In short
Podcast Summary: This Week in Startups - Episode E1786 with Will Ahmed, CEO of Whoop
Overview In this episode of *This Week in Startups*, host Jason Calacanis interviews Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop, a company focused on health and performance through wearable technology. They discuss Whoop's journey, the "Quantified Self" movement, product design, the subscription business model, and the future of wearable tech.
Key Topics
- The "Quantified Self" Movement
- Definition: A movement where individuals use technology to track various aspects of their health and performance.
- Whoop's Differentiation: Unlike typical fitness trackers, Whoop focuses on providing in-depth analysis and actionable insights into health metrics such as recovery, stress, and sleep.
- Whoop's Product Features
- Data Collection: Whoop collects significantly more data (100 times more than competitors like Fitbit and Apple Watch) related to heart rate, heart rate variability, sleep stages, respiratory rates, and skin temperature.
- Simplicity in Data Presentation: The device simplifies the complex data into actionable insights (e.g., recovery status displayed in red, yellow, or green).
- Design: Unlike traditional smartwatches, Whoop is a strap that focuses solely on health monitoring without distracting apps or notifications.
- Transition to Subscription Model
- Business Model Change: Originally a hardware sales model, Whoop shifted to a subscription model at $30 per month, which has proven effective for customer retention.
- Comparison to Competitors: The transition was influenced by observing competitors like Fitbit, which struggled with product retention, and Peloton, which thrived on a subscription model.
- Challenges and Resilience
- Funding Difficulties: Will Ahmed discusses the early struggles in raising capital, particularly during 2014-2019, where the company nearly went bankrupt.
- Amazon Competition: Ahmed shares the story of how Amazon initially expressed interest in investing but later released a competing product that ultimately failed due to lack of focus and innovation.
- Innovations and Future Prospects
- Wearable Future: Discussion on future advancements in wearable technology, including potential integration with AI for deeper insights and health monitoring capabilities.
- Continuous Improvement: Whoop aims to evolve its product continuously through software updates rather than waiting for hardware launches.
- Community and User Engagement
- User Feedback Loop: Whoop incorporates user behavior tracking and allows users to log their habits (like alcohol consumption) to analyze their effects on health.
- Data Sharing: Users can share their data with coaches or healthcare professionals, fostering a collaborative approach to personal health management.
Key Takeaways
- Importance of Resilience: Entrepreneurs must navigate challenges and adapt their business models for long-term success.
- Focus on User Experience: Whoop prioritizes making health tracking non-invasive and integrating seamlessly into users' lives.
- Future of Health Monitoring: Continuous advancements in wearable technology could lead to significant improvements in predictive health insights.
Conclusion Will Ahmed’s insights into the challenges of building a successful wearable tech company provide valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and those interested in the intersection of technology and health. Whoop's commitment to innovation and user-centric design positions it well for future growth in the health monitoring space.
Follow Will Ahmed
- [Twitter](https://twitter.com/willahmed)
Check out Whoop
- [Whoop Website](https://www.whoop.com)
Podcast Resources
- Sponsors:
- [Vanta](http://vanta.com/twist) - Compliance made easy.
- [CLA](http://claconnect.com/tech) - Advisory services for startups.
- [Notion](http://notion.com/twist) - Project management tools with AI features.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00I know there's a lot of founders that have trouble raising capital. And Whoop was one of those businesses. I mean, there were so many years, Jason, where it was very hard to raise capital. You know, that sort of period of like 2014 to call it 2018 or 19 was very hard to raise capital. And the business almost went bankrupt in 2017 and 18. And then you fast forward a mere few years later and, you know, multi-billion dollar company. And so it's just, I can't understate how important resilience is to your founders and this idea of just keep going.
0:57innovation takes balance. CLA CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com slash tech. And Notion just launched Notion Projects, which includes new powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. All right, everybody, Welcome back to the program. Really excited to talk about the quantified self. We've all been wearing these watches and Fitbits, but there is one device that all of the quantified self people in my life will not shut up about.
1:40It's the Whoop. So I invited Will Ahmed on the program today. Will, you're the founder of Whoop, yeah? And the CEO? Correct. All right. So why are all these quantified self people obsessed with Whoop when the Apple launch exists? I was on Fitbit forever. I thought that these devices were going to get commoditized, but apparently there's a reason why you exist and it's a high-end consumer who is obsessed with this product. What is the magic behind Whoop? Well, we have a big focus on really helping people improve health and performance. I think that the product does a good job taking an enormous amount of data.
2:23In a given day, we collect about 100 times as much data as a Fitbit or an Apple Watch when it pertains to your health. So we take a lot of data and we're able to simplify it into a few key things that you need to know. So that might be how recovered you are, red, yellow, green, are you ready to work out? that might be how hard a workout was or what your stress is in any given moment. That may be how much sleep you need for tonight to recover for tomorrow. And we're able to quickly help our members improve their health and performance through a pretty non-invasive wearable product. I think it doesn't look like a watch.
