Will Ahmed - Founder and CEO of WHOOP | Building a $3.6 Billion Dollar Health Company

Today, my guest is Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Woop, which has developed next-generation wearable technology for optimizing human performance and health. Woop has raised more than $400 million dollars from investors and is currently valued at $3.6 billion, making it the most valuable, standalone, wearables company in the world. Will has recruited an active advisory board that consists of some of the world's most notable cardiologists, technologists, marketers and designers. He is a member of the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School, where he provides counsel to the dean and faculty on topics related to the strength and health of the institution. He was also named 2021 Sports Business Journals 40 under 40, as well as 2020 Fortune 40 under 40 health care list, and previously named to Forbes 30 under 30 and Boston Business Journals 40 under 40. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. 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Learn more at HubSpot.com slash sales. What was the rabbit hole that you went down to start? Well, it's a great observation, and I would say it's true. I probably gravitate towards depth over breadth. I am kind of someone who follows his passions, and so I was growing up, I was always into sports and exercise, and that was certainly a big part of my childhood, big part of my life, exercising team sports, you name it. I played squash at Harvard, so I was a college athlete, and the process of training every day, three hours, four hours, the time commitment being similar or even longer, I just got very caught up on this question of, how could I better understand what I was doing to my body? What does it mean to get fitter? What does it mean to train properly? What does it mean to overtrain or under train? Why do some athletes get injured and some don't? What is the other 20 hours of the day when you're not exercising due to your body? I thought these were fairly fundamental questions, and so I expected quick answers, and what I found instead was like a real absence of information, which frankly seems surprising, and I thought there should be good ways to understand the state of your body. And I think to your question about things that I've always gravitated to, like if I go back to my early childhood as well, I always gravitated to technology. When I was 13 years old, I had the first voice recorder that you could talk to that would then type what you said. I thought that would save me a lot of time in school. Turns out that technology actually did need a couple more decades to get good. But I bought the first Palm Pilot that could get on the internet with cattying money that I saved. I had one of the first iPods in my class. So I was someone who really liked new technology. And I think in the back of my mind, I always knew that technology, particularly computers, were going from being on your desk to your lap to your pocket to what seemed inevitable would be on your body and even in your body. And so we're talking about a time frame in which I was starting whoop. I was, you know, around 20 years old thinking about this idea. I had just gone from a blackberry to an iPhone. And apps were becoming a thing. So it struck me that these different things were all about to collide. This idea that technology was getting smaller. This realization that you didn't know anything about your body and my experience as being an athlete. And so I ended up doing an enormous amount of physiology research. I ended up doing an enormous amount of market research on why this technology didn't exist in an accessible form factor. And that body of work became the call it a business plan for starting the company. And you know, you made a really good point about health and wellness and not really understanding what's happening to our bodies because we look at the average person that goes to the gym and they fall into almost like like ideological dogmas about health and wellness. And this is something that's happened for a significant period of time. And there is data out there. And there are people that study the journals. I mean, I just had Lane Norton on the show and he goes very deep into the actual science behind and he looks at consensus and he looks at which papers lean this way versus the other way in terms of what health wellness nutrition does to your body. But very few people look at it and say, Hey, there's there's something that we should probably just instead of just guessing and following this guru or that diet or that fat almost akin to a religion. And let's just see what our bodies are doing and understand it. And it seems, you know, now it's a new fat where people are very focused on their health and wellness. But I'm also curious as to the lens that you look at health and wellness through why in your mind, do you think you took this very pragmatic data driven almost it would be common sense to be able to track this versus I would say without putting a number to it like 95 plus percent of the population that just falls into camps of what's already there. Well, I didn't start whoop to make a lot of money and I didn't want to create a product just to sell a lot of a product. You know, it wasn't it wasn't starting a business for starting a business is sake. It was really the fundamental question was, well, how can you measure the human body to tell someone what they should do? And because that was our focus, that core problem that I experienced as an athlete, because that was our focus, it first of all led us to having a lot of integrity around data collection, data accuracy, competing with medical technology, not competing with step counters, you know, there were all of a sudden there was this enormous amount of competition. I'll say competition in quotes because I was felt like it was a different thing, but, you know, V1 step counters. And there were 10 products that I could list off right now, ranging from the best sports apparel brands, Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma, great technology companies, Fitbit, Jawbone, Quantus, others, and then big big tech companies even entering the space like Intel and Microsoft and others. And yet they were all doing this thing, which was, what can we sell to the mass market? That they already believe in basically. Yeah, and like let's invent steps as like this new thing that is your health unlock. But to me, it felt like there was very little substance to it. And so I was really interested in can we measure things that are medically and scientifically relevant and validated. And by the way, we're going to start actually with a population that knows they need it, professional athletes, because professional athletes obsess with their health and fitness. So in a way, I almost de-risked our market by targeting people who got paid tens of millions of dollars to worry about their bodies. Because they're the most dialed in. They matter the most to them, not the casual, trying to lose weight in new years going to the gym person. Yeah, I always believed we'd get to the mass market, which is really where we are today, where we have consumers of every shape and size, with a lot of different, by the way, motivations for wearing whoop. But I felt that the best way to get there was to start with really accurate data and the world's best athletes and move in that direction. I love that. And I think that you had some, you had two huge athletes in your first 100 customers. Just as an entrepreneur, I can't remember. There was one of them, LeBron James, I think, if I remember incorrectly, or was it somebody else? Okay, there was two. LeBron James and my develops were two of our first 100s. That's the other one. Yeah. How do you, as an entrepreneur? 