WHOOP: Will Ahmed

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31:14Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2012. Will has just graduated college and he's assembled a team to build the device that will become Whoop. Yeah, we started working out of the innovation lab, and the first prototype was a ridiculous-looking product. Was it a wristband thing? Yeah, it had to connect to a computer, and then it had a long wire that connected to a box, a sketchy-looking box. And then it had another wire that came out of it that eventually connected to a goofy-looking wrist-based sensor. And it's got a big box. It says Bobo on it and a cord coming out of it.

31:58Okay. That box was the interface between the wristband and the computer? Yes. That box did a lot of the processing. And the breakthrough with that box was that it could measure heart rate and heart rate variability under certain circumstances. It was still very much a prototype. Now, look, what was the point of the prototype? The point of the prototype was to prove to ourselves as much as to anyone else that it actually doesn't defy physics, this idea that you could measure the human body accurately from a wrist-worn thing. And so that was a big breakthrough for us in this feeling of it's possible.

32:41And at that time, I had also now gotten pretty far along in the design process of, what this is going to look like when all the data shows up. Why was HRV, heart rate variability, so important? Why did you think that that was the measurement? By the way, I'm assuming the other products, at least at this point out there, were not doing that. So why was that so important? I can go into much more detail about heart rate variability, but the punchline is if you can measure this thing and baseline it to a human, you could understand in any given moment the state of their body. Is your body at peace?

33:19Is it recovered? Is it stressed? And it also became obvious if you could measure heart rate variability during a control, a control being under the same circumstances every day, you could then get a really good sense for the person's state of recovery. I mean, you start working on this in the summer of 2012, right? And you are going to basically end up working out of this innovation lab at Harvard for 18 months, probably to the end of 2013. When did you start, when do you remember starting to see encouraging signs that actually the technology you were working on was promising? I think it was a stage in which I had gotten very focused on what each successive prototype needed to be able to demonstrate to help us raise capital.

34:13I think that it was pretty obvious to me that this was a business that actually was much more capital intensive than I had realized. And so I was in what I would call a perpetual state of fundraising for the first 12 months of the business, which probably was a horrible way to raise capital. But it was clear to me that I needed to be able to hit proof points to be able to show that it was possible. And so one of the hardest things about building this company was we were building software and hardware like on complete islands just i was with the design and with the software i was always assuming the hardware was going to arrive so to speak and so that's where the first prototype being able to measure hurry variability helped that's where the the following prototype which came you know maybe six months after that and we'd raised another 400 grand that prototype was able to do it without all the shenanigans of a wire and, you know, a computer attached to your arm and so forth.

35:11You got a wireless version of this. We got a wireless version of it. Now, it had a four-hour battery life, and it was totally unclear whether it could be manufactured at scale, but we believed it would be, of course, and so onwards. One of the things that I think a smart advantage you had was you could take this, once you got a Bluetooth version, you could ask athletes at Harvard, particularly the squash team to try it out. Right. And you could kind of use them as guinea pigs. Yeah. College athletes, recreational athletes, but I mean like data collections, you know, where you put a whoop on a wrist and you put a chest strap on them and you get them to go exercise.

35:54Yeah. But athletes have very different body types. Athletes are diverse. And then a lot of sports happen outdoors. and a lot of sports have what's called non-periodic motion. So you can think of running and walking as having periodic motion, which is like your arms are moving in a certain rigid way. Whereas a sport like basketball or squash, your arms are kind of moving all over the place. Anyway, I bring all these things up because the challenge to heart rate monitoring is the darker the skin, the harder it is, the hairier the skin, the harder it is, and the more non-periodic motion, the harder it is.

36:31and if you're outdoors, that's harder than indoors. Sorry, that's because of the light? Yeah, it's because of the light. I'll give you a simple way to think about it, which is the technique of photoplasmography is essentially shining light underneath your skin, which is reflecting off of your capillaries. And the frequency with which that returns to a photodiode can be interpreted to be your heart rate or even estimate other physiological metrics. So essentially the light – wow. I mean that's interesting. The light based on – because it's reflecting, right? But it's affected by skin tone? Yeah.

