WHOOP Podcast - Will Ahmed discusses entrepreneurship, building WHOOP, and the future of technology

Episode Date: March 3, 2021

Will Ahmed sits down with Joe Bullmore of the Gentleman's Journal podcast to discuss everything about WHOOP and our journey over the last decade. This conversation is a deep dive on entrepreneurship, the future of wearable technology, and exactly how WHOOP is trying to unlock human performance. Will and Joe discuss the origin of WHOOP (4:16), believing in your vision (8:58), how WHOOP leads to positive health changes (12:33), being told you will fail (13:20), building prototypes and tracking HRV (20:57), WHOOP as a coaching tool (28:37), sleep: the last frontier of health (33:24), COVID-19 and respiratory rate (35:58), how WHOOP got its name (42:16), the future of wearable technology (45:00), learning on the job (49:03), how to hire the right people (51:14), and defining success (1:01:30). 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 WOOP podcast. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of WOOP, and we are on a mission to unlock human performance. If you haven't heard of Woop, you can check us out at Woop.com. You can check out the membership. It includes hardware, software, analytics that's designed to improve your health. We measure sleep and recovery and strain. And if you use the code Will Ahmed,

W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, you can get 15% off a WOOP membership. Okay, on this week's episode, we turn the tables and feature an interview that I did on the Gentleman's Journal podcast. That's right. I sat down with Joe Bullmore to discuss everything about WOOP and our journey over the last decade. This conversation is a deep dive on entrepreneurship, the future of wearable tech, and exactly how Woop is trying to unlock.

human performance. I get asked a lot of questions through email, through Instagram, Twitter, other platforms, and this I think episode does a good job answering many of your questions for me. So we discussed the inspiration for Whoop and how the company began. Why the best ideas often start from a contrarian point of view. The trials and tribulations of developing the Woop strap and what we learned along the way. Why heart rate variability is core to everything we do here at Whoop, the importance of following your dreams, truly, and how to deal with feedback that you perceive as negative, and how Whoop got its name. That's right. So I hope you enjoy this episode. Joe did a great job as host, and I enjoyed the conversation. You can

also check out more of his work on The Gentleman's Journal podcast. Without further ado, let's turn it over to Joe. Thanks so much for joining us on The Gentleman's Journal podcast. Woop is one of those brands that kind of crept up on me. I hadn't heard of it. And then suddenly seven of my friends had them at the pub one evening and we're all comparing recovery rates and all sorts of numbers and charts. And I felt slightly left out. But it's one of those things that people seem to completely evangelize about and get very, very excited about. Why do you think that is? What is it about it that makes it so exciting to people? Well, Woop does a pretty good job of telling you things about your body that you don't already know.

I think that's one of the main differentiators for the product. Wearables that came before Whoop were good at telling you things that you kind of already knew. And Whoop is good at giving you this lens into what we like to call secrets that your body's trying to tell you. We measure physiological indicators very accurately, and that allows us to give you scores around recovery and strain and sleep. And there's this moment of self-discovery that I think people get quite passionate about

and it makes them intrigued and all of a sudden they want to know what their friends are doing for slow wave sleep or REM sleep or how they're getting more of it or why their recovery is so low today after only having two drinks last night and you know next thing you know you go down this rabbit hole I can imagine so tell us how the how the original idea came about what was the kind of spark I got into the space personally because I was always into sports and exercise and I was playing squash as a 20-year-old college athlete at Harvard, and I felt like I didn't know what I was doing to my body while I was training. I was someone who used to over-train.

And I was surrounded by other athletes who, you know, at times might under-train, might get injured, might misinterpret fitness feats. And so I got very interested in sort of this notion of recovery, this notion of optimal training. And I got interested in what could I measure about my own body to perform at a higher level. And that led me to the research department at Harvard and doing a lot of physiology research.

I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school. Wow. And yeah, I wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body. And I think separate from the research that I did on physiology, I just broadly believed in the future of technology. Even from a very young age, I was saving up money to buy technology. I remember I had the first Palm Pilot that could get on the Internet. I think it was the Palm Pilot 5.

I bought the first iPod in my seventh grade class or something. So I remember being very interested in computing. And I broadly believed that computers were going from being on your desk to being on your lap to being in your pocket to being on your body to eventually even being inside your body. And so that as an evolution seemed incredibly obvious to me. And the combination of this deep obsession that I had taken with with physiology and my belief that technology would play a big role in health monitoring. Yeah. I made me to founding Woop at an age of 22. That's young. So tell me about Harvard as a kind of

entrepreneurial environment. One of my favorite films is the social network. And I picture you as a kind of one half of the wink of us twins, athletic, ingenious, working hard, kind of super high performing. That's what it's like. Is everyone a real overachiever there? Well, the interesting thing about Harvard and maybe one of very few criticisms of Harvard is that it attracts people that have excelled at competing for so long that it gets harder to break out of that mold. These are valedictorians. These are top athletes in their high school. These are very accomplished people at young ages who have gotten good at winning processes. And so what happens by the time you're a sophomore or junior is now there's a new process to go into investment banking that's

competitive or there's a new process to go into consulting that's competitive. And so it naturally attracts these people who are good at winning processes. And I think there's a problem with that that I've now seen sort of being like eight or nine years removed from school, which is that people are going into banking and consulting as an example because they're attracted to the competitiveness of the process, and less so actually the career path. And they realize whether it's two years or five years or in some cases I've talked to people 15 or 20 years into the industry. that they're not doing what they love. And so that to me is a sad thing.