15. So if you go back in time, they both were kind of like at the peak of their powers in 2015. Yeah. So as an entrepreneur, you're starting this out. Maybe walk me through where they even engaged with whoop, what version of whoop was that? How do you get this new piece of tech in front of these athletes that have this army of coaches behind them that are supporting their progress? They're probably looking at you like, what is this guy bringing to market that? What is he saying that he can measure on my athletes? How is he saying he's better than me? Well, I think the secret to getting to anyone famous in the world is identifying someone in that person's life who has a big influence on them, who everyone else doesn't already know. And so in the case of professional athletes, that is not their agent or their coach or their spouse or partner because everyone inundates those people to get to the athlete. And it turned out back then, it's changed a little bit. But back then, the personal trainer was a pretty unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And yet they would spend in some cases eight, 10 hours a day with that person. You know, LeBron James spends more time with Mike Menseas, his trainer, probably than his wife. I mean, it's just by virtue of being a professional athlete. And so in the case of some of these very high profile athletes, we went to their personal trainers. And also in the case of whoop, that was actually the right person to try the product before putting it on the athlete because we needed the trainer to be an ally anyway. And then at the end of the day, the product either delivers or it doesn't. I mean, that was our version one product. It probably had an 18 to 20 hour battery life. So people were constantly swapping on and off battery packs, which was part of the reason we invented we invented the battery pack because we wanted people to never take it off. And, uh, yeah, it was pretty amazing. I mean, it was very validating to have athletes of that caliber wearing our product when no one else was. But it also then reminded me that's part of what it takes to become an athlete of that caliber, right? You you're constantly looking for that 1% edge and pushing that envelope. So when you take this product to market, so V1 of whoop, you have LeBron James, you have Michael Phelps, which is absolutely phenomenal. What are those most important health markers that you're measuring? Because like you mentioned before, they were looking at steps that seemed always as an athlete myself, not at that level. But still an athlete, that always seemed like a weird measure of health. So I can see objectively you're looking at that saying, hmm, I'm a college athlete. I think there's a lot more that we can do than just look at steps. So what are those first few things that you include in V1 of whoop? Well, we set out to replace the chest strap, which was a heart rate monitor kind of, you know, around your chest, that was good at measuring exercise. We set out to replace the electrocardiogram, which measured heart rate variability and heart rate variability happens to be really important for measuring recovery. And we set out to replace the PSG machine, which is the gold standard for sleep. And in short, what that meant was three daily scores, strain, which is everything, you know, related to stress, cardiovascular exertion, recovery, which is really how much strain should you put on your body? And sleep, which is, of course, how much restorative sleep are you getting every night? And that as a cycle still exists today on whoop, where we're trying to live a step ahead of you, you're getting 24, seven coaching. And you know, whoop will say in the morning, okay, you've got an x percent recovery. If it's high, take on a lot of strain, if it's low, maybe even rest don't work out. And then over the course of the day, you accumulate strain, which whoop is automatically measuring. At the end of the day, whoop looks at what you did to your body. It looks at the sleep debt that's accumulated. And it says, okay, you should go to bed at this time to recover for tomorrow. So it's this, you know, nice circular loop, sleep recovery, strain, reset, and whoop living a step ahead. And so you've obviously tested this out with again, these high performing athletes. So the individual that's now mass market, they're just trying to get into slightly better shape health, whatever that metric or that verbiages. What does this mean for them? What is this? How radical of a life shift is what whoop is recommending say versus the quote, unquote standard average American going about their day, maybe going to the gym once or twice a week, which would already be great if they do that. But what is it recommending compared to what the average person does now? Well, I think there's a huge difference in your just general self awareness of measuring your body versus not. So step one is just wearing whoop. And when you start wearing it, all of a sudden, you're creating a baseline on yourself. You're now going to understand with no intervention, how much sleep do I get? Is it good sleep? Is my body generally recovered or am I generally run down? Am I putting exertion on my body to get stronger, to get fitter? Are there metrics that demonstrate I'm in good health for my age? How stressful is my life? Because whoop measures stress throughout the day. And then how are lifestyle and behavior decisions making affecting my body? Okay, you drink three times a week. What happens when you drink alcohol to your body the next day? Do you feel good about that? Does your body seem more run down than you were expecting? What might you not be realizing about your day to day? Could you be getting sick? Could you be peaking physically? And maybe it's time to push yourself. So again, with very little intervention, all of that's going to become very clear just from starting to acknowledge the data. You know, someone spends seven hours in bed. They think they get seven hours of sleep. Newsflash, you spend seven hours in bed. You spend a lot of that time not getting sleep. And you want to make your sleep as efficient as possible. So that's a great example of something that all of a sudden when you look at the data, you know, an alarm bell goes off. Okay, well, what can I do actually just to make my seven hours more efficient? Right? Because most people complain they don't have enough time for sleep. Look, you're already dedicating at least a quarter of your life to sleeping. Why don't we try to figure out what's going to make that quarter a more productive quarter of your life? Right? Fairly simple concept. And that's where then the intervention start to come. So whoop might observe certain lifestyle decisions. Your diet, your hydration, your alcohol consumption, a lack of mindfulness, stress levels. When you exercise in the morning or in the evening, all these things whoop will tell you what's working and what's not. And it'll start to help you make shifts. It'll also give you a kick in the ass from time to time. You know, if you're peaking and your your body is well recovered, like let's get some exercise. Let's get active, right? If you're run down though, and you're maybe a hard charging person, whoop will be a product that tells you for the first time, hey, give yourself a rest. Do less, take a nap. So it's, you know, I think that's where people all of a sudden realize, wow, there's a lot of information I can have at my fingertips. And if I start just listening to a few things here, how much better do I feel? Wow. I think that what it does is it's bringing a mass, like you said, a massive amount of