Ep. 88 The Grit It Takes To Turn Your Idea Into A Billion Dollar Reality With Whoop's Will Ahmed

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1:29look I don't want to offend the other guests but Will Ahmed might be the most impressive guest we've ever had on this podcast aged just 22 while still a student at Harvard he founded Whoop a wearable health tracker that measures the minutiae of your heart rate data to give you insights into your strain and recovery. Ten years later, the company was valued at$3.6 billion and Whoop is won by athletes across the world from LeBron James to Michael Phelps. Will's story is incredible, but what I found most impressive was his insight into building a business, building a big idea business, something that reinvents the way we see things or the way we do things or the way we think about our health in this example.

2:11His lessons that he learned along the way, both from raising funding to setting up the right type of team to breaking down his own walls when it came to the things that made him, in his words, not the best leader that he could necessarily be. I think that it's a truly invaluable story and the advice and kind of wisdom that he dropped on this podcast is some that I think I will remember for a very long time.

2:42Before we get into the episode, if you could just go to the podcast on Spotify and give us a rating. You can choose the rating, but let's be honest, a higher rating really helps us get amazing guests. I know it's not probably something that you think about following and rating the podcast, but it makes a huge difference to what we're able to do. So thank you so much and I hope you really enjoy the episode.

3:05Thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for having me, Grace. Very excited for this conversation. I always start by asking everyone whether they feel like they are more working hard or hardly working at this moment in time in your life. Working hard, definitely. Yeah, always or just at the moment? No, it feels like kind of always. I think the framing of, you know, call it work-life balance is maybe the wrong framing. And I heard it described once as work-life harmony, which resonates more for me. Like there's times where you just need to be investing more in your work if you're building a business.

3:39And it's an unrealistic thing to try to create something from scratch and all of a sudden insert it into the world and all of a sudden, you know, build a successful empire and whatever it may be. Like, I don't think that happens by accident. I think you have to make it happen. And so a lot of that requires just work and time and hours. Oh, definitely. And I think that like work-life balance originally was talked about or invented and kind of brought into the social narrative because it was, you know, the idea was to make sure we're not glamorizing hustle culture too much, et cetera, et cetera.

4:14But I also feel like the way it's often then represented in terms of this kind of perfect balance is makes it feel like another quite unattainable thing when actually you're completely right. If you want to build something huge, if you want to do something that people have never done before, chances are that more often than not, you're going to have to lean in sometimes. You're going to have to have some times where your life is 90 % work and 10 % rest or you're being a bit shit with your family or your relationship or your friends or whatever it might be. And I feel like understanding it that way and understanding that you can have it all but you can't have it all at once has been very important for me.

4:49Yeah, I mean that resonates for me. I think that the first question to ask is like, what do you want? Like what do you want in life? And if you want to build a business, you're not entitled to that thing being successful at all. And so you need to create space in your life to have it be such. And pick any industry, any occupation, entrepreneurship aside, but definitely entrepreneurship. like there's a cost to creating something that hasn't been created before or becoming someone that that doesn't exist in the world and and so you know sacrifice costs these are key parts of of being a successful entrepreneur and being realistic about that I feel is very important rather than yeah just accepting it yeah so to give people some context on your entire journey and how you got to where you are now for anyone who is either familiar with Whoop, but maybe not familiar with you and your entire trajectory.

5:50Could you give me a little whistle-stop tour of your life into your career, into where you are now? I can do that. So I grew up on the north shore of Long Island, Mill Neck outside Oyster Bay. I was kind of always into sports and exercise. size. My dad, Egyptian immigrant, came to this country with very little. My mom, American, very analytical, great writer. My parents, totally different people. I think grew up observing two different extremes of how to solve problems in the world. I was also an only child. You spend a lot around adults. And I went to boarding school when I was like 14, 15 years old, a school called St.

6:39Paul's in New Hampshire. And I got pretty good at squash while I was there. That helped me get recruited to Harvard. So I went and played squash at Harvard. And while I was studying at Harvard, I got very interested in physiology and continuously understanding the human body. and my experience of being an athlete showed me that we didn't really know what we were doing to our bodies while we were training i was somebody used to over train but other athletes would you know get injured or misinterpret fitness peaks or not necessarily understand the importance of recovery and so i just got very interested in that from a research standpoint and i spent a few years in school trying to better understand the human body and and that led to an idea which led to starting a company, which I did by the end of my senior year.

7:28And for the last 12 years now, I've been building a company called Whoop in Boston. And we build really high-end wearable technology that is designed to help people improve their health. And what were your dreams as a kid? Like in your mind, when you were thinking about success and what success looked like in the future to you? What was that version of success? What did that look like? I think I had some gravitational pull towards business. My dad worked in finance. I spent time in the city, like feeling that hustle and bustle, um, city being Manhattan. And, but I had a very, uh, you know, I had this image of like suit and tie, you know, uh, cubicles kind of like more of a grinder, probably view of, of business.

8:19Again, this is the six or eight-year-old Will trying to think what the future looks like. I think internships are a great way to figure out not just what you want to do, but what you don't want to do. And when I was in college, I did internships in finance. I worked at a hedge fund and a private equity firm and investment bank. And so I got a flavor for finance. And I just realized in that experience that I didn't want to be my boss's boss's boss, so to speak even if i one day could which is presumptuous but that just didn't feel like the path i wanted to go down and at the same time i was very drawn into physiology and i was very drawn into this idea of creating technology i think if i go back to my younger self like there was more of a thread to pull on around technology i was very intrigued by technology even as a kid.

9:12I had the first iPod in my fifth grade class. I had a Palm Pilot that could get on the internet long before anyone was even talking about that. I remember I would caddy in the summers and save up money to buy these weird gadgets. I got a voice recorder that you could speak to. Then when you plugged it into your computer, it would type out what you dictated. which I thought was very futuristic. It didn't really work, but it was this, you know, I thought it was going to save me all this time typing because at the time I wasn't very good at typing. And, you know, that sort of thread of being really interested in technology never went away.