3:05It just looks like a strap. It's a band. So do people, you know, it doesn't have apps on it or anything. What's the sensor array in there? And how is that sensor array different than, say, like your typical Fitbit or Apple Watch? Well, you make a good point in that Whoop is not, it doesn't have, you know, 100 different apps associated with it. It doesn't allow you to do phone calls and, you know, flagging Uber and all these emails and notifications. It's really entirely focused on your health. and as a consequence i think we've become very good at health monitoring we've become very good at telling people what they need to do next and creating a product in turn that people don't take off so one thing that while we didn't invest in say a screen or a bunch of apps and a bunch of notifications we did build for example a modular charger that allows you to charge whoop without ever taking it off your body.
4:02So that would be an example of, you know, one area where we leaned in and other folks went a different direction. What's the sensor array in there? Because it does seem like you're recording at either a high, you said you're recording more often, but is it recording at a higher fidelity as well? I would assume that since this is made just to do quantified self, just to record health tracking, you can do some things, maybe some other devices can. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the list of physiological data points that we collect is pretty long, ranging from heart rate to heart rate variability to everything about your sleep staging, respiratory rates, skin temperature, more as it pertains to your fitness and BMI than other products, a lot around stress and specific performance measurements.
4:55So the product itself is collecting a lot of data, although I think in part what people gravitate to is the accuracy of those readings and then the way that the product is able to simplify the information. Because just because you collect 100 times more data doesn't mean that you should show that much information. You have to figure out a way to tell a story back to someone and hopefully guide them through it. yeah the the apple watch i was a fitbit guy for a long time and loved it for steps heart rate sort of then i went apple watch because somewhere around version five or six it wasn't terrible but i just went for a run and or i did a hike and then a little run at the end and when i went for the running part i got none of the heart rate it just doesn't record it consistently why does the Apple Watch suck at that and and how do yours how does yours work better is is this like a consistent problem in terms of getting consistent heart rate on the wrist is just challenging or is it that they're trying to do too many things what's the magic there it's a combination of it being hard um and the product likely being designed for you know a lot of different use cases and health and fitness being one of, you know, say 100 of them.
6:12One advantage that we had, I mean, it was a challenge, but it's an advantage from an accuracy standpoint, is that we started working with high performance athletes. So, you know, I found a whoop in 2012. So, I've seen a lot of ebbs and flows to what people might call the wearable space or the quantified health space. And the initial vision was really to work with the world's best athletes. Now, athletes are very diverse, skin color, wrist size, hairiness, sweat complicates things, movement complicates things. So we actually picked by far the hardest use case for measurement. And that meant that a lot of our foundational algorithms for things like heart rate were built on a wildly diverse data set.
7:02and we needed the product to work on a wildly diverse data set in order for it to be successful. And we also had a very high bar for what success looked like because we were giving feedback back to these superstar athletes who were used to some of this information, albeit in a much worse form factor like a chest strap. So that created, I think, a powerful foundation. and what do people use it for today what when you talk to your who is your ideal customer today and then what are they using it for is it is it for elite athletes or is it for just the sort of next tier down of individuals how many people are using it now yeah it's funny the company's mission for 10 years now has been to unlock human performance but i think over that time frame our definition of human performance has widened a lot so initially Usually human performance was winning a gold medal or an NBA championship.
8:00And then as we entered the consumer market, it became to your point about elite athletes, understanding hardcore training, understanding recovery for the first time. Today, our audience on Whoop is much wider. And I would say that the key attribute that holds someone together on Whoop is this notion of being motivated in your life. So yes, we have very motivated, fitness-oriented members. We also have people who are motivated in their daily lives, their careers, their students, their executives, their lawyers, doctors, and they want to better understand their body. Maybe they want to understand travel.
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9:51That's 10 hundies. Get$1 ,000 off at vanta.com slash twist. That's vanta.com slash twist for$1 ,000 off your SOC 2. It's an interesting business model. I notice you're not trying to compete on hardware anymore. So instead of buying a$600 watch or a throwaway Fitbit that costs$100, it's$30 a month. Is that right? You just do charge a one or two year subscription for folks. Talk about how you came to that business model. Yeah, I think you'll appreciate this. In building a startup, I think you want to be careful how many things you actually try to innovate around. I never thought our business model was going to be one of those innovations, but it actually turned out to be one of the most important changes that we made to the company.
10:35So it was 2017 that we first launched to consumers. We were a$500 high-end hardware. And we found that the people who bought Whoop were staying on it for a long time. So we didn't have the same drop-off rates that you would experience with, say, maybe a Fitbit or a Jawbone, sort of challenges that faced those businesses. But we had a different problem, which is that not that many people were buying Whoop. So we started to ask ourselves, is there a different business model here that's more product first? There were a few other things going on at that time. One was that Fitbit was a public company and a really brilliant distribution business, right?
11:18Like year over year, they were 5Xing the number of units that they sold. But in many ways, they won the wrong game because people would take them off and wouldn't put them back on. And so they weren't as product or retention oriented as I thought they should be. At the same time, there was an up-and-coming business called Peloton, which was a subscription business along with hardware. And that business was getting valued at 10 or 20 times their revenue, I realized, whereas Fitbit was getting valued at, say, one or two times their revenue in the public markets. So do you want to grow up to look more like Peloton or Fitbit?
