Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed About this episode Will Ahmed is the founder of Whoop, the fitness monitoring app worn by LeBron James and Serena Williams, and which goes toe to toe with Apple, Google and Amazon.
Will is the classic example that business and entrepreneurial drive follow on from being obsessed with a problem. After repeatedly getting injured in his college sports career, Will became obsessed with understanding his own body. He read over five hundred medical papers and realised the product he was pining for didn’t exist, so he invented it.
Will has one of the most original perspectives on how to bring your personality to your business that we’ve ever seen. Employees at Whoop get a bonus if their sleep is good, and the company is ruthless in its priorities to make sure it’s only focused on a couple of things at a time. All of this means Whoop has some of the best wearable tech on the market, despite only a fraction of the resources of its competitors.
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Transcript 17,963 words · 3 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 So two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Fucking hell.
0:04 Speaker 01 A $3.6 billion company. Wearable, health and fitness coach. The founder of Whoop. Will Omed.
0:11 Speaker 00 You know, Nike and Apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space. But when it comes to health monitoring, we're the best game in town. That really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. One of the reasons Whoop has been successful is there were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that.
0:33 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. I shall steal that.
0:35 Speaker 00 It's worth emphasizing for your audience why that matters. So there was a phase in building Whoop where it was so much about the next milestone. That I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine. If the company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing.
0:54 Steven Bartlett? What's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see?
0:58 Speaker 00 I was super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And I remember I was driving my car and I'm on the highway. And all of a sudden, it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you. And you feel your fingers and they're like numb. I actually drove myself to the hospital and they do, you know, all these analysis on me. And like, it turns out I had a.
1:21 Steven Bartlett? Without further ado, I'm Stephen Butler and this is the Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
1:37 Steven Bartlett? Well, as you look back on your, your life and you connect the dots that led you to, to do what you've done now with Whoop and your professional life, um, what are those dots?
1:52 Speaker 00 Well, I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. I was always into sports and exercise. I was a super active kid. My parents are very different. My dad's an Egyptian immigrant, very street smart, charismatic. Came to this country with very little, rose the ranks in finance over time. My mom, very analytical, very book smart. And, and watching how they approached life, I think, was a fascinating way to grow up because they had very different toolsets to solve problems. And I was always playing sports.
2:37 Speaker 00 I was always exercising and that eventually led my way to Harvard. And, and so I was a college athlete. I got recruited to play squash at Harvard. And over the course of my time there, got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body, how I could understand what it meant to train optimally, how I could prevent overtraining, which was a problem that I had, how I could really understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising. And so that took me down this rabbit hole of physiology research, which we can get into. But I read hundreds of medical papers while I was in school and then ultimately wrote
3:20 Speaker 00 a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body. And then over the course of my time at Harvard, built up the confidence to, to start a company, which was a fairly crazy thing, looking back on it. And for the last 10 years, I've been building this company called Whoop.
3:36 Steven Bartlett? We went through that very quickly, but a lot of those things are very, very unusual. One of the first unusual things is, I mean, we all train, we all, a lot of people train and work out and stuff, but we don't then fall into an obsession about how to optimize the performance of our training and ourselves. What is it about you, have you been able to figure out in hindsight, what it is about you and your makeup that made you so obsessed with that particular topic?
4:01 Speaker 00 Well, it struck me as something that.
4:07 Speaker 00 Really didn't make a lot of sense. Like I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard, exercising with no information about what I was doing to my body. And yet, that's a school also that is totally obsessed with deeper knowledge. And so that in itself seemed like a, like a deep irony. And then I also was a pretty competitive person. And I was someone who was overtraining, right? Where you get fitter and fitter and fitter, you sort of fall off a cliff and you don't know why. And that bothered me, like that bothered me that I didn't, I didn't fully understand what I was doing to my body, what was, what was the missing ingredient, so to speak. And I just sort of started pulling at that thread. And it really took me down a rabbit hole.
4:52 Steven Bartlett? Overtraining. I've heard this term. Never been sure if I've believed it, because I don't really know what it is. But for, for someone that doesn't know what that is, what, what is overtraining?
5:01 Speaker 00 The technical definition is it's a continued state of overreaching that then leads to a period where your body is essentially in a depressed state. And what that will look like physiologically is essentially you, your body's rundown, you know, activities that would normally feel somewhat easy are quite difficult. Psychologically, it makes you feel kind of lousy, rundown, symptoms similar to being sick. And depending on how overtrained you are can last, you know, a week or could last months. In my case, it normally didn't last longer than a couple of weeks. But it's kind of this ultimate betrayal, right? Because you're pushing yourself
5:44 Speaker 00 so hard to get stronger and fitter, that you actually get to a place where you're completely broken down.
