WHOOP Podcast - Nate Checketts, Rhone CEO, unveils new WHOOP gear and shares his views on technology

Episode Date: June 17, 2020

WHOOP and high-performance apparel brand Rhone have teamed up for an all-new drop of WHOOP clothing. Rhone CEO and Co-Founder Nate Checketts joins the WHOOP Podcast to discuss the partnership, his views on the role of technology in our world, and how he uses WHOOP to optimize his own life. Nate talks about why he was always cut out to be an entrepreneur (1:56), leaving his job at the NFL to start his own business (4:03), why he loves his WHOOP (7:30), his relationship with former NBA Commissioner David Stern (8:06), how WHOOP is a part of his toolkit to manage diabetes (10:43), his philosophy on business (12:35), pioneering technology advancements in fabric (13:13), the new WHOOP/Rhone clothing (16:21), what he's learned about late meals from his WHOOP data (27:30), why he's cherishing more time at home during COVID-19 (30:52), and his advice for potential entrepreneurs (34:34).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 am your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. So at WOOP, we build technology to measure strain and recovery and sleep. You can check out the WOOP membership at WOOP.com. And you can use the code, Will Ahmed, W-W-I-L-L-H-M-E-D, for 15% off your WOOP membership. And we are happy to announce a product drop.

We have partnered with Rhone for men and Alala, for women to have awesome new Woop apparel. So you can check that out at Woop.com to see all the new gear. And for today, I am joined by Rhone co-founder and CEO, Nate Chekett. And we talk about his high performance apparel brand, the journey to building a successful, mind you, a very successful apparel business, what it was like to be an entrepreneur, and a lot of the inspiration behind Roan. He also goes deep on describing each of the different garments. So those of you who are into fabric technology, I think you'll find

it quite interesting. And it's a preview of some of the stuff that we've created with Roan. We talk a little bit about a relationship with former MBA Commissioner David Stern. May he rest and peace. And we also talk about Nate's Woop data and how he's used the product to optimize his performance as an entrepreneur. I think you're going to enjoy this one. Without further ado, here is Nate. Nate, welcome to the WOOP podcast. Thanks, brother. I'm excited to be on. Well, congratulations on everything that you've built with Rhone and your whole career. Was it always obvious to you that you were going to be an entrepreneur? Yeah, I mean, in many ways it felt like I didn't really have a choice about it, you know, for better or for worse.

I was, I didn't know it was called being an entrepreneur when I was younger, but I was always like selling something, hawking something to friends at school. I started, me and my brothers always had like a lemonade stand growing up. We accidentally were selling lemonade at the end of our street and started selling it to a wedding. what we thought was a wedding that ended up being awake for this woman's husband at the end of the street. So we got in big trouble for that. It's a good learning experience. Yeah, exactly. I was just always, I was always like interested in building and making things and selling them. And so, yeah, it felt less like a choice than anything else. Well, I know the, I know the feeling. What for you led to starting Roan? I was working at the NFL at the time. And I had, uh, I had

done a startup prior to that where I was, you know, we had built this mobile software company that we ended up selling all the IP to the 49ers for. And you know this. Like when you're an entrepreneur, it's like riding a roller coaster, right? So you almost become ruined from like a corporate standpoint. So going to work at the NFL, I was thinking, this is going to be the greatest thing ever, you know, great job. But the pace of it is just, you know, it's just slow. And any corporate job is because there's levels of bureaucracy and things that need to be approved and, you know, in an entrepreneurial environment, a startup environment, things are like, you know, you're just, every day's changing. There's so much. And so I compare

it to like, if you like riding on roller coasters and then next thing you know, the only rides you can go on are like the kitties section. Yeah, they're safer. They're less risky. And for some people, they really like that. But if you're a roller coaster guy, like, you're not going to be happy. And, uh, and even at the NFL, I felt a lot of guilt not being happy there, but I just wasn't. And, um, and the idea for Roan came from my brother-in-law, he just, you know, we were looking at the retail landscape and we felt like it was changing so much. And this was a really interesting category. And, uh, I knew I wanted to do something in that. not vain again. So I kind of jumped at it. Now describe the time period when you were making that