And I think where Harvard could do a better job is it would inspire more people, more young people, to start companies. And I was fortunate in that I got to work out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which was actually a very new thing. You know, people think that Zuckerberg and Gates and these legendary entrepreneurs

that went to Harvard, Harvard, you know, sort of had this natural setup at Harvard to start their companies. But in fact, it was just that they were very talented people and took initiative. You know, in Zuckerberg's case, he ended up moving out to California, right? And Harvard deserves a lot of credit for Whoop being in Boston because I would have moved whoop to New York. I was originally from New York and I was kind of expecting to move to New York. But Harvard said, hey, here's this space that's going to be dedicated to young people starting

companies. And you can work out of there with your co-founder. or with new employees or whatever, and it'll be this, like, environment for creating companies. And so that's been an amazing initiative that Harvard's taken on and is a large, large reason why WOOP is still in Boston today. Were you on that funnel when you were kind of 1920? Could you see yourself going into finance or consulting? Oh, totally.

I mean, after my freshman year, I worked at a hedge fund. After my sophomore year, I worked at an investment bank. And after my junior, I worked at a private equity firm. Right. So I, you know, I did the same game. And I remember even my senior year, feeling almost a little embarrassed that I wanted to start a company, you know, feeling like, okay, I'm not going to be go make the, you know, these high paying jobs that all my friends are. I'm not going to be, you know, winning another process, if you will. And there's a natural, I don't know, there was an insecurity that came with that. And in some ways, I think that that the young people, who don't feel any pressure to go down some career path may be better off they really may be better off because in some ways they're more risk tolerant yeah i think young people need to be more risk tolerant and we'll probably get to get into this you know even if woup had failed it would have been the right thing for me to do yeah because of how much i learned about myself in the

process and i think that's a very important thing for entrepreneurs of all ages but especially younger people what was the feedback early on when you were 22 and you were telling people right i'm starting this company in wearables did a lot of people tell you it was a terrible idea and you should stick to the safe path yeah an overwhelming number of people told me that um what was their main um criticism well i should say this i mean starting a company was much harder than i ever thought it would be but it wasn't as hard as everyone else told me it would be which was to say that it was impossible So that's the natural tension I think anyone has when they create a business. It's going to be harder than you think it is.

You've got a vision for how it's going to work, and that's a rosy vision, you know, and that's part of what gets you to do it, and that's a good thing. It's just there's a lot of stuff that happens along the way. And the younger you are, the more naive you are probably for what's going to happen. And in this case, in this case, whoop was my first full-time job. So obviously a lot of things came up that I couldn't anticipate. You know, I think it also was probably my background. Sure, I studied research, but I was trying to build a deeply technical company without having a background personally in engineering

or computer science or even being a doctor myself. Now, I was able to recruit two great co-founders, John Capulupo and Eurelian Nikolai. They had very deep technical backgrounds, so that all of a sudden that started to help complement these things and build them out. But I think it took years, really, for me to start absorbing. being negative feedback in a useful way. I put up a huge wall to negative feedback, probably from the ages of 22 to 25, 26, because I felt like so much of the feedback was distracting me from what I believed was the right mission for the company and vision for the company. And it was so negative that if I had listened to it, I don't think I would have been able to get out of bed in the

morning. And I think that's a challenging thing. And it's something that over time, you kind of have to watch yourself because you also can get a lot better from negative feedback and you have to be able to incorporate it into the way that you you do anything and especially run a business. So that was probably one of the things that I most needed to learn as I grew as as an entrepreneur and as a CEO. So we should probably explain kind of what the core premise of whoop is. Have we done that yet? It doesn't feel like we have because I'm straight into the middle. Right. So WOOP is on a mission to unlock human performance. We build technology across hardware and software and analytics. It's a completely vertically integrated system, which means we really build and control everything in the stack of technology. And for you listening to this, the benefits of WOOP are that it will help you change behavior and improve health. WOOP measures things like the strain of your day, strain of workouts. It measures how well you sleep. in great, great accuracy, it measures your recovery every day from zero to 100% red, yellow,

green. Are you ready to take the day on? Or do you need more rest? Maybe you shouldn't exercise. In many ways, whoop is the first fitness product to tell you not to exercise, which I think is intriguing. So a lot of whoop is built to be this 24-7 life coach and tell you what you need to know. And the main difference between whoop and any other product in the market is after you've been on WOOP for 12 months, you have a meaningfully lower resting heart rate. You have a higher heart rate variability. Those are both fitness improvements. You're getting higher quality sleep and you're spending more time in bed.

So those are great, great meaningful behavior change. And I think improving health is really the hardest thing to do in this space. Where are you at the moment on the traffic light, red, yellow, or green? Today I'm green. I mean, I am ready for you. Okay. I'm very glad to hear it. so let's go back then you you graduate Harvard and you go as you say this is your first job

hell for leather who did you surround yourself with we know you've got your kind of technical co-founders but who were the mentors and the people you went to for advice it's hard to to think about it and uh because i just remember so many of the people i respected um talking to about whoop really telling me why it wasn't going to work or why i had to do it in a different way. Wow. Yeah. And I mean, it was really discouraging and it goes back to sort of like building up this wall to negative feedback. In some ways, I now look at it though as the reason that Woop was successful was that we had an insight on the world that no one else saw. You know, many of the best ideas start from this contrarian point of view that later turns out to be right. So in 2012,

I was saying things like, what if recovery is more important to performance than anything else? You know, that was like, that was kind of like a weird idea. I mean, coaches, when I went to meet with coaches, for starting, because Whoop really started with professional athletes and the best athletes in the world. And then over time, we built this big consumer base, which is really everyone. But our origins were in sports.

And I would meet with coaches and I would ask them, you know, what kind of technology? would you want? If I could build technology for you, what would you want? And they always came back to exercise. Oh, I'd want more analysis on the video or the technique or the speed or the location or the sweat. And then when I asked them, well, what are the problems that you're facing? It always came back to player availability, you know, training optimally and injury. And I just thought there was a huge mismatch between what people were asking for and what their problems were. And this is a bit of an insight for anyone entrepreneurial listening to this.

Customers tend to be incredibly good at describing problems. They tend to be less good at describing the solutions to those problems. And that's where the entrepreneur needs to come in and figure out what is the right thing to solve this problem. And sometimes the process of solving that problem may lead you to a solution that no one else sees yet. And I would say that was the case for whoop, where we believed we had to build everything from scratch.