37:12So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally from other products, which were like looking at, you know, 30 white men walking on a treadmill indoors. And we're like, each one of those is the easiest thing, right? Whereas if you took people with darker skin outdoors playing basketball, you'd have a much harder data set to reconcile. and our advantage although at the time it felt much harder was that we built a an algorithm with the foundation for the hardest conditions and and it also forced us to collect a lot more data than other products because we had this high bar for accuracy and by the way there's a lot of disadvantages to doing that it requires more battery life it means you have more data to send And it means there's a lot less things you can do.

38:05We didn't have a high-resolution screen in part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection. So basically you had to solve all these problems. You had to figure out, well, how is this going to work on an athlete who's darker than an athlete who's lighter? These are not insignificant problems you had to solve given that there are all kinds of athletes. Totally. And it was a great example of the more you learn about something, the less you know. I mean just as you kept going deeper, there were all these things you'd uncover. People with tattoos are harder to measure and so on and so forth.

38:44Well, while – I mean again, you're doing this very patiently, very methodically. In the meantime, Fitbit is exploding even though it's doing a somewhat different thing. But, you know, in the minds of most consumers, they were probably saying, oh, if you if you met somebody, they were just assuming you were building another fitness tracker. You've got Fitbit. You've got Jawbone. And then you learn that like the biggest companies on Earth, like Nike, for example, are pursuing their own bands, their own wristbands that track different metrics. You know, I think the Nike fuel band comes out in 2013.

39:25You guys are still working on just the underlying technology here. Didn't that stress you out? Considerably. And it made it much harder to raise capital and to recruit employees. And essentially, it made it much harder to get people to buy into this story, I was saying. Right, because when you would go to investors, they would say, well, come on, Nike is working on this. How are you going to compete with Nike? Totally. And in a way, they were right and in a way they were wrong. They were right in the sense that the story I was actually telling when you really unpacked it was we were going to build a brand like Nike and we were going to start with the world's best athletes.

40:05And then we were going to go to consumers using the story that we had built a performance brand. and the idea that I was going to literally use the playbook of the company that was launching a competitive product is pretty hard to wrap your head around. So I could get why a lot of people struggled with that. I'll never forget this investor I met my spring of my senior year, because at that point it actually had been announced that the Nike fuel band was coming. And I confessed to him that Nike was going to enter the space. And he had all these reasons for for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all.

40:40We should just try to build software. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, you know what? You are going to fail and you're going to fail so badly. And I'll tell you the number one reason you're going to fail. You're going to fail because you don't listen. And I remember for months, I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn. So knowing that Nike was going to come out with its own band, which it had for, I think it was out for five years, a fuel band. How did you convince anybody to give you money?

41:19So you remember how I said they were right in a way and they were wrong in a way? The way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing was that Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology. and the strategy that Nike, in my opinion, should have taken was much more similar to Whoop, which was, no, we're going to do the hard work. We're going to measure the hard things. And then we're going to tell this story from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and LeBron James on down.

42:01And that would have been, I think, successful. And so I had so much relief the day I tried the Nike Fuel Band because it was just another step counter. And it was a huge missed opportunity, I thought for, by the way, a brand that I have admired since I was five years old. Nike is the company that actually taught me what a brand was. You know, like I, you wear a white cotton t-shirt that's blank versus a white cotton t-shirt with a Nike swoosh. Why do I feel different in the one with the swoosh? And it's because the swoosh stood for something. And that's a brand. A belief. And I thought that was so cool.