11:57Do you want to grow up to look more like a subscription business or a hardware business? Along with that, there was this question of, is a one-time fee even the right way to think about health monitoring? If you think about someone's life, it evolves a lot. The reason that you may buy a health product or a fitness product today could be quite different in three months or six months or 12 months. And so we thought that also the best way for a product to meet a customer's needs would be to evolve over time alongside that customer. So all of those reasons led us to Whoop being a subscription. And we essentially launched Whoop as a subscription in May of 2018, and it created this pretty amazing growth engine for the company.
12:43Now, today, you can sign up for Whoop in a few different ways. One is you can buy an annual membership for$240. So that's the equivalent of$20 a month. And to be clear, the hardware is included, and we make continuous software and analytics updates. So, you know, six months ago, someone signing up for Whoop had no idea that they were going to get a stress monitor that was going to show them how their stress evolved in real time. They had no idea they were going to get a strength trainer that was going to measure the muscular load of workouts. But those are features that we launched in the last six months to our members as part of their subscription.
13:21Right. So, no one charged on that and just, you get it. You get it. Yeah. And so, it's made us a better business too. and I would say a company because it puts us in this position of constantly releasing new features and analytics at a really rapid cadence. Whereas products that we're competing against, in my opinion, are making a mistake of holding back their innovation for 12 months from now or 24 months from now so that you buy the next hardware, right? Yeah. So we're in a continuous cycle of improvement and they're stuck in an annual cycle of improvement. And so I think it's an advantage to our business.
13:59And then, of course, we now have this recurring revenue, which is much more attractive. Yeah. And you have an idea of what you're going to make next month. If the economy stalls, you don't have to worry about selling some$800 device and people going, maybe I'll push that out six months and I'll buy it later. They're paying a buck a day or in the case if they buy a two-year membership or a one-year membership, they're probably paying 75 cents a day seems kind of reasonable if you care about your health or if you're in any way sort of one of these optimization people now you had amazon wanted to invest in the business they decided to compete against you how did that wind up going it's a good setup question uh well i know the story but i want you to share this story because this is particularly important for i think founders who listen um and it's the majority of the audience to understand like, hey, it can be pretty scary when a big 800-pound gorilla decides they want to jump in the ring with you, but they also don't have the same level of focus or maybe not the right business model.
15:01So maybe you can tell that story. Well, Whoop was in a pretty fragile period around 2017, 2018. I mean, as I highlighted, we were five or six years into building the company and then pivoted the business model pretty profoundly. And at that point, it raised tens of millions of dollars. So we were vulnerable as a company. And that was also around the time that Amazon reached out being interested to invest. And there's reasons to think that's a good thing. This is a company with enormous distribution. This is a company with AWS that's a partner. This is a company that could open doors. And so we spent a lot of time with them and we shared a lot of information with them and they didn't invest in Whoop.
15:54And then a few years later, they came out with a direct copycat of the product. So much so that one of the product managers working on what was called the Amazon Halo, like tweeted out. I mean, you can't make this stuff up. Whoop, there it is on top of the product announcement. So basically taunting you. after they jerked her chain yeah now yeah i don't know whether that individual was involved in in the other part of it or it's the same company it's a bad look i mean it's a bad look but it but it was very obvious that they copied us right uh and so i put out some sort of public information about why i thought the product would fail after reading things about it and it was it was a productive rallying cry internally too um so much so that we put on as we were building our next technology um we put on every uh circuit board don't bother copying us we will win and and and the inside joke being to us like if you actually were able to find that circuit board it was because you were taking the product apart to obviously figure out what's inside and probably copy us i love it so so that felt pretty good and then uh you know sure enough uh two years later they discontinued the product because it had failed yeah i mean the truth is big companies well you know they do have a lot of resources they do have distribution what they don't have is the passion or mission uh to understand why they're doing a certain thing right and so they can go off on these little adventures scares the heck out of the investors in a company the but this is why i really tell my founders to not get involved in corporate vc if i had been on your board and we've been approached i'd be like anything but this please because if they're interested it's for nefarious reasons and i literally have a company that just got offered you know a valuation that doesn't make logical sense by a strategic and i'm like what do you think they're if they have x i wouldn't say how many billions but if they have large amounts of billions in the bank what do you think their motivation is like we're not going to increase their cash position this is a company that prints money so why are they doing this like they're doing it to block other competitors from buying us and to get information and to you know this is the problem with strategics you know they're when facebook came out with their strategic fund and they were going to meet with all the y combinator companies in some partnership i was like you're crazy if you let company in the incubator stage get meet with zuckerberg and facebook like are you not paying attention to the scorp is it's a tail of the scorpion and the frog um i think i think that's the very like tactical advice to take from it which is to be really skeptical of of corporate investors the the reflection i have is just also the importance of resilience for a team And I think it's kind of like maybe the top two or three things that a startup team needs to have or a company needs to have is resilience because like so much stuff happens and goes poorly.