A lot of investors, for example, would say, oh, well, why don't you just build the software for a Nike fuel band or the software for a polar chest strap? And I see, you don't understand. Those technologies won't exist in a few years. Like, they're not measuring the things they need to measure. They don't have the form factor that they need to have to be worn 24-7.

And, you know, people just look, me like I was crazy because here you are a 22 year old competing with Nike, right? And so I get it. I mean, I get and I think I was crazy, but here we are. Well, I love that idea of contrarian thinking. It's interesting. You mentioned fuel band and I think back then around that time there was also jawbone must have been one of the big ones. And I don't know when. When did Fitbit start? That was fairly soon after us as well. Yeah, this is funny. Fitbit started in 2000 and 10 or 11. Okay.

And I went to a recruiting fair, my senior year at Harvard for FIPPIT. Wow. And to demonstrate how small the company was at the time, the CEO of FIPIT showed up to Harvard to do the presentation for why engineers should join FIPIT. And so, and I think they expected a lot of people to show up. And for whatever reason, like there was only four of us. And so there was this big room and there was all these pizza boxes and TIPPIT. shirts and whatever. And it was me and three other people. And three of us wanted a job and one of

us wanted to start a company. And so for me, it was like this great opportunity to talk to an entrepreneur about how he had created Fitbit. And I really knew in that moment that they were going to build a big business, but it was going to be a very different business than the one I wanted to build. And even though there's a lot of similarities between Woop and Fitbit, You know, we both build hardware, we both measure stuff, we're appealing to consumers. The true nuances, the details of what we were going to collect and why we're going to collect it and how we were going to visualize that information were so profoundly different than I knew that we would be on very different trajectories.

And sure enough, if you look at Whoop today, you know, it's a subscription business. We release software updates weekly. We release new analytics all the time. We're constantly doing research and partnered with research institutions and sports teams. And we don't even measure steps, which in many ways, FIPBitch deserves the credit for sort of bringing to the market. Because we don't think steps is a relevant metric. So it just shows you that there's massive nuance to industries from a distance may seem quite similar. That's very interesting.

I mean, this is a personal aside, but I'm a step, a real step at it counter now. I'm always 10,000 steps every day. And if I don't hit that, I get a bit superstitious that something bad's going to happen. So why is it irrelevant? What should I be measuring instead? Lots of things, presumably. Let's start with the simple question of, are you actually measuring steps, right? If I move my arm around a lot, all of a sudden, a Fitbit's giving me credit for steps.

That may or may not be a step. But let's assume now that it actually is steps. You know, some days you probably want to put a lot of stress or strain on your body. And some days you don't want to at all. And what we measure at whoop is this notion of recovery, which is able to tell you how much strain to put on your body, right? If you're someone who's trying to get back in shape and you have a high recovery, okay, that's a day where you want to take on more strain.

But strain could be in the form of weightlifting. It could be in the form of yoga or Pilates. It could be in the form of cycling. Now, I just gave you four legit workouts that put strain on your body that don't accumulate steps. That's true. So is step counting actually a relevant metric for any of those? Is that going to tell you what you did to your body?

Probably not. Now, there's other days where your body's run down and you probably don't want to put as much strain or stress on it. And again, if you went for a walk, that might be a good thing to do if your body is run down and that would give you low strain but it would give you a high steps marker and again there's there's a lack of correlation between this idea of step counting and this idea of strain yeah and we believe that strain which is a measurement of what's happening inside your body your physiology is much more important i love that that's very good i'm going to stop step counting almost instantly

The kind of prototype process, we had John Foley, who's the founder of Peloton on, and he, his prototype journey was a kind of a journey from hell in many ways because he, like you, was trying to build a hardware product and a software product and change people's behavior as well, all in one. So we had so many, so many problems along the way. I wonder what yours was like and what were some of the kind of the early versions. Yeah, I can sympathize with that for sure. And Peloton's a great success story and touches on many of the themes that we talked about earlier. Again, they created a vertically integrated system.

So they control every layer of that product experience. And that's one of the main reasons I believe that they're so successful. I think whenever you're going to go about building hardware, you have to be very specific about why you need to build it. And what about it is going to create a unique point of view in the market? Because building hardware, just to state the obvious, is more expensive, more time-consuming, and introduces a lot of risks. So for WOOP, when we were at a prototype phase, we were mostly focused on this idea of could we measure heart rate variability from the wrist accurately? Heart rate variability is this fascinating lens into your autonomic nervous system. Like most of the research that I talked about reading at Harvard was on this statistic heart rate variability.

And it goes back to the 80s where, you know, Olympic power lifters were looking at their heart rate variability every morning to determine whether they should lift weights or not. The CIA had used heart rate variability for lie detection tests. Cardiologists were using heart rate variability to determine if someone was going to have a heart attack. And I'm thinking to myself, like, wow, this is a very powerful statistic being used by a lot of different, interesting and important, you know, groups. why isn't everyone able to measure this? Oh, well, it turns out you need an electrocardiogram to measure it. Electrocardiogram being that kind of like big expensive hospital equipment that you see in movies like, beep, beep, right?

So that was the fundamental question. Could we measure this thing from the wrist really accurately within the same accuracy as an electrocardiogram? And the first, I would say 12 months of whoop were focused on that from a hardware standpoint. We were doing a lot of things from a design standpoint. You know, we sort of were building the software side of the business with the assumption that the hardware side of the business was going to work out. You know, it's like, it's truly like building a plane as it's taking off.