9:56And I think around the time that I was in school, in college, smartphones were taking off, apps were taking off and sensor technology was getting smaller and smaller. And so I asked myself, well, could we take all this sophisticated medical technology that's out in the world? Could we put that in very small sensing? And then could it send data to your phone? And all of a sudden you've got this 24-7 coach with you. And obviously at this point, I mean, you said that you'd started it by your senior year at Harvard. Was there any part of you that, I mean, I know, especially from those schools, it's very, obviously there are entrepreneurs and there are breakout successes and, you know, particularly at certain schools, there's a tendency towards entrepreneurship, but I do feel like as well, there's this mass movement towards corporate and graduate roles and that view of kind of being accepted into that world and therefore successful, like you got one of the, I don't know, a Goldman like internship or whatever it might be.

11:05Was there ever a point as part of that that you felt like you weren't maybe doing the right thing or that it was a lesser version of success kind of starting this thing up when you didn't know it was going to be successful? Oh, totally. I had real insecurity around it. I mean, And a lot of my friends were going into these banking roles and consulting roles and making six figures out of college. And there was something pretty desirable about that, at least at a superficial level. I also didn't really know what I was doing. I just want to emphasize that. I didn't know what it meant to start a company.

11:42So there was a built-in insecurity or self-doubt that comes with it. The thing I say to entrepreneurs, though, who talk to me about, am I ready to take the leap is for me, starting Whoop wasn't even really a choice at the end of the day because it became such an obsession. You know, when I was sitting at my desk, I would start daydreaming of it. You know, when I was working even in finance, like I'd start pulling market reports on wearable technology or, you know, fitness gadgets. Like it just, the things that you are thinking about in the back of a cab or when you're in the shower, before you go to bed, like when your mind is quiet, where does your mind go?

12:28And for me, and it's kind of been like this for now 15 years, my mind's gone to woo. I mean, I think that's such a similarity between particularly successful entrepreneurs. And I always talk about the fact that like, I think it's incredibly important to contextualize entrepreneurship and contextualize the fact that like, the realistic side of things is, you know, the breakout successes you often see after a good amount of time of not necessarily paying yourself of having like a lot of no's of having a lot of rejection. and actually the people who hear that the important thing is saying that and the important thing is you know revealing what it actually looks like but the people who are going to be entrepreneurs are going to take all of that information in and they're still going to do it and that it's kind of like a great way of whittling through whether it is right for you because I think that the majority of successful entrepreneurs have looked at all of that and thought yeah that sounds terrible and like maybe that would be terrible and maybe it would be really hard and maybe I would fail and maybe I would lose all of my savings and I'd be really embarrassed and everyone has these jobs by this time or whatever but the people who are gonna do the thing are gonna do the thing and as long as you've like had that information and you still want to move forward in that direction to me that's like a sign of both a good idea a good direction, a good path for you because you've taken in all of that information and a true entrepreneur from what I've seen just seems to still go for it.

13:56Well, I think there's sort of two phases to being an entrepreneur. There's probably a lot of phases to being an entrepreneur, but there's two distinct ones from the standpoint of risk mitigation. One is before you actually commit to doing the thing and you're in that exploratory phase. and the other is now you've kicked off, you've launched, and you're trying to build the thing. And I think that in the first phase is when people get a lot of bad advice. And so you'll have, particularly if you're a young person, I think you'll have a lot of, call it the adults in the room telling you, oh, well, you should go work at this place to gain this experience and then do this.

14:33And then you'll have this foundation on which to start your thing. and what's going to happen to you if the thing fails. There's a lot of that. But I think the assessment of risk is very narrow. It's just through the lens of, well, if the thing you start fails, you're hosed. And what it underestimates is actually how much you learn and develop about yourself in the process of starting that thing. And I don't know that there's ever a better time to start something actually than when you're young and hard charging and you've got the energy and you're a little naive to the world. Because by the way, fast forward 20 years, you may have a family, you may have kids, you may all of a sudden feel like you need that stable salary.

15:27So there's always going to be different risk profiles. And for some reason, young people are told to play it safe a lot when I don't think that's actually particularly good advice. And the second phase that I was kind of getting to there of, okay, I've made the leap. That's a powerful moment because in some ways it's hard to go back, right? Now you just know, all right, I got to make this thing a success. And that's when you start actually realizing how hard it is. In some ways, it's actually good to not know quite how hard it is before making that leap because you're just filled with, at least I was, I was filled with rejection.

16:07Like just so many people saying no and this is going to fail and this is why. And I hadn't actually faced that much rejection in my life up until that point in time. So it was like a hard thing to learn how to cope with. it's important to know how much that phase of the journey often does come with that much rejection because I think that's something we hear again and again and again. Was there ever a point during that time or once you'd started the business and we're kind of figuring out how to scale it that you thought, you know, I wish I'd worked in private equity for a few years or I'd wish I'd worked in BC and seen how these things grow or I wish I'd worked in someone else's startup.

16:45Was there ever a time you thought that? No. It was more that I was in an immense amount of pain. I was in the center of the storm, but I knew that was where I belonged. Good answer. And look, I think acceptance is an important phase of entrepreneurship. You have to accept that it's going to be hard and painful and you're going to eat glass. I mean, it really, I think is almost a better framework than trying to keep telling yourself, oh, this is all rosy. And more often than not, you're just going to keep ending up in these situations that are quite daunting and figuring out how to pick yourself up and rise and rise and rise.

17:29But I will say the most fond memories I have of Whoop have been that those periods of time where your back's against the wall and you're on the cusp of failing and you figure out how to persevere. And then, you know, in that process, you learn a lot about yourself and your team and what resilience really is and just how deep that well is inside of you or any single person. And there's something kind of amazing about that. Yeah, I completely agree on that. And I would always, I mean, I have always said that as shit as those times have been, those times where it was like you really have been against the wall and it's really felt like, you know, we might not have a business in two months time or whatever it might be.

18:11Those are either the times that I feel like the way the team pulled together and the way I felt people work together and the way, you know, we believed in the company so much. Like out of that time, I remember literally losing probably like 99 % of my imposter syndrome or like any like confidence issues. Well, I'm glad you shared that. I think there's a lot right now that's being done as a disservice, particularly to younger people right now, growing up, students, people in college, people shortly out of college who are almost being told by society, hey, if you're too stressed, just take on less stress, do nothing.