5:53 Steven Bartlett? Had I asked you at 14 years old, say 14, 16 years old, what you were going to be when you grew up? What would you have responded?
5:59 Speaker 00 I don't know that I would have known, but if you looked at the things I was interested in. So I was always playing with technology, which in hindsight was quite predictive. Like I had the first, I had the first iPod in my sixth grade class, I remember. So we're about the same age. So you probably remember when the iPod came out and like how cool that thing was. Thick. Yeah, it was really thick and it had that like wild wheel. A little before that, I had a Palm Pilot, like a Palm Pilot seven. It was like the original Palm Pilot that could get internet access. When I was around 12 or 13, I had one of the first voice recorders that you could speak into and it would type for you.
6:44 Speaker 00 Oh, wow. So it was like, you know, Siri, but 20 years ago. And it didn't quite work, unfortunately, but I had this real itch towards technology. And then I think somewhere between the ages of like 18 and 20, I also saw this huge convergence happening with smartphones, with the way that computers to me seemed like they were sort of seamlessly moving from being on your desk to on your lap, to in your pocket, to what I perceived to be eventually on your body or even in your body. I thought that was a natural evolution. So I definitely had this pull towards technology.
7:22 Speaker 00 But I think throughout, you know, I was overcoming this feeling of whether I should go into finance, because I grew up, my dad was, you know, in finance. In fact, after my freshman year at Harvard, so most undergrads do, you know, different internships and whatnot. After my freshman year, I did an internship at a hedge fund. My sophomore year, I did an internship at an investment bank. And my junior year, I did an internship at a private equity firm. So like I did, I was really flirting with going into finance. But I think, I think this is what I was supposed to do.
8:02 Steven Bartlett? From everything I've read, it's quite clear to me that you're a very curious person. And my brother's very interesting, my oldest brother. Whenever we were, when we were younger, he always wanted to understand everything. And when he became interested in something, he became obsessed in it. And he went like right down into the rabbit hole. As I read through your story on multiple occasions, whether it's meditation or others, how the business came to be, or, you know, your journey to trying to figure out how to optimize the body. All of these struck me as a person that once they get interested in something, they go all the way down into the rabbit hole to find out the solutions. Is that accurate?
8:36 Speaker 00 I think it's fair. I think it also stems from this ability to throw myself out there.
8:47 Speaker 00 You know, back to how your childhood influences your, your future. There's, there's a story, I don't know if I've ever talked about this, but a fascinating story where I was in fifth or sixth grade, middle school, and we're doing what's called a blue and gold day. So I went to a school called Greenville. The colors are blue and gold. And you have this like fair essentially, which is all sorts of different competitions, races, that sort of thing. And there's a captain's race at the end of the day with like the, the four people representing their, their class, so to, so to speak, to run the, the fast race.
9:28 Speaker 00 And I was a, I was a captain, so I was very anxious about this final race. And right before the final race was one of the longer races, like I think it was three or four laps. And so, you know, if you were to run that, you'd be quite tired. And that wasn't a race I ever ran. But Timmy all of a sudden was sick and so he didn't show up for, for this race. And I remember Peter Zaloom, who was our science teacher, he's walking around and he's yelling, "Hey, Blue, we need someone to run this race. We need someone to run this race." And I'm kind of like avoiding even making eye contact with this teacher because I really don't want to run this race.
10:10 Speaker 00 And it was like he zeroed in on me out of a distance and just marched over. And he said, "Will, you should run this race." And I said, "No, no, I've got the captain's race. I gotta do that." And he's like, "Will, 90% of life is showing up. The other 10% is what happens when you get there." And like in that moment, I was like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna go run this. And I don't even remember what happened in that race. I don't even remember the captain's race, uh, which in some ways emphasizes his point. But that whole thread of just showing up is something I think about all the time.
10:45 Steven Bartlett? Why, why do, and this is, I guess, a lesson for entrepreneurship because you saw some. I was gonna say, and this links to something in your story. I was gonna say you saw an opportunity, but you didn't see an opportunity, did you? You were dragged by your obsession.
10:59 Speaker 00 Well.
11:00 Steven Bartlett? And interest.
11:01 Speaker 00 In building whoop?
11:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
11:03 Speaker 00 I definitely saw an opportunity to continuously measure the human body. And I also saw an opportunity that, uh, computing was getting to a size and, and sort of sophistication where it could be smaller and smaller.
11:19 Speaker 00 But the pull that got me to building this company and I think persevering over years was that it also was a personal obsession to really understand my own body. Yeah.
11:32 Steven Bartlett? Cause when people typically recite their stories of how they became an entrepreneur, you, you get this kind of like, they put, I don't know, a white piece of paper there. And they're like, what is the opportunity in the market? And, and when I read the quote from you that said, you were an entrepreneur before you realized you were.
11:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's true.