I mean, you just kind of have to assume it's all going to show up when it needs to go. And fortunately, we were able to build a prototype that could really accurately measure heart rate variability within a few milliseconds of an electrocardiogram. And so that as a milestone was enough to help us raise, you know, initial seed capital and the thinking being, okay, with that seed capital, we'd be able to take what was, frankly, a big, cumbersome, ugly-looking prototype and try to help, you know, turn it into a consumer wearable. And, you know, it was really the first, I would say, two, three years before we had a product that I wasn't completely embarrassed by. And even then, you know, when we started launching

our whoop 2.0 to high end athletes, because that was our first market, I was still, there were so many things about it that I was just deeply embarrassed by. But I knew that we needed to kind of get it out into the world. Because to state the obvious, with a wearable gadget, there are lots of different considerations. If it's not comfortable or if it's incredibly ugly or just uncool-looking, it could be the best product in the world, but people aren't going to want to wear it. What were you embarrassed by? Yeah, wearable technology to be successful, you have to be great at like at least five things. You have to be great at hardware, software, analytics, design.

You probably need some notion of brand or community. so it's a very it's a very hard thing i mean how many things in your life do you wear 24-7 right very few from the earliest days that was that was the vision yeah now in 2014 2015 two of our first hundred members were uh lebron james and michael phelps so we started with truly the best of the best and that for me was validating because although there were so many things i was embarrassed by the product. I thought it was too big. I thought its battery life was too short. You had to constantly be attaching this modular battery pack to charge it. It had like an 18-hour battery life. It took very long time to send data from the sensor to the phone because we were collecting

so much data. It took too long for the scores to update on your phone. The Bluetooth connections would drop. I mean, all these things. But just the fact, for example, that we were able to give an athlete of that caliber, a green recovery in the morning that was based on their physiology or a deep analysis of their sleep. Maybe we'll talk about sleep at some point. That was enough for them to keep wearing it. And I'll never forget I was sitting on my couch with my parents in like 2015. I was watching a basketball game and it cuts to commercial and it's LeBron James in a Kia commercial. wearing a whoop strap.

And I was like, wow, that's amazing. He wouldn't even take it off to shoot a promotion for another brand because he was so into the data. And so it was this extremely validating moment, although we didn't have revenue. And although the product is certainly not something a lot of people would have liked at the time, there was something about what we were collecting that would make someone of that caliber willing to never take it off. And mind you, we weren't.

paying him anything, right? That was a big, again, stubborn point of view early on, is that we weren't going to pay athletes to wear our product. Our product needed to deliver on its value proposition. And in turn, I bet you the best athletes will want to buy this because it'll be so important to their performance. So tell me how that relationship came about with LeBron, because as you say, he's probably one of, if not the most marketable star in sports. So how you as a small startup managed to even get close to him without getting through all the layers of publicists and agents and everything like that well the secret to getting to anyone famous or super successful is getting to someone in that person's life who has a big influence on that person's life

who not everyone knows okay and in 2014 15 time frame the personal trainer was still a very underrated role within a professional athlete's life. I know today, you know, Instagram and other platforms have sort of built up big personas for celebrity trainers. But at that time, everyone knew who a superstar's agent was and their coach was and their wife was or their girlfriend. And just by virtue of everyone know who those people are, they're impossible to kind of go through as the right channel if you're an unknown startup. But the personal trainer who happened, to spend eight, 10 hours a day with their athlete was actually a relatively unknown person. And so both in the case of LeBron and Phelps, we had gotten to them through their trainers.

Now, mind you, the technology had to work and the trainers themselves had to like it. But it was also the perfect entry point where it wasn't me telling LeBron to wear it. It was his trainer saying, hey, I've tested this. I see how this could actually be incorporated into our program. you should wear it. And that introduces another sort of important insight. When you're building something disruptive, you have to figure out who within the market that you're disrupting is going to be your ally.

And while a lot of the technology that WOOP creates is designed for coaching, we actually never wanted to replace the professional coach or the trainer. We wanted to empower them. And that was a very, it's a slight nuance, but it was an important thing in helping us get off the ground. So we know, obviously, how important whoop can be to athletes of that caliber. Sadly, I'm not, Will, if you can believe it, an athlete of that caliber, despite my incredible physique. So what, for someone like me, just an everyday guy, 30 years old, what are the kind of benefits to my life that a weep would bring? And look, it's worth noting that the majority of people on whoop,

are like you and me, right? And they're not professional athletes. Thank you for putting us in the same bracket, by the way, even though you were the captain of squash at Harvard. I'm very glad. I mean, look, today I'm a professional entrepreneur. So, you know, I think first and foremost, it's helping people identify a few simple things in their life

that they can change that will make them healthier, happier, more optimal, right? for many people the jumping off point is sleep you know it's a third of our lives and and it happens to be a black box and it doesn't need to be and i like to say you can only really manage what you measure so if you're not measuring your sleep how are you going to manage that how do you actually know what's going on i'll give you an example if you ask someone hey how much sleep did you get last night and they don't measure their bodies what they'll say is oh i went to bed at 11 and i woke up at six. So I got seven hours of sleep last night. Now, the reality is they didn't get seven hours of sleep. They spent seven hours in bed. Seven hours in bed translates to periods of time in which

you are light and light sleep, awake, you're in REM sleep, and you're in slow wave sleep. Now, light and awake are pretty much worthless. Slow wave and REM, that's where all the magic happens for your body. Okay. So really, you want to be thinking about how much time in bed did I spend in slow-wave sleep and REM sleep. And again, let's go back to that example, seven hours in bed. We have people on Woop who spend seven hours in bed, and they get 30 minutes of REM and slow-wave sleep. We have other people who spend seven hours in bed.

They get five hours and 45 minutes of REM and slow-wave sleep. Now, the person who got that much REM and slow-way sleep versus the person who got 30 minutes, it's a universe apart in terms of how you feel, a universe apart. again, same amount of time in bed, but completely different results. And it's worth explaining why a REM and slow-wave are so important. REM sleep is when your brain is repairing itself. So that's for cognitive function. So if you're listening to this, you probably want to have high cognitive function.