18:52And I think as a consequence, you see a lot of young people with a great deal of fragility. And this is showing up in data in a lot of different ways. But the message of learn to cope with stress, become more resilient, I think is a really important message. And in part, that's some of the work we do at WHOOP is around understanding this relationship between strain and recovery and how it's not just taking on less, but creating a body for yourself and a way of life for yourself where you can take on more. And so anyway, I think all these things are related in an interesting way. Yeah, I completely agree.

19:34I want to talk about the beginning of the company. Obviously, you've now got to a point where you've raised a huge amount of money, you're valued at an incredible amount. I want to talk about getting to the point where you had your minimum viable product, getting to the point where, did you get money straight away before the product had been made? Well, the evolution was maybe we raised 300 grand from friends, family, former boss. We then raised maybe 400 grand from some angel investors. And that was over the course of like 12 months, by the way. And I've now raised over 400 million. Our last financing was 200 million.

20:16It was much easier to raise 200 million than it was to raise like the first 400 grand. And I say that just to emphasize a few things. One, it's actually just really hard to raise capital if you haven't done it before. It's a process. It's a skill like anything else. You have to grind at it. You have to develop yourself. You have to learn when to ask and when to move on. And it's also tied very closely to your track record and your credibility in the stage of the business. When I was 20, years old what did i know about building a wearable technology business up against nike and apple um okay now 12 years later leading market position you know recurring revenue business all these high profile playing people playing uh wearing it like okay actually all of a sudden now it's easy to raise capital so it's like it's a process right you have to develop these these skills and i think that's very important to highlight because i think that the there is an assumption that at a pre-seed or seed stage, it's going to be easier because it's smaller amounts of cash.

21:20Whereas also a lot of the time when you're talking to angel investors, the amounts they can invest are smaller too. So the amount of yeses you need to get in order to have a good amount of cash to start a business, if you're doing it that way around, it's hard. It's not an easy stage to be in, especially if you're up against second time founders who are starting new companies. And of course, people are going to put their money into them. Well, look, I mean, I think I was perpetually fundraising for the first two years of the company, which isn't, by the way, the way I would recommend it. I think you want to have a set time in which you raise capital and create a very competitive process.

21:55We can talk more about raising capital. But I wanted to make a slightly different point, which is I think that most startups or early technology companies, e-commerce businesses, et cetera, they take the form of two different types of company. One is this company which is lean and iterative expressions like test, iterate, fail. You can kind of zigzag your way to product market fit. You can show a lot of traction quickly. And through this process of constantly changing your methodology and really only having hypotheses and tests, you ultimately end up with something that theoretically people buy and becomes a business.

22:41That's category one of companies. Category two of companies is, look, we're going to build this thing and it's going to cost a lot of money. And then when we're done with it, everyone's going to buy it. And by the way, category two companies fail a lot more often, I think. But it's worth just being self-aware of which company you're building. And Whoop was very much so a category two company, which also meant that we had like no traction for a long time, like years really in the market. We had different iterations of the technology and different stages at which the technology was performant.

23:23But I think that also just made raising capital very hard. No, I can imagine. Yeah. At that beginning stage, how did you get to the point of building your first product? Like what went into that? So if you've raised a small amount of capital, I think you want to be really intentional about what it is that you're going to prove with that capital that's going to help you get the next batch of capital. If you're building especially this type two company, it's probably true in general, but if you're building like the big vision, this is the thing we're going to build and everyone's going to buy it, you need to show iterations towards that to the best you can.

24:01If I look back at the medical research or physiology research I did in school, Well, it really highlighted three categories of technology that I thought were important. The first was the PSG machine, which is the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you have any sleep issues, if you think you might have sleep apnea, you'll probably get hooked up to a PSG machine, which has these different nodes all over your body. You'll have to go to a sleep lab and you'll get your sleep graded by human beings. Okay, well, that's a pretty cumbersome experience. Can we take that technology and put it into a really small form factor and give you accurate sleep monitoring?

24:37Second was the chest strap. Heart rate monitor goes around your chest, really uncomfortable for men, almost intolerable for women, super old antiquated technology, but really useful for measuring your heart rate during exercise and understanding exertion during exercise. Okay, can we put that in a small form factor? And then third, electrocardiogram, best known for being able to detect issues with your heart, but beneath the hood could measure something called heart rate variability, which all this physiology research I was doing demonstrated to me that it was a fascinating lens into the state of recovery of your body.

25:19Can we put that in a small form factor? And when we looked at those three technologies, it seemed like the hardest thing, but perhaps the most impactful to be able to do out of the gates would be to replace the measurement for heart rate variability and to be able to replace the measurement for heart rate during exercise. Because we wanted to take the chest strap and put it in a small form factor and we wanted to be able to measure recovery. And just to say it, like we were initially targeting athletic performance, so we wanted to have a metric for strain, we wanted to have a metric for recovery.

25:54The thinking being, okay, if I know how recovered you are, I can tell you how much strain to take on your body. If you're run down, I can actually tell you to take on less strain. And all of a sudden, we can create this coach that's telling you what you should do on a daily basis. And so our very first prototype, which is this hideous, large, bizarre-looking prototype with cord coming out of it and a box that has to get plugged into the wall, but ultimately has a wristband that when you wear and you're hooked up to all this stuff, could measure heart rate and heart rate variability from the breast.

26:29And it was the first product to do that. And so the fact that we could demonstrate that this wacky contraption was able to measure these key things, allowed us to then prove, okay, we're going to take the wacky contraction and we're going to be able to put it into a smaller form factor. Wow. I think from even what the technology was doing at the time, to be able to imagine that going into something so small, I would not look at an EKG and be like, this could be on my wrist. Of course it could. The information itself on the kind of, I assume it's somewhat algorithmically run in terms of how it reports back to you and therefore how you know, I don't know, how your strain connects to your recovery or your HRV or whatever it might be.

27:17Did that research already exist or did you have to fund the research that made it make sense on like a little screen for someone? Medical research is an industry that suffers, I believe, from really small sample sizes and just generally slow iteration. Technology actually as an industry is kind of the opposite. You have large sample sizes and you actually want to move at a fairly rapid pace. And a lot of the studies that I was reading as a college student had 20 people in them. And, you know, big claims were being made based on those 20 people. And so I just thought, you know, I thought to myself, wow, like when we get this product on a hundred people, a thousand people, we're going to have actually like some of the largest physiological studies.