11:47 Steven Bartlett? That bucks that narrative a little bit, which I think entrepreneurs sometimes try and sell because it makes them seem more intentional. I can't replicate your curiosity and interest that made you go off in that journey of optimizing the human body. So I just think in, in society and culture generally, entrepreneurs sometimes look back and try and make their story sound like really, really intentional. When a lot of it, in your case, as is the case in mine, was like, I was interested in this thing and I just kept on going because I loved it.
12:14 Speaker 00 I think that's right. I also spent a lot of time like building the confidence to start the company. Like, I really didn't know what it meant to start a company and. I mean, I spent two years doing physiology research. I then took another class that was around if you have an idea, how do you write a business plan for it? And I remember like my senior year, I was doing like the third or fourth iteration of this business plan and I was meeting with the MIT professor, a guy named Howard Anderson, who taught the class and was like a venture capitalist. And at that point, I wasn't even enrolled in the class. I was just working on this business plan. And he's like, he just sort of stopped. He said, Will, at some point, you have to ask yourself, is this
12:59 Speaker 00 a paper or are you starting a company? Right? It sort of puts you on the spot. Like, why are you doing all this work? And I think I, I think I did a ton of work to feel as prepared as possible to like, have the confidence to take the leap. And I'm so glad I did. But I, you know, when I meet young people, I try to encourage them to do as much work as they can to build up that confidence and also to understand that there's a lot of things you aren't going to know in the process of building a company. But once you make that commitment, the learning's coming fast, right? And I'm sure you've experienced that.
13:36 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I see it all the time, especially in young people who they're using perfectionism as a way to procrastinate because they're, they don't feel competent or ready yet to. So you'll have people that, you know, come, come up to you and say, I've been working on this idea for, for two years, three years. And they're making all these assumptions, which they could quite probably figure out in a week if they just went to market to. But it's a guise for fear, I think, sometimes. It's a guise of like, I actually don't feel ready or I don't, I don't have the answers. So I'm just preparing more and wait for that perfect moment.
14:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think overcoming a fear of failure is a really critical step in life. And there's a lot of methods to think about for that. I think for me, it was doing a lot of work. I think it was following my passion. In some ways, the reason I feel like I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was, it was that it almost became an inevitability that I was starting the company, unless so a choice. Because it was like, all I was thinking about in my free time, you know, the things you do, the things you think about before bed or in a shower, you know, the quiet moments throughout life. I think those are pretty telling.
14:54 Steven Bartlett? And what role has that played, that obsession with solving the problem and solving that challenge and your general interest in it, what role has that played in your hardest times? As in, when things get really fucking difficult and it's easy to quit? If you're someone that's authentically driven and authentically curious about that thing, must make it somewhat easier to carry on?
15:18 Speaker 00 I think for sure. It pulls you through, like the obsession of solving a problem pulls you through. I mean, I struggled though for years with building Whoop. It was, it was really, really painful. And I think an important thing for any entrepreneur, but especially it was for me, was to disassociate my own identity from that of the company's. If you're, and you've been a young entrepreneur, so you know this, like as a young entrepreneur, I think a lot of your identity all of a sudden gets tied up in that thing you're creating. And for me, that meant if Whoop was having a good day, I was having a good day.
16:03 Speaker 00 If Whoop was having a bad day, I was having a bad day. And if Whoop was failing, I was failing. And that's a very unhealthy association, but it's also not true. Like literally, you can be taking great steps to improve as a leader, or as a manager, or even as a recruiter, and certain things will happen that may put your business sideways. And conversely, I'm sure you and I have both met founders, entrepreneurs who have watched their company go like this, but meanwhile, they're spinning out of control, right? And I think the faster that I could separate those two identities, my own and Whoop, the easier it actually became to build a successful company.
16:47 Steven Bartlett? Is part of the reason you're so, our identity becomes attached to the company? Cause I was thinking about why that was, that was definitely the case for me. And the answer was because my entire net worth was, was this thing as well. So coming from a background where I didn't have money, my family didn't have money. My entire net worth was this thing that was going well. So you can see how if the company starts to struggle, it's like Steve's actually poor again.
17:12 Speaker 00 Well, I had that too, for what it's worth. And some, in some respects, I still have it today, just like given the nature of the,
17:17 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
17:18 Speaker 00 of the value of the business. The, the key, uh, the key, at least for me in, in building the business was finding ways for myself to manage stress, to manage, uh, the difficulties that come with building a company, without finding myself on that yo-yo of the company's performance, right? It can't be that, uh, if the company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship. And if the company's having a bad day, you're feeling down. And so a lot of my, I think growth as an entrepreneur has been figuring out how to have a steady hand and how to, you know, sort of stay calm through the
17:56 Steven Bartlett? Chaos.
17:57 Speaker 00 Chaos, yeah.