transition and like talk a little bit about what you identified in the market. So this was 2012, 2013 and there were a couple of kind of macro trends that were driving our thought process. You know, the first was that there was this huge push into this direct-to-consumer retail climate. You know, you had early players like Warby Parker and bonobos who were disrupting entire industries by selling directly to consumer, you know, their main point of distribution was through their website. So that was one thing. And then the other thing that was happening on in kind of the performance side or in the

active side is you had this aggregation. We kind of mapped it out. And we saw according to the two key points like price point and gender mix, you have had two clusters. All the clusters, you know, the clusters that we had grown up with, these wholesale driven businesses, I don't want to call any brand out specifically, but it's all the brands that we grew up with, you know, the big box brands. And they're all within plus or minus of five percent of each other in terms of their price or in terms of their gender mix. And then you had kind of this new cluster of brands that were less than 15 percent of their

sales were to men, so 85 plus percent to women. And, uh, and, uh, and, uh, and, you had, you had kind of this new cluster of brands that were, And they were selling at a 40% price premium to Nike at an index level. And what would be an example of brands like that? You know, so Lou Lemon was kind of like the big one there, right? The obvious one, right? But there was 200 female focused brands in that category. And so then you look and say, okay, well, let's look at the premium model on the men's side, 85 plus percent focused on men's at a price premium to, you know, the big players that we've grown up with.

And there was no one. We couldn't find it. We couldn't find a single brand that fit that. And whenever you see those white spaces, you start to ask yourself, like, okay, there must be a reason why somebody's not doing this, or this is clearly a white space and an opportunity. And we felt like there were, you know, because of these macro trends, also the casualization of American workers and the overall interest in wellness, health and wellness.

So kind of taking this performance aspect and broadening it just outside of when you're training or running, all these macro trends were kind of saying there's an opportunity here. Well, good for you. I mean, I think we met, what was it, maybe 2014 or 15, and you guys were showing me some of the early material for the Roan brand. And I remember thinking to myself, like, yeah, there isn't a lot out there that's targeting me as a guy who wants to wear high performance clothing. and I just felt like you guys had a different point of view on the market. And by the way, really premium apparel, which is, of course, why Woop and Rohner are doing this partnership together, which we'll come back to me. I remember you saying it early on.

And by the way, I've used Woop as a tracker in many ways. And I just think, like, it's such a good product, man, relative to what else is out there. I sometimes get wearable overload, so I just take stuff off. But I have my Woop and I wear it all the time. The charging is the most, like, game-changing part about it, like the wireless charging, like, that is just so cool. That's like, as soon as I was wearing it, I'm like, this is the coolest thing.

I've never seen anything like this. Slide that charger on, so awesome. Thanks, brother. It's been fun to kind of grow these businesses side by side and, you know, share kind of insights with each other through the years and check in and, you know, I've been a big fan of what you've been doing. And I know we also shared a great love for and had an investor. David Stern who passed.

Yeah, man, may he rest in peace. He was great. I loved that guy. David Stern, so good. He was one of the first angel checks that we were able to get. And he came to like three or four of our events that were not like crazy big events, but the guy showed up. It amazed me the degree to which he showed up, you know, and would respond to us as

young entrepreneurs, like who looked for mentorship and guidance. And, you know, here's this guy who, by all metrics, really stood out as an incredible business leader and magnet. And for him to give that much time, I think, to me and you and others just speaks to who he was. I don't think people appreciate just what he did for sports in general. Like, for my money, there's not ever going to be a better commissioner. I mean, the state, when he got the league and really took it over, what he did, with that league is what made basketball basketball and turned it really into a global sport. There's just and and but he is such a present guy. I mean, he can be an intense guy.

