WHOOP Podcast - The Story of WHOOP and the inspiration behind our mission to unlock human performance

Episode Date: May 20, 2020

The tables have been turned for this week’s podcast. Will Ahmed changes roles from host to guest as we share his discussion with NOBULL founders Michael Schaeffer and Marcus Wilson on their podcast, Behind the Horns. Will dives deep on the founding of WHOOP and our mission to unlock human performance. He shares what WHOOP is all about (2:13), why Lebron James and Michael Phelps were among the first WHOOP users (3:09), the inspiration for creating WHOOP (4:08), trying to unlock the secrets of the human body (5:05), how WHOOP tracks strain and recovery (11:04), understanding HRV and why it plays a huge role in recovery (12:07), how WHOOP measures sleep (15:16), the importance of slow-wave and REM sleep (16:11), how WHOOP can indicate you might be getting sick (19:28), the guiding philosophy in designing WHOOP (24:17), why high-performing people focus on sleep and recovery (28:20), how WHOOP helps parents (33:02), and ways to better optimize your travel (39:51). Plus, Will answers your questions in this week's listener mailbag (44:16),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 back to the Whoop podcast. I'm your host, Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop. And we are on a mission to unlock human performance. So we build technology across hardware and software and analytics. It's designed to better understand your body. That includes measurements around strain and recovery and sleep. Woop members will notice the recent update to adding respiratory rate, trends in the WOOP app. That's a great way to keep an eye on things during this unusual time within COVID-19. And if you don't have a WOOP membership, you can use the code Will Ahmed and get 15% off a W-W-M-M-E-D. That's Will Ahmed, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D. In this week's episode, I am actually the guest, and I'm being interviewed on the Behind the Horns podcast, which is hosted by Noble founders, Michael Schaefer and Marcus Wilson. Noble is a high-performance footwear and apparel company. I interview those guys on episode 25 of the WOOP podcast.

And this is a good one because I go deep on the inspiration behind founding Woop, what it takes to build a business and some of the challenges that you may face as an entrepreneur, how Woop tracks and calculates your strain, your recovery, your sleep. We go very deep on H.R. RV and I answer some of their questions about their data. We talk about how WOOP can indicate you might be getting sick. So funny enough, we recorded this before the COVID-19 crisis, but this particular part of our conversation, I think, rings really true, especially today, how alcohol affects your body, and some of my favorite travel hacks. So I think this is a good one if you're looking

for more information on WOOP, how it came to be, and what we do. Without further ado, I'm going to hand it over to our hosts, Michael and Marcus. Thank you for being here, Will. Thanks for having me, Michael, Marcus. It's good to be here. So let's just start off with telling everybody about WOOP. So our mission at Woop is really to unlock human performance. We believe every individual has an inner potential that you can tap into if you can

better understand their bodies and their behaviors. And we've built technology really across hardware. and software and analytics designed to continuously understand you. So it starts with a small sensor. It's measuring your body 24-7. And it's sending data from the sensor to your phone, phone to the cloud. One of the main things that differentiates WOOP is we have a big focus on sleep and recovery and strain.

And we also collect way more data than any other product in the market. So we collect about 50 to 100 megabytes of data on a person per day. and we sample data about 1,000 to 10,000 times as much as, say, a FitBit or an Apple Watch. So it's a huge focus on health data. It's a big focus on performance. Our origins are really in professional sports. So we started working with really the best athletes in the world when the first product came out. And two of our first 100 users were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps.

And we became partners with the NFL Players Association. So we were distributed to every player in the NFL. We became the first product approved in Major League Baseball. We got to work with incredible people like the Navy Seals. Over time, we developed a whoop into a consumer brand. And so now today we're on our third generation of hardware. And so it's been a pretty fascinating evolution from high-end sports wearable to now a product that a lot of people are finding value in

and just bettering their daily lives. So I've been wearing whoop since 20, 17 daily. And I have a million questions for you related to strain, recovery, sleep, all these things. Before we get to that, I would love to hear how you got started. Yeah, I got into this space because I was always into sports and exercise myself. I was playing squash pretty competitively when I was growing up. And I got recruited to Harvard to play squash. And I became captain of the team there. And I felt like I didn't know what I was doing to my body while I was training. You know, a lot of athletes over-train, under-train, misinterpret fitness peaks, don't necessarily understand the importance

of recovery or sleep. And I was certainly one of them. Like, I used to overtrain almost every season, which is the ultimate betrayal because you're putting so much effort into getting fitter and stronger, and then all of a sudden you fall off a cliff because you've just pushed your body well past what it's capable of. And so I got very interested in, okay, well, what could I measure about my body to prevent me from doing that? And at a school like Harvard, it actually felt like the three or four hours that I was spending exercising was some of the least intellectual time I was spending. Like it just seemed like we were frozen in time with the way we thought about exercise. So I did a ton of physiology research. I read something like 500 medical papers while