17:58 Steven Bartlett? How have you done that?
17:59 Speaker 00 A few different things.
18:03 Speaker 00 I think the first, uh, and probably the most profound for me in general has been learning how to meditate. So in 2014, so I was about 24 years old. The company was maybe, I don't know, 30 or 40 people. Um, I think I had raised maybe $20 million, something like that, which certainly felt like a lot of money. And, um, and I felt like I was really failing, like as a leader. I was super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And, uh, and I remember having, um, what I would later learn was a panic attack. You know, and I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision
18:47 Speaker 00 like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they're like are a little bit numb. And you have this taste in your mouth. I actually thought I'd been food poisoned because the, the feeling was so. Unusual, outrageous. And, uh, and so I drove, I actually drove myself to the hospital. And I checked into the hospital and they do, um, you know, all these analysis on me. And like, it turns out I just had a panic attack. But the fact that I ended up in the hospital from panic attack, I was like, all right, wait a second. Like, I gotta really reset how I'm building this company and growing. And, uh, two days later, I signed up for this meditation course, transcendental meditation.
19:30 Speaker 00 And, uh, I've been doing it like every single day since then, about, yeah, about eight and a half years later.
19:38 Steven Bartlett? When I sit here with CEOs who, many of which have had panic attacks.
19:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
19:41 Steven Bartlett? Funny, funny enough, um, and they talk to me about meditation. I always seem to get a similar response, which is, I can't meditate. My head's too busy for that.
19:50 Speaker 00 Well, I think the busier your mind is, the more you need to meditate. I, so I learned how to meditate in two thousand and fourteen. And I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well. Um, there's sort of a four week check mark. I think there's like a four month or maybe a one year check mark. And then there's four years plus, which is fortunately where I am today. And the fascinating thing is what you first observe in meditating. Um, and I should just sort of clarify what kind of meditation I'm doing. So I, I spend about 22 minutes every morning doing this. And you literally are, um, you're, you're breathing, but then you start repeating a mantra.
20:35 Speaker 00 And the idea of the mantra is to start clearing your mind out and you're just focusing on the mantra. But what inevitably happens is thoughts start to drift in as you're saying the mantra. And you get to have this moment where you get to decide. Do I want to think about the thought? Or do I want to pass it along by going back to the mantra? So just right there in that moment, you start to realize that you can filter your thoughts. You also get to choose to sit with certain thoughts, right? Think how often in your life you might have thoughts coming in. You feel like you can't really control what you're thinking about, right? You almost like don't have that focus. So that's the immediate benefit that you get, that you feel while you're meditating.
21:20 Speaker 00 The more powerful benefit, and this is what I meant about feeling certain stages of having done it, is at least for me, it started to feel like I had a third person, you know, sort of watching me. And I would hear this voice in my head suddenly, like when I was about to get angry or when I was about to be upset or, and it was sort of a, all of a sudden, you're able to sense what you're about to do or say before you do it. So the immature version of me as an entrepreneur might find himself saying things and being angry and reacting. And then sort of almost catching up to the emotional state that I was in and trying to reel it back.
22:01 Speaker 00 Whereas the, the more meditated version of me, I think has been able to recognize when I'm about to say something before I say it or feel something before I feel it. And then, and that, it feels like a superpower.
22:18 Steven Bartlett? Did that grow over time, that third person ability with your transcendental meditation practice?
22:25 Speaker 00 I think so. I mean, it's, I imagine that learning how to breathe and meditate is like any other skill. And if you refine it for weeks versus months versus years, it, it gets better.
22:36 Steven Bartlett? And it's, it's basically becoming conscious, isn't it, of what's going on in your mind? You're becoming more conscious of your thoughts and that they're choices and you're not them.
22:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. I, I think it's at least helped me stay more in control of, of my actions, my feelings, decisions I'm making. And, and I really recommend it to anyone. Like, I think it's, I think it's a game changer.
23:01 Steven Bartlett? 2014, you cite in a few things you've, you've spoken on as being a very difficult year. That's when you had, as you said, 20 to 30 employees, you'd raised 20 million. Things were pretty crazy. In those early years, did you have doubt? Because when I think about the Whoop story.
23:20 Steven Bartlett? Its competitor set are all massive fucking juggernauts. And I've, I've like from afar, obviously, when I got, I got my week two months ago. I remember thinking, how the fuck have they done that? In a, in a, in an environment where you've got these big, you know, Steve Jobs founded companies and this company. And they've all got billions and 200 billion in the kitty. I'm like, how did they get on my wrist? How did they pierce and get?
23:43 Steven Bartlett? You went into an incredibly competitive market. When you did that, when you raised that 20 million, did you have doubts about yourself?