28:15And of course, now we have this profoundly large data set. So the faster answer to your question is, yes, all the work we've done has been based on medical research. Now we're at a stage where we're so big, we're doing a lot of the cutting edge research. You'll meet with our data science team and they'll be uncovering things that no one's ever talked about before. I'll give you an example because we just published this recently. So this measurement heart rate variability that I was mentioning before, really powerful for recovery. It turns out it has all these other really interesting signals. One, which we couldn't have anticipated, was around pregnancy.

28:56And what we found in looking at, again, a small study on, I believe it was 12 women, over three years, and they observed for 12 women who went through pregnancy that over the course of their pregnancy, their heart rate variabilities declined. So this would be a sign that they were potentially getting less fit or their body was under a lot of stress, which would make sense with, you know, the body evolving. But then very interestingly, at the 33rd week, these women experienced this sharp inflection in their data where all of a sudden their heart rate variabilities were rising right up to the day of giving birth.

29:37And so the researcher hypothesized, is heart rate variability an important biomarker for pregnancy? And is the 33rd week this important inflection point before someone delivers? So we read about this research and we went out to our members and within a week's time, we had 2000 pregnant women contributing to science and sharing their data. And what's powerful about this data set is not only was it normal pregnancies, it was 10 % of the pregnancies were early deliveries, which is consistent with pregnancy in general. And so then the question became, well, is this heart rate variability trend that I just described where it decreases and then shortly before birth increases or delivery increases, is that a phenomenon that's specific to the 33rd week?

30:34Or is it seven weeks back? Because if it's seven weeks back, then it's predictive. And sure enough, what we found was it's seven weeks back. And so now we're developing the capabilities to be able to show a pregnant woman when we think she may be able to deliver based on that inflection. That is incredible. That is so interesting. I can imagine that people who invested in you early on are feeling very good about themselves. Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating. And that's just, that's one category of an infinite number of things that is going on in our lives. That feels very exciting. That feels like a great, like, byproduct of the whole.

31:17It's amazing. I mean, you'll meet with our data science team and they'll be uncovering things that no one's ever talked about before. But I hadn't quite considered the effect of so many people wearing things that otherwise would only have been taken in very small, not just small sample sets, but also small timeframes and like very specific, like you could go for that test and you could be ill that day or you could go to that test and you could be super stressed or whatever it might be. There are control factors that we're not necessarily going to be able to bear in mind by having a small time frame.

31:48So I find that incredibly interesting based on how much data that can advance actually what we know about our bodies and how much you can then use that back into the data in terms of how to help people live better lives. How much did you have to raise before it got to the point that you created something like what you're wearing now? Was detached from wires? Was it complete wireless wearable? It would be somewhere between$10 million and$30 million. Okay. At$10 million, we had a product that we were making in small numbers but was worn by the best athletes in the world. Right. So I knew that I wanted professional athletes to be the first people to wear Whoop.

32:29And I knew that really for two reasons. One, I thought that professional athletes were the right people to buy it because they get paid millions of dollars based on how they recover but they don't know how they recover. So it felt like a breakthrough to be able to tell them a recovery score every day or tell them how they slept or tell them their strain. The hole that I saw in the sports market, if you will, was that everyone was so focused on exercise and no one was talking about the rest of the day. And by the way, that was my own mistake as a college athlete. I trained hard during practice, so I thought I'm just going to get better.

33:04But I also didn't sleep much and I'd go out drinking from time to time and whatever. Like you live your life. But if you're not as focused on sleep and recovery and diet and all these other things as you are on training, you actually don't get better, which sounds super obvious. But if you don't measure it, it's actually kind of hard to manage. So that was reason one. Pro athletes should want to wear this. They need the data. Reason two, though, was if we can get the world's best athletes to wear Whoop, we can create a whole brand around performance. And I always wanted Whoop to end up in the consumer market.

33:40I wanted to build a consumer brand. But wearable technology and in particular medical technology historically was very uncool. Just like categorically unsexy. If you wore a health monitor, it was like a sign that something was wrong with you. And so how can you create a health monitor people wear 24-7 that actually says something positive about you? Well, you ground it in performance. So that was why we started with professional athletes. And that strategy largely worked, albeit it was slower, it cost more. And it almost killed the business because it took us so long to have a real revenue-generating business.

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35:47But two of our first hundred users were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Right, and how did you get them to wear it? Well, the key to getting to anyone incredibly well-known, influential is to get to someone who has a big impact in that person's life that other people don't already know. So in the case of an athlete, everyone knows their agent. Everyone knows their coach. So going through those people, they're inundated. Everyone knows their wife, whatever, right? so this is 2014-15 it's changed a little bit now today but back then the personal trainer was actually kind of an unknown person you know instagram wasn't super popular yet you didn't have these like training videos and yet the personal trainer was the person who spent more time with their athlete than anyone else in that person's life and so i realized if we could get to the personal trainer and get them to try the product and by the way they had at some point had to like it, that trainer would actually be the right person to put it on the athlete.

36:55And so in the case of LeBron and Phelps and kind of going down the list, we tried to find their personal trainer. Have you heard of the Triangle Swimwear story? The what? Triangle Swimwear. It's a swimwear brand. No, I haven't heard of it. But their like big story, there was this one year where they were the biggest swimwear brand. I mean, a few years actually, and they were kind of absolutely everywhere. And it was before really influencer marketing. And so, or celebrities were influencers, but you know, more than that. But they, they really, they pinpointed Kendall Jenner as the person that they wanted to wear the bikinis.

37:29And they just sent to every single person in her friend group, didn't have followings, whatever it might be, sent to every single person apart from her. And obviously she got to a point where she was like, can I have one of these? Like all of my friends are wearing them. Like it's clearly the cool thing at the moment, which, you know, reminds me of that approach. In terms of building the right team to take what is not only a business, but something that redefines a whole space, that's what you've aimed to do, that's what you've been doing. How did you find the right people and what were the biggest lessons you had in hiring those right people?