Definitely. But he, he is just like he's so well read too. Like I remember having conversations with him and he like, you know, even at 70 plus, like the guy was so dialed in well read. And so his passing was, uh, was tragic. somebody I really admired. Yeah, well, I'm glad we got to touch on that. You were saying, you know, when we met, so around that time frame, 2014-15. Yeah, yeah, I just remember kind of being so blown away with what, you know, where your mindset was from a wearable standpoint, because I was just coming off, you know, working at the NFL, I was part of the team that worked on the next-gen stats project. And, you know, for those that don't know, the next-gen stats is where we were effectively putting wearables on player shoulder pads

and tracking everything from, you know, impact to acceleration, to, you know, kind of watching the formation take place. And so we talked to every single trackable, wearable out there in the market. We were going out and putting them on various shoulder pads. And how do you bifurcate the data? You know, here's the data that you want to be consumer available. and here's the data that's related to health and safety that you don't necessarily want to be digestible. So I just had a natural fascination with wearables in general.

And I'm also type 1 diabetic. So, you know, I have an insulin pump on my arm at all times. I have a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor, you know. And so I have a real interest in kind of how wearables can impact overall health and wellness and really tell you a lot about yourself. And so we were sharing what we were doing on the fabric and the technology side. And it was like, hey, let's, you know, what would a whoop, what would a whoop tracker look like with, you know, with a Roan Gold Fusion band? And it's been fun to kind of see that come to life more over the last little bit. Yeah, no, it seems like we kind of both went our separate ways for about five years and actually turned our ideas into businesses.

And now we get to circle back. So it's exciting, obviously, that we're coming out with the whoop branded. Roan shirts. And again, like, you know, there were a bunch of different brands who wanted to do this with us, but we really felt like you guys had sort of the highest quality material and apparel for our male audience. Talk a little bit about that material and what makes it, I feel like the best way I can describe it is it feels so breathable when I'm exercising. And I'm actually wearing a Roan T-shirt as we do this. So I'm a big believer. Thanks. Well, you know, I think the I think really what the opportunity was is that the majority of active, the distribution is

through, you know, these wholesale environments, right? And so that just limits to what you can do from a fabric investment standpoint. When people see our prices and we, you know, we run at a premium price to the mass retail, I think it's very accessible. But it's because we invest in fabrics. It's not because our margins are off the charts. We've always said, if we're not the best, in the category we're playing in, then we shouldn't even be playing in that category. We just launched a $118 Italian dress shirt last year that I think is like such a game changer. If you ever have to wear dress shirts, this will ruin wearing dress shirts for you because

it's, but it's really all in the fabric. And so we work with these highly innovative mills and they do smaller production runs, but it costs more. And, you know, it's like I always tell people it costs more because it costs more. And then we also pioneered this fabric technology called gold fusion, which uses gold and silver particles that get infused into the fabric to fight odor and bacteria. It actually improves the dry time and was started as an agricultural crop disease fighter. So it's not bad for the environment. like every other antibacterial treatment on the planet, you can actually drink the solution.

So there's just a lot of really cool stuff on the fabric. Let's spend more time on that specific because I remember that was the thing that we talked about like five years ago, which is this very unique fabric. How the hell do you identify that? Well, we started, you know, when we started, we were like, look, what do you guys need? Like, what are the attributes that they're interested in? anti- odor was a big part of it. And there were a couple brands out there using silver thread technology. And essentially, the way this works is the silver gets melted down and it gets

extruded, meaning it gets pulled into a yarn. And that yarn will either be like a polyester coated yarn or a nylon coated yarn. And then that gets used in the building of the fabric. And that was a huge advancement over how most antibacterial treatments were being done, which are kind of these misted sprays that are like pesticides and last for 15 to 20 washes. The silver thread was lasting 50 washes. So we were like, great, this is the best thing that's out there. We went out there. We called it Silver Tech.

We started using this. We weren't the only company to be using, you know, this kind of silver yarn. You see it, you know, it really comes from one or. or two main companies, but you see it all over the market now. And then as we launched with it, we started getting hit by all these different companies that were doing interesting things. One of them was this company that an investor connected us to that had developed this antibacterial solution for fighting crop disease.