Measuring your REM sleep is really important for that. That's when you're dreaming. So people who say, I never can remember my dreams or I didn't have any dreams last night, it might be that you're not getting enough REM sleep. Slow wave sleep, that's when your body produces 95% of its human growth home loan. So that's when your body's repairing muscles, joints, injuries. And so people think they get stronger in the gym. In reality, you're breaking your muscles down in the gym.

You get stronger during slow wave sleep when you're repairing your muscles. So REM and slow wave sleep critically important. And again, how do you know? know how much REM and slow-wave sleep you're getting if you don't measure it. So that's the starting point. You start measuring this and you start to realize like, hmm, I'm actually not getting a lot of REM and slow-wave sleep. Well, what are certain things that are affecting how much REM and slow-E-sleep I get?

And WOOP does a good job helping you unravel that. And it's often a couple simple things that you can start to tweak that really improve your life. And mind you, nowhere have I said yet, oh, you need to spend instead of seven hours in bed, nine hours in bed. I'm just saying, like, let's try to optimize the seven hours you're in bed. And there's a lot of different habits and behaviors that you can try, some of which are incredibly easy. The biggest hack for anyone listening to this is start going to bed and waking up at almost exactly the same time, if you can. This is a notion called sleep consistency and we've found the people who have sleep consistency again going to bed

and waking up at the same time have much faster recovery higher heart rate variability lower resting heart rates it's a very effective way to improve your sleep and your recovery amazing sleep is kind of it seems almost like the last frontier of health someone said to me the other day and they're fond of these kind of aphorisms that sleep is the smoking of the of the 60s and 50s. We have no idea how bad, bad sleep can be for us. Do you think that's fair that we're kind of, we're just discovering it now? Yeah, I mean, I do get the sense we actually know how bad sleep is for you. I mean, excuse me, a lack of sleep is for you. You know, it seems to be correlated with virtually every disease state and every mental health issue.

So clearly getting sleep is super important. I think where I get very excited is the role, that whoop and others can play to help people understand, well, what are the few things that I need to do to improve my sleep? Yeah. There's just a bunch of things. I'll give you some quick hits. So, for example, people should be sleeping in a colder bedroom for the most part. I like to sleep at about 65 degrees Fahrenheit, which is pretty cold.

You want your bedroom to be really dark. Most people have too much sort of natural light coming into their bedroom while they're sleeping. If you're traveling a lot, which many listeners probably are, you know, consider wearing a sleep mask when you're in a hotel because there's a bunch of random lights, like on the walls and stuff. You may want to experiment with supplements, you know, something like magnesium can help you stay asleep. Something like melatonin can help you fall asleep, right? So if your mind's awake, you have to try to fall asleep, melatonin can be good for that. You want to be careful how closely to bed you eat. So this varies a lot by individual, as do the supplements. And again, this is

something whoop is good at. It's good at showing you what's right for you, right? Not what's right for everyone, but what's right for you. But one thing that we see consistently is if you eat very close to bedtime, that can affect your sleep. So typically you want to be eating close to three hours before you're actually going to sleep. Alcohol, this probably won't surprise people, but alcohol negatively impacts your sleep. What does surprise people is by how much and actually how little they have to drink to really disrupt their sleep. Depends a little bit on alcohol tolerance and weight and things of that nature. But typically once you're going past one drink into the sort of two drink on range, that's where you start seeing meaningful, meaningful

decay in sleep. Another kind of hugely poignant and probably very unexpected success area for Whoop has been in the COVID pandemic because you had some incredible case studies early on when you realized that you were an early indicator or you could detect early indicators in a way that other people had sort of missed. Can you tell us about how that came about? Yeah. So Whoop, it's funny how many things go back to sort of your core values. But two of our core values were to base everything we did on research and to move at an uncomfortable pace, meaning we want to move fast. We believe that's an important way to innovate. And so when we found out about COVID-19, which maybe it was a little earlier than most, it was, I would say, around late January, we started doing research. Late January, 2020, we started doing research on COVID-19.

By early March, we were the first consumer product to have COVID-19 tracking in the Woop app. we decided very quickly that we were going to build a large data set on what did COVID-19 look like on WOOP. And the power to having a big platform with lots of people on it is that within three weeks, we had 2,000 people report that they had tested positive for COVID-19. So that was not an insignificant number of people. And we were able to quickly partner with CQU and Cleveland Clinic to look at that data set. And so we built a data set on what does COVID-19 look like before, during, and after on whoop? And the interesting thing about whoop is for the longest time, we always saw that illness showed up in one way or another.

Illness, you know, typically if you have a cold or the flu, we'd see you have an increased resting heart rate. We see you have a decreased heart rate variability, disturbances in your sleep. And you'd often see like red recoveries on whoop, right, which is a sign that your body's run down. So whoop in the past was good at picking up on illnesses. But where this is more complicated is how do you know that something is a cold or a flu or in this case COVID-19? And that's where we fortunately found a smoking gun in respiratory rate. So respiratory rate is the number of breaths that you have in a minute. Most people have a respiratory rate of somewhere between 10 and 20 breaths per minute while they're sleeping, which is when

WOOP measures respiratory rate. And historically, it's an incredibly boring statistic. So if you look at respiratory rate over the course of a year, it may not deviate by more than half a breath for an entire year on an individual. It's just a flat statistic. And when we looked at people on Woop who got the cold or got flu, their respiratory rate, again, flat. What was crazy is that people who got COVID-19 had massive.