38:06Well, there's a lot of things that come to mind in that question. I think that the first thing broadly that's true is if you're trying to create a new category, you need people who get excited about doing things that have never been done before, not scared. And by the way, that's a really important sorting mechanism and it's a pretty easy sorting mechanism. If you're in an interview with someone and you say to them, I'm going to be asking you to do something on your first day that no one's ever done before. Like they're immediately either going to be excited by that or terrified of that. And so you want to select, you know, self-select towards the ambitious, the people who are more comfortable with ambiguity, you know, the pirates, so to speak.

38:54and from there there's all sorts of different questions about well what stage is your business at and is the person that you're hiring right for the stage i think there's a big shift in what a company is at 20 people versus say 100 and up whoop today's close to 600 so i've seen sort of different evolutions but i think that the before 100 and after 100 is sort of an interesting tipping point. And I think particularly in those early days, you just want pure missionaries, like just obsessed with what can this be? They're scrappy, they're gritty. And in some ways, those are characteristics you really never want to lose.

39:35There comes a time where you may be more comfortable hiring a quote unquote quote, mercenary for a specific role as you can more narrowly define the box within which someone is supposed to execute their role. If you're building a self-driving car company, you might need an artificial intelligence person who's specifically good at LIDAR or some particular sensing thing. And that's a very specific hire that you just have to make because you need that that mercenary uh but for the most part i think you want to be hiring as many missionaries as possible you want them to be scrappy and gritty and depending on what you're actually trying to accomplish if you're trying to create something that's never existed before you have to self-select for people who want to do that and what would you say the biggest differences were in that change from like before 100 people to after 100 people and were there any before 100 because it feels like to even get to 100, there's like a 1 in 10 and 30 and 70.

40:40Yeah. One of the biggest things that you have to acknowledge as the founder is that your role is shifting from being founder to being CEO as the number of people grows. And it's an important transition to be really aware of because it can be a quite painful transition if you're not. I was someone who cared a lot. I've always cared a lot about details. And so I've gone kind of, I've always been able to go deep into the org to figure out what's going on. There's a stage though at which your output is really just the output of the six or eight people that report to you. And where you'll get yourself into trouble is if you're still trying to be that individual contributor that you were when the company was 20 people.

41:31By the way, when the company was 20 people, you could have been the lead salesperson. You could have been the best engineer. You could have been the product visionary. And just as the company grows, you want to be careful how much of that responsibility you're still carrying versus trying to be empowering a team that reports into you and putting a lot of focus on are you growing as a manager versus are you still solving all the problems yourself, so to speak. Yeah, we've talked about that a lot on this podcast in terms of the evolution towards more managerial roles as you move through your career and how a lot of the time that's not taught at any stage unless you go and do an MBA and there's obviously specific management aspects but it's not really always about people managing or how to get the how to inspire people the most or how to get the best work out of people dependent on their personality base and I feel like that's something that we often overlook in career trajectory as a whole because obviously it's absolutely something you need to master and I think a lot of the time we think for entrepreneurs it's not necessarily something you need to master whereas actually being able to teach people to do what you were so good at to get into the position you are now to be able to replicate that or even better do that to a higher standard because it's their area of expertise is I mean it's very very tough to be able to get that work out of people in the way you like it to a to an extent that is you know to the right scale and actually I think there's been so many points in in my career that I found that probably the most difficult thing, building a team, but not just making sure it's the right people with the right skill set and the right aptitudes, but also making sure that everything can get to a bigger level than what it was when you were doing it with so much passion, kind of not on your own, but, you know, to a smaller scale.

43:37Yeah, I think a lot about the decision making within an organization. So like pace and control are interesting levers to think about because they can end up being a little bit on opposite ends of the spectrum. If you want your organization to move really fast, what you need is everyone in your organization to be making decisions on a daily basis. The more decisions that are getting made, the faster things go. The more committees you have, the more processes you have, often the slower things will go. less decisions getting made. Take the most extreme example. Say every decision that a hundred person organization made was made by one person.

44:20You'd have a lot of control, but you wouldn't have a lot of pace. Well, what is that balance in between and where do you find yourself based on your business? Hard to say without actually knowing what someone's business businesses, I've found for Whoop that it's generally best the more decisions being made all the time versus I made the decision. Having said that, you still have to figure out where are these moments where you're going to insert yourself to have a strong point of view. And another good framework to thinking about this is whether the decision is going to have a small impact or a big impact, and whether the decision is a one-way door or a two-way door.

45:07So what's a one-way door decision? Well, it might be the capability of your key product launch. What is that key feature that a product you're launching has? You only get to launch that thing once, right? So that's a one-way door. A two-way door might be the specific price of something, like a newer product. You can change the price later, but that's still fairly important, but it's still actually a two-way door when you really stop to think about it. Anyway, a lot of decisions are two-way doors that at the time feel like they're one-way doors. It's just important to really ask yourself one-way versus two-way and big versus little.

45:52Ideally, one-way door decisions that are big decisions, like big impact decisions, you can get yourself more involved in. And what you want to avoid doing is finding yourself making key decisions on two-way doors that are actually small impact. Because that's all of a sudden where you realize you're deep in the org or you're micromanaging and this and that. Before we move on to more of the specifics about Whoop itself and kind of really diving into that journey on the side of what the company's become and why you've built it that way in terms of the product itself, I'd love to know what the biggest differences you found are between running a$3.6 million company and a$3.6 billion company that it is now.

46:42Well, there's a lot of fundamental differences about the business itself. You have a lot more employees. You have a bigger customer base. You have a lot more revenue. The decisions that you make that are one-way door decisions have more consequence, and so there's a little bit more weight that comes with them. I would actually say, though, the biggest difference is how I feel doing the job. When Whoop was this really small fledgling company and we didn't have customers yet and I really didn't know who I was as a businessman or an entrepreneur, I carried a lot of insecurity probably. And I also, there was like this existential threat, you know, to the work that was being done.

47:36Like, is this actually, can we actually build this technology? Like, can this even exist? Can we actually get people to buy it? Are all these things that people are telling me, are they right? Like, maybe this is going to fail. Like, maybe this is a terrible idea. Like, why do I think I can do this? that noise in the back of your head is very real when you haven't proven anything yet. And I certainly hadn't proven anything, at least at that stage of the business. And at least now I can look back on 12 years and say, there's been a lot of things that we were right about. You know, there were a lot of shots on goal that went in, you know, and, you know, I am capable of doing this.