23:53 Speaker 00 I think I developed doubts in managing the company. Like, I always believed in the vision of what we set out to build. I mean, dating to 2011 or 2012, when I was doing all the research, like it was almost a straight shot from 2011 or 12 to today. The paper I wrote in 2011 was titled, The Feedback Tool: Measuring Intensity Recovery in Sleep. And like literally today, our three main metrics are strain recovery and sleep. So in terms of having a strong perspective on what the world should look like when the technology is built and actually measuring all the things it needs to super accurately.
24:36 Speaker 00 I think building whoop was, was more of a straight line than, than the average company. Where it was all kinds of zigs and zags and chaos is learning, one, how to be a CEO and run the company. To your point, learning how to navigate competition, and we can talk more about that. We've had some interesting experiences in that category. A big theme was actually being able to raise capital in part because of the competition, right? Like, it was hard. First of all, for a number of years, we were building the technology before we ever were really generating revenue. And that's, that's just a hard business to build. And it also took us a lot longer to get the product to market than we thought it would.
25:20 Speaker 00 Right? And so you're in this scenario where.
25:25 Speaker 00 You know, you're saying to investors, well, we're getting there, we're getting there, we're getting there. And so the, you know, the first seven years of the company, I would say, were enormously hard from just a technology development standpoint, from a capital raising standpoint, even from a business generation standpoint, because we, you know, we were seven years in and then completely changed our business model on its head, which was a bet the company moment, you know. And, and so there were just a lot, it was a lot.
25:57 Steven Bartlett? Had I told you at 22, the next, was 22 when you founded the company?
26:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
26:03 Steven Bartlett? If I told you at 22, the next seven years would look like that, do you think you would have done it?
26:09 Speaker 00 I think I would have done it. Yeah. I mean, it was painful, but I knew I was doing the right thing. Like, I knew I was, I knew I was in the right storm. You know what I mean? Like, there were a lot of feelings of being like my back against the wall. There were a lot of feelings of doubt.
26:31 Steven Bartlett? What were those feelings of doubt?
26:33 Speaker 00 You know, are we going to get this thing to market soon enough? Are we going to figure out what the right way is to sell it? Are we maturing as a, as a team? Are we going to be able to attract more capital? I mean, again, back to raising capital, we've raised about $400 million in capital today, but that's still sense when you look at the companies we've been competing against to get to this stage. And so I was, I was nervous about that piece of it. And especially again, as a young entrepreneur who's, who was raising capital for the first time.
27:03 Steven Bartlett? You said team and we there, co-founders.
27:07 Speaker 00 Yeah.
27:08 Steven Bartlett? How important is that in hindsight? Because I feel like you don't find out the answer to how well you've chosen your co-founders until a couple of years in.
27:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, look, I had a great CTO, I had a great lead mechanical engineer. We built the business together for 10 years. My CTO just transitioned to new projects. But it's been an amazing ride. And I think the fact that we've been able to build this technology that has, you know, through a variety of different third parties been credited as being most accurate wearable in the market, speaks to the technical chops of the founding team. And I don't take credit for that.
27:55 Speaker 00 So I think it's a remarkable accomplishment. And I think it's also important when you're building a founding team to have a fairly clear set of responsibilities. I get a little nervous when I hear of a founding team and they're both like the business guy or they're both like the technical guy and kind of do the same thing, you know? The advantage that we had in starting the company was each category of thing that we were trying to do was so hard. Like inventing a wearable that could measure heart variability as accurately as an electrocardiogram or raise capital at a time that, you know, Nike and Apple and, you know, a dozen other companies were entering the space.
28:40 Speaker 00 Like if I struggled with raising capital, like I wasn't going to have a partner giving me a hard time. If he struggled with building the technology, I wasn't going to give him a hard time. Like, we just knew it was hard. And we also knew that the other wasn't going to be better at it. So I think that there was an element of complementary skillsets that's helpful.
29:02 Steven Bartlett? If you were giving someone advice on how to pick a co-founder in terms of the character traits that you look for in that person, what would you suggest that they look for? Because it's a question I get asked all the time about co-founders.
29:13 Speaker 00 It's probably some combination of commitment, intensity and humility.
