unfortunately, the 2020 World Expo is about to

become the 2021 World Expo because of COVID, but it is a spectacular operation. It is, for those of you who are not familiar with the Expo, it used to be called the World's Fair. So think of it as the greatest show on Earth that happens once every five years in a different country. And It's like the Olympics without sports, right? All these different world leaders come together, congregate in a new area. And what's amazing about the World Expo is in Dubai, they've invested $15 billion in just building a whole new city for it. It is beautiful.

Will, you and I had the opportunity to go there and see it under various stages of construction. It is some of the most innovative design and architecture and urban planning that you will see anywhere on this planet. and there have been at times over 10,000 construction workers wearing whoop on the site because the expo organization, in addition to being committed to pulling off an incredible six-month exposition that will have 25 million visitors from all over the world, also made a huge focus of theirs being worker wellness and safety. It's not just about the buildings, it's actually about the people who build them. And so we are on the wrist of thousands and thousands of

construction workers every day, and we are committed to helping them stay healthy, stay well, and identify risk as early as possible. These are people working in pretty challenging conditions, right? It's really hot. Construction anywhere is dangerous, and they've got a big job to do. So we are very proud to be a partner of theirs. Yeah, Rash and Muhammad and that whole team there have done a really phenomenal job. It's been very innovative, frankly. To put Woup on 10,000 construction workers is a real lunge, I think, in terms of how to how to better understand that whole environment, how to make it safer, how to make it more effective. It's been very cool for us to be partners with them. What can we do for the government, you know, and military? What can we

talk about there? Yeah, so WOOP is worn by a number of different elite tactical units in the military and across the government. We were recently awarded a contract with the U.S. Department of agriculture, and specifically with the National Forest Service, which is a part of the USDA. And these men and women do not get the option to stay home during COVID because they are fighting forest fires across the country right now as we speak. Yes, this is not a job where you get to call out sick. This is not a job that can be done remotely, right? This is a job that is incredibly dangerous on a good day. And, you know, these people are real American here. They are referred to as America's first responders because they are literally protecting the country.

It's an incredible group of men and women. And they are now using WOOP for their personal, tactical wellness and COVID protection. And we are very grateful to them. And we're happy to know that we were able to provide a technology that actually makes them better equipped to do their jobs during really challenging circumstances. Yeah, they are heroes. And by the way, they don't get enough credit because I would encourage anyone listen to us to a little curse. Google search on forest fires. They are insane and like they are so dangerous. They spread so fast. And these people truly do keep the country very safe. So we're pumped to be working with them. Yeah, you're talking about folks who cannot socially isolate. You're talking about folks who are

camping in order to do their jobs. And you're talking about people that are working through incredible levels of fatigue as well, which all of those things compound and make a job even more dangerous. It's obvious to say this. But there's a lot of jobs. in the United States that just need to be done, you know, COVID or not. And one other project that we're working on is with all those surgeons, Deborah. I mean, picture being a surgeon during COVID-19, you can't just stop doing surgery. Absolutely. So these are partners we have at the Denver Health Medical Center and actually a variety of other hospitals across the country. We're doing research with these partners,

the long-term longitudinal studies. And at the same time, they don't get to. to stop for a moment. We got some interesting reports actually from some of our surgeons who'd been wearing whoop for a while, which is in the early days of the pandemic, they actually started to see their whoop data improve. And I thought that was fascinating. And we were trying to hypothesize what would suddenly, why would a pandemic suddenly make surgeons look better, rested, more recovered and ready to perform? And what we were hearing from them was they knew their lives were about to get really, really crazy. In part, they had seen other cities get hit first. And they were resting up. They were preparing for a big surge. And they were clearing everything non-essential from their

calendars. And so if you take out all of the overhead, all of the meetings, all of the things that can fill your day, and you're left with only the most important work, you actually have a group of people who can perform at even a higher level. And that was just one of the more interesting insights we've gotten out of some of these enterprise partners that we have, right? Not everybody responds the same way, whether it's during COVID or afterwards, to stress that comes on to them as part of their job. And people are faced with really different kinds of challenges as well. Another interesting insight that we had, actually, it was a friend of mine who told me this, who works at a large medical center, not a hospital, but an organization with hundreds of doctors,