48:29And so that's not to say that the challenges we face today are smaller than the challenges we face as a little company. In fact, they're much bigger and they're much more consequential because we have a lot of people that are counting on us. But the way that I feel making those decisions is very different because I feel I've earned my way to being in that seat. And I've also, in parallel, developed tools and techniques to manage the stresses of being a CEO. And at that smaller level, how did you get yourself through that lack of confidence or those times of insecurity? It's one of those things where, yes, there was self-doubt, but there was also doubt purely based on the fact that it hadn't been done before.

49:19So, of course, there's going to be doubt because if it hasn't been done, why hasn't it been done and can it be done? But internally and mentally, how did you get yourself through that in a way that you ultimately came out the other side? Well, I think a lot of it was kind of white knuckling it and a little bit of fake it till you make it. I think I also, I put up a real wall to negative feedback. And by the way, that was a wall that I later had to tear down because you need that feedback in your life. But I just felt like I was overwhelmed by the number of people telling me this thing was going to be unsuccessful or the different reasons that what we were doing was wrong.

49:58And when you're building a technology that takes years to come to market, you can't really swerve what that technology is. I was very committed to what we were building and I was really pretty confident it was right. And so I just lost sight of any benefit to listening to this sort of negative feedback. And look, that's a defense mechanism and some of it stems from insecurity. When you're the most secure in your role, you can actually hear negative feedback and it just bounces off of you. And you can hear it without listening to it. And that takes some time and some confidence building in your own life.

50:44So I think it was a combination of grinding through it, getting more comfortable with a pain threshold because that's also what happens is you just feel like you're in a lot of pain at times because it matters a lot to you and it hurts to have all these people say, yeah, this isn't going to work or why are you doing this or you've got the wrong strategy. But you just kind of keep putting one foot in front of the other. That was kind of always the mantra in the back of my mind was just keep going, keep going. And now you've built that evidence that you can do it. Do you find that insecurity or self-doubt coming back at all, particularly in big, like, I don't know, funding rounds or inflection points within the product or new product launches?

51:32No. I mean, I feel pretty grateful for the fact that I've been able to build a business to this stage. And even if Whoop were gone tomorrow or I, for some reason, wasn't at Whoop tomorrow, like, I think I would feel pretty empowered to do the next thing. Yeah. And so that kind of just comes with, again, remember earlier we talked about this idea of risk and I think you learn so much about yourself from the process of taking on something really hard and particularly trying to build a business that whatever you end up doing next, independent from the success of that thing, is probably a great stepping stone.

52:11No, that makes sense. I want to dive into specific decisions you made about the product and the business as a whole, especially the ones that you think mean that you cut through this kind of fitness wearables noise and have ended up so huge. The first thing, which I'm sure you get asked a lot, is what was behind the decision not to have a screen? I knew you were going to ask about the screen. So the thing about having a screen is that once you have a screen, you tell the time. And once you tell the time, you're a watch. Okay. The problem with being a watch is that people have great affinity for a lot of other watches.

52:49And by the way, watches are like the original wearable technology. Some of the most beautiful pieces of jewelry in the world are watches. What watch you wear says a lot about who you are and your identity. Long story short, I didn't want to compete with watches. And at the same time, there's a lot of scope creep once you put a face on something. You'll be sitting in a meeting and it'll start with, well, it'll show you your heart rate and your time. And then someone smart will say, well, shouldn't it show you some of the other metrics? And then you'll agree to that. And then someone smart will say, well, shouldn't it also alert you when you get an email?

53:30And you're like, yeah, well, I guess, yeah, we should do that. And then next thing you know, well, what about a phone call? Well, what about a text? Next thing you know, you've built a smartwatch. Right. And all of the resourcing that you had previously put into health and fitness and being the best health and fitness monitor in the world is now getting divided up into 50 other things that you didn't even realize you were building. And I think this can happen to a lot of companies with really good intentions. Again, each one of those things was easy to say yes to. But when you wake up after 50 yeses and all of a sudden you're building a smartwatch and not a health monitor, you're a different company.

54:10And by the way, you're squarely building what Apple is building now. So good luck with that. So by being really, really focused on health monitoring, we've also been able to be the most accurate at it. We've been able to collect the most data at it. And Whoop is great at all the things that we do for all the things that we don't do. Extra USPs always feel like a good thing when building a product. It feels like a reason for someone to buy something. It feels like, well, if we put a watch in this and we put your text messages in this, then you're not just buying your fitness data, but you're also buying convenience.

54:42You're buying whatever it might be. You can factor in the cost of what you would usually spend on a watch and you can spend it on us instead. And I think that's so interesting because obviously with you, you very much decided that those extra USPs actually take away from the product and position yourselves differently. Precisely. I mean, I think that independent from this question of should Whoop have a screen, like there's a more macro question of does the world need more screens? Does any consumer need more screens? And in general, you know, I've been critical of technology for trying to invade your life.

55:16You know, these devices around us are constantly kind of pinging us and they're constantly trying to distract us. And I got attracted to this idea of building technology that was actually meant to be in the background. Even the design of Whoop is designed to not look all that much like technology. We're essentially hiding all of the capabilities underneath a comfortable band and a good looking clasp. And by the way, it's the most customizable wearable in the world too. So you can have it in 75 ,000 different combinations of colors and looks and feels. So we went more in the direction of comfort and customization and a fashion identity, if you will, than in the direction of, oh, let's create another phone.

56:03Did you get any negative feedback or pressure from investors or internal team or based on that no screen decision? Yeah, from virtually everyone. By the way, it's our number one requested thing from our customers. Well, it's because they then don't need to spend on their watch or whatever it might be. They can justify it better and all of that. But this is where focus groups are kind of interesting and confusing and it goes back to what's your vision for the future that you're trying to build towards. One of the most common things that our customers ask for is a screen. The number one cited positive is that it doesn't have a screen.

56:45So – What's your master? Right. Working out which noise is the noise to listen to. Yeah. And I'm almost positive that if we put a screen on it, people would wear it less. Yeah. I can imagine that. Obviously, as a company, but also as a product, values this idea of strain versus recovery. Building a multi-billion dollar company. Not a lot of recovery in there. How have you managed to instill that within yourself, within the company ethos, within this idea that you need to work really, really hard towards something and not have this idea of 50-50 balance, it's harmony instead, as you've said, whilst also valuing this recovery to an extent that might not be to the extent that an athlete might be able to recover?