42:43Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was so cool. And it did influence a lot of how we built the company. All right. So you are – you're aware that the big sort of sports brands are getting into this thing. But you're really just keeping your head down and focusing on what you're going to offer. And I think it was around 2014 when you changed the name to Whoop. You go from Bobo Analytics, call it Whoop. Just briefly, what's the – how did you come up with that name? whoop was a word that in college uh all of my friends and i would say to express energy or excitement you know people would say like oh how are you feeling and you respond oh i got whoop i feel good and it was this like upbeat word that people would say it made them smile and there was a certain virality to the word that was hard to explain when other people heard it they then wanted to say it but i wonder before you even had um a product right because it would be three years Like it wasn't until 2015 when you actually had something that was ready for – ready to put out into the world, which we'll get to.

43:45But three years, right? And of course you're building something very complex. But meantime, all these competitors are coming out with products. Do you remember a feeling of just really just anxiety about wanting to get something out there? Oh, I mean it was probably the most anxious period of my life when I look back on it. I was totally upside down physiologically, which is sort of ironic because I was trying to build a product that improves your sense of balance. But yeah, I was drinking too much coffee. I was tired all the time. I was stressed all the time. I was drinking too much alcohol. I was strung out.

44:28And at that point, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95 % of them. Yeah. But you managed to attract some investment. I mean, it's not insignificant. You know,$6 million in June of 2014 and then a bit more by the end of that year. I mean, there were clearly people who were believing you, but still compared to your competitors, you're vastly, you know, being vastly outspent. Yeah. We had raised$10 million probably total by the end of 2014, and then we had probably raised$25 million total by mid-2015. Got it. Okay. So you have in 2015, it's I think it's the end of summer 2015. You have the first version ready for launch.

45:18And the game plan here is, we're not going to launch this as a mass consumer product, we're going to launch this as a product for athletes, for college athletes, professional athletes, what data would an athlete have access to if they wore this because it was initially it was going to be expensive, it was going to be $1 ,000 per player. We'll get into the business model in a sec, but what was the offer here? What would you get by wearing it? You would get strain, sleep, and recovery measurements with a certain level of depth behind each metric. So with sleep, you'd get sleep staging and time in bed and hours of sleep that you got.

45:56With recovery, you'd get a score 0 to 100%, red, yellow, green. You'd know your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, sleep quality. And just to be clear, you would see this on your iPhone. It was a band that had no interface, no screen, but it was tethered by Bluetooth to your iPhone and you would see it on your phone. That was the initial model. Yes. It would send data to an app via Bluetooth. And then we also built a web app that was designed for coaches. So the coaches could see how their players were recovering and arresting, et cetera. Yeah, but my biggest focus was really trying to get the world's best athletes.

46:39Who was your Barbie Dreamhouse athlete that you wanted to get this on? LeBron James and Michael Phelps were the two. Okay. How are you going to get to – I mean first of all, those guys have huge endorsement deals, millions and millions of dollars. Like how are you going to get to them? And even if you do get to them, they're going to say, presumably, well, do it. But you've got to pay me a million dollars or five million, whatever. Or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like, how would you do that? So those two people had a lot of infrastructure around them. And you're right.

47:12They had a lot of offers and these things. And the secret to getting to them, just to say it, was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. It turned out in 2015, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them and spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron, like Mike Mencius was his longtime personal trainer, still is today. And he started wearing Whoop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron.

47:49So that's how you started. You got them on the wrist of the personal trainers just so they could try it out. I mean, Michael Phelps and LeBron James were among your first hundred users. I mean, we're not talking about really good athletes. We're talking about the greatest athletes in their sport. I mean, first of all, let's just talk about LeBron for a sec. I mean, he's a Nike athlete. They had a product that arguably was a competing product. Like, I guess it's LeBron James and he can do whatever he wants. But wasn't that complicated? Didn't that create friction? Well, the way that it didn't was that we had no relationship with him.