self-awareness. Humans have a ton of bias in everything they do. And I think that this is really, it's removing a lot of the bias in your day to day. When you look at the people that are using this, and when you go out into the market, now you're worth, you know, value, valuation, several billion dollars is a huge market for you've built a huge company. Excuse me, but there's also a huge market and a huge market of competitors. And I'm very curious when you were building this out, where was, where was Apple? Where was Fitbit? Was that a concern for you at all? Because it seems like there was already these big technology players that were competing or now are competing in the space. And I think whoop does quite a bit more than the data points that they collect. But at the same time, version one, was it already being outpaced by a Fitbit, by an Apple, by all the other competitors you just mentioned, or was this already light years ahead? And is that the first mover advantage that allowed you to capture share the market? And now you have the little customer base and that's where you grow from? I would say whoop has always been different. I think that you're not trying to compete. That's probably the key word. From an outside in, I think there's a perception that these products all compete with one another. And that may be fair, a consumer has to choose between them. But for 10 years at whoop, we've never said, oh, this competitor has this feature, so we're going to do it. We've kind of always stuck to what is the problem we're trying to solve? Who are we really focused on? And what are all the things as a consequence we're not doing? So I'll give you one simple example. Whoop doesn't have a screen. It's not a watch. We have zero apps on top of health and fitness. You're not going to do phone calls, push notifications, emails, any of it. And the reason for that is that we want to be entirely focused on health and fitness. Another reason for it is once you're a watch, then you can't wear two watches. And so you're all of a sudden whoop would then be competing with every watch, including Apple, including Rolex, spill in the blank. Pick your favorite watch print. So that would be one specific example for how we've chosen to be different. Every single product that we've talked about today that's not whoop measures steps. Whoop doesn't measure steps. We don't think it's a particularly useful metric. We don't think it's physiologically that relevant. So we don't measure it. These are just examples of whoop being different. And there's been a lot of really good companies that have entered the wearable space and unfortunately failed. And I think it's because this space touches a lot more than technology. It blends into identity and fashion and who you are because when you wear a product 24-7, right? How many products do you wear 24-7? Not many. Really? Yeah. When you wear a product 24-7, it starts to say a lot about who you are. And so I think that's the piece that technology companies didn't get right. They missed a lot of the aesthetic and the identity and what is this product make me feel? And I think on the flip side, a lot of the sports apparel brands that are actually great at brand and design really failed at building technology. And so you had this sort of interesting lane that whoop could occupy that tried to borrow from the best of sports apparel brands and technology companies. So I talked to me about some of the pains that you have growing a business that okay, from the outside looking in, it looks like it may be similar to others but when you're actually in this space and you've potentially invested in or tried other wearables, whoop is very different. So early stage entrepreneur, you're building this from scratch. Did you raise money, did you try and bootstrap, building MVP, prototype? Walking through something like those first initial pains that you had when you're trying to make something that's that novel to market. Well, it's worth saying that I started with when I was 22 years old and I didn't realize how much capital the concept was going to require. And so pretty much for the first like seven years of the company's history, I was in like a constant phase of having to raise capital and whoop constantly raising out, running out of money. And that was just, it was just really hard. I mean, honestly, because we, as I talked about, we set out to build really ambitious technology that didn't exist. So that's expensive. And then on top of that, we focused on initially professional athletes, which is a small market. And so fast forward five years from starting the company, we had great technology and great brand positioning, but we still didn't really have a business. And so that made that made raising capital hard and time consuming and a lot of people asked, well, you know, is this ever going to be a high revenue business and this and that? I think one of the most important decisions that we made was shifting the business to a subscription where you can now sign up for woop for as little as $30 and you get this high piece, high tech piece of technology in, you know, in the mail. And you get to decide over time if you want to keep using it. And so it really aligned our product with our members' satisfaction or their happiness as customers. And then it created an enormous growth because people could try the product. Well, today you can try the product for free. So we're really leading with we've got the best product. But you need, so obviously when you do subscription model, then you turn into, I guess that you turn into a software company as opposed to a hardware company. So even like multiples on valuation could be significantly higher that way, probably a little bit easier to raise money as well. I'm curious about your insights on that. But you also have to account for the physical cost of creating the product. And then you have to make sure that the LTV, that customer makes sense. So when you're doing this, you're building these products, you're first selling them just as a hardware sale to start off. And then you move into subscription later on. Yeah, we started with selling the athletes and teams for, you know, a thousand or $1,200 a year, like high-end enterprise sale. And then we went into consumer market and we sold as a one-time $500 fee. So it was like, you know, equivalent to a high-end watch or, you know, Garmin type watch from a cost differential. And what we saw as the people who bought Woop for $500, were wearing it for a very long time. And that was actually a big deal because most of the products that we've talked about, Scott, that have been less successful, they had these huge drop-off rates. So after three weeks, three months, people would stop wearing them. And Woop didn't have that problem. We actually had people wear them for a very long time. But you know, that was going to be my next, that was going to be my next question, is going to be, if you're doing a subscription model, how do you, how do you get the consumer behavior to keep the product? But you already had that sort of handled. Yeah. So we already saw that there was that long-term stickiness. But we weren't selling that many units. And so we asked ourselves, is there a business model here that better aligns us with customers and allows them to try the product for way less cost? And that worked. But to your point, it then created another problem which again was related to cash. Because you actually are growing, now you're growing very fast, but you're shipping product that costs more than the dollars you're getting. Now that's okay because later you're going to make it all back because they're on a subscription. But out of the gates, you might be upside down. And