is when they look at their frontline staff who have been contracting COVID over the last couple of months, and they do contact tracing, what they're finding is these individuals were not getting it from their patients. They were actually not getting COVID in the workplace, but they were still getting COVID. And for me, that was a really clear reminder of why you need a 24-7 monitor. And it's not just enough to make your place of work safe if you're serious about keeping your employees ready to perform. You actually have to help them in their whole lives. And people are complicated, right? You might be doing everything right, but you might live with someone who is a little bit more relaxed. And so you're still at risk.

And so that is one of the ways that employers who are serious about making sure that they have a workforce that is ready to go are thinking about what they can do for their employees. Such a good point. What are we doing with that company, Blade? This is an innovative helicopter company. Yeah. So Blade is a really cool company, right? This is a helicopter transportation company based out of New York City. And this is a company that does a couple of different types of work, and they never shut down during.

the pandemic because they are considered mission critical because some of what they do is they fly organs around the city for emergency medical transfers, right? These are organ transplant. This is mission critical work. This is stuff that can't wait an hour. This is a company that had to stay fully operational the entire way through. And one of their leadership team recognized early on that he saw an elevated respiratory rate in his whoop data. He felt fine. He went and got a test. he tested positive and for him it was a huge wake-up call that wow we I am so lucky that I got this early warning and and I think we owe this to the whole company and that's what they did and that's exactly the kind of single anecdote that often happens inside a company that's a wake-up call

for how you can make the whole company safer and a lot of people are getting these wake-up calls all across our membership base and realizing hey there's more I can do to protect to my team. Yeah, it's such a good point, and we're lucky to be partners with Blade, too. You know, and for people listening to this who are thinking about their own experience with Whoop, if you are interested in putting Whoop on your team or exploring that, what are resources that someone can go to, Debra, for that? Yeah, absolutely. So we would invite you to check out whoop.com. Right in the header, you'll see a link to our Back to Work page, which has information about what we offer, how we go about doing it, links to further reading, particularly useful if

maybe you're communicating with someone who's not as familiar with whoop inside your organization and a contact us form. We would love to hear from you. We are talking to big companies. We are talking to small companies. And what we're able to offer is all of the benefits that you would come to expect from a WOOP membership experience along with customized group onboarding to make sure that employee groups get off and running in a really healthy and productive way. Now, where's privacy in all this? Because if I were buying this for all of WOOP and I had nothing to do with WOOP and didn't know what WOOP was, I would want to know about privacy. Yeah. So Woop is a company that respects privacy. It's actually, it is baked into our core. Woop will never share your

personal data without your consent, including with your employer. And so our default setting is to allow people, allow employers to give Woop to their employees. without access to their data. There are certain industries, however, where there's a different regulatory bar. And in those cases, we are able to provide respiratory rate deviation alerts to those employers. Those tend to be companies where there are other COVID-specific protocols already in place. So for people listening to this who are wondering if WOOP is right for their business, what size organizations are you talking to right now? Yeah. So we're really talking to the full spectrum of organizations.

You know, we're talking about small and medium-sized businesses that might be buying WOOP licenses for 50 or 100 people, and that's the entire staff, all the way up to some of the largest global players. Folks, you're going to read about RC on the New York Stock Exchange, companies with 50 or 100,000 employees as well. And look, when we talk about what meaningful employee benefits look like, I've been in a lot of conversations about what's the employee benefit of the future now that everything we know about work has been so turned on its head in the last couple of months. And I think the most

meaningful benefits that an employer can offer an employee at this time and going forward are those that are relevant to what's going on in my life, personalized for me specifically and not a one-size fits all solution that we somehow might all like, something that reflects my personal data, my personal experience. And frankly, I want benefits that are in line with the values of my company. And that feels really important now. And it actually feels more important now that so many of us are working from home, right? My corporate identity is much less about the headquarters that I travel to or the office that I go to. It's about the values of my company. And do I live them and do I feel them wherever I happen to be working now? And to have a company that says, look, what we advocate is for you to