48:26We had no relationship at the time with Michael Phelps either. And many of these athletes, I mean, they were essentially just a buyer of the product. You charged them for this or you gave it to them? I'm assuming you would give it to them. Well, in the case of the trainers, we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it. And again, because we believed that the product was valuable. and at the end of the day it's kind of obvious whether someone likes whoop because wearing something 24 7 is like it's a it's really hard it's just really hard to do it's just hard to build a product that people wear 24 7 and so if they're actually still wearing it 24 7 uh they like it and so our our engagement metrics became the lifeblood of our story And I remember there was a year where LeBron and his whole team were wearing it and it came out that they were wearing it in games and that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA.

49:23It wasn't allowed by the NBA. Yeah, it wasn't allowed by the NBA. And so that created this whole scandal around Whoop and ironically created more interest from other sports leagues. And so shortly thereafter, we did this very cool partnership with Major League Baseball and we grew in the NFL. And so there was – it did turn out to be true that if you start with literally the very best athletes in the world, there is a massive trickle-down effect. And was there even then at that point, you know, once – let's just say a year in, you know, when the Apple Watch is becoming more and more popular, I mean you've got a screen -free device here.

50:07I mean it's measuring different things and more things, but there's no screen, right? And a screen is like a shiny – this sort of the shiny object sort of screaming out there. I have to imagine even at this point you had investors saying, OK, when are you guys going to do a screen now? Yeah, a lot of it goes back to the origin of wanting to create a product that you wear 24-7 and wanting to create a product that has super accurate data. And it turned out, as we really unpacked it, that having a screen was not going to help either of those. In fact, it might hurt it. So what do I mean? Well, first of all, this idea that you wear it all the time.

50:43If you put a screen on the product, then it's a watch. And if it's a watch, then you can't wear another watch, right? And if you're having to decide which watch to wear, you're going to take whoop-ops sometimes. And furthermore, as we started to unpack the watch capabilities, you kind of quickly start saying yes to a lot of functionality. First, it's saying, well, maybe you should know when your phone's ringing or push notifications or emails. And next thing you know, you're building a smartwatch, right? And one of the ways that we built a product that people use is by just discarding the notion of having the most features.

51:24We were not going to have the most features. In fact, we were going to have very few features. We were going to be singularly focused on fitness and health monitoring. Got it. OK. So you have this product. It's doing well with athletes and they like it and you're ready to put out a version for consumers. This is in 2016. And again, for people who aren't familiar with whoop, I think a lot of people listening are. It's basically a strap. I mean, it looks like a cloth strap around your wrist. It's very simple. When it was ready for consumers, it didn't quite take off initially. Maybe you had expected it to or maybe you didn't.

52:08I don't know. But were you surprised that it was sort of slow to get mass adoption? I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I was doing. I mean, there are moments in the history of Whoop where looking back on it, I'm reminded that this is my first full-time job, let alone the first company I've started. So I think launching to consumers was one of those wake-up calls. The bet at the time was, hey, we've built this brand with professional athletes, the world's best, and a bunch of fitness enthusiasts are going to want the product that's used by the pros. Yeah. But one of the challenges was that we weren't paying athletes.

52:57So we didn't technically have the rights to likeness and image, right? But you couldn't do advertising with them. But we weren't doing advertising with them. And by the way, we also didn't really know how to do marketing yet. And maybe most importantly, we were selling the product for$500. So compared to like a Fitbit, which is like$100 or$150, that was a lot. Yeah, it was a lot. More than an Apple Watch at the time. Well more than an Apple Watch, yeah. And so, you know, in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have expected to sell a lot. But look, we observed two things. The first was that people who wore Whoop, which is to say they bought it and then they put it on, would wear it for a long time.

53:39And this user engagement was unique. I mean, it was a market, the wearables industry, just to say it, is a market that's been plagued by engagement, which is to say someone buys a Fitbit and then three weeks or three months later, it's in a drawer. They were just really cheap and that was it. People would buy them and use them and then stop using them. Yeah. And so we didn't have that engagement problem, but we had a big problem, which was that people weren't buying it. Yeah, that's a big problem. Now you start to look at the incorporation year of Whoop and you start to look at how much money we've raised and you start to squint a little bit.