And they said, we haven't really tried this in textiles yet. We've tried it in toothpaste. We've tried it in, you know, all, all. and cleaning supplies, but, you know, we'd love to kind of test it with you in textiles, and we said, yeah, let's do it. So we went, and it was an applied physicist and a PhD chemist that had developed the solution, and we were blown away with the results, the safety and efficacy of it, you know, at 100 washes, still 99% effective. So, like, nothing on the market was coming close to it. And we decided, okay, if we're going to do this, we want to have an exclusive

on. And so we negotiated with the company to effectively pioneer the textile side of it. And yeah, it's been amazing. Well, it's so interesting also just hearing the entrepreneurial side of that, like, you know, asking for the exclusive and making a big bet there. And look, it's turned out to be right. So the rain tea and the long sleeve, these are the ones that are odor control, they're quick dry. Am I describing these properly? Yeah, I mean, the rain is like, the way I describe it is it's almost like that heritage college tea that, you know, that you love that has your, you know, college name across the chest. So it feels like that from a comfort standpoint, but it's, it's lighter. And then it has all of the technical

properties that these synthetics have plus. So it, I mean, you put it on. It's just, It's really, I think, the most comfortable shirt in the market, but it really also performs well. So quick, quicker dry time. You know, people don't understand what wicking is. Wicking isn't just about the shirt staying dry. It's about removing moisture from the body and sending it out. So it'll actually pull the moisture away from your body. So if you're a heavy sweater, the shirt will get wet quickly and then wick it out, which it does faster than almost any shirt in its class.

I've experienced that. So we're coming out together with rain tech teas. So you'll be able to buy those at Woop.com. We're also coming out with Element T's. So how is that different? So the Element T is a Pima Cotton. Some people really prefer cotton over a synthetic. And that uses long staple Pima Cotton from Peru, which is really the best place in the world to get long staple Pima Cotton.

And is more of kind of your everyday shirt. Certainly you could work out in it. That has the silver thread built into it, whereas the rain uses cold fusion. Got it, got it. And which is better for exercise? It sounds like the rain is better for exercise. The rain is. The element is better for daily wear.

Yeah. So the element we do, it's like an everyday tea, almost in an ascendal tea. It comes in a crew and a V, you know, depending on what you prefer. Okay. So we've got both of those together, super pumped about. that talk a little bit about the heritage French Terry Folsom this is a this is like the perfect piece for right now you know I don't know about you loungewear yeah I'm in yeah yeah it's like I'm living in I'm living in sweats right now I think most people are I was

joking with my wife I was like I think we need I need to do the laundry I've run out of sweatpants officially but yeah it's you know the heritage collection is really about that kind of classic sweat pant and zip up hoodie feel with all the technical properties that we bring to it. You know, that's part of what we want to bring is like real classic look and feel like deeply, deeply comfort based, but with all these technical properties overlaid. And I remember you and I had this conversation about whoop, like, how come there's no, how come there's no face to it like how come you can't see you know the digital um piece and like

we share this we share this viewpoint that real technology doesn't pull you away from the environment it like it enhances the environment it keeps your head up in the environment and uh like who won't distract you while you're working out it's you just know it's there you know it's tracking you know it's doing its job versus like i think so much technology pulls you away from the environment versus making you kind of lean in and feel it. And that's what I think about fabric technology. I don't ever want to see a t-shirt with a wearable really built into it. Because I don't think it's going to do a better job than a risk-based wearable. And like who wants to be, then you have to change your entire wardrobe to like switch it out and it just doesn't make sense to me. And most of those

that have started, most of those companies that have started in that vein have failed. And again, And it's like, you're not solving, you're not solving anything for me. I'm not kidding. Like, on a monthly basis, somebody will reach out and be like, hey, have you ever thought about putting trackers in your clothing? I'm like, yes. And I have decided that is a terrible idea. I think that's a philosophy you and I share.

Yeah, I think we both designed technology to improve your life, not invade it, right? Yeah. And that's a big theme for whoop. So I love the look of this. Heritage French Terry. Let's see, we've got courtside quarter zips that we're doing together. Yeah, the reason why we call it the court side is like, it's almost like a little bit retro basketball.