so fortunately, the venture capital industry was kind of invented to solve that problem, which is like, okay, there's clear product market fit and there's clear demand. And you've got a positive LTV to cack thing, but it's going to take time to get paid back. So then that's when you start, I'm assuming that's when you started raising. Yeah, I mean, we raised capital consistently for 11 years straight. But like, I can tell you, and for your audience that has to raise capital, like, whoop is raised 400 million to date. The first 400,000 dollars I raised took way longer and was much harder than the last 200 million dollars that I raised. And it just goes to show that it's not the dollar size. Like, at every stage, there's what feels like an unlimited number of people that could write the check to support your ask. Like, there's a lot of capital in the world. That's something I tell entrepreneurs all the time. There's a lot of capital in the world. Don't get bogged down by someone who says, no, just move on to the next. But it is a skill. Like, it's a thing you have to learn how to do. Like fundraising is, you know, presenting. It's building relationships. It's having an ask. It's knowing one to negotiate and one not to. And so that's a skill that you develop with time. And the reason it was easier to raise 200 million dollars than 400 grand was, well, I had 10 years of practice. And the business was a much better business than, you know, the business plan in the early days. And so, you know, to anyone raising capital, if you're having trouble with it, just know that every entrepreneur at some point has trouble with it. Two questions about raising capital. Actually, I'll ask the first one that I'm curious about as somebody who's raising capital for 11 years, when do you achieve profitability? And when do you look to sort of flip from raising to next step of the company? But I mean, you're still in this, you just, you've raised up, you've raised over 400 million. But first question is, as a founder who's raising capital for 11 plus years, what are the tips that you have to not sort of let that sidetrack you? Because raising capital can be a full-time job. And that's a lot of raising capital. So are you enlisting investment bankers? Are you doing this all yourself? Are you going on road shows? Like, what are the things that you've learned that allow you to do this and still build a business successfully and not like lose all your hair and you still have a lot of good hair? So there's not too many grays left or not too many grays yet. Excuse me. So how do you do this properly? Well, the first critical theme is either be raising capital or don't be raising capital. But don't be in a gray area of kind of raising capital. And that's a mistake that I certainly made, but I think a lot of entrepreneurs make in the early stages, because the reality is you kind of feel like you always need capital. And so then you're sort of always in a position where someone can write a check. But the problem with that, which leads to then the second point, is you're not creating a competitive process. You have to create a competitive process. And it can't just be that you're always open for business, because then people feel like, well, I can show up whenever I want. So if you want to raise capital, you have to say, all right, from from this period to this period, I'm going to take introductory meetings. And maybe that's a two week to four week period. And then you hit it hard. You try to meet with as many people as you can in a compressed period of time. And then you start to figure out, okay, how many people are interested in you build a funnel on down. Within that process, I'll say the third mistake that I made about as many times as anyone can make it is you're going to come across people where you're on the fifth call, the sixth call, the 12th call. And they seem very eager. You keep telling yourself they're going to get over the hump, but there's always like, there's always one more thing they need, right? Imperically, that person never writes the check. Like, I've got enough data on this. At that point, to just know that like that person never writes the check. And the time in which you can go from just moving on from that person and finding a new person who gets really excited and does your deal quickly is actually a very short period of time. Because like I said, there's like an virtually unlimited amount of capital in the world. So, you know, to summarize, it's be fundraising or not. And when you're fundraising, create a very competitive process and funnel. And when someone is on the fence, just move on. Like, keep going. And like that, you'll be amazed at how much more efficient the process gets. And now, to my second question or second point, just for an entrepreneur, this thinking of doing an 11 year run. And let's pray that they get to the point where you're at where you can raise up to 400 million. You have a multi billion dollar evaluation unicorn company. If you are running this model, there's a period where you're not profitable. And then VCs solve that problem. Do you ever look just in your head as a founder? Do you look to ever flip the profitability ASAP? Or are you looking? This is going to IPO at some point. And this is where I'm heading towards. Well, this is, this is a question that I think depends a lot on your business. And what your motivation is for building a company. For whoop, we've always had a big research and development element to this company. Because we've been swimming with sharks. We've got the most well-funded, biggest technology companies in the world trying to copy our technology or build similar products. Or, you know, who hope we just go out of business, right? And so we have to stay innovative. And that requires an investment. Additionally, the business is still growing quickly. And so when you're on a faster growth curve, you can invest towards that growth. Now, it's worth noting that the market, so to speak, of technology companies or the public market has sort of changed its opinion on, do you want growth or do you want profitability? So you want to keep that in mind, too, if you feel like you have to raise capital soon. And so we've been in a position where we haven't needed to raise capital for quite some time. And so we've been able to follow a path that feels appropriate for whoop and the stage that we're at and the importance of research and development. We're just going to take a quick break. Thank the longtime friend and sponsor of the show, the HubSpot Podcast Network. They have incredible podcasts. One of my favorites, one that you have to check out this month is Nudge hosted by Phil Agnew. Now, if you've ever noticed, the smallest changes always seem to have the biggest impact. On Nudge, you learn simple evidence back tips to help you kick bad habits, get a raise, grow a business. The point is every bite size 20-minute show comes packed with practical advice from these incredible entrepreneurs, behavioral scientists, and everybody in between. Nudge is fast paced, but very insightful, and a must listen if you're a podcast fan. Make sure you listen to Nudge wherever you love to get your podcasts. Yeah, no, I think that that's a totally fine perspective to take. And I think the reason why I ask that question is because I think that I just want to frame when a founder is building a company, the path that they're going to go on, and have the foresight to figure out, do they want to raise money, where do they want to take the company, what is the market they're playing into, are they building it to sell, are they building it in terms of like, I want to have a nice cash flowing business, are they building it to IPO, I mean, I'm