19:08And it's really how you rise to the occasion and move past it. The other thing I'll just say is I know there's a lot of founders that have trouble raising capital. And Whoop was one of those businesses. I mean, there were so many years, Jason, where it was very hard to raise capital. You know, that sort of period of like 2014 to call it 2018 or 19 was very hard to raise capital. And the business almost went bankrupt in 2017 and 18. And then you fast forward a mere few years later and, you know, multi-billion dollar company. And so it's just, I can't understate like how important resilience is to your founders and this idea of just keep going.
19:50And that's where the mission and grit is what it's all about. If you can get through those hard times and the great thing about being a subscription business is that it becomes so predictable. And I think that the business model pivot, I'm sure you got massive resistance to it. I'm sure consumers were confused. Why do I have to pay this? Yada, yada. So maybe talk a little bit about the courage and the grit, the resiliency to get through that business pivot, because I'm sure investors and other folks, and probably people internally, probably a little voice in your head was saying, is this the right thing to do?
20:25Well, there's a theme I come back to, which is if something's broken, you have to take a pretty drastic action. And if something is a little off, okay, you can iterate and test your way maybe through it. But we had a bit of an existential crisis where it was like, hey, we've built this innovative product that people love and no one's buying it. We need to take a huge reset on this business model. And this is our best shot on goal at what that business model should look like. And funny enough, when we first launched it, it was$30 a month. And even today, it's still anchored at a$30 monthly rate if you want to pay month to month.
21:11There's cheaper options if you pay on an annual membership. The other thing that we did more recently, which I think you'll find interesting, is we launched this notion of free trials. So you can literally sign up for Whoop for free for 30 days. And at the end of 30 days, you can decide whether you want to be a member or you send us the device back. and it's a pretty powerful um acquisition tool now for us and again it's you're entirely leading with the product first right and and so i think that's been our orientation all along is to be really very product focused yeah in the people who are using it how much of it is sleep i know we were early investors in calm and sleep wasn't even on the table it was just mindfulness and meditation sure but something happened in the last five or six years i don't know if it was trump and the stress trump call people cause people or then followed by you know covet and people having anxiety about that or just the general mental health and anxiety and also screens and devices doom scrolling this whole thing just got people acutely aware of sleep and how important that is So, how much of, and that was probably something you were not originally working on or was it?
22:31And then how much is sleep a driver of subscriptions and usage today? Well, we always believed sleep was going to be core to the experience. I mean, the physiology paper that I wrote in 2011 was the feedback tool measuring intensity recovery in sleep. So there was like this core idea that those would be the metrics that WHOOP would develop. I think that there's a certain awareness that has gone mass market around, one, the importance of sleep, and then two, the technology that's now available to measure it. But on the awareness front, I think that people have realized that it's this essentially black box third or quarter of their lives.
23:22You're going to have a whole third of your life and you're just going to have no idea what happens during it. Yeah. That's a pretty weird phenomenon when you actually stop and think about it. yeah and uh and then you know you've got a lot of papers coming out about how sleep is you know lack of sleep is linked to all sorts of different disorders and you know uh early death alzheimer's all these different uh problems and on the flip side longer sleeps linked to all these positive benefits happiness etc uh and so i think that that as a drumbeat has really resonated i think that people have also realized that steps was essentially a fake metric.
24:02And so, in a way, steps has become the new sleep. Pop culture moved on from steps and they needed something new to talk about. So, sleep filled that void. And then the technology piece is very real. I mean, Whoop built its technology off of a PSG machine, which is essentially like a sleep laboratory you go to and you have nodes all over your body. And the idea that you can get a similar quality of sleep staging from a sensor that's about the size of your thumb as you could from going to a sleep laboratory, I mean, that's a pretty amazing sort of moment in time for technology, right? Yeah. And so, I think that the technology being in a place where it can now measure it is a part of the reason people are now interested in it.
24:49All right, everybody. Stephen Estes is a principal at CLA, Clifton Larson Allen. This is a professional service provider that specializes in CPA, tax consulting, and wealth advisory. Welcome to the program, Stephen. Thank you for having me. So you specialize in VC-backed, high-growth startups. What's an overview of how you advise these companies in the early stage? And then what typically gets complicated as you go? First and foremost, I'd say CLA exists to create opportunities for our clients, our people, and our communities. And we do so by taking an industry-specialized approach, becoming experts in our respective industries.
25:26And that really enables us to identify those kind of opportunities and spot issues before they become problems. We work with a variety of companies in the tech space, right, from incubator all the way up to IPO and through the exit. So we generally will come alongside them and partner with many of the early-stage companies, right, when they come out of an incubator and then kind of expand that relationship as those companies scale and grow. And we come alongside and assist for fractional CFO work, audits, M &A assistance, international, and really just help those companies throughout their entire life cycle.