increases in their respiratory rate. You know, we're talking 20, 30 percent increases from their baseline. And so we published research on that showing how respiratory rate could be a leading indicator for COVID-19. And this makes sense, by the way, because COVID-19 is a lower respiratory tract infection. So it makes all the sense in the world that if you have a lower respiratory tract infection, your respiratory rate would go up. And we've now published this research. It's in a medical journal and it's peer-reviewed. And so I would encourage people to check that out. It shows, you know, elevated respiratory rate can catch about 80% of cases within three days,

which, you know, I think is pretty significant as a finding. That's incredible. And then, of course, from that, you got these kind of new, well, I suppose not deals, but you supplied in the, what's it called, the NFL is what I'm trying to say, and the golf tour as well, BGA. It was interesting. The golf one happened really fast. So the PGA tour was always a kind of a home for Whoop. Many professional golfers had naturally adopted Whoop and were just, you know, everyday paying consumers. And then golf was one of the first sports to come back with the pandemic. And they came back around June timeframe. And Nick Watney, a professional golfer, had been on Whoop for 10 months. And the way the COVID protocols were, work is you would get tested on a Tuesday, and if you tested negative, then you would play in the tournament over the course of the week. And Nick tested negative for COVID-19 on a Tuesday. He plays in the tournament on Thursday. He wakes up on Friday, and he looks at his whoop, and he has a 1% recovery,

and he has a respiratory rate that is increased by 30%. So he had a respiratory rate of 14 for 10 months straight. Yeah. 14, 14, 14, 14, 10 months straight. And then one day he wakes up and it's an 18 it just jumped off the page wow and the crazy thing was he also felt fine right so these indicators show up independent from your feelings that's another important thing to recognize right feelings are overrated there are physiological indicators you can measure feelings are overrated and so nick goes to the doctors and says i need to be tested again and they're like no you're cleared to play blah blah anyway he convinces them finally to test him and sure enough he tests positive for COVID-19 and then he was able to drop out of the tournament and you know within 24 hours the PGA tour learned of this and they procured over a thousand whoops straps for every you know every player on the PGA tour plus you know all the caddies all the media members the staff like everyone in the bubble wow and so that was the beginning of a bunch of partnerships like that we ended up supporting the NFLPA yeah and a bunch of NFL players as they're

went back this season and we've done it with the LPGA, we've done it with a bunch of schools. So, you know, we're doing everything we can to help. Amazing. So I mentioned at the start that a few of my friends were obsessive about their whoops. So I asked them this morning, I try to crowdsource some questions off them. Okay. So my friend Alex has asked, A, where do the name come from? And then part B, did you ever think you'd put a screen or interface on it?

Was there ever a prototype that had a screen? So whoop as a name was, well, whoop was a word that when I was in college, a lot of my friends would say, and it was sort of this viral word for expressing happiness or excitement or energy. People would say, like, how are you feeling? And someone would respond, oh, I got whoop. I feel good. Yeah, I got whoop. So it's kind of noun.

I got whoop. Yeah, yeah, it was like this sort of expression of energy. And it was a word that made people smile. And it was a word that people don't forget. And so that made it, in my opinion, a good name to build a brand. And the screen part, part B? It's a real question that we debate often. I can promise you that we've designed a lot of different things at Woop.

The nature of design is that you design things that never make it to market. I think that there are a lot of advantages to not having a screen. We really don't want Woop to compete with watches. and we build technology to improve your life, not invade it. And I think a lot of these smartwatch type products are noisy and excessive. And you already have something in your pocket that does a lot of that. So we're skeptical that you need that for whoop. Okay, good.

I hope Alex is satisfied with those answers. My friend Ed, who is a bit of a worry war, and I mean that in the sweetest way, he said is there ever a time when people talk about the kind of psychosomatic side effects that if their recovery is a bit less than they get in a kind of downward spiral and they start to get really anxious and worried that they're getting in or they're going downhill and actually it can become a kind of dangerous self-fulfilling prophecy. Is that ever happen or was that something you're aware of or conscious of? You know it's funny if you go back in time and like look at the development of the printing press people were critical of the fact that

you know, more people being able to read would be too much information and it would be bad for society. So at every phase of real technological development, I think people have sort of had one direction of feedback, which is like, oh, is this too much information? And I just think the right way to frame any types of information is the lens that you look at it through. Yeah. And having a a green recovery is one additional piece of information. Having a red recovery is one additional piece of information. Knowing that you're sleeping properly or not properly, those are things that I think can keep someone in check.

And there's no question. You have to learn how to apply the right filters to your life and to information. Yeah. So where do wearables go next then? I mean, is it going to get more and more kind of granular the information we get and more and more prescriptive in a way because i mean i would love it if i could wear something that said right you need to drink orange juice in the next 15 minutes to get to be optimal or you need

to i don't know go on a run i mean just really specific kind of even nutritional and i don't know anything like that is that going to be the next stage i won't speak for wearables broadly but i'll speak for whoop in that we want to be able to tell you the one to three things you know every day week month year that you need to know to improve and be healthy and over time i think that's going to be a very wide set of things that we can tell you yeah um everything from from diet to sleep to training to uh meditation mindfulness breathing you know i think there's a lot of different categories that are highly personal and the promise of wearable technology is that it can really change people's lives it really can it can measure things about your body that you don't know and it can tell you

about those things and in turn you can change your life and we've seen this on whoop over and over again it never ceases to be incredibly inspiring and and if there's a benefit from covid 19 it's that i think it's accelerated the rate at which society is recognizing the importance of health yeah and and also recognizing limitations with our existing health care system. I'll speak for the U.S., but the U.S. healthcare system's a mess. And wearable technology has the potential to move a lot of curative costs to being preventative. And preventative medicine is much more effective than curative. Amazing. One of the things on that note, I suppose, that obviously WOOP teaches us is the importance of rest and the importance of time

off and not kind of being always on. And I think in startup cultures, particularly with founders and entrepreneurs there is a temptation to always be on and and to be kind of squeezing every minute out of every day i wonder as a founder and entrepreneur and a driven person yourself how do you kind of make sure you relax and make sure you're not always working well i meditate uh every day i learned transcendental meditation in 2014 and i've done it almost every single day since and it's uh It's changed my life. I highly recommend. You seem very, very, very relaxed as an interview guest and as a boss.