sure, you know, at the stage you're at, I'm sure people have approached you, names of companies that everybody would know, I have no idea, but just I would assume because they start approaching when the companies were 50 million, let alone 400. So it's just interesting to how entrepreneurs think through that problem, and I just want them to be aware of all the different opportunities, because I don't want them to just run into raising money if they don't have to all the time, I want them to have the sort of the end in mind. That's really what I'm trying to teach over to an entrepreneur that's just starting out at least. I think it's a great, I think it's a great perspective, and it's worth saying that whoop is not similar to all businesses, and that, you know, many businesses don't require a really big upfront technology risk. I mean, we've had real like existential technology risk in building this company, and so many companies can find customers much faster. And for what it's worth, I think, with the growth of AI in the past two years and large language models, you're going to have companies that are 10 people doing tens and 20, you know, millions of revenue, and those businesses can be very profitable, and certainly not require meaningful venture investment. Yeah, no, you're right. Actually, there's a really interesting chart or a graph, and it shows the amount of employees required to get to one million dollars in revenue, and it sort of shows as downward curve. Have you seen this chart before? But it basically makes sense. Yeah, so it's like, you know, from the 1940s or 1900s to 2023, and now it's like one or two employees are required to get to a million dollars in revenue versus 50 or 100 or whatever it was. So that's just an entrepreneurial thought to take away. I want to talk about some of your thoughts on innovation. So from the get go, you focused on counterintuitive approach. I mean, you mentioned, you know, the screen, you're tracking very meaningful health data that makes the, you know, the wearer more self-aware. How do you look at innovation? When you think of, you know, the next, the next piece that you want to roll out, what do you look for in terms of, I think the market will appreciate this. I think this will resonate with the market, or is this, you have a whole bunch of R&D. I guess when you're looking at something that's never been done before, how does your brain work? How do you approach problem solving like that particular thing? It's such a great question and it's interesting that I don't feel, I don't think entrepreneurs talk as much about it. You know, they talk around it, but they're not explicitly addressing what risks are we taking as a company. And when people hear about technology risk, for some reason, it's very easy for them to say, oh, that's risky. Oh, it's risky. Can you build that? Will that be able to be accomplished in a certain time frame? I don't know how we're going to build that. Like those are, those are things that will come up when you propose technology risk. However, when an entrepreneur is presenting a plan that seems achievable and you're launching a product that you know can already be made or exist, it surprises me that that doesn't also introduce alarm bells for risk. Hey, there's a strategic risk there that you're not innovating. Right? And so it's just worth acknowledging that technology risks and strategic risks are two different types of risks. And I personally gravitate towards taking technology risks that in a fact decrease your strategic risk, decrease your market risk. Right? Let's take an extreme example, curing cancer. Okay, very high technology risks, very low market risks. Right? So as I think about building an innovative company, to me, it's a huge risk strategically, not to take very big technology risks. Like we need to take technology risks. We need to be pushing the envelope on what is possible to unlock human performance, which is our mission at Woop and has been for 11 years. And so to me, innovation is being pulled towards the risk of technology and the unknown versus shying away from it. I absolutely love that thought process and that mental model, because I find that a lot of entrepreneurs, they actually, to your point, they default to the strategic risk or the market saturation risk or however you want to describe it. But they don't actually understand that that's a larger risk than innovating because I think the innovating thing is hard to grasp. The market, it's there. I can navigate it. I can see it. I can touch it. I can play within it. But the strategic, the innovation, it's almost like an esoteric concept. It seems scary. It seems like there's a billion variables as opposed to just a thousand to draw a parallel. But I understand exactly what you're saying. So what is the strategy even though you have the innovation risk and pursuing the innovation risk decreases the strategic risk. What is the strategy in innovating that still even more so can decrease innovation risk in terms of creating something that consumers want to adopt? Well, a good framing to think about, especially with hardware, is if you're brainstorming a new hardware today and you think it's going to launch in 18 months, well, in 18 months, the world's going to have changed. And then on top of that, that product you just came up with might be in market for another two years after you've launched it. So you need to put your head in a place that is three, four years from now. And I think a lot of times people aren't comfortable going to that place because that place tells you that what you're building right now is actually not that ambitious. It's not that innovative. Like I meet with a lot of entrepreneurs who are earlier in that journey and maybe they're building their first product. And so I think the thing sometimes I'll say is if that product that you're going to build for the next 12 months existed today, it would very likely be innovative. Are you worried at all though about what it looks like in 12 months and how the world's changed and how the market's changed? And by the way, your competitors didn't stop working for the for 18 months, they're going to put stuff out. So all of these things I think just speak towards like cranking up that ambitious, you know, ambitiousness with with your products and your technology. And look, there's a positive to this too, which is that you then I think a track talent that wants to work on hard problems. There's a lot of companies out there that whether explicitly or implicitly have just decided they're not that going to be that innovative. And so those are companies where you can build something on a very predictable timeline that you know can be built. But that's just a different company and culture than what we're trying to do at whoop. Speak to me about, you know, you as an entrepreneur founder from from day zero to to where you're at right now. The this the span of different problems that you've had to deal with is huge. Obviously at different stages of the company as an individual, how have you grown? How have you matured? What are some lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur now dealing with 500 plus people, you know, raising $400 million that obviously were not so apparent when you first started out. I think I think I've gotten a lot better at embracing negative feedback and debate and pulling in a lot of different perspectives. I think in the early years of building whoop, I built sort of a self-defense mechanism if you will towards negative feedback of any kind. And it was in large part because I was getting so much negative feedback. I wasn't really that used to rejection. And at age 22, you know, I had like kind of a nice young