26:00It's our promise to know you and help you that really enables us to transition from being just an accountant to a trusted advisor. Get started right now at claconnect.com slash tech. Let them know your boy, Jake, sent you claconnect.com slash tech to get started right now what have you added to the product in terms of um either new sensors or with software that uh has connected with users i know recovery time seems to be i was like the you have an incredible subreddit by the way that you must yeah where people are just like i drank electrolytes i'm in a sauna i did strength and they're just like you know it's pretty obsessive yeah it's quantified self people get a little obsessive that was i was talking to chamath about it we love them we love them and he had to stop using the um glucose monitor because he said he was getting too obsessive with what he would eat in terms of glucose monitoring um but what have you added in terms of either sensors or software that wasn't there in the beginning that is connected with people because i notice these devices are now automatically detecting i don't know if you have that feature automatically detecting what people are doing um and then you know obviously recovery time so how much of what you're doing at whoop has to do with algorithms and software versus hardware and the sensors yeah i mean the the hardware we release every two even in some cases three years over the company's history so a lot of that's just a foundation and it's the software and the analytics and the algorithms and increasingly the AI that's taking that to a new level.
27:44And just in the last six months, we released two pretty innovative features leveraged on top of our hardware. I'll describe the strength trainer because it ties this notion of hardware and software together. Two years ago, we acquired a company called Push, which was a startup that built a big following in the sort of elite weightlifting community because it did a good job quantifying what lifting weights was doing to your body or your muscular load. Essentially, if you bench 100 pounds versus 200 pounds versus 300 pounds or squat or whatever, and do it for a certain number of reps at a certain pace, this is the muscular load that we can measure on your body.
28:24Now, historically, wearables have never measured muscular load. So, So we thought that was a pretty interesting use case. So we acquired the company, which had its own hardware product. And mind you, this is after we'd already launched our latest hardware. And we took that suite of algorithms and software and figured out how to map their hardware to our existing hardware. And then on top of that, we built a whole software package that allows you to choose exercises and build an entire workout. You know, that would be the equivalent of you working out in a gym or in a hotel or whatever. And, you know, entering reps and weights and all these things.
29:10And then we launched this feature on top of everyone's existing hardware. so what for every other hardware company a thousand percent would be a new hardware launch whoop did as a software upgrade and a firmware upgrade just over the air and so then all of a sudden strain for whoop went from being just cardiovascular so you know based on your heart yeah um to cardiovascular and muscular in certain circumstances when you had weights or um you know strength training so uh you know that that i think hopefully encompasses or gets in your question yeah i know when you calculate the strain it knows your heart rate it knows your skin temperature i guess it knows your breathing or some approximation of your breathing and then can use that and then if you're telling it hey i'm doing squats or kettlebells or whatever it can put all that together to say hey here's your general strain level yeah exactly so So, you know, like a running workout, for example, would primarily, our strain metric would primarily be based on the time that you spent in different zones of your max heart rate.
30:21So, simple math, if your max heart rate is 200 and you're at 190 beats per minute versus 170 beats per minute, when you're at 190, you're putting more stress on your body, right? And so, the longer you spend at higher zones, the more strain credit that you get. So, you could do a very long workout at lower intensity or you could do a shorter workout at higher intensity and you may end up with similar strain. Now, that was a primarily cardiovascular measurement. Yes, it uses skin temperature, respiratory rate, but a lot of what you're getting credit for is these elevated heart rate zones. On the flip side, if you do a workout like weightlifting, and this is why I've been critical of step counting as well, it's not giving you enough credit for what you've just done to your body from a strain standpoint.
31:14so now whoop is able to use our accelerometers and gyroscopes to measure how you're lifting all sorts of different exercises and we're getting the input from you on how much weight it was and exactly what your reps were and it does all the rest to measure the tonnage of that workout and what the as a consequence muscular load effect is on your body and that was based on years of research and then there's this body feature that you have now so you're putting a sensor into clothes to do other types of cardio activity explain that so we have a principle just to zoom up for a second like we have a principle that wearable technology should either be cool or invisible and a lot of wearable technology is kind of stuck in no man's land in the middle of those two phenomenons and it looks something like a piece of plastic on your wrist with a, you know, a time and a step counter or something like that.
32:11And, um, or, you know, some of the smartwatches on the market, like they aren't super desirable things to wear and they're also very present. And so we wanted to stay away from that. We wanted to be either in cool or invisible and cool is creating a product that aesthetically resonates for you. It's hard to understate how much of a commitment it is to wear something 24-7 and how much it starts to say about you if you wear something 24-7, right? How many things in your life do you wear 24-7? Not much. Right. So we needed to create an aesthetic that could resonate for people. And then as a consequence, we designed a product that's infinitely customizable.
32:50So we have about 70 ,000 different bands and collections that you can wrap this little sensor with. yeah and you know you can swap them in and out in a pretty seamless fact and as you can see the product's mostly material in fact we've tried to almost take the tech out of the product no i mean it's so subtle it's so elegant that it doesn't look like you're wearing looks like you're wearing something you know somebody gave you on the playa burning man and was like hey here's a cool wrist right thing it doesn't look like it's electronic in any way that was the thing that i was like where's the display like how do i see my heart rate right so do people complain about that because i like to see my heart rate when i'm working out is that like something you guys suffer over a bit we get it but there's enough our opinion is there's enough screens in the world so whether it's your phone whether it's the machine that you're working out on whether it's your ipad maybe one day even it's your smartwatch whoop will send the data there right and so you can you can find a way to see it uh because for most of the rest of the hours of the day, having a screen is actually an inhibitor, in our opinion, to wearing it 24-7.