29:20 Speaker 00 The commitment piece is really important because
29:25 Speaker 00 You're gonna have a lot of very difficult things happen in the first six months, let alone the first six years. And so you want to know that this person's committed to doing this and it's going to be hardcore. And no matter what happens, we're gonna get through it. You know, I think startups really only fail if the founders quit or you run out of money. So like, if you can overcome those two things, you've got a pretty good shot. And so commitment's critical. And then intensity and humility, that's what I just generally look for in anyone that I work for or work with. You want hard driving people. You want people who recognize that it's going to take an enormous amount of work and discipline to develop whatever product
30:10 Speaker 00 or service it is that you're creating for the first time. But you also want along the way to have people who recognize that with that intensity and with that intelligence, with that depth, they have the humility to recognize that they may not have all the answers. And in particular, when you're building a company and a small company at that, that has a lot of different departments that intersect. And in the case of Whoop, I mean, hardware, software, analytics, data, regulatory, design, marketing, whatever. You could have a meeting with four different departments and it's really just four people. And all of a sudden, there's this massive collision around how we're going to send data
30:52 Speaker 00 from a Whoop strap to an iPhone. And like, the product person has their own perspective, the iOS engineer has his own perspective. You know, the Bluetooth expert has their perspective, the engineer has, the mechanical engineer has his own perspective. And so there's this natural collision of how should we solve this problem? And I think when you build teams with high humility, they tend to come out with the answer that's best for the company, not like I came up with it. So that would, I think that's a pretty good starting point. Commitment, intensity, humility.
31:26 Steven Bartlett? When you think about the most difficult time. So I know that you would have been through many, many difficult times. But when I say that, when I say the most difficult time, maybe a day, maybe a piece of news you got.
31:40 Steven Bartlett? An email. Is there something that comes to mind as the most difficult day, time, moment?
31:45 Speaker 00 Well, there was a period of time of about eighteen months where Whoop never had more than three months of runway.
31:54 Steven Bartlett? Of cash in the bank.
31:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. So picture that, right? Because, um, you know, so much of building a business is having the runway to strategize and grow and recruit and, and I had, the company had gotten into a weird moment where
32:13 Speaker 00 we were still doing innovative things, but we hadn't found the next investor to sort of carry the company through to the, to the future, uh, to a future round or, you know, give us two years of runway, which is sort of what you'd want for any capital injection. And we were making some deals happen. There were, there were compelling things happening in the business. And so we were able to stitch along a number of, uh, investments, but never enough capital. And so I just felt this enormous weight on my shoulders, man. Like it was, it was so intense. And, uh, and it also was a, it was a company size that, you know, it's one thing to say,
32:58 Speaker 00 okay, eighteen months and you never have more than three months of runway. It's one thing to say that when you're like a ten person team. Like we were like a fifty, seventy person team, something like that. So, you know, that you feel a lot of responsibility as well when you're operating through a period. And essentially it got to the point where, um, if we didn't get, uh, essentially a term sheet signed, uh, on a Wednesday, uh, we were gonna go bankrupt on that Friday or file for bankruptcy on that Friday. So imagine like two days from, from it all going away. And I remember writing, uh, like even writing a note to all of our investors about what
33:42 Speaker 00 a journey it had been and thank you. Like I felt all the feelings of the company had failed without the company having failed. And fortunately was able to get the deal done on that day. And, uh, Yeah, I'm so glad I did.
33:55 Steven Bartlett? I've been there, I've been there for multiple payrolls. I tell this funny story about it being payday on that day and the bank, our bank at the time not releasing the funds, we have 200 people. And them saying they'll only release the funds on that Friday when everyone's expecting payment if I get a contract signed by one of our clients. So I'm in London having drinks with this client. And we get to like, you know, a certain point at lunch, I'm like, you wouldn't mind signing this contract, send it off to, but multiple times, especially running a B two B agency business that was growing. Cash is always 60 days away, you've got to pay your bills today.
34:28 Speaker 00 Right.
34:28 Steven Bartlett? But what's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see?
34:36 Speaker 00 Well, I look back on that whole period with like immense gratitude because it, being able to overcome that and being able to essentially pull through in a circumstance where I think almost any other business would have failed. It just, it reframed for me going forwards, what it means to be facing a challenge. Like that was a real existential challenge, like this whole thing's going away, we're all going home, the technology is worth nothing, right? That's, that's like, poof. And so now it's like,
35:12 Speaker 00 okay, the sales were lower this month than the last month, or this great person on our team got poached by that company, or this epic competitor came out with this product. Like, there's, there's some level of perspective that comes with all of those, you know, big challenges, because I just remember being able to work through the, what I deemed to be one of the biggest challenges.
35:37 Steven Bartlett? Did you get anxiety through that period?
35:40 Speaker 00 Totally, but I, I also like, I was able to build a whole lifestyle and process to approach stress. And I do think that success may come for people when they overcome a level of stress that would break most people. And so.
35:59 Speaker 00 I'm a little critical of how pop culture likes to talk about stress, which is if you're stressed, you know, take on way less of it. Right. And that that may be true in small doses, but what we really want to learn is how to cope with stress and how to manage through it and how to overcome it. And I think also, if you're stressed about something, it's also a signal that it matters to you and it's important. Right. So, uh, it, look, it was, that period of time was
36:36 Speaker 00 enormously stressful, painful. I felt like I had to keep some of it to myself versus burden like a larger team with it. You know, so that there's certain burdens. I do think that CEOs or leaders or entrepreneurs carry, where you're, you're almost compartmentalizing something and you know, you're gonna have to, to feel it.