54:17Like, why hasn't this business figured out how to generate revenue at a material level? And you're five years in now. Oh, yeah. I imagine you had enough faith in the product that you thought this is going to be fine. But still, like, I'm sure there were people maybe not so subtly asking you that question. OK, you're five years in here. You're not your sales aren't great. What's going on? So there was a period of time in 2017 where we were asking ourselves the same question. Like, what is wrong? Like, why aren't a lot of people buying this? When we come back in just a moment, Whoop changes its business model, and another massive company enters the wearables market, Amazon.

55:02Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

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56:51Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Whoop has had some pretty big wins. Michael Phelps and LeBron James are using the device, which is huge. The problem is that's not translating into sales. But eventually, Will starts to figure out what's wrong. It took us some time to realize that we had the wrong business model. Perhaps we were totally wrong to be selling this as a one-time fee. And so then we started playing with this idea of, okay, well, what if the hardware cost X and the subscription cost Y? And you started unpacking that. And the more time that I tinkered with the idea, the more I got obsessed with the idea of what if it was just completely a subscription?

57:35The whole thing was a subscription. The hardware was just included. and you're signing up for the data and the platform and the insights, the coaching. But the band is free. The whoop strap is free. And I fell in love with that idea and I became convinced that that was going to save the company. And the engagement data would suggest that I was right, but it was still pretty unproven. It was a company that wasn't yet good at marketing. And to your point, we're five years into building it, didn't have a big revenue stream. It wasn't like competition was gone, by the way. We still had all these companies in the space.

58:11At this point now, they were more tech companies actually than fitness companies. So 2012, 13, 14, 15 were kind of defined by Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma entering the space. Now Apple was heating up. They'd seen success with their first watch or two. Samsung was entering the space. Microsoft was entering the space. And at the same time, my conviction level that we were onto it, we were just one turn away. My conviction level was at an all-time high. And so that was a very painful 18 months. In some ways, you were actually really lucky that you were under the radar, right? Because no one – I mean, when people talked about fitness trackers, Whoop wasn't in the conversation in 2016, 2017.

59:00They were talking about these other companies you mentioned, the Apples and Samsung, Fitbits and so on. And, of course, that would change eventually. But in some ways, you were kind of lucky that you were under the radar and perceived maybe by those other companies as like, oh, well, this is really more of a medical device for professional athletes because they weren't working. I guess they weren't really focused on offering the same data. I think that's right. But I do think that by having the first launch kind of be such a snooze fest, it gave us a chance to launch again for the first time. I meet hardware founders and they talk a lot about how their first product is going to sell 100 ,000 units in the first year.

59:45And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer market to just teach you what's the state of play. and buy you some time to get to that second or third iteration. The worst thing that could have happened to Whoop and would have killed the company, ironically, was selling 100 ,000 units in 2014, 15, 16, even 17 probably. Because we weren't ready for that big a number of people to come on and for all the challenges that would come with it. And there's a sort of like gradual infrastructure that you need to build as a hardware company.

1:00:29You need to get in lockstep with your manufacturing line. You want to have the infrastructure to support customer support and membership services and these sorts of things. And so, yeah, we probably weren't ready for that in 2016, but we got ready for it. All right. Let's talk about 2018, right? Because this is an important year. You get, I mean, you're still kind of under the radar, right? I mean, you're raising money and you're showing promise. You know, that year you attract money from the NFL Players League Association. But one interesting thing happens that year, which is you're approached by Amazon.