It's this ultra soft mesh that we developed. And even my father-in-law who just got back from doing two years humanitarian work in the Philippines, he came back and just like basically updated his entire wardrobe. And he, I think he's called me like three or four times. He's like, Nate, what is this quartz I'd made out of? It's just this super, super soft mesh. And it's awesome.

It's really, really comfortable. And that's a long sleeve, right? Yeah, it's a long sleeve zip up. So you've got, you know, they call it a quarter zip, but it kind of starts from the sternum up to your neck as a zipper. Yeah, it looks awesome. Okay, and now let's talk about the guru pant. It also seems relevant for right now.

Yeah, yeah. This is a lighter weight pant. You know, it's kind of more of a travel pant than anything else. Like, you know, you wear this hiking and kind of out. You can definitely wear it running, very tapered. So like tapers down to the ankle nicely. And the whole thing is perforated, which means that there's like small perforations throughout the fabric. So it just breathes really, really well.

And the more you move in it, the more you're stretching it, the kind of the better air perforation you get. I feel like you're challenging me all my product knowledge right now and seeing how I'm doing, seeing if I can make it through. Well, I've got a great, I've got a great, you know, little product deck in front of me of sweet-looking Roan, Woop, Brandon gear. So, you know, you're making the pitch for why people should choose these different things.

Okay, seven-inch short. We make our training shorts to be kind of like multi-purpose. I, you know, we do have some shorts that are more focused for running and, you know, for yoga and different modalities. But I think the vast majority of people, and I'd be interested to know kind of what the loop data is showing on this is like, the vast majority of people want to do a little bit of everything versus kind of just one thing. And, you know, I admire athletes that only swim or that only run or, but that's not who I am.

my, you know, maybe it's my ADD and my personality. Like, dude, I like to, I like to do a little bit of everything. So our, uh, our shorts are made to kind of do that too. It's made out of this, um, again, in an Italian fabric that, uh, that I just fell in love with. If my memory serves me correctly, they also have like a little bit of a waterproofing. Is that a fair way to describe it? Like, they're breathable, but it feels like water kind of, I don't, I want to say bounces off. It's not like a, it's not like a bathing suit. But there's something about, it that's a little bit different than what I've seen in other shorts. Yeah, it's called a warp knit. And what the warp knit does is it's this, you know, think about a fabric that gets fused together. So

it kind of like layers onto it. And as you move, that's what creates the breathability versus most products that are stretchy are like deeply lycra based or spandex based. But the problem with lycra or spandex is that air can't permeate through it. It can't, it can't, come through the spandex, which means that it heats up really, really fast. So the trick was, how do you take a warp net, create this kind of level of air permeability, while also creating a water resistance, sweat resistance to it, which was really, really important. And that's, you know, that's basically what we have. Well, one thing I hope people appreciate in listening to you, Nate, is the degree to which you know all these details about your product and your fabric. And I think

it's something that up-and-coming founders or entrepreneurs maybe don't fully appreciate, which is the depth to which you need to understand these things in building a business. So it's really interesting listening to talk about it. Thanks, man. I mean, I think it's necessary, right? Like, I was just talking to somebody. 100%. What I believe in, what I'm excited about is 50, 60 years ago, we all had this

kind of main, whatever town you went in, there was like this beautiful main street. and there was a baker and a butcher and a coblet. Maybe I'm going back to, maybe it's more than that. But, you know, every window had its own store display and everything else like that. And then mass retail killed Main Street. And what I think has been so cool over the last decade is all of these amazing brands, you know, like a loop and others that have popped up. And it's creating a new digital Main Street.