person resume. I went to good schools and captain sports teams got good grades, you know, went to Harvard, whatever. And then all of a sudden I graduate and start this company and I feel like on a daily basis I'm getting punched in the face and getting rejected. And so by the way, that's everyone doing anything in life. So this is not personal to me. But I'm just saying that I, you know, I didn't know how to grapple with that. And it was very negative. It wasn't a lot. There was really a very small number of people I would meet in a week that would say this is exciting or you're on the right path. And look, I think they had good reason for it. I was super young. I was not an engineer or a doctor or designer or filling the blank of all the things you might want a founder of a company like this to be. And so my defense mechanism was to not hear it at all. Like walls were up. And the problem with that is it carried over into how I was managing the company too. And so if members of my team were disagreeing with me, I just had like a tunnel vision kind of stubbornness. And look, there's an aspect to building a company where you have to have strong points of view on the world. And those points of view probably are contrarian and need to turn out to be right. But the nitty-gritty of managing a company is a million details. And those details require iteration and disagreement and all sorts of collaboration. And so as a young person running whoop, I was bad at that. I really was. And I was probably much harder to work with as a consequence. It's worth noting. I was also like stressed out on my mind. I really didn't know how to handle the pressure that I had put myself in, which was raising, you know, tens of millions of dollars in having 25 employees or 30 employees. Like all of that felt really like the weight of the world. And so it took years for me to build also like a process by which I was comfortable in that hot seat. And I was managing stress appropriately. And I was hearing feedback. You know, you can hear feedback. You don't necessarily have to listen to it. I think that's a powerful frame for anyone in a leadership position. You want people to feel heard. And you want to embrace those, you know, differing points of view. And at the end of the day, if you're the CEO or you're running the thing, you get to make the call. So it's worth really embracing some of that different, those different perspectives. And anyway, that's a little bit of a background on that evolution. I love that. And I know that you've spoken a lot on other podcasts about decoupling your own self-worth from directly correlating to the success of the company. And I think that's actually a very powerful point. And I am curious how you came to that realization, how you navigated sort of that mental health journey probably had impacts on physical health as well. Give maybe give a listener's a little bit of insight as to entrepreneurs in the audience, even just high performers, because I think this is a very common issue. You tie your self-worth to your professional success. So walk me through sort of that light bulb moment in your life. Yeah, I think it's really important for an entrepreneur, but really anyone in their career, not to tie their self-identity to that of the business or the project that they're working on. And there's a few reasons for this. The first is that it's not actually the case that your performance equals the performance of the project or the business or fill in the blank. Like I, in the early days of whoop, if whoop had a great day, I felt I had a great day. If whoop had a bad day, I felt I had a bad day. And if whoop was failing, I was failing. And in reality, like that's not actually what's going on. You can give a great pitch and a great presentation, and an investor is going to tell you no. And it has actually very little to do with you. You can put together the perfect sales package and a great marketing plan and some external event like COVID might be the reason that your sales stumble. On the flip side, and I've seen this too, you can have businesses that are doing great. And all of a sudden, the leaders within that org are actually spinning out of control. I mean, really losing who they are, whether it comes from a place of arrogance or whether it comes from substance abuse or fill in the blank. And so it's just worth explicitly saying like you and your company's performance are different things. And you can keep getting a little better every day, independent from what's happening in your business. The advantage to that is it helps you really focus on what you can control. You can control a lot about yourself. You can control a lot about how you feel. You can control a lot about your output. And that brings I think a huge feeling of self awareness. It brings a huge feeling of empowerment. And it gives you a little bit of an acceptance that some things are out of your control. And the other reason it's worth emphasizing this point is it's often the case that you the leader need to get better in order for your business to get better. So you identifying ways that you can get a little better every day and working on those will at some later stage play an important role in your business, but may not today be one to one at all. You know, when I was 23 years old and trying to manage 25 people, I was way more uncomfortable and way more stressed and way more dysfunctional than I am today 10 years later managing 500 people. And again, it's it's it's because it's not about the numbers. It's about how are you trying to grow in in the role? Well, we're some I would actually like to speak about some health wellness topics. And I think a good place to start would be what have you incorporated into your own life? Because I want to tie I want to tie things that you've incorporated into your own life. Things best practices that you've seen with some people that use whoop some of the things that whoop measures why we should be paying attention to them. So let's go down that road for a second. So for yourself, what do you do that is sort of focused on your mental health physical health that you do every single day? I mean, one huge one is I is I meditate every day. And I do that for 20 minutes every morning. I highly recommend it. I would actually probably point to meditation as the single biggest thing that pulled me out of that. Call it darker area darker area of being a CEO and then becoming a CEO who was much more comfortable, much more capable of managing stress. So meditation, I highly recommend we can talk more about that if you'd like. I try to exercise most days of the week, but in practice that's probably four to five days a week. I think having days off is good. I eat three meals every day. I don't really snack. I try to eat reasonably healthy food, but I'm not measuring every calorie in and out of my body. I do a lot around sleep because I just want to make my sleep as efficient as possible. So I try to go to bed and wake up at similar times. It turns out if you do that, it inherently makes your restorative sleep higher and it makes your physiological biomarkers better just by going to bed and waking up at the same time. I try not to eat too close to bed. I drink a ton of water as you can probably tell from this podcast. I still drink alcohol, but not that often, which from wearing a whoop, you kind of find alcohol is just generally negative on your body. Although, you know, there's always a good time for these things. I like to sleep in a cold, dark, quiet room. Each one of those things makes your sleep better. I wear blue light blocking glasses about an hour before bed every single night. Whoop actually makes these glasses, but they have like a red tint that