I was in school. And I ultimately wrote a paper myself around how I thought you could continuously understand the human body. And that really became the business plan for Woop. You know, I didn't set out to start a company as an undergraduate in school. But one thing just led to another and I just became completely obsessed with this concept of continuously monitoring the human body. The other thing I'll say is that I was always fascinated by technology from a really young age and I felt like there was this natural evolution of computers going from, you know, being on your desk to being on your lap to being in your pocket to eventually being on your body or in your body. And I felt like that was a wave that was coming that,

hadn't really touched health at all. And so the combination of those two things got me quite fascinated with this idea of starting whoop. And about six months after I founded the company, I was fortunate to meet a guy named John Capilupo, and John was studying a lot of the hardest math classes in the country.

And his father, as it turns out, is a professor of exercise physiology. So the two of us had a real overlap around physiology, and he had the technical job, to do some things from a sensing standpoint that hadn't been done before. And I had a vision for how to build a product for coaches and athletes and beyond.

And so we started working together. This would have been summer of 2012. I had just graduated from Harvard. John had just finished his sophomore year. I think he was 19. I was 22, maybe something like that. And we were off for the races from there. So now today, Woop is about 150 employees.

We've raised a little over $100 million to date. and we serve a ton of different market. So it's been a pretty wild journey and there's a lot that's happened in between those two endpoints. That's phenomenal. It's interesting because Michael and I got started in 2012 as kind of when we first said,

you know, let's get after it and build something. But building a, do you consider Woop a tech company? Like, how do you refer to the company? I mean, at its core, we are a technology company. I think a lot of our differentiation is around data and analytics. So we actually think of ourselves as more of a SaaS business than a hardware business.

Most of our differentiation over time is coming from the way that we're communicating value to you and the way that we're explaining data. So we anchor ourselves primarily around data and analytics, which ties us more to the SaaS world of things or software as a service. And a lot of our, I would say, intellectual property is around the way the whole system comes together. It's not any single piece of what it takes. to monitor your body. It's sort of this holistic approach. So it's interesting, I would imagine with technology, you mentioned that you raised over $100 million. There was probably a lot of money required to get it off the ground. So starting in the summer of 2012, how long was it before you actually started generating revenue? Oh, it was years before we were generating

revenue. We were a cash burning machine in some ways, you know. But, you know, we were chasing pretty hardcore intellectual property. Yeah. And in 2012, you know, Fitbit was probably valued at $20 to $50 million. Yeah. You know, it just sold for $2.5 billion. So it was a tiny company.

Yeah. Really, the main technology in the market were polar chest straps, which I thought were absurd. Yeah. And I was convinced those were going to go away. For those who are unfamiliar chest traps, you know, they go around your chest.

They measure your heart rate quite accurately. You have to spit on them. They're super uncomfortable to wear. You often get a rash from them. It was slight down. Significantly worse for women for obvious reasons. So they're just, you know, antiquated technology. And products like Jawbone hadn't even started yet.

The Nike Fuel Band hadn't even been created yet. And in fact, when Jawbone and Fitbit were suing each other over intellectual property breach, whoop in that court case was listed as. prior art to those two companies. So that just shows you how early we were to the space. And if anything, part of our success has just been surviving long enough not to die. You know, there's a ton of other, there's a ton of other companies out there that are in a graveyard because they kind of shot out of a rocket and then ultimately fizzled.

You know, Java on Nike Fuel Bin, BASIS, there's a company called Quantis, Project Florida. These are all companies that at one point I had to talk about in the process of raising money or how is whoop differentiated. And now, fortunately, there's actually less players in the market than there were in arguably 2015. Yeah, for me, it's great because there's so much data there, but you present it in such a digestible way. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. It's been really good to see. Yeah, I think one challenge to collecting as much information as we do is having the restraint.

around what you actually show to someone. I like to say to our product and design team, the more information we collect, actually the less information we have to show to the end user. And so thinking about data in layers is a pretty healthy concept. There's a feeling that you have when you work so hard to collect all this information

that you have to show it off. Hey, look at all these things that we collect. But then you just recognize that a user is looking at 25 different data points. they don't know what to do with it. So to your point, you know, we summarize things, really first across strain and recovery and sleep. Strain and recovery being the two major anchor points.