And so for people who are, And it's not geography-based. So it's like if I'm somebody who cares about, you know, whoop is such a broad applicability, but like if I care about my health and wellness and I want to track it and I believe in the quantified self, like that's a perfect way of kind of solving that. And, you know,

my hope is that people appreciate that these founder-led businesses, we're passionate about our products, man. Like we could talk. It's people get sick of us talking about it because we're so passionate. it well you have to be too because it's like you're going to talk about it about 20,000 times over the million so you better you better not get sick of talking about it uh well super excited to do this collaboration with you that gear is going to be out well by the time this comes out the gear is out so you can find that online uh you guys have a bunch of other cool pieces that we

didn't collaborate on so people should check out roan.com for those um what are uh what are some things that you're doing on the fitness front or the performance lifestyle front, you run a performance lifestyle brand. What are some of your tricks along the way? Well, I've been doing a lot of our work from home, workout from home workouts. You know, I kind of love 20 to 30 minute hit sessions, and then I'll do a seven mile run on Saturdays. It's like, it's like almost my reset. Just go out and get a nice, nice beautiful run. And I ran the New York City Marathon. in November and I just fell in love with outside running. That's my thing. I love to do that. So I kind of, you know, for joint longevity purposes, I kind of limit it to seven miles and I just go

once a week and really do that. And then I'll do some hit classes. We have a treadmill that I'll do some hit classes on. Any tips on the sleep or recovery side? After wearing my woup and tracking my own sleep, you know, one of the things that's interesting is, as somebody that is endocrinology challenged with my diabetes, the impact of eating late is like, I just don't think enough people talk about that. I know you, you probably talk a lot about it, but just in general, I didn't, I didn't appreciate how much of an impact late night eating was having on my sleep. And then when I started cutting that out and really like trying to get crazy about it,

the early to bed, early to rise is like such a very real thing. The, you know, the hours of sleep I'm finding, again, for me, everybody's a little bit different. But like if I can get in bed by 10, which is hard for me, it's just like, you know, just hard for me to do. But that 10 to 2 is more valuable than if I were to extend those, you know, those hours later on. And so stop eating, stop eating late. and going to bed early is like, yeah, which is hard to do in quarantine because it feels like Groundhogs Day. Yeah, that's right.

So what for you is too late if you're on a 10 p.m. bedtime? I try not to eat after 6.30. Yeah, so you're talking about three and a half hours before bedtime. Yeah, we've seen that in our data where, like, eating too late can meaningfully, you know, screw up your sleep and your HRV and things of that nature. And it's actually one of the things in the WOOP journal now that a lot of people are tracking against. What for you do you envision changing as a business leader in the era of COVID-19 or afterwards? You know, I think what's been impressive is just how well our team has worked through this.

And, you know, I know that in our case at Rhone, like most of us are built to be able to work from home. but, you know, with all the added complexity of, you know, parents being e-learning students or teachers and, you know, kind of having to manage their, all of the complexity that comes with COVID, still been pretty highly effective at getting things done. And so I was talking to our head of people and just saying, like, you know, we need to learn something coming out of this. We cannot be going back to the office and just saying, you know, well, that was. was a great like little learning experience let's just go back to doing exactly what we were doing and so we've talked about how do we you know how do we embrace what we've learned in the work from

home environment without you know I think the fear is always that people will abuse it but I think I don't know I it's really open my mind it's something that we're tackling right now in very real time to understand how we can how we can embrace the good part of it and you know retain the part of what I love of being in the office together I mean that that that That is what I miss more than anything else right now, as being in the office with my colleagues. I, like, genuinely miss them as people. Yeah, I do too. I feel the same way.

And I also agree that there are a number of things to look at as positives about, or just positive takeaways from, you know, this work from home experiment, if you will. What for you has stood out as something that's a positive? I've got three kids, three boys, ages 11, 8, and 4. and I've always loved being a dad, but, you know, like, I think this has been a really special time with the kids and just, you know, just getting to spend, like, we have three meals a day together. I mean, not every day, but most of the days we get to eat three meals together a day. And I'm trying hard to protect that because I know that this is a small moment in time that's likely not repeatable to the same kind of degree. And, and, and, and, And so, yeah, I think just being able to spend time with the people you care the most about, that's like, that's really cool. Yeah, no, I think that's a really good point. How about from the standpoint of the actual mechanics of running the business, what are some things that you feel like are working or not working?