blocks all the blue light in your life. So I would say I'm still probably optimizing my life as a CEO more so than as just purely a human. And as a consequence, like I'm on my phone, you know, up until the moment I go to bed, maybe I'll watch TV with my wife in bed, whatever. But those devices produce blue light, which essentially tells your body to stay awake. And it turns out wearing blue light blocking glasses, which have this red tint that blocks it, prevents that exposure hitting your brain. The consequence of that is they make you naturally sleepy. And in turn, they actually give you higher restorative sleep. So that's just a collection of of things that I've found valuable. Let's talk about we can we can go into meditation because you're very passionate about it, but let's talk about restorative sleep. So obviously, this is whoop tracks this significantly. So what is restorative sleep? I mean, like just as a layman, I know REM sleep, but I don't know much about sleep at all. So maybe give us like a math, a quick master class in restorative sleep, what most people do. And correctly, what's screwing up their sleep, what's good sleep, what's bad sleep, how it impacts your life. Because I think that's actually a really big piece that unless you've gone down this rabbit hole, you're measuring your sleep with whoop, you may not know anything about. Yeah, this is this is really going to become the pitch for why you should measure your sleep. Okay, because let's take that person who spends seven hours in bed of the seven hours they spend in bed, they're really in four stages of sleep. Light, awake, REM and slow wave. Now, light and awake are essentially useless. They don't give you that much benefit. Ram and slow wave together known as restorative sleep. That's like where all the magic happens. And your REM sleep is when your mind is repairing, cognitive repair. And that's also when you have dreams. So if you're someone who can like never remember dreams, or you don't think you're having dreams, it's probably because you're not getting enough REM sleep. Slow wave sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. So people think that they're getting stronger in the gym or when they work out. You're actually getting stronger during slow wave sleep because that's when your body is repairing itself. If you've got an injury, if you're trying to make any type of fitness gains, if you're at an older stage in life, slow wave sleep is so, so important. Okay, let's go back to the person who spends seven hours in bed. You could spend seven hours in bed and get 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep. That's not a lot. You could spend seven hours in bed and get five and a half hours of REM and slow wave sleep. That's a ton. Again, same amount of time in bed, two completely different people. And I say that quite literally, like the person who's getting 30 minutes, I guarantee you has issues in their life. They're tired. They're not happy. Maybe they're going through periods of depression. They're stressed. They can't manage stress. Person five and a half hours, I almost guarantee you they're happy. Like you can just plot the chart of correlating that. It's that it's that significant basically. Yeah, yeah, to be fair, those are both outliers. 30 minutes would be very little. Five and a half hours would be a ton. But you know, I've been measuring this for a very long time. I can now feel the difference between two and a half hours and three and a half hours of restorative sleep. And it's not that many things to tweak to be at three and a half hours or four versus one and a half or two. And so this is where like to me, managing, you know, managing your sleep starts with measuring it, figure out what your baseline is. And then like let's tweak one or two things. Let's not get crazy. We're not doing a big lifestyle overhaul, hopefully. Like maybe it's going to bed and waking up a little more consistently. Maybe it's not having the extra glass of wine. Maybe it's your bedroom needs to be darker. Maybe it's drinking a glass of water before bed. Again, these are like fairly simple things that you would be blown away, how much they can improve the quality of your sleep, and as a consequence, the quality of your life. And listen, I know you're not a doctor, but I'm going to ask you anyways. So you can just like from your experience or from other people that you know, maybe that are qualified to speak on this, when you get this kind of sleep, is this something that can impact your longevity, your lifespan, decrease cancer, decrease dementia? I would assume yes for all of it, but I don't I don't know if it's that impactful. Do you have any data points or any perspective on that? There's an avalanche of medical research that points to a lack of restorative sleep being associated with virtually every disease state and negative in your life. That's amazing. In a bad way. It is like it is the magic pill. It's like if you can just sleep a lot better, your life will be a lot better. So that is obviously huge. And I'm assuming that that optimizes all of your hormones as well. So if you're obviously you're recovering from the gym, but also probably reduces your cortisol to a degree. So if you're trying to lose weight, it's going to be a little bit easier. I'm sure it sort of just optimizes everything. What are some other main, you mentioned meditation just in terms of measurement though. I'll give you an interesting research study and then I'll give you an outlier of someone whoop. I don't think he'd be upset with us talking about this because we talked about it on our podcast together. So there's medical research that came out recently that showed a lack of REM sleep increases your amygdala's response. So again, REM sleep is where your mind's repairing. Your amygdala response is the fighter flight response. So if you're not getting as much REM sleep, they've proven that your your body is going to be more apt to being in this sort of fighter flight state, right? Like kind of more wound up essentially. I did a podcast with Alex Honald. Alex Honald famously is the guy who's climbed all of these amazing, you know, mountains without a rope. And are you familiar with Alex? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I asked him about his sleep and it turns out he gets five and a half hours of restorative sleep a night. So if you're asking yourself, how can a guy possibly climb a, you know, 10,000 feet without a rope? Well, what do you know? His amygdala response is way lower than everyone else's because he's getting so much quality sleep every night. And I just thought, is he aware of that? Yeah, was he aware that he was doing that on the wound podcast? And it made perfect sense. But he was just fascinating that like he had such an outlier level of restorative sleep. That's fascinating. What would be one other, if you were going to pick one other life changing intervention that would be the cause of a thing that whoop is measuring outside of sleep. Obviously a huge one. What would that one other thing be? For me personally, people are aware of it when they see it. For me personally, meditation has been that I mean, learning how to control my breathing, being able to listen to my thoughts, being in a place where you have a mechanism that you can go to to reset. You know, the practice of meditating is is breathing and letting what's in your mind float in and out of your mind. And in the process, learning how to cycle through thoughts and essentially choose what you're paying attention to. And so you're developing essentially a third person perspective of yourself. Here are the things Will is thinking about. Oh, Will should fast forward that and they let's will