become fully empowered and use data to make the best decisions for you and your family and treat you like a whole person. That's probably one of the most powerful benefits that an employer can offer to an employee. And the idea that a part of that is early detection of this virus that we're all trying to live our lives through is so critical. Yeah, it's a great summary. I mean, one thing that we do here at Woop, which is fun, is we give people a hundred dollar a month bonus if they get over 85% of their sleep performance. So we literally pay people to get more sleep, which I've always thought It was a fun thing that we do internally, and who knows what the right version of that is for your organization, if any version of it. But it does, once you have this data and you can start to incentivize people around positive behavior change, positive habits, you'll just be shocked, I think, at how high performing your teams can be.

You know, I like to think we have an incredibly high performing team here at Woop. 75% of people every month are getting over 85% of their sleep performance. That's pretty amazing, actually. Like, that's very, that is like our company sleeps. That's awesome. I'm trying so hard. I'm not 100% sure I was one of those people, but I'm doing my darndest. Yeah, but what you're really saying when you're running a contest like that is you're saying,

we have specific values that involve not frying our employees, but actually helping them become the best version of themselves. And that's the kind of company I want to work for, and I'm proud to work for. And it also creates a shared job. language across an employee base around how are you doing? How are you doing today? Oh, I'm great. I'm green. How are you doing today? Oh, I'm great. I got 98% of my sleep need. Right. Those are, it's almost like a lingo that becomes embedded inside a culture that reinforces all of those positive behaviors. Yeah, I mean, there's two ways to think about a healthy balance in your life.

And of course, we frame this through strain and recovery. Organizations that see members of their teams start to burn out. What's happening is that person's putting on more stress than their body is recovered. So the immediate reaction is, oh, well, we need to put less stress on these people. We need to dial down their strain. And that's one way to do it. The other way to do it, which actually makes your organization much more high performing, is to figure out how you can increase their recovery. Because if they're more recovered, they can take on more strain. And I'm very proud to say at whoop, despite the blazing pace, I think we've moved that. We really have not had people burn out. It's kind of unbelievable to think about it, actually, but we move at an uncomfortable

pace that's a value for us as a company, and employees don't burn out here. And I think it's because we put just as big an emphasis on sleep and rest as we do on, you know, hitting aggressive deliverables. Yeah, I think that's right. We even saw that play out in the Columbia Presbyterian COVID field hospital that was set up in New York City. A lot of these folks were former special operators, former military doing really, really high stress COVID field hospital work on the Columbia Athletic Complex. And one of the comments from one of the leaders on the field there was we're putting an incredible amount of pressure on people. But this is a team that's wearing whoop and this is a team that's really dialed into their own data and their own needs. And we're actually

seeing people thrive and in some cases improve their overall performance and readiness, even under extremely high stress circumstances. What are some of the positive benefits, Deborah, that we'll members see in general? What's pretty remarkable to say is that we have seen meaningful and sustained behavioral changes in every population that we've studied. And these are people across an incredibly wide spectrum of age, health, behavior, education. level and job type. And one of the things that just consistently happens is you get a population that starts sleeping more. And that includes people like myself, right, working parents, right, who have very little free time. Pandemic parenting is no joke. But when I'm on whoop,

I actually change my behaviors to create more sleep because I'm highly incented to wake up green. We also tend to see people increase their exercise strain levels and increase their frequency of exercise. This includes very fit people. They start to think about their workouts a little bit differently, and they start to get their high strain days better in sync with their high recovery days. We also see improvements from people who need to travel. We see faster recovery times from people who are crossing time zones because they're being really thoughtful about what they do to their bodies during that time.