57:40Well, the training analogy is a good place to start. You want your strain level that you put on your body during exercise or throughout the day to be equivalent to how prepared your body was for it. Let's take an extreme example. Let's say an athlete's really, really run down, low recovery, and then they take on a lot of strain. That's going to increase the likelihood that they get injured, right? That's going to be a negative performance. Let's take the opposite. Let's say you're peaking physically and you don't do much that day. Well, that's a missed opportunity, right? So a lot of people get focused then just on that relationship, but there's a bigger thing happening in the background, which is actually this question of, well, how can you be really well recovered all the time?

58:32How can you be able to take on more and more day over day? And this is where it starts to feel very relevant for everyone who wears Whoop, mind you, most of which aren't athletes at all. So as a CEO, the thing I focus on is how am I going to put myself in an environment where I can take on more stress and still feel fine and comfortable? and how can I make my body more resilient to stresses and what are different techniques that work through that lens. And so I've developed certain habits that I would say are great in that category. Like I meditate every morning for 20 minutes. I am really into like hot-cold therapy.

59:22So I'll take hot saunas and steam showers. I'll take ice baths, freezing cold showers. I, you know, I'm pretty deliberate about when I'm drinking coffee and try not to drink coffee after 2 p.m. so that it doesn't affect my sleep that night. I've got a whole sleep routine that tries to optimize the amount of hours I spend in bed being high quality hours. So, you know, a lot of people who say that they don't get enough sleep, say they don't have time to get enough sleep. And so, you know, if you ask a friend, how much sleep did you get last night? Maybe she says, okay, well, I went to bed at 11, I woke up at six, I got seven hours, that's pretty good.

1:00:10Well, it turns out the seven hours she spent in bed consisted of time where she was awake, she was in light sleep, she was in REM sleep, and she was in slow-wave sleep. It turns out of all that sleep, the time that really matters is your REM and slow wave. Light and awake really doesn't improve your body all that much. And she may be someone who gets five and a half hours out of that seven hours in restorative sleep, which by the way would be amazing. Like she would feel amazing if that was her every day. On the flip side, she might be someone who gets 30 minutes of REM and slow wave. That's a pretty huge spectrum.

1:00:49Just again, same person who spent seven hours in bed. And by the way, the person who's getting 30 minutes every night, they have unquestionably a lot of problems in their life and a lot of health issues. And so how do you take the time that you spend in bed and make it the most productive for yourself? Make it the highest quality. We haven't even talked about just spending more time in bed. We're just talking about you already do this thing. How can you make it great? And to me, it's kind of a crazy black box in people's lives, this idea that you're going You know, just have like a quarter to a third of your life and have no idea what's going on and no way to improve it and not even really think about improving it.

1:01:27So, you know, that's another thing that I've kind of dialed in through some trial and error. But it's a combination of like really cold bedroom, going to bed and waking up at similar times, you know, magnesium, a little bit of melatonin if I'm traveling, really dark room. Like there's different things that you can do to optimize. I'm like taking nights in my brain. Magnesium nights. There you go. We're going to have a full bedtime routine this evening. I'm so interested in what you said about the point in pregnancy to which you were able to predict that, you know, or potentially able to predict that a child is going to be delivered early.

1:02:03I'd love to know if there are any other sex-specific differences that you've noticed in the data or based on the difference between a male wearing a whoop versus a female wearing a whoop in terms of like we know the hormone cycles are 28 days versus 24 hours. All of these differences. I'm really interested in to standout differences that you've noticed as a company. Yeah, there's a lot of research that we're doing in this area. We recently added menstrual cycle coaching in the Whoop app. So a woman can get different coaching based on where she is in her cycle. And that will evolve for different phases.

1:02:44And there's certain foods that are better to eat. And there's certain practices as it relates to caffeine and stimulants that are better during different phases. So that's also something we just added this Whoop coach inside the app. is in partnership with OpenAI, it allows you to actually talk to Whoop. So you can ask questions about, okay, given that I just had my period or my period's in this upcoming day, this is what I'm hoping to do. And it'll give you feedback on that, or it'll ask you questions, and you can interact with it, which is pretty powerful as an experience. So we've also now got a whole pregnancy experience in the app.

1:03:26So if a woman's pregnant, It'll monitor the three trimesters. It'll monitor postpartum. It'll give you feedback on how your body's evolving in that context. So these are all female-specific features that we've been working on. Yeah, amazing, because I talk a lot about how underserved we are data-wise in terms of female health and the fact that before 1993, the clinical trials with women were pretty much non-existent unless they were specific to female conditions and therefore, you know, our knowledge on sleep, our knowledge on exercise, our knowledge on how much we should be eating, all of these things are vastly underserved within the kind of female space.

1:04:08So I'm very interested in terms of with the data set you're getting, how much progress can be made in that direction. Yeah, it's something like 97 % of medical research has been on men, which also means 3 % has been on women, which is pretty staggering inequality. And so we have what's called Whoop Labs. We've got a whole research center dedicated to this. We recruit men and women in equal numbers, and it's something we're really focused on. No, I can imagine that's going to do a lot purely because of the data. I mean, there's just not enough data. We've had hundreds of years of medical trials that are, you know, not inclusive of women and, you know, what we can get in the right direction in terms of that will be incredibly interesting.

1:04:57I'd love to know what in building the entire company have been come to mind as the most challenging moments. Well, there was a phase in 2017 and 18, where we went from working with professional athletes, sports teams, leagues, we had built this cool brand in and around performance and we were transitioning to being a consumer company and yet we hadn't figured out the right business model yet. So we were selling the hardware as just like a one-time$500 fee and not a lot of people were buying it. And so we were in this weird stage where we had done all the brand building. We had built the technology, which It took years.

1:05:46We're now five or six years into building this company, and yet we still hadn't quite figured out the business. That was a very painful, probably two-year period, where I was just constantly fighting to keep the company alive. It was very hard to raise capital. There were a lot of reasons why the company should have failed. Objectively, if you're six or seven years into building a company and you don't know what your business model is, you kind of should fail. So there's a lot of reasons to look at it and be like, yeah, this was a great research project. This was a cool pro athlete thing, but it's not a business.