37:01 Speaker 00 I'm sure you know what that feels like.
37:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, of course. I think, you know, I did that for my entire career. And then I think the, the shift I've seen in, in culture with leaders was COVID. When a lot of companies, the facts were clear. Like we have to close down if you're a high street brand, for example. We have to close the doors. So that's when I think a lot of CEOs started being more honest with the state of play with their team members. And would say things like, listen, we're gonna have to let half the team go. And this is how much money we have in the bank. If we don't get here, then we're gonna have to close down. I, I saw a big shift then, and it inspired me a lot about being transparent with my teams. But I mean, for the whole of my professional career, yeah, I just, I just brave face. It was like, you would have no idea if it was the best day or the worst day, because my face was the same.
37:43 Speaker 00 So you got good at holding it in.
37:45 Steven Bartlett? A hundred percent. But my business partner didn't. And he became an alcoholic. So he, as he's talked about many times, he turned to alcohol. So we lived in the same house together.
37:54 Speaker 00 Sure.
37:54 Steven Bartlett? And he would, I, there were times when I went downstairs at 3am and went into the laundry room and he was there drinking.
38:00 Speaker 00 Yeah.
38:00 Steven Bartlett? And, you know, so we were, we were both coping in different ways. I was kind of compartmentalizing and kind of just, I called it a video game mindset where, it's what you've talked about, I was, I was holding the controller. I think my business partner was inside the game. You know what I mean? As in like, there was a, a chord between me and what was going on.
38:17 Speaker 00 Did you develop any like lifestyle hacks?
38:23 Steven Bartlett? I've got to be honest, no, not at the time. And now I think I have more. But at the time, no, I was just trying to get to the next day. And I think I have a natural sort of predisposition to in the worst moments ever, just purely focusing on what I can control.
38:43 Speaker 00 Which by the way is a big deal.
38:45 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah, I only know this in hindsight because I wonder why. And if I told you about the worst day we ever had in the business. Years later, my business partner says, why were you so calm on that day? Well, I had very few choices. So the worst day we ever had in the company, my choices were so small. And they were so obvious, as they often are. It's like if the room is on fire, like the door is over there and the button is there.
39:06 Speaker 00 I think about that all the time is like, are you controlling all the controllables? And often if you are, or even just, you know, setting, setting down in your mind, or even putting on paper, hey, what are all the things I control about the situation? What are the things I don't? That can be a very calming exercise.
39:24 Steven Bartlett? It's very focusing.
39:26 Speaker 00 Yeah.
39:26 Steven Bartlett? Even talk about that day when we had the cash flow problem. I knew what my objective was. Get this guy to sign this piece of paper. What's there to worry about? I have no time to worry. So, um, so, yeah, that was a, but you, you developed lifestyle hacks to help you disassociate.
39:41 Speaker 00 We talked about meditation, which was a big one. Exercise, big one. I got into hot, cold transitions. Gratitude is a big one.
39:57 Steven Bartlett? So take me through your day then, because I think this will reveal a lot of your habits.
40:02 Speaker 00 Sure. So let's take a given day in Boston.
40:08 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 00 The day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a framework for, you know, the next day.
40:20 Speaker 00 A few days a week, I work out with a trainer early in the morning. So I'll actually pack everything up for that. Well, I've got my workout clothes out. I'll have the what I'm gonna wear to work the next day. I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm gonna focus on the next day. And then like sleep, because you know, building Whoop, you think a lot about sleep. I, you know, I sleep in a really cold bedroom, a really dark bedroom.
40:53 Steven Bartlett? Why cold and dark?
40:55 Speaker 00 It's just shown to give you higher quality sleep. Yeah. And I try to go to bed at a somewhat consistent time. This is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed a little earlier. But so I'll probably get to bed between, I don't know, 11:30 and midnight. And then I'll wake up at around 6:30.
41:16 Steven Bartlett? Controversial question about your wife then. Does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed?
41:21 Speaker 00 It doesn't because we have, we've got good intimacy. Like we've got good bed cuddle habits, you know? It's like a
41:30 Steven Bartlett? Cuddling tongue.
41:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, we, we, we've done a good job coexisting in a bedroom environment. Although that's an interesting thing you can track on Whoop. So if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner, you can literally record that in the Whoop journal, in the app. So in a second, I want to hear what's in your Whoop journal.
41:52 Steven Bartlett? No comment, you can probably check.
41:55 Speaker 00 What you're checking against. So cold room, consistent bedtime.
42:04 Speaker 00 Yeah, and then I wake up and I'm like out the door. Really quick shower, workout clothes, got my stuff. I always give my wife kisses before I leave. That's like a nice relationship hack while she's, while she's sleeping. And then I work out for an hour with my trainer. I'll do a steam room after that, freezing cold shower. I do a breakfast that's mostly like egg whites. It's mostly proteins like egg whites, like avocado, bacon, that kind of stuff.