You seem kind of wonderfully horizontal. Is that fair? Yeah. I really try to be. I mean, I think like a younger, again, a younger version of myself was kind of on the yo-yo or on the sinusoid sinusoid curve of trying to ride the success and failures of building a business. and you just realize over time that you need to stay even keel through all of that.

Yeah. You know, if today wasn't a good day, tomorrow is going to be a good day. And if today's a great day, something bad may be around the corner. So you just have to create this sort of even keeled attitude. And that's what I've tried to do. I think it's made, but frankly, it comes with some of these other habits. Meditation being by far the most important one, you know, finding time to exercise. and still take care of myself.

Yeah. You know, not eating crap, not like, you know, using alcohol as a form of medication or whatever, you know, because I've seen other entrepreneurs struggle with that. Getting sleep, you know, having healthy relationships. I'm happily married. You know, I think it ends up being less about the business itself and more about you, the individual, how you're growing, how you're reacting to everything. Yeah. That's at least what I've found. The other thing I would add is that when you first start a business, this was the case for me. A lot of your identity is tied up in the success of the business. I was incredibly young person. I hadn't had any other jobs. So if Woop was succeeding, I felt like I was succeeding. If Woop was failing, I felt like I was failing. And that's not the right lens to look at it through. The most important thing is that

independent from what the business is doing, you continue to grow and to improve. And to look at those as two separate variables. And in fact, over time, it becomes even more important that you are growing and improving as a leader or a manager or an innovator and being pretty, I think, introspective about that. At least, again, that's what I've tried to do. The other mistake that I made when I was younger is I would compare myself to these world class entrepreneurs yeah you know um okay whoop today is five people and gosh i can't convince

the sixth person to join i bet steve jobs never had to deal with this you know it's like a super unhealthy attitude and uh and and and so a couple of things one it's it's not comparing yourself to anyone else right it's being really focused on you yourself and two i've now met very successful entrepreneurs. And I've realized in talking to them that in the early days, I don't think they necessarily knew any more than you do. Yeah. Like they were figuring it out too. And so that goes back to this importance of finding ways to grow personally. So I just want to touch on that because you were obviously just a handful of people at the start. How many people work for Woop now? About 370. Which is a hell of a lot. And obviously, as you said, this was your first ever job.

So you hadn't really, apart from those kind of internships, worked for other organizations. But you were driving the bus from a very early age. How did you work out how to, we talk a lot about culture? How did you work out how to build a culture and hire the right people and not hire the wrong people, which can be just as bad? And how did you do that as you were doing it, if you know what I mean? Yeah, it took me a while to articulate this. But I think first and foremost, the key was the way I thought about hiring people and the way our early team, frankly, thought about hiring people.

And in hindsight, what I've always looked for were people with a combination of high intensity and high humility. High intensity being a great work ethic, a great desire to excel at that thing that they're great at, whether it's coding, or designing or marketing, right? Like, that's their thing and they want to keep diving into that. So there's a level of intensity that comes with that. And high humility, recognizing that in the pursuit of excellence, you don't have all the answers. And I just came to recognize that when you're in a small environment

and it's fast-paced and you've got individuals representing entire departments, you know, how do you send data from a whoopstrap to an iPhone? Okay, pretty simple question, very complicated answer. There's a lot of different things to consider. So you've got five people in a room, a product manager, a designer, you know, a signal processing engineer, and a firmware engineer, and they're going to figure out how that works. And there's just this natural collision that happens, right? Naturally. And that collision is actually fine.

You know, friction can be good, but what you want is for that group to come up with the best and, for the company, not I came up with it, right? Like, not that feeling of it was me. And so that's where I think the humility piece comes in. And then the outcome of this is when you have a lot of people that are like what I just described, you can create a much flatter hierarchy because people are comfortable talking to one another at all levels. If I'm a director, I don't have to go to my VP for the VP to then go to that VP,

for the VP to then go to that director, then then go that engineer for me to talk to that engineer. I just go directly to that engineer, right? So it's much more efficient. It's more transparent as a consequence. And you ultimately work towards building an idea meritocracy where the best ideas win. And it doesn't matter if you're an intern or, you know, a VP of what. So we've got these questions we ask everyone at the end that are a little bit more personal and maybe a bit more fun. Who knows? We'll find out. So the first one is what do you think you'd be doing if you weren't doing this say say whoop had never happened and and you got i don't know maybe gone to golden sacks or something well you know i think i would be building a business i i've just

realized that's my calling to to be creating products and teams and and uh you know trying to make an impact do you have other kind of things you'd like to do other ideas that are kind of in your iphone notes sitting there i have a number of ideas and and they often are sort of framed around problems to solve but you know I like to do things all in and today I'm all in on who quite right too what's your worst habit worst habit it's funny the first thing it came to my was biting fingernails you know so a weird nervous immature thing that I've that I do from time to time I do that as well I think it must be fairly common maybe maybe we're very creative I don't know maybe it's a good thing we'll find out what's the most impressive thing you can cook

see. I think the tastiest would be like a seared waggo. Wow. My wife and I have gotten into cooking and that's one of my favorite things to buy is like some nice high-end waggo and you know, you kind of sear it on both sides, make some, make some sushi rice and maybe some ginger to go with that. Yeah. That's good. What are you most proud of in your career so far? I think building Woop and the people and the product that come with that, you know, I think Woop as a company attracts incredibly brilliant, hardworking people that have very good intentions for the world. And I think the product, the fact that it's able to change behavior positively, you know, it's technology that I think is doing real good in the world. I'm incredibly proud of that. What's your biggest failure on the

other hand, or your biggest regret? I try to live pretty regret-free. And I also am someone who kind of believes that you go back in time and you start tweaking a few things and maybe everything else ends up different. And I also, I don't think about failure in sort of this conventional way. I try to frame almost every negative as a positive in one way or another. If something doesn't, you know, work the way it was supposed to, okay, well, we just figured out one more way not to do that, you know? It's like, it's so much, I think of, of life is sort of the framework that you approach it. And in some ways, it's even playing little tricks on yourself to keep going and to maintain momentum. Yeah. We had, um, Jamie Siminoff from Ring, the founder of Ring,