So you can think of strain as the intensity of a workout or the intensity of your day or even the intensity of this podcast, right, which feels relatively low. But you can imagine other moments in time where you're stressed, right? And that's elevating your strain. so we measure strain continuously and then what we also do is every morning we give you a recovery score from zero to 100 percent red yellow green and what that recovery score is doing is it's telling you how prepared your body is for strain so ideally if your body is more recovered you take on more strain and if your body is less recover you take on less strain and if you think back to the

problem that I had as a college athlete of overtraining a lot of that is you're taking on more strain than your body is recovered right it's just an imbalance and i think a lot of what we've tried to do with whoop is make it actionable where it's it's trying to live a step ahead of you rather than focused on what just happened and that in turn can help inspire behavior change and and performance gains so recovery right yeah what drives recovery well there's a couple ways to think about that question from from a purely whoop standpoint, the way we measure recovery is a combination of the quality of your sleep, heart rate variability, and resting heart rate. The single most important variable in that is something called heart rate variability, which is this incredibly interesting statistic.

That's kind of like a secret that your body is trying to tell you. It's this fascinating lens into your body. And heart rate variability is literally the time between successive beats of the heart. So if your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute, It's not actually beating every second. It might be beating at 1.2 seconds and then 0.8 seconds and then 1.3 and then 0.7. And that variability of time between beats is actually a good thing. It's super counterintuitive, but the higher your heart rate variability, the better. And the reason for that is it's a lens into your autonomic nervous system.

So we're going to geek out for a second. Your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So sympathetic is activation, right? That's heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration, up. It's what's happening when you're stressed or you're exercising. You're thinking about something. When you inhale, that's sympathetic. Parasympathetic's all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep, right? And what you actually want is for every sympathetic to have a parasympathetic response. That effectively is your body

governing itself. It's managing you in your environment. You can think about if you're all sympathetic, your body's not actually reacting properly to its environment, right? Because it's just stressed. And that's why things like meditation can be powerful because you're literally triggering your sympathetic and parasympathetic. When you inhale, it's sympathetic. When you exhale, it's parasympathetic. So anyway, heart rate variability is a measurement of your autonomic nervous system. It's a measurement of how in tune sympathetic and parasympathic activity are. And we're able to measure your heart rate variability during the last five minutes of your slow wave sleep.

Now, we measure it 24-7, but in particular, if you measure heart rate variability during slow-wave sleep, that's when your body's repairing itself. So by measuring this lens into your autonomic nervous system, while your body's repairing itself, we have this fascinating understanding of the status of your body. And that, in turn, is what's generating a recovery score. That's awesome. So I had never heard of heart rate variability until I started wearing a whoop. And I was trying to explain.

to one of your podcasts on heart rate variability. And I found myself at my kitchen table trying to explain what heart rate variability was to my wife, her brother and her cousin, all of them are doctors. And then as I got about halfway through it, and I realized that I was like way over my head. So I was just like, so I'm just going to play that clip for them around all that stuff. Yeah, there's a few different layers to what I said. But the other thing that's quite fascinating is the correlation with sleep here. Right. So sleep is obviously when your body is repairing itself. And WOOP has a big focus on sleep. And in particular, Woop measures the stages of sleep quite accurately. So we've done hundreds of studies against a PSG machine. PSG is like the gold standard for measuring sleep. And we've been able to show that Woop measures your slow wave and your REM sleep and the periods of time in which are light and awake as accurately as a PSG. Now, why is that powerful? It's powerful because actually the amount of time that you spend in slow wave and REM is so much more valuable than the

other periods of sleep. If you spend eight hours in bed and you only get 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep, that's actually way less effective than the person who spends six hours in bed and gets three hours of REM and slow wave. And by the way, the degree to which I just described those and the separation there, that actually exists. There are people who spend eight hours and get 30 and there are people who spend six and get three right now why are slow wave sleep and rem sleep super important rem sleep is when your mind is repairing uh if you ever talk to a doctor and they ask you did you dream last night or do you dream in general what they're actually trying to get at is how much rem sleep do you get although they may not tell you that uh slow wave sleep as you guys know