34:01Now, let's go back to invisible in your question. So, the other paradigm is that the technology just disappears and you still get the value of the data. And our initial shot on goal at making Whoop disappear is Whoop Body, which is a line of clothing that allows you to put the sensor in different locations that aren't your wrist so i take it off my wrist and i put it in my shorts yeah so we'll do this demo for those of you who can see this video and i'm just taking the sensor apart and now voila i've got this tiny little sensor and i can put this in these different locations so key thing is same exact sensor but i can now wear it on my upper arm in a shirt or under a bicep sleeve i can actually wear it around my waist in boxers or shorts or underwear yeah here's a good demo of this yeah we've got leggings where it can slip in around the the cap so a big focus on having this technology be able to disappear and you'd be surprised by how many people are using it in their sort of daily lives you know people just saying oh i'm going to just wear it in my boxers from now on uh so you put it in your boxers but do it does it still touch my skin then and i still get my all the skin readings and heart rate readings or do i lose something by putting it into the you know intimates or my shorts great question we we validated the sensor from all these different locations so we we have something called whoop labs which is where we invite people um essentially off the street and we do these data collections every day and people wear body suits of sensors all over their bodies and we've identified certain locations and then we've you know built algorithms that make all those locations tell you the same thing so if you were wearing six whoop straps at the same time in all these different locations you'd get the same readings and uh and so you know think about different use cases like there's the obvious sports use case so patrick mahomes you know wore his whoop under his sleeve during the super bowl that's pretty cool he wouldn't have been able to wear it on his wrist but because he can wear it in different locations he was able to wear it during you know high impact sport you think about jujitsu wrestling even racket sports people may not want things on their wrists um anything high impact even certain weightlifting situations so there's a lot of like sport specific reasons to not wear something on your wrist and then there's the daily life use case which actually has a wider range than we realized but you know it turns out like doctors and nurses for example can't wear anything on their wrists often when they're in a waiting you know in an operating room you know you think about maybe a woman going out to a party and she doesn't want to wear something on her wrist or she's got jewelry on both sides or okay all of a sudden it can now be it can now disappear yeah that's brilliant uh you know this all happened because i started this new coaching service i don't know if you've heard of found f-o-u-n-t so i haven't found.bio it's just like a guy who trained navy seals and so the first thing he said is like do you have a whoop and i'm like no you know i lost like 40 pounds and now i'm trying to get in shape and he's like all right we got to get you that's that's a big deal let's take a pause on that way to go well the first 20 well i got i used to run marathons basically 165 and then i went up to 213 i got married i had kids I gained three pounds a year for 20 years or two to three pounds a year for 20 years.
37:40All of a sudden, I woke up. I was 40 pounds overweight. And then I did 20 pounds just using Kevin Rose's Zero app. I don't know if you know that fasting app. It's really cool. Fasting, yeah. So, I did the intermittent fasting, which Tim Ferriss and Kevin Rose put me on to. And I did hiking, lost 20 pounds. And then two years ago, I was listening to Kevin Rose and Tim Ferriss talk about Ozempin. and i immediately got back from italy two years ago and uh got a prescription for ozempic and i wound up losing the next 20 pounds on and off doing webovian ozempic and so now i'm 170 172 40 almost to your fighting weight look at that almost to my fighting weight if i get to 165 that's when i used to run marathon i used to run the new york city marathon every year just for fun there you go not competitively in any way but anyway now i got this new quantified self coach so it's like for executives and so i'm 52 and i'm just trying to super optimize to be you know around for a long time for my daughters be the best ceo investor i can be and just be in great shape again and they were like we got to get you on a whoop and then i'm going to give i'm going to share that information with my coach so the coach will see my you know weight every day for my fitbit scale my whoop data great whatever else i share with them um so i'm getting kind of stoked for it and then i got a peloton tread um and i got the tonal machine so i got the whole battery of stuff and then i i did the whole you know when you look at this stuff i think economically what does it cost to be part of equinox now it's like 200 a month or something 250 it's it's crazy how expensive it is and so that's like whatever it is 2500 a year three thousand dollars a year and then you put a bunch of uh yeah two so it's three thousand a year and i was like well my wife and i joined that's six thousand a year to be part of like a really good gym six thousand a year over ten years is sixty thousand i'm like you could buy every smart device in the world and the subscription and it wind up being a third of the price or half the price and you own it all and so i have a small gym at home it's not like super fancy uh but i'm just dialing it in and i'm really excited to use.