the smart doorbells. I mean, he, it wasn't a failure, but he had a moment where a glitch in the software, basically, if they weren't very lucky, would have destroyed the entire company pretty much overnight. Have you ever had anything like that where it's a similar kind of thing with software and hardware? Have you ever had any hugely dark moments? Definitely. That's the short answer. Well, I mean, you know, basically. Yeah, we've had plenty of those. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's encouraging, I suppose, in a way. If you could learn one new skill, what would it be? Probably speaking new languages. Yeah. You know, my wife speaks about four or five languages. Wow. Like incredibly envious of that. I speak language. What was the last piece of advice you gave someone? Well, I, you know, I think in the

context of building a business, 65% of startups fail because the co-founders get in a fight or the founding team gets in a fight and they can't work together. And so I was giving someone advice recently related to their relationship with their founding team. And it was, It was really like, don't let that be the reason that you guys fail. You know, like figure out a way to hug it out, you know, figure out the things that you're grateful for for having them on your team. Yeah. And work through it.

Yeah. Because it ends up being that the stakes just feel really high. And so these smaller things seem very amplified. Yeah. And I've seen this happen to founding teams where they let, they let the emotions of the moment mess up their relationship and it doesn't it doesn't need to be it's it can be you can work through it are you quite good at keeping those two things separate kind of business and pleasure so to speak like in the fact that some founders kind of don't necessarily

socialize but some are other ones are kind of best mates with the people they work with well I would say I've become very close with with everyone on my direct management team I would say I'm close certainly with my two co-founders, John and Aurelian. We've been working together for eight or nine years. I'm sure at times all of us have wanted to kill each other. But here we are, right, nine years later. And you think about some of the arguments that could have screwed up the relationship. And now we've got all these employees and all these people wearing our product and a company that's valued over a billion dollars.

like wouldn't it have been such a a shame a shame right absolutely is there a phrase you'd like to banish from the earth or something you really hate when you hear it in the office i hate the i hate the expression fail fast you know that's become a popular thing to say in the world of startups as in kind of try things very quickly and if they don't work move on to something else yeah just to me it's the wrong framework like you want to succeed fast you know and and keep finding success you don't really want to be that focused on failure you want to constantly looking for ways to succeed and part of that comes back to again the framework of how you think about what is failure you know it's almost it's almost a useful word to remove from your

language what's your most treasured possession i think possessions are a little overrated okay do you have an early prototype of a whoop somewhere that you love and adore and the will one day be in a museum? We do have a bit of a whoop museum, which shows the very early evolution of whoop prototypes. And again, it's a healthy thing to look at because it just shows you what you can start with and what you can develop over time.

You know, if you keep working at something every day for a decade, it's unbelievable how much progress you can make. But a lot of people, I think the challenge, the challenge is a lot of people, even if you told them, you have to work at this thing really hard every day for 10 years and at the end of that you're going to be really successful they still might not do it unfortunately a lot of people might respond to that say well is there a shortcut for that yeah you know like there's there's a little bit too much of a

pressure in society i think to find find shortcuts so can i ask you another question that's not something we ask everyone but i'm just wondering on that note how you celebrated when when you got valued at a billion dollars when you knew that you were running a company that hit that three common mark as they like to say how did it feel uh look it felt amazing uh and i i you know one had a had a few drinks with john and and and and you know some of the people have been building this business with me for so long um obviously in the world of covid it's kind of hard to overcook a celebration yeah um but i do think that the most internal reward i feel for whoop is when i get messages from people who wear the product and share

how uh it's changed their life yeah and that that to me i think is i've come to have a greater appreciation for that than the the financial success that's come with it is there a book that's influenced you more than any other well a book that was helpful for me in building Whoop was called Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, the creator of Nike. Nice. And Nike's a brand I've always had enormous respect for. And many things about the way that Whoop was founded, I realize resemble the way that Nike was founded.

And what I respect a lot about Phil Knight's book is he spends an enormous percentage of the book talking about the very early years of the company. When it wasn't even called Nike, it was called Blue Ribbon Sports. and just the painful detail that they went into to like get that first sneaker right and all the intricacies of that first sneaker and it just it just reminded me of the very early days of whoop and it reminded me of some of the early values that we've had as a company and uh it just made me feel like we were on the on the right direction and again i have great admiration for nike yeah and finally do you have a personal motto personal

motto, I probably have a number of different things that I say to myself, you know, keep going is one thing that always comes to mind because I think so much of being a successful entrepreneur or a successful, anything, I've gotten to meet a lot of successful people across sports and business and even research and science. And a lot of what they have in common is being able to maintain enormous output but for a long time yeah right uh people often talk about well building a company is more of a marathon than a sprint yeah but that actually kind of misses the point because if you're going to um be a world class marathoner you're running like four minute miles right how many people can even run a four minute mile let alone do it for 26.2 miles and that's that is the right

analogy for building a very successful company, being a high-performing professional athlete, you have to find a way to have that kind of output for a very long time without burning out. And WOOP as a product has helped me a lot with that because it keeps me in check. It makes me know when I shouldn't do more or know when I shouldn't make, you know, 25 more decisions in a day, shut it down. So I think keep going is a good way to frame it. Good. Will, thank you so much.

It's been absolutely fascinating. No, it was a pleasure. I feel like we're a little bit wiser, but also maybe a bit healthier. Maybe I'll sleep better tonight. I hope so. Magnesium, darkness. Okay, I'm on it. Thanks so much.

Well, I hope we can catch up again soon, maybe in the real world. I'd like that. Thanks, Joe. Thank you for listening. A reminder, you can grab a WOOP membership with 15% off. If you use the code Will Ahmed, W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E-D, follow us on social at Whoop at Will-A-A-M-A-M-A-M-A. And stay healthy, folks. Stay in the green. Thank you.