1:01:07They have a fund called the Alexa Fund. And they come in to talk to you about maybe investing in you, which must be really exciting because it's Amazon. I mean, if Amazon is going to be an investor, well, you know, it's like the next stop, you know, the moon, right? I mean, so when they came to you, you must have been pretty excited. Totally. And look, we had a distribution problem. And so, you know, who's bigger than Amazon when it comes to distribution? What did they say? They said we're interested in making an investment. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And they did a lot of diligence on Whoop. And it started with their deal team.

1:01:46They came in to really go into your – they went into your data room really kind of looking at your numbers and technology. Yeah. Were they talking about a possible like dollar figure of what they might invest? I don't remember the exact dollar figures, but I can tell you that in 2017 and 18, I was trying to raise probably$10 or$20 million. And so they would have probably been a candidate to take all of that or lead that. Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them. and they included their product team in the diligence. And then they ultimately did not invest in Whoop to our surprise. Why? What was their reason?

1:02:26This is maybe a disappointing answer, but I've had so many investors pass on Whoop in the last 13 years that all the answers kind of blur together. Yeah. And so I don't remember what their reason was for not investing and it could have been a dozen things, frankly. Do you remember caring that much about it or just being like, OK, whatever? At that point, I had gotten pretty numb to people passing on Whoop or, as it often felt to me, rejecting me because I spent so much time as the sort of front man for these pitches. And that 18-month stretch of like beginning of 2017 to mid-2018, Whoop was on fumes.

1:03:09I mean we never had more runway than three months for an 18-month period of the company, which is just – it's hard in hindsight to figure out how that ended up being possible. But we just were continually on life sport. We would continually find a little more capital or a couple of good things would happen and people would get a little more excited. And I was perpetually fundraising and getting told no a lot. Well, during that time, it's just so fascinating, especially now that we know what the product is today, which we're going to get to, and just how it's triumphed. But at that time, I mean, you were raising – there's this kind of conventional wisdom about raising money now.

1:03:51You'll hear founders say, raise money when you don't need it because that's when you have the most leverage. But here you were raising it because you really needed it. Totally. And I imagine that you had to accept terms sometimes that were hard to swallow. You know, remarkably in the company's history, we've never done a down round. And it's hard to actually explain how that's possible when I think back on it. But we had people who were using the product who were quite euphoric about it. But the irony was that the unlock for the business was going to be moving to a subscription. And what's the problem with a subscription?

1:04:30You get far less money up front. And so the only way out of this problem was to have more capital on the balance sheet. Right, because instead of charging$500 for it, you were now saying, okay, it's going to be free, but it's going to be like$30 a month or whatever it was going to be, which is much more affordable for somebody to sort of try it out. Totally. All right. I want to turn back to the Amazon story because they were sort of toying with the idea of investing and they decided not to. And that goes away. And you keep working on new iterations, new versions of your product and the 2.0 and then 3.0 comes out.

1:05:15And then Amazon announces they're making a monitor strap, a wearable band that you feel looks quite shockingly similar to the Whoop. Well, the first thing I actually found out because so many investors had hit my email up with it when the announcement came out. So it's like that, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're looking at your phone and all of a sudden I've got like six emails from shareholders being like, Will, have you seen this? And it was really a bit of a condolences message too because everyone believed Amazon, which had unlimited distribution and unlimited resources, if they entered the space, was going to be quite problematic for Whoop.

1:06:07It would crush you. And just – you could do an image search of this. It looks pretty much like a Whoop. They knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the lead product manager from Amazon, when it came out, posted on Twitter, whoop, there it is, announcing the new Amazon Halo. Wow. Which just was like a sickening level of like we're above the law, so to speak. And look, you know, it's sad to say this, but they were above the law. Like we weren't going to go after them legally. You can't sue them. They have endless resources to fight that lawsuit.

1:06:46We were going to win in the court of public opinion and with consumers. But you would lose so much money trying to fight that case. Yeah, we didn't touch it. But it became a rallying cry internally. I had already seen how Nike and Adidas and Under Armour and Puma and Microsoft and Apple were supposed to be the death of Whoop. And this was another company that, at least in my opinion at that moment in time, was not going to beat us. It was also around the time that we were designing the circuit board of our next generation product. And so I wrote on every 4.0 circuit board, don't bother copying us, we will win.