when uh 95 percent of your human growth hormone is produced so people think you get stronger in the gym actually in the gym you're tearing your muscles slow wave sleep is when you repair your muscles because that's when you're producing human growth hormone. So if somebody then sleeps for eight hours and has only a little bit of REM versus six hours and more REM, so they sleep shorter but the quality is not as good. Do they actually feel more rested, the people that sleep for eight hours or the people that sleep for the six hours with the more REM? Like do you actually feel the difference when you wake up? I mean, you can track it, right, with data, but how do you feel about it? So physiologically, the person who got

more quality sleep, so that in this case would be the six-hour person, would physiologically have better statistics. Now, feelings are a funny thing because your feelings are often wrong. You may wake up in the morning feeling a little groggy and later that day go do some kind of athletic event and have the best performance of your life. I mean, you hear anecdotes about this from professional athletes all the time. In fact, sometimes professional athletes, when they're feeling their peak, will actually wake up in the morning feeling a little sick. It's a bizarre phenomenon. feelings are a little bit overrated, which is why, again, I think it's so important to have something that can actually truly measure what's happening inside your body.

When we compare HRV, so I track it periodically. I'm a couple years older than Marcus. A lot older than Marcus. But when my baseline is always much lower, right? And I consider myself a fit person. I work out every day, but I just can't get it. I can't get the HRV to get to a higher level over, you know, even over a month. Is there a genetic factor to that?

Is it purely how I recover? And just to be clear, Michael's insanely fit, right? We've done, yeah, we've done, you know, team like tough mutters, and it was Michael and Jed, and Jed is in his mid-20s that were just, like, miles ahead of everybody. But you're always higher, right, on the HIV, which is better, right? It's considered more. So a good way to think about heart rate variability is that you want to keep your heart rate

variability at the same level or even increase it over a long period of time. So everyone has their own personal baseline and a good degree of that is genetic, but it also ties closely to fitness and health. So if over a two or five year period, you can actually keep your heart rate variability flat, that's actually a very good sign because what happens is age decays your heart rate variability. Now, the gap between the two of you may be part genetic in part age. It's not necessarily direct reflection on fitness, right? Because we have people on who are fit,

that heart rate variability is a little bit lower. And we have people who are actually less fit and have just sort of unusually high heart rate variability. So one interesting thing you mentioned in your last paragraph was also about health, right? So how does health, which you might not, maybe you don't even think you're sick, maybe you don't have a disease that you know of,

could that be showing up, these results that there's some underlying issue potentially if yours is lower but you are fit physically yeah i mean we've had fascinating results from from whoop members you know a lot of them writing in saying hey i felt fine whoop gave me a red recovery three days in a row i felt fine i felt fine and then on the fourth day i woke up and i had the flu you know or i had happened to me a couple of times where it's just like i feel like i got a really good night's sleep and i just was surprised to see that was in the red and then a couple days later or the next day i started to get the sore throat and all that so it's a little spooky actually now it's what's great is on the flip of that sometimes

you'll feel a little sick and whoop will say you're fine and it kind of reminds you like okay you know when i wake up i always trying to think about how i feel before i look at my whoop because there are times where it's just like it literally if i'm if i'm waking up and uh i look at it and i'm in the red then i'm immediately feeling like you know damn i didn't get enough sleep or something's going on how does nutrition aside from meditation mindfulness and recovery through sleeping how does nutrition have an effect on or does it i don't know i'm just geeking out yeah it has a massive effect and the reality as you guys know is the reason there's so many diets out there is there's no one diet that's right for everyone right and so one thing that we encourage people to do with whoop

is to observe how different things that they're putting in their body affect their physiology, right, affect their performance. And in some ways, I think you can only really manage what you measure. So if you think things like rate of recovery is important or how well you sleep or your baseline physiology, you need to measure those things to be able to manage against it. Now, let's say you think you should go on a keto diet, right? Well, a smart way to think about that is, okay, what does your body look like for 30%? 30 days before that, what does it look like for 30 days during? And then if you drop off,

what does it look like afterwards? And by the way, we've seen crazy different results. Some people, it looks like the best thing that's ever happened to them. Some people, it looks like they've redlined for 25 days, you know, plant-based diet, you know, keto, paleo, all these different types of nutrition that I think are popular in some of the circles that we run. There's a good way to measure whether or not they're right for you. At the professional level, we worked with professional athletes when they went through some of these things. Like paleo is super popular in the NBA maybe three years ago or so.