should focus on this. That's kind of what's happening when I meditate. And then the powerful thing about it where it and where it starts to feel like a superpower is then that starts happening throughout your life rather than being angry and realizing you're in a conversation where your voice is elevated and people are yelling at one another and you're kind of catching up to yourself. You'll hear a voice in your head that says, Oh, Will is about to get angry. And all of a sudden, then it becomes a choice. Well, should I get angry? Do I want to get angry? And that's a very powerful, I think, uh, relationship to get to build with yourself. Do you notice? Because you mentioned that when you're measuring throughout your day, you measure sort of these three stages of your daily, of your daily response to do and when you meditate, do you notice that any sort of markers improve in any of those three measurements that you take? Well, if you were to look at my stress levels while I'm meditating, all of a sudden they're the same levels as sleeping. So I do think that my meditation practice starts to resemble sleep to my body, which is quite powerful. You you can also look at how someone sleeps on days they meditate versus days they don't. I mean, I almost never miss meditating in a day. So it's just that much. It's like, you know, taking a shower or brushing my teeth. It's just kind of built into my life. So I actually don't have as much data on, you know, having not done it. But I will say, if you looked at the whole whoop population, for people who meditate some days versus others, the days they do meditate, we often see a lower stress level throughout the day. And we often see improved sleep that night, independent from when they meditated. I mean, this is kind of a powerful phenomenon. Yeah, meditating first thing in the morning may actually improve your sleep 15 hours later. Is there a certain kind of meditation that you do in particular, because I don't know what that well, but I know there's like a ton of different styles, right, of meditation. Yeah, my practice began as trans, is I don't meditation. And then over time has become a few different things. And it'll depend a little on the day. I just can't, you know, I can't emphasize enough the value for people in trying some of these different techniques. We live in a world which is constantly trying to get your attention and a world in which you're almost never alone with your thoughts. And I think that there's problems with that. And I think that meditation or mindfulness or closing your eyes and breathing, whatever you want to call it, that's a really powerful offset. Yeah, I agree. I think it's a noisy world. I appreciate how much you've evolved as a human and as a CEO and as a founder as you built this company. I think that this actually is a testament to the self-awareness, probably that your product brings because you could have evolved regardless as an individual, but I think that the ability to see how a day in the life truly affects you. I think that that's probably very telling us, probably why you've come to take on some of the habits, reduce your stress, find ways to optimize yourself, find ways to optimize your sleep, your life, the way you interact with your team, with your investors, just like I can see this starts to permeate like all these different aspects of a day in the life of, which is fascinating. Well, you know, thank you, Scott. I will say, like, I think I'm still learning, I'm still a work in progress, you know, I don't claim to have all the answers. And it's just, I think it's making a commitment, though, to that, to that process of life and acknowledging like, hey, what can we do to keep climbing the ladder? Yeah, yeah. I want to just give you the floor because I just, I always wrap up with a few, a few quick questions to pull some last insights out of you, but is there anything that you want it to go into? I know, I know a big focus for you right now is your coaching feature. That's something that's new to the Woop community, obviously, bringing in LLMs and I think like AI into the Woop experience, but any other lessons, any other ideas for the future of the company, anything else, basically, the floor's yours that you wanted to go into that we didn't chat about. Well, I would encourage anyone listening to this who's been intrigued by thinking about ways to improve your health or your fitness or measure your body to just check out Woop.com. And we now have the ability for you to try the product for free. So you can literally sign up for 30 days, full Woop experience. And if you don't like it, you just send it back. So to me, that feels pretty low risk on a consumer side. And who knows, you know, for a lot of people, it'll, it'll change their life because they'll measure things they didn't, they never have before. Yeah, amazing. Okay, last two questions. And also, by the way, where are the socials? I'm just going to drop the socials while we're live. So you're at, yeah, everywhere. Okay, perfect. Gotcha. Everywhere. All right. If you could tell your 20 year old self one thing, what would that thing be after all the experience now? Keep going. I mean, that's been a talk track in my head for a long time. When things are great, something's lurking around the corner, you know, keep going. Don't get too comfortable, confident, full of yourself. Like, just keep going. And when things are bad and it's hard and you're failing and the company's failing, just keep going. Like it gets better. The sun also rises. So I think, I think trying to find balance in the chaos of building something that doesn't exist or the chaos of your life. And just reminding yourself, like the highs, the lows, they're going to keep coming and you just got to keep going. I love that. And you know, when you look back, you've had an incredibly successful career as an entrepreneur, you've built this incredible company at this stage in your life. Think about this question personally and professionally. What does success mean to you? Well, success for a whoop is unlocking human performance and delivering a product that's improving people's lives. I mean, increasingly, we get messages for how it's saved someone's life. And they saw something in their data and all of a sudden they were talking to their doctor and next to you know, they're in the AER. So those stories for me are incredibly powerful and and so that's what I really gravitate to from a business success standpoint is how many people's lives are we improving with this technology? And how can we continue to do that for a long time and at a bigger scale? I think if we do that, all the business metrics follow. I think for me, personally, it's kind of back to the, you know, the last point, which is to keep going and seeing what I'm capable of and how else I can grow and where else I'm going to fall down and try to pick myself back up, you know, this idea of being in the arena and sort of just embracing the fact that you're you're figuring it out and it's hard and it's difficult and I wouldn't have it any other way, you know, and so for me, that's that's kind of like the personal test. But I've come to realize that the success of it is being in the middle of it and feeling comfortable. The success of it is not like exiting it, exiting the arena and drinking margaritas on the beach. Like to me, that's not that's not the end state. The end state is figuring out how you can be in this epicenter of innovation and chaos and stress and everything else and feel comfortable and be able to deliver valued for the world. So while also by the way, having great loving relationships in your life with my wife, with my parents, with my friends, that for me is personal success.