1:07:30In tiny letters on the circuit board? On the circuit board, yes. Along with every engineer's initials. And the joke was if anyone actually found this message, they probably had nefarious reasons because they were opening our hardware. to look at our circuit board. And they were going to see this message. And that made us so happy. It's interesting because, of course, Amazon is one of the greatest brands in modern history. It's an incredible company and has sort of changed the way we live. But they have, you know, from time to time, a smartphone didn't work. They tried this. And for anyone who doesn't know, it doesn't exist.

1:08:09The product was discontinued, the halo eventually. But it's interesting because on the one hand, you could have gone down the path of saying, all right, we're just going to go after them and try and sue them. But that probably could have destroyed your company because you would have spent years in litigation, tens of millions of dollars trying to fight this. And for Amazon's surrounding air, I mean, they can fight you and certainly make the case that this is not a copy. Or you can decide to lean further into your brand and just say, you know what, forget about them. We're just going to focus on building and doubling down on brand and really making sure that people see that what we're offering is, we believe, a better product.

1:08:50Yeah. I think my sort of personal philosophy is you can only control what you can control. And if you're stressing about things that you're not in control of, you've lost the plot a little bit. And I think it's a pretty good company strategy too, which is to say like if you spend too much time looking at what the competition is doing or letting the competition dictate your strategy, you've probably also lost the plot. You know, I'm curious about, again, going back to the athletes. I mean initially it was like, hey, we're offering this really cool thing that will give you a competitive advantage.

1:09:25But now, you know, now you've got, I mean, Michael Phelps I think does endorsements for you and Ronaldo. And so I imagine that some of these athletes, if not many of them, are investors in the company now. Yeah, we have an amazing roster of professional athletes that have invested in the company. Patrick Mahomes is in there and Eli Manning. Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Virgil van Dijk, Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald. And for me, I've gotten to make friends with a lot of these global superstars. And they've offered a lot of good advice to me personally and also to the business. You know, and I don't always say this show because I want to be neutral, but you have a great product.

1:10:15Thank you. And it offers great information, but it's one product, right? It's the band. It's the wearable. And is there a future where you've got seven different products or other things that you're selling just to kind of diversify? I mean is that a concern? Is that a necessity for you guys or maybe not? I think we'll add products to our portfolio to the extent that they contribute to that core mission, which is to unlock human performance and healthspan. A challenge with the definition of lifespan is it just means how long do you live? But what we like about healthspan is it really reflects the quality of how long you live.

1:11:03I mean, I get messages every single day from people who talk about how Whoop's improved their life or increasingly, probably at least once a week now, Whoop saved my life. And it's just hard to find a mission that feels that valuable. Well, when you think about, you know, the journey you've taken where you are now, because I mean, there have been a lot of close calls where you guys could have gone under. And here you are, a really established, super well-respected brand. How much of where you got to now do you attribute to that hard work and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky? I think there's certainly a resilience that the company's had or I've had over the last 13 years.

1:11:49I think there's been a lot of near-death experiences. I think there's been a lot of moments where quitting may have seemed responsible. I think I benefited from being young and naive for a lot of it. And I do think at its core, the idea was right. And in some ways, I'm still trying to fulfill the vision that I had as a 21-year-old. I mean, that's pretty cool. That's Will Ahmed, founder of Whoop. By the way, while Whoop is probably best known for helping you track the strain and recovery from doing sports, it also tracks your response to other things like acupuncture, circus arts, commuting, cuddling with a child, cooking, and even public speaking.

1:12:41Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at gyros.com or on Substack. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer with music composed by Ramtina Rablui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Chris Messini, J.C.

1:13:18Howard, Sam Paulson, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

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