And I remember LeBron was playing with Ray Allen. And Ray Allen had amazing results from paleo. LeBron went on paleo. And this was a period where he was wearing whoop pretty intensely. And he had terrible data from being on that diet. And sure enough, his trainer took him all. off it pretty quickly. So it's just an interesting example of, you know, not everything's right for everyone and you have to measure against it. The last thing I'll add, and this relates to

nutrition, alcohol has a profoundly bad effect. Has a profoundly bad effect on your physiology. Like having the flu and being hung over from a physiological standpoint are almost indistinguishable, which is a fascinating concept. It's amazing to me, two glasses of wine within, within And four hours of bed has a severe effect on me. It's just crazy. It's a few factors. One is your body weight. The other is how many drinks you have.

The other is actually the type of alcohol. So clear alcohol is better than colored alcohol, typically. So if you're going to have like vodka and gin, that's actually better than, say, whiskey or beer. And then the last thing is the amount of time before bed. So if you drink really close to bed versus four. four hours before that'll affect it. But here you're describing two glasses of wine.

Wine's better than a lot of other alcohols. And four hours before bed, which is actually a good amount of time and you're still seeing it in your data, which just goes to show that it has a profound effect. Question on hardware. So you were saying hardware is going from desktop to laptop, wrist now, right?

And then potentially in your body. Like how do you, I mean, you probably can't even talk about most of that. But are you guys, do you have a lab where you think about what hardware looks like down the road 10 years 15 years down the road where it's going yeah i mean you're i think as an entrepreneur or an innovator in technology you're kind of always balancing this moment in time where you want to have your your feet on the ground and figure out what's the next thing to do but you want to have your eyes

in the sky of where it can go yeah and that's how we approach it our overall philosophy is that wearable technology should either be cool or invisible and i think a lot of wearable technology is stuck in the middle. You know, it's something you notice and it's not particularly cool. And the justification for that is, well, it's tech. It's, you know, supposed to do all these things for you. But I think that's lazy. So we try to straddle two pretty diametrically different ends of the spectrum. On the cool front, you know, what is an aesthetic that you're comfortable wearing? And from that standpoint, you know, we designed something that's actually pretty customizable. This sensor, you can dress up with all sorts of different bands. You can put all sorts of different class on it. We wanted

it to feel ownable, especially if it's something that's going to be sitting on your wrist for a large percentage of the day. Now, beyond that, if you think about invisible, we want this to be something that can actually disappear on your body. And so while today a lot of people wear the sensor, you know, on their wrist, you can actually wear it on your upper arm, you can wear it on your shoulder. Oh, interesting. I didn't know that. And over time, this is going to be able to live throughout the body. And so a lot of what we're doing with the sensor is just getting it to be smaller and smarter. And we're going to keep doubling down on those two ends of the spectrum. The spectrum related to cool and the spectrum related to invisible. He just basically completely took the whoop

apart into the smallest possible pieces and shows how it can move around your body. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So I just have some random questions for you because I'm just very curious about like HRV. What is the highest HRV numbers that you've seen? we've seen numbers between like 300 and 400 which to put that in perspective for people have no context of HRV you know good numbers show up between 50 and 120 what it tends to be is it tends to be like an Olympic caliber swimmer or runner because at the end of the day it is a primarily it's a primarily cardiovascular metric yeah so you're looking at how healthy someone's heart is and so that tends to to skew a little bit better towards people who are doing massively intense cardiovascular sports. And then again, it's genetic, right? Do people actually guard that data? Is it like a competitive advantage to, like, do people talk about it and share that

are competing with each other? Yeah, it varies a lot by sport. Yeah. You know, again, we've worked across literally every professional sport at this point. And you see different cultural dynamics, like, at every level. I think that team sports can tend to be more collaborative. So if you're on a basketball team, you're the center. I'm the point guard.

I'm not that worried that you're going to take my job, right? I'm curious what your stats are. You're curious what mine are. So it's a little bit more collaborative. I think if you're an individual competitor, maybe it's something you want to keep closer to the chest. But again, it varies. You know, there's a level of openness right now with everything. everything related to privacy that I don't think people saw coming decades ago.

You know, if you think about just even where Instagram has taken people of, you know, photographing every possible, you know, aspect of a high, high profile person's life, you know, up to the moment of this is my exact location. It's a pretty remarkable moment in time that we live. And I think that with health data, that I look at this from a very optimistic, potentially idealistic, which is that high-profile people who are talking about athletes and others have a remarkable opportunity to influence culture positively through an understanding of what they do to perform well. You know, if you think about it, it was really only maybe 30 years ago that professional

athletes started lifting weights. You can't go to a hotel in America that doesn't have a gym today. And that story, I think, was really told through professional sports. And if I look at the next story that high-performing people are going to tell to society, I think it's going to be around sleep and recovery. And that was the bet I made effectively 10 years ago in the process of getting interested in Whoop was, wow, there's this whole other aspect to your life, which is around sleep and recovery, that to me doesn't feel like it's getting properly covered.