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39:56One of the reasons I wanted to have you on was because I'm starting to use it. I am using Notion as I speak. I use Notion all day long. My entire company runs on Notion and Notion is perfect for project management. And I got a lot of projects going on and I want them to go at this point in my career perfectly. I don't have time for mistakes and nonsense and low performance. Well, part of being a high performing organization is to use project management. We use Notion all day long to do important events in our lives, right? So when we do something like a project like the All-In Summit, or we're doing the parties at the All-In Summit, we have a sales pipeline, we have AV checklists, we have schedules, all this stuff.
40:41Well, guess what? Notion isn't just about documents. It is about project management, and they have crushed it. Today, I'm excited to share that they just launched Notion Projects, which includes new powerful ways to manage projects and leverage the power of their built-in AI features too. Notion Projects combines project management with your docs, knowledge base, and AI so you can stop jumping between tools and stop paying too much for them too. So do your most efficient work with Notion Projects. You can try it for free today at notion.com slash twist. That's all lowercase letters notion.com slash twist.
41:18When you use our link, you're supporting our show. Go right now to notion.com slash twist. Give us an idea of what's coming. Like, what do you think about because I know that Tim Cook's been obsessed with glucose level. And supposedly there's going to be some way to maybe be able to tell your glucose through your skin. I don't know if that's possible or not. But I know he's obsessed with that. We have an investment in a company called NutriSense that does glucose monitoring, etc. What do you think the future is for you guys?
41:53I think glucose monitoring is interesting, albeit not. I don't think it'll be in a convenient form factor on the time frame that it's being written about. I think I also am a little bit skeptical of its mass market appeal. so you know folks with diabetes like need to wear a continuous glucose monitor and about 30 percent of them do it and it's you know i think it's been pitched in the last two years at least in the startup ecosystem as being like another category and at least i've certainly heard this pitch of of um yeah we're like whoop but for nutrition or like for continuous glucose monitoring and I think of it a little bit more like a DNA test where it's you do it once and you kind of have a sense now but the idea that you're going to wear a continuous glucose monitor in that form factor forever is kind of hard to imagine and so there's there's a number of categories that we're pretty excited about I think that what you're going to see is over time this shift from being able to improve people's lives pretty dramatically with their health to um you know ultimately saving people's lives on a fairly regular basis i think it's going to be like uh almost like a chat gpt moment you know in this last you know how like all of a sudden this thing came out and it was like being a toy to being like it actually worked yeah i think it's gonna be i think it's gonna be pretty binary like that where all of a sudden you realize that you're detecting people are going to have heart attacks before they have heart attacks or strokes or disease states or illnesses.
43:41And to me, it's obvious that continuous health monitoring will get to that level. Right? You know, we're in this mode of we want to build a 24-7 life coach for you. And you can interact with it and learn everything about your body from it. And it'll put you on different plans and tell you when something's wrong. And I think starting to give advice or is it up to me to interpret the results? Like, is it tell you like, hey, by the way, you know, your sleep sucked. You're, you know, you haven't been working out. Here's some ideas for you tomorrow. Or here's some things you could do today to get back on track.
44:16Is it coaching you now, the product? We think of the product very much as a coach. And that's a fairly deliberate, that's a deliberate word because there's other ways to think about health monitoring. And I think over time, it will certainly be able to you know i don't want to say too much but you know it'll be able to tell you pretty deliberately um what you need to do next based on your goals or tell you things that you don't know to ask about which of course is what a great coach does yeah that anticipating what i should do based on my weight my recovery time my heart rate etc my age you're going to just have so much information it's going to be amazing are people now sharing with their doctors do you have that multiplayer mode built into it yet or am i just going to have to get my same password to my coach over at found well you can certainly create a team uh where you can share information with other people in your life family members friends your doctor uh so that's built into the product today yeah it is that's awesome yeah you can also export your data as a pdf for certain time intervals and you could say, hey, doc, I'm coming in next week.
45:33Here's my last 30 days of all my whoop metrics. And that might be a little bit more of a raw readout of numbers and whatnot. But I don't think we're that far from there being a layer that sits on top of this information that can do a lot of what that doctor visit would have done. Yeah, that's so clear to me because some of the so many doctors they're not using whoop they're not up on the latest science they're not listening to tim ferris or whoever they're just not up on it that's what that's what i keep finding is the general practitioners are out of shape themselves that they don't know the latest science and so i'd rather get my information from whoop and you know what i really would like to see because i'm doing my blood draw next week i'd like to see some you know whatever quest diagnostics whoop and then um connect all the data sources yeah and then i have i did my pro novo scan have you done one of those yet the full body scans so yeah i actually haven't done that but i'm going to that's pretty cool it's really cool um and then i guess daniel f from spotify now is investing in a company that's going to do really cheap body scans and then i just took a cancer test that's one thousand dollars and it's a blood test just to see if you have cancer in your bloodstream it's not perfect yet but these things i think are going to become in the future and there's going to be like a battery of things you can do and then connect it all like if i could if you had my blood work plus what you have from the whoop plus prenovo there's something there that is going to be the revolutionary yeah yeah that's going to just be the game changer well game changer then it's like these doctors i don't think these doctors know how to interpret it but ai will figure it out over time ai will do a much better job over time because you're going to put together three or four colossal data sets i mean that's the exciting thing for me is if y 'all can get coordinated and put this data set together and put ai against it oof sky's the limit right yeah and and we will and i think that the other advantage that that uh we have over even um a doctor or trainer or coach like in your real life is like their sample size might be tens hundreds maybe even a thousand people like best case scenario whereas you know we're building data sets on millions of people right and so it's just the the number of people that look exactly like you on our platform is pretty profound yes you'll have x number of 52 year olds in america with my bmi and my height and nobody's going to have that information so and then there's a whole behavioral layer to it.