You cut out alcohol on that long flight, and the odds of your waking up recovered the next day are just radically higher. and we also see changes to behaviors that feel like just sort of normal habits but can also be really destructive. So things like drinking alcohol close to bedtime or late day caffeine consumption. These are all things that we all kind of do and we don't think a lot about, but your whoop data really holds you accountable and you start to see what that does to you. And so a lot of people very quickly change habits that they've had for a long time. Yeah, I mean, you can only manage. what you measure. That's something we say a lot on the podcast. And intuitively, I think people

know, okay, alcohol is not great for my body. Maybe I shouldn't have a huge meal on the flight. Maybe time zones are affecting me. But when you have data to back it up, it just has this unbelievable ability to change behavior. So I'm glad you got to call those out. What do you think the future of the workplace is going to look like going forward? Man, it's anyone's guess. but if we look at the way that campuses are trying to solve these problems and different states are approaching things, I think we're going to end up in a very hybridized state for a long time. We're learning quickly that a lot of jobs can be done from home and that others not so much and that we knew this ahead of time, but whether your home easily converts into an office where you can be

productive is an incredibly personal and specific variable based on everything about your life stage and your living situation. And I think what we're looking for is what are the tools that can help people as they go through this period of flux? You know, I think when the pandemic started, I was one of those people who thought, okay, this is going to be a hard month, but we'll be okay next month. I can't wait to get back to work in my old format. And a friend of mine made the joke, which is, you know, you thought you were running a 5K and you were doing a really good job and then you found out it was a marathon. And that is definitely what it has felt like. And that lack of certainty means we have to recognize the fact that we don't exactly know what next

quarter, the quarter after that. And frankly, a year from now we're going to look like. And so, man, now is the time to build resilience. Now is the time to figure out what do I need out of my job and out of my boss and out of my teammates so that I can sustain this performance through a really uncertain time. Like many people, I think I've spent a lot of time thinking about my mental health, my physical health, and my general well-being. And what do I need to do differently? Because I don't know when I'm going to be back in something that feels like a normal routine. Yeah, I think your analogy is the right one. And I think for a lot of people, it's going to start to feel like an ultramarathon as we go into 2021. And again, things don't snap.

back, right? And we're all learning to live in a world of COVID-19. I think the people who can find ways to thrive during this moment are going to come out of this moment the most resilient people on the planet and the most resilient teams on the planet. And I think the companies in turn that find ways to thrive. And I don't just mean, I really don't just mean from a purely revenue standpoint or bottom line standpoint, because this moment affects different businesses, obviously, differently. I mean more from the standpoint of can we function effectively together in a super distributed, very disrupted way. And if you can get through that, you as a business, I think, are so well prepared for the future. And you can actually be a stronger business from having to go

through this exercise. Well, anyway, we are pumped, I think, about this new business unit. I'm pumped about it, Debra. I'm really excited for what you and your team have been able to do in a short period of time. And it just seems like every day I'm getting emails, you're getting emails, this business, that sector. Oh, yeah. I mean, there are... We're trying to keep up. Yeah, we're being approached by industries that, frankly, are a little unfamiliar to us

or that wouldn't have necessarily been on the top 10 list and we're suddenly realizing, actually, this is an area of the business where folks would really benefit from whoop, too. and clearly there's somebody inside that organization that saw it and connected the dots and were so happy for that. Yeah, it's funny. I get asked a lot right now, did you expect to be serving us, you know, and sort of fill in the blank construction worker or healthcare worker or someone who's, you know, a little bit outside of that stereotypical whoop consumer? And what I say is, yes, inevitably I've believe that everyone will move towards 24-7 health monitoring, I think what COVID-19 does is just move that timeline way up. It was never a question of if, it's always been a question of

when, will people adopt tools to monitor their body and, again, uncover those secrets that your body's trying to tell you. And I think that COVID-19 has just accelerated the rate at which people now recognize that. I think people and their employers suddenly don't need quite as much convincing to recognize the incredible value in having that kind of benefit. Well, Debra, thank you for coming on, and let's get back to work, I guess. Thanks for having me, Will. Thank you to Debra for coming on the Whoop podcast. You can learn more about our new business unit at whoop.com slash back to work.

And feel free to reach out to us there if you're interested in Whoop for your organization. You can also get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use code Will Ahmed, that's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. As always, thank you for listening. Stay safe, stay green, and keep that respiratory rate flat. Thank you.