And what does it take an athlete like Tom Brady to be performing at an MVP caliber level at age 42 in the NFL? what is he doing to his body or LeBron James or Ray Allen and these people who had these sort of weirdly long careers because the reality is that information isn't just going to benefit the next LeBron James. It's going to benefit you and me, right? And thinking about how we live our lives and thinking about some of the things that we put in our bodies and thinking about some of the different behaviors that we have. And so that's where I think Woup has a pretty powerful opportunity to try to communicate some of those stories with data. So across different sports you know how do how should athletes be thinking about whoop and do you see different

information or different uh data sets for like crossfit athletes versus you know NFL players or other sports yeah it's a really good question i think that in general uh you have to ask yourself well what are some of the problems or challenges that someone faces in a sport right in the case of crossfit you know it has a high rate actually of injury and over training. Part of what makes CrossFit so compelling is that it's working new muscles that someone who's new to CrossFit maybe has never used, but that also can trigger injuries and it can trigger overtraining. So that's where looking at recovery becomes super important. We find that a lot of the Crossfitters on the on Whoop get very obsessive about, hey, am I at a

green level today if I'm going to be doing this new challenge at a CrossFit? And if I'm not thinking about are there ways to maybe go more high rep versus high weight? That's one good way to offset against recovery for those whoop members listening. You know, if you've got a lower recovery or mid-level recovery, consider doing more reps versus more weight. And then, you know, I think the thing that holds all of these different populations together doesn't matter if you're a professional athlete or an executive or someone who's just trying to get back into shape.

Understanding your sleep is so fundamental. And so we really see everyone on whoop gravity. to sleep and the sleep coach and thinking about some of those concepts we talked about with REM sleep and slow wave sleep. So have you seen things expand, like starting with professional athletes? So how, who's wearing whoop today, you know, outside of the professional athlete world? It's been really interesting to meet a bunch of different CEOs, some Fortune 500 CEOs, people who have really stressful jobs, people who travel a lot, potentially aren't in control of their sleep schedule as much as they'd like.

And just hearing from them how they've used whoop to try to offset that stress, try to offset some of those challenges. Okay, you've got an earnings call on Wednesday, it's Sunday. You know, think about how you're preparing for that Wednesday the same way, you know, an Olympian or professional athletes preparing for that game on Wednesday, right? We've got surgeons and doctors on whoop. You know, this is a population. Take a surgeon, right? You're a trauma surgeon. You're often in a hospital for 18 hours at a time.

someone comes in from the ER, bullet wound, you've got seven minutes to figure out whether or not that person can live. I mean, that's a super intense lifestyle, right? How is that person making sure that they're optimal every day, right? That's a really powerful question for society. What are we doing in society to make sure that person can be optimal? Should that person be spending 18 hours a day in a hospital? So that's a super interesting population. You know, we see people like firemen, cops, people who are on their feet a lot, right? So their daily activity, we talked about daily strain, their daily activity is pretty elevated. We're starting to see more youth athletes on whoop. So people between the ages of, say, 14 and 20, right? There's been

a bit of a cultural shift, unfortunately, in youth sports to specialize earlier. I'm sure you guys have seen this where instead of, you know, I was probably playing six sports when I was 14 years old. now okay I'm going to be a shortstop age 12 and that's the only thing I'm doing nine months out of the year definitely not a good thing yeah I don't think it is either but but whoop is you know a product that can help an individual understand okay what am I doing to my body right yeah you know what's interesting is my 14 year old daughter is wearing a whoop and the thing that is really exciting to me was she now pays more attention to sleep and so I find her going to bed on her own earlier without my wife or I having to tell her, which has been a really cool thing.