42:36 Steven Bartlett? Two points there. So the first was working out in the morning.
42:39 Speaker 00 Yeah.
42:39 Steven Bartlett? Is there any like data or science around that being advantageous?
42:43 Speaker 00 So back to being able to control the controllables. I like to work out in the morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to. What I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning and I'm supposed to play like squash that evening and then a couple of things come up around 6pm and all of a sudden I realize I'm not gonna be able to get out the door. And so then you know, you don't exercise. So the nice thing about working out first is like, okay, I've checked that box.
43:13 Steven Bartlett? And then the other thing was this, the cold water.
43:16 Speaker 00 Cold water.
43:17 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. Talk to me about why you do that and how that helps.
43:20 Speaker 00 So there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy, even if in the moment they're a little painful. And for me, being in the cold is one of those things. Like, I feel a huge jolt of adrenaline from it. It also forces me to breathe properly. And I think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces you to breathe properly is good for you. And then I feel kind of happy after doing it, like, like this little injection of happiness. And so I end 100% of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible.
44:01 Speaker 00 The colder, the better. And then the, the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect, depending on where I am, is, I mean, there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a sauna a few days a week, it is likely to increase longevity.
44:20 Speaker 00 I would say I like the cold more than the hot, but anyway.
44:24 Steven Bartlett? I'd say I'm the opposite. My, my girlfriend is a breathwork practitioner.
44:28 Speaker 00 Oh, okay.
44:29 Steven Bartlett? Coach. So obviously you understand what comes with that. And cold water is a big part of what she encourages on me. So she jumps in these ice baths and I'm like, I'm trying not to feel masculine. I'm like putting my toe in and I'm like coming up with reasons, but no, she's got me into it. So.
44:43 Speaker 00 So what kind of breathwork do you do?
44:46 Steven Bartlett? I don't even know the name of it. She's got her own method. She teaches classes. She's doing classes in London at the moment, big groups, one-on-one sessions. She's doing, she does sessions with lots of people that come on this podcast, in fact.
44:57 Speaker 00 Oh, cool.
44:58 Steven Bartlett? Cause they end up getting, getting to know her. So, but yeah, I don't know what type of breathwork it is, but it's an hour in a room, like the.
45:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, the double inhale.
45:09 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, game changer.
45:11 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think that's cool. I think it's amazing, yeah.
45:13 Steven Bartlett? That's a huge industry that's, that's feels like a wave coming into shore because this word breathwork showed up like 18, 24 months ago over here. And now it's everywhere with like Wim Hof.
45:24 Speaker 00 That's a good point. I mean, Wim Hof, yeah, I think Wim Hof pushed a lot of it, especially around the cold. And I, look, I think it's taking off for a good reason. In part because, again, back to controlling things you can control, you can literally control your breath in a second. And there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability. And heart rate variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system. It's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. So it's a little confusing, but if your heart beats at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating every second.
46:08 Speaker 00 Like it might be 0.7 seconds and then 1.3 seconds and then 0.6 seconds and 1.4 seconds. And it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing because it's a sign that your body is able to regulate in its environment. And your autonomic nervous system literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Now sympathetic is activation. So that's heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. Often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising, right? Now, parasympathetic is all the opposite, heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep.
46:52 Speaker 00 But where this all comes back to breathwork is literally inhaling.
46:58 Speaker 00 That's sympathetic.
47:01 Speaker 00 That's parasympathetic. So just by controlling your breathing, you can decide whether you want to be sympathetic dominant, parasympathetic dominant. You can increase your heart rate variability, you can decrease it. And that's something that's in your control. And heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a lens into how restored your body is.
47:25 Steven Bartlett? I noticed that because my friend Logan sent, he went for a night out. He got drunk, it was a wedding. Yeah. And then he screenshotted his, his whoop dashboard the next day and, and put it into our chat and went, fuck. Cause everything was red. And, and he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important, but I couldn't quite understand. And I remember trying to, trying to read about why it was important, but I, I knew you were coming here. So I thought I'd ask you myself, cause you, I've heard you talk about the importance of heart rate variability. I understand now what it is, but why is it such an important indicator? And what are the things that we do that make it plummet?
48:02 Speaker 00 So the fascinating thing about heart rate variability is it's been measured since like roughly the, the eighties. And the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that Olympic power lifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift. So based on whether they had a low or a high heart rate variability in the morning. And they'd get hooked up to an electrocardiogram, like this is an intense thing. And then they would go decide how much they were going to lift based on what their reading was. I was like, that's kind of interesting. Turned out cyclists were doing