I think it's hard to keep people consistently motivated. You know, being on Zoom calls nonstop, I think people's energy and kind of excitement, Like kind of up the ups and downs, talk about a roller coaster, has been very prevalent. And I think it's also really normal. I don't know about you, but I've had days where I'm like, man, I am cranking. I am on, you know, I'm the most productive I've ever been. And then I have days where I'm like, why can I not get myself going today? You know, what is it that is stopping me?

And, you know, certainly some of that is related to sleep and other. pieces, but I think it's also just mentally and staring, you know, staring at Zoom calls all day, that part can be draining. So it's this balance of keeping people motivated. We do these, we do these team activities multiple times per week, but it's, but it's hard. It's not, it's not a perfect solution right now. You know, one thing I've found through the, through that lens that you just described is actually the type of work, like, you know, you, you and I both have brands that create physical products and I find that the whole Zoom environment from a pure creativity standpoint I think is actually pretty weak I find that creative work right now is actually harder to do

whereas I find that you know work that includes like banging out emails putting together a board deck whatever seeing super easy just ripping through it you know whereas whereas the hey let's come up with a creative solution here and you've got people sort of talking over each other on Zooms and whatnot, that to me is the piece of it that's harder. And so when I try to think about an environment that, you know, embrace or, you know, a takeaway that embraces this sort of moment or a work from home policy, I keep thinking about it along these different lines of creative work and I don't know what the other form of work is, but, you know, sort of more mechanical. That's a good, Yeah, that's a good piece.

Like, I'm not, I just know that it's, that it's not perfect and, you know, trying to be really honest with myself and, like, being able to identify, okay, now I need to go for a walk outside and, like, take these breaks where it's also not being kind of constrained to these typical work hours, not that as entrepreneurs we ever were, but, like, I think it's even widened because we're all just, you know, we're all just kind of in our own flow. I think that's right. For someone listening to this who's starting a business, what advice you have for them? Well, I would really challenge yourself to, you know, to ask if you really do want to start a business. It's hard. I think people underestimate how hard it is. There's a lot

of ups and downs and challenges from it. So just make sure that you're really committed because the truth is, is the data shows most businesses fail. And, um, And you've got to be willing to just push through hard, dark, difficult times. And there's, you know, there's great rewards that can come if you do. But, you know, I think it's almost become a little bit of, I don't know, like, in a weird, nobody, when we were growing up, nobody was like, I aspire to be an entrepreneur. That was like a title for your uncle who didn't have a job. You know what I mean?

But now it's become somewhat glamorized to, the fact that it's like, I want to be an entrepreneur. I want to be my own boss. And, you know, I just think people need to be very realistic about themselves. So there are some really great things that can come. But there are, you know, there are some other kind of challenges. And not everybody is an entrepreneur. And that's okay. It's, and, but I would say that if you are committed to doing it, you know, the piece of advice I always give is embrace your own ignorance, don't, don't feel like you have to know everything. Just start moving, start making momentum, start going down the path versus analyzing and, you know, like trying to get your business

cards right, or what's the right name of the business? Like, just start making progress and you'll figure the rest out on the way. Momentum is a really important, um, it's a really important feedback loop too as well in building a business because like as things go wrong, you need things to kind of keep that dopamine hit moving you forwards. Yeah, totally. I like the way you put that. Well, look, man, this has been really fun. I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.

Where can people find more about you or about Roan? Well, Roan's just RheoN.E.com. And I'm not super active on any social platform, but Instagram's probably the most, you know, most active. And it's just Nate check it. So it's the best spot. All right, well, we'll include those in the show notes. and again, you know, thrilled to do this partnership with Roan

and put out some apparel together in the world and look forward to doing more things with you and the team. Yeah, I'm super excited about it. Thanks a lot. Thanks again to Nate for coming on. Amazing brand he's built with Roan. Check out the new Whoop Roan gear and the new Whoop-A-Lah gear. You can follow us on social at Whoop at Will Ahmed.

You can get 15% off a Whoop membership with the code Will Amman. med. That's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. Thank you all for listening. Stay green, stay healthy.