And then we get a little bit competitive on some of these things, too, which is a... You're tying her allowance into her recovery score? You're not recovered today. It might be a fun game, actually. We've heard that, too, where it's a bit of a thank you because Woop is the parent when it comes to, hey, you go to bed. Yeah, yeah, because you start thinking about it. And it's just like, I know what I need to do to have a good recovery the next.

day, you know, barring being sick or any of those types of things. The question is just doing those things. So what keeps you up then at night? If you are up at night, what are you thinking about? You know, related to the business, I think that our big focus for us now is on growth. So we were about 45 employees at the end of last year. Right now, we're around 140. So in the last 12 months, we've maybe added 100 people.

it's a fair amount of growth and one thing that happens as you guys have experienced probably as well is you know you'll start walking around the office and realize you don't know everyone's names or even what someone does and there's this moment of like paranoia like oh shit

like what happened around here and you have to embrace that you know even though it feels uncomfortable you have to embrace that and so that's that's one thing that I've just been thinking a lot about is how do I make sure that I'm doing the best job I can

and being accessible to everyone who's just joined this company. And also finding touch points where I feel like I'm giving some visibility to people. And so I'm not just that guy who's sitting in his office in a bunch of meetings or on a bunch of calls. But you're you're someone who's present and feels like part of the organization. And then I also think a lot about culture, right? Because you've seen, we've now seen enough stories in the press, whether fairly reported or not, you see enough stories where as a company has scaled from say 100 to a thousand people or 50 to 250 people something's gone off the rails with the culture and you know and it can corrupt

what otherwise would be a great business and so how can you use culture as something that actually is a positive feedback loop not a negative feedback loop and so basically the same stuff that we're thinking about yeah yeah the similarities are just what are some of your guys's tricks for improving culture well so Well, one we have, yeah, so being a training brand, you know, we have team workouts twice a week, which is, which is fun. There's no, no requirement to go, you know, go if you can type thing. So there is a very much of fitness culture, as you would imagine here. Beyond the workouts that we sponsor, we also find that by nature of who we hire or who feels like they want to work here, we create a dynamic between team. members that actually makes them want to work out together, even if it's not CrossFit, right? In the beginning, everybody cross-fitted. That's not true anymore. We have rock climbers, runners, ice climbers, you know, there's people that do triathons, yoga. Sometimes they do it

together. Sometimes we're involved. But a lot of times they take that outside of work and do that naturally and organically. And that's exactly what we wanted to create. But it's very hard to hire people like that because you want talent from a professional perspective, but then also that cultural fit right so there's two things that are super important and personality obviously is another one so we pass on a lot of people where we don't think they would fit in well which makes you know ramping up the team size very quickly very hard yeah so for you hiring 100 people in a year we can relate to that yeah yeah it's tough crazy experience yeah i mean what i love about what you guys just described is i think about mechanisms that break down uh breakdown breakdown organizational

hierarchy. Right. If you're doing a workout class, everyone's on the same hierarchy. And I think the more things that you can do to make a company feel like it has a flat hierarchy, even though, sure, people are at different places in their life or their careers. You've got VPs and you've got interns. That's the nature of a business. But what I hope, at least at Woop, is that everyone feels like they have an equal voice in some regard. And you try to create an idea meritocracy where it doesn't matter who's coming up with a great idea, that idea can still win. So you guys have been around since 2012, right? Marcus and I started something in 2012 and then Noble launched five years ago.

So it's actually a five-year anniversary. Congratulations, guys. This week, which is pretty amazing. So we've been digging deep in the archives to see kind of what, you know, a lot of stuff you remember, but you also forget a lot. So what are some of the anecdotes, anecdotes that you remember from early on? Well, the first thing that came to mind when you said the five-year anniversary is that we have this funny tradition that's a celebratory dinner, which is at a restaurant called Mother Anna's. Now, this is like an okay Italian restaurant in the North End.

And I say that because the first time that John and O'Reilly and I went there, the company was the three of us. And we had just raised like $300,000. And so we were buying ourselves dinner. at this Italian restaurant. And then fast forward, maybe, I don't know, 12 months later, we close around for $3 million. And we're like, oh, where should we go from here? We're like, well, we went to Mother Anna's last time.

And so we went back there with maybe six or seven people. Now, we just closed around recently. That was a $55 million round. We had, I don't know, roughly 80 people at the dinner. and all of a sudden the whole floor of the dinner was occupied. We were in multiple rooms. I'm like trying to give a toast going between rooms. And I had this funny image that I was talking about in the toast,

which was that at every different fundraise dinner, how many seats we were occupying and who was in those seats and where we were in the restaurant. And it's funny to have those sort of visual images for every checkpoint in building a company. And I'm sure you guys have versions of that. It would be unboxing shoes or, but I think it's healthy for any entrepreneur or founder listening to this to have those sort of like checkpoints in your mind because even with all the challenges that you face, you want to be able to look at some of those positive moments and appreciate the journey. So we're running out of time here, but I can't let you go without talking with you about your top travel hacks because you travel a lot, but I see that you still maintain your recovery.