48:11We didn't talk as much about this, but Whoop has a journal inside of it where you can add different behaviors and track them. So, alcohol consumption is the one everyone does because they realize how much alcohol affects their sleep and their recovery and these things. But maybe you're going to try a new supplement or meditation or fill in the blank, like your doctor prescribes a drug like what is this new thing doing to your body and so you can actually do like a little a b test on your body okay when i do it versus when i don't this is how it impacts my experiments yeah run experiments and and so whoop will tell you right back okay when you when you do this and not this this is what happens to your body and this is the perfect formula for you and then oh by the way there's a bunch of people who look just like you who are doing this thing and it's going really well, you should do this thing, right?
49:06And so that's where it goes. Where does your community coalesce? Is it in the app or is it just on Reddit or Facebook groups? Because they must be pointing you in this direction. It would be really powerful to be able to say like, yeah, this group of 50-year-olds is going to run this week and drink a glass of wine. This group is going to run the same three miles but not drink the glass of wine. Yeah. we i mean we have communities i would say in a number of of different places and admittedly some people on whoop want to play a very single player game which is their data with whoop and we have i think a lot of encouraging privacy principles for those folks um like we have a strong principle that we're not going to sell your data to third parties which is something i don't think most big tech companies could authentically claim yeah but i mean if you gave me a would you share anonymously into this group to and then give to get you know the old give to get concept i'll get my data i can get the average of 50 charles in the system and benchmark myself one of the nice that was one of the nice things about peloton i liked was when you were doing the workouts it'd be like hey here's where you stand versus people in your cohort and yeah that's a little gamesmanship uh but it was just a lot of fun but you guys raised at a large valuation so companies got to go public at some point i guess you want to be a large independent company is the goal yeah i mean i think well i think that we've built the business uh to be a standalone business and so uh i think an inevitable evolution of that is taking the business public in the coming years yeah we've raised about 400 million in capital and yeah fortunately we've been able to ride through the last couple years and and continue growing yeah i mean it's tremendous well listen And I'm ordering it today as part of my get healthy in my 50s.
50:58And I really appreciate that you're working on it and you didn't give up. And you didn't sell the business to some strategic. Yeah, thank you. To your success with it. It's really amazing what you've done. And it seems like the price is coming down a bit. So if you buy it over two years, you can get down to what, like$20 a month? Well, you can sign up now for$20 a month if you sign up for a year. It's pretty good. I mean, like, I think there's probably, like, somewhere between$20 and a Disney Plus subscription is the mass market. So, it's still a high-end product. But it's not that high. It's not absurdly high-end.
51:33I think that was the only criticism I heard about the product was it was too expensive. I think it used to be$40 a month, right? Or it was a little bit more? The highest we ever got was$30 a month. Oh, okay. So, yeah, that's pretty high. But if you get down to$20. It's interesting, though. You did all that math on Equinox, but you can just look at fitness classes. One fitness class is$40, right? Having a personal trainer is$120 an hour. There's a lot of data points on health and fitness that point towards it being inexpensive to be able to continuously measure your body. Yeah, and well worth it.
52:11At the end of the day,$20,$30 a month. like you just and you can now try whoop for free so you got nothing to lose for free it's all good if you don't like it you send it back all right listen continued success i really appreciate you coming on the program thanks for not giving up i will report back to you what i think of the product as i go on my uh little adventure here with my executive coach and getting in the best health of my life and we'll see you all next time on the student starves bye bye
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Today’s show:
Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed joins Jason to discuss Whoop’s journey (1;50), the driving paradigm behind Whoop’s innovative product designs (31:38), the future of wearable tech (41:26), and more!
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Time stamps: (00:00) Whoop Founder and CEO Will Ahmed joins Jason (1:50) The “Quantified Self” movement and features that set Whoop’s product apart (4:04) How the device interprets health data and obtains consistent results (7:24) Whoop’s customer base (8:52) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist (9:59) The decision to pivot to a subscription business model (14:31) Amazon turning from potential investor to failed copy-cat competitor (20:09) Incorporating new strategies into the business (24:49) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech (26:21) Developments since the product’s inception (31:38) Whoop Body and the driving paradigm behind the product design (40:00) Notion - Try Notion Projects for free today at notion.com/twist (41:26) What lies ahead and the future of wearable tech (44:47) The ability to share the recorded health data (47:20) AI utilizing large health datasets and the Whoop Journal * Follow Will: https://twitter.com/willahmed
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