1:06:25And so that was quite a lot to overcome. And how did you reach the breakthrough there? Was it changing the pricing structure? Was it changing the marketing? Yeah, we had a huge breakthrough, which was we flipped the whole business model on its head. It went from being a lot of money upfront, one-time fee, never pay again, to it's a$20 to$30 a month subscription, everything's included, cancel when you want. And what that huge flip created was an enormous boost in demand because now people could sign up for Whoop for$30 and decide whether they liked it over time. And at that point, we'd already built a product that was pretty sticky.

1:07:09And so we became a recurring revenue business and a fast-growing business, both of which are – that's a good formula for raising capital. So from there, the business gained a lot of momentum. But that phase between selling consumer hardware and turning it into a subscription with traction because it wasn't just that, okay, we're now a subscription. It was, well, six months, 12 months later, they're still paying you. There's a lot of questions like that. So that was a very painful period. And what made you, was it your idea or I assume there was an idea to turn it into a subscription and like, did you have any gut resistance towards it?

1:07:57Was it something that you were like, yep, let's try it. We need to try it. Like we're really at the stage where it has to work. Yeah. Yeah. Fortunately, our business was enough broken that it was like, okay, we're going to do something pretty dramatic. It wasn't, oh, we're going to go from 500 to 450. That's going to solve the problem. It was, no, we've got really the wrong setup here. This isn't working. Our customers buy it. They wear it for a really long time, but no one's buying it. And so clearly something's wrong about the way we're offering this up front. And it's worth acknowledging that was like a bet the business decision.

1:08:37Because if that didn't work, it was highly unlikely we were going to get another bite at the apple of reinventing our business model. And did you work that out by customer research? Or was it kind of focus groups of talking about these things or getting surveys out to people? Or was it just a big old stab in the dark? It was largely just an intuition that that was the better path. Now, we did have two very obvious data points. One was when people bought Whoop, they kept wearing it for a long time. And two was not that many people are buying it when it's this much up front. So how do you work with that equation?

1:09:14Well, and to be fair, there were different versions of it. Could you have a hardware fee and a lesser subscription. And I just realized it was most profound to go all in on this idea of subscription. And what I underestimated, but in a positive way, was just how much that was going to change our business. Because all of a sudden, when you're fighting for that dollar every day, every week, every month, it makes you as an organization just much more customer obsessed. And it's all about, well, what are you doing for your members today? the difference in being a hardware company is you sell something to someone and all of a sudden you almost don't want to do them any favors until you build the next thing so you can sell them the next thing whereas if you're a subscription you want to actually be constantly iterating along that way right that makes a lot of sense and before we finish what would you say the best piece of advice you've ever been given is?

1:10:13It probably goes back to those early days of having to tear that wall down that I put up. And I was very stubborn and I didn't, you know, it was kind of my way or the highway. And I wasn't good at engaging a lot of diverse viewpoints, in part because it was a coping mechanism for the fragility of the company, maybe even my fragility in running it. And I had an advisor say to me, you know, you don't have to listen to everyone, but you should just hear what they're saying. And it was just a useful framing. It was like, yeah, I mean, why can't I acknowledge these different viewpoints? Why do I just have to put up a wall to them.

1:11:01And now the interesting thing is as you've experienced more success or as you've put some wins on the board and more and more people are inclined to just agree with you, now you're actually kind of seeking dissenting opinion, right? And now when someone really disagrees with me, it's almost a source of enthusiasm a little bit. Like now I'm curious, what is it this person knows that I don't know? Why do I feel so strongly about what I do? Do I actually feel so strongly about what I do? Okay, but now you're having a healthy dialogue with yourself and with the things on the phone. I had that dream again.

1:11:42My small business needs IT help, but I don't use LinkedIn, and I hire wrong. So then I'm doing IT, and when I go to plug the servers in, they become sentient, and they won't let us access our network almost before they're chain emails and memes to more and more and more people. And then I wake up. Don't let hiring nightmares ruin your dreams. LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant finds and invites best fit candidates to apply so you can discover talent you may have missed. Get 50 % off your first job post at linkedin.com slash Pandora offer. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by Morgan Stanley's Thoughts on the Market.

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1:13:34The table, so to speak. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, I think it's incredibly valuable. I also think that there are probably so many people with a significant wall-up, especially if they're doing something that's difficult and getting a lot of negative feedback and almost needing to put that wall up to protect themselves every day, but at the same time it's not helpful because you're not moving in the right direction a lot of the time. What advice would you give to someone who is in that position, who maybe has an inkling that they have that wall or has been told that they have that wall and needs to kind of think about bringing it down?

1:14:08Well, I mean, I sit here saying, you know, I've been able to tear that wall down And I've sort of would say I've matured as a human as a consequence of that. There is something to be said, though, for you have to get your thing off the ground. Like people like to ask me, okay, if you go back and change one thing, what would you change? If you could go back and tell your younger self something, like what would you – and the answer is nothing because I'm happy with where I am today. You know, and so you have to – I do think if you go back and you tweak something here or you change something there, maybe the whole – the rest of it unravels.

1:14:46And there is something I think that early on founders know, some intuition, some – who knows where it's coming from, coming from within. Often it's things that people can't even express. But it's a point of view that's strong. And I think that there's something valuable about that. And I do feel that entrepreneurs let others creep in too much on that vision and on that point of view in the world. and so some of tearing that wall down is becoming a better manager and becoming a better human and and yet there's there's an aspect to when you first are trying to get something off the ground which is like you know you have a point of view on the world like take it on and you're the one who's taken the money and you're the one who's you know yeah said you're gonna do it so keep the wall at points, know when the wall needs to be up and like when you need to be able to have blinkers on and block out the noise, but also gradually being able to tear that down when you feel safe to do so and putting yourselves in positions where you do feel safe to do so, even just as that person said, hearing it, even if you're not going to listen to it.

1:16:03Yeah. I mean, I think that there's certainly a phenomenon where kind of having the blinders on can get you from point A to point B. I just think that you'll be a much better CEO in the long run when you can take the blinders down but still run in a straight line. I like that one. Thank you so much. You've been amazing. Yes, it's been great. Thanks for having me.