Yeah. So there's a few different things for traveling. Let's take just getting on a plane as a starter. The thing about flying is it dehydrates your body. So you want to try to drink as much water as you can. I in general drink an absurd amount of water. In the airport, I'll almost drink. I'll get a couple of those tall smart water bottles and try to knock those out. I also almost never eat on a plane. The thing about being at altitude, is that your body is shutting down non-primary bodily functions, one of which is digestion. So if you eat food on a plane, it makes you really lethargic and you can actually feel your body just as, you know, not perform it at a high level. So generally try to avoid eating on planes if possible. Now, depending on how many time zones you're going over or not, you can think a little bit about what your strategy is to sleep or not sleep. So I like to try to get on the time zone that I'm going to be on if I am planning to be somewhere for longer than two or three days.

There's a phenomenon called sleep consistency. What that means is that your body performs better when it goes to bed and wakes up at exactly the same time. You're building a circadian rhythm that's consistent and then your body gets used to it and then it performs better. This in itself is why traveling over time zone screws your body. up because now your circadian rhythm gets screwed up. So if you're doing a day trip, or let's pretend you're going to California for 48 hours, you may actually not want to get on the time zone. And we've seen teams do this where they have a game on the East Coast and then they're back on the West Coast, which is where they're based. And what they'll do is they'll function on

West Coast time, even on the East Coast. It's pretty fascinating concept. So I try to think about that when I'm scheduling flights and for how long I'm going to be somewhere. If you're trying to get on the time zone, that's where I find stimulants and supplements are quite helpful. So if you land somewhere and it's 10 a.m. and you feel like you should be asleep, you know, drink some coffee, right? Get through the day. And I'll try pretty hard to get through the day because I think it kind of shocks your body into shape. The other thing you can do is I like to try to get, even if it's a really light workout, you know, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, just sweat a little bit. It can help your body acclimate to a new time zone. I'm a big fan again of cold showers. They can like snap your body

into function. So those are some of the things that help. And then when it comes to if you land somewhere and you need to go to bed, that's where I think magnesium and melatonin, I'm a big believer in both of those. And I think you can hit them heavy, you know, if you need to fall asleep. Because again, the key is just getting your body as acclimated as quickly as possible. I'll definitely be taking some of those things to heart for sure. It's awesome for you to be here with us, to hear the story behind Woop and to talk a little bit about some of these things. There's so much more. There's so many questions I have for you. So we'll certainly have to have you back. Oh, and little known fact, the first podcast that Michael and I were ever on was your podcast, the WOOP podcast. So thank you for introducing us to all of this. And I want you guys to know, Michael Marcus, like everything you guys have built. is really inspiring. I think you should be really proud of what you've done. I'm a huge believer in the shoes and the whole brand and I rep it proudly. And, you know, for a whoop, we think of you guys as, you know, a friendly brand that we're proud to do stuff with. For sure, the feeling's mutual.

Thanks again, Will. We really appreciate it. Thank you to Michael and Marcus for having me on the Nobel podcast. I am a big fan of them and the business and look forward to doing many more things with them. Reminder, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership if you use the code Will Ahmed. You can find us on social media at WOOP, WOOP, at Will Ahmed. We're on all the various social networks. And I am going to do a little Q&A for you right now. So Samantha asks, what is your number one tip to improving heart rate variability? So heart rate variability, as you all know, is this balance between sympathetic and perisipatic activity. And I think if you're already fit or if you're someone who feels pretty good about fitness, pretty good about sleep, you know, some of the basics, one great way to try to improve your heart rate variability is to introduce some kind of a breathing practice in your life.

That could be meditation. That could be a more intense breathing technique like a Wimhoth method. that could be a pretty basic form of meditation, mindfulness. But I've found personally that the people who do a breathing technique tend to increase their heart rate variability. Mark asks, what else besides COVID-19 can impact respiratory rate? So great question. We just added respiratory rate trends to the WOOP app.

So you can now see what your typical baseline is versus your normal daily readings. and that's important because you want to stay within that that range. What we've seen other than COVID-19 that impacts respiratory rate is smoking. So people who report being smokers actually have a much higher respiratory rate. And what's interesting is someone who's maybe even not normally a smoker if they have a cigar or they're around people who are smoking or cigarette, you name it, we'll actually see their respiratory rate increase. obviously and another lower respiratory tract infection could also increase respiratory rate. So those would be things like bronchitis or pneumonia.

Okay, folks, that's it for now. Wishing you and your families a very, very safe week ahead. All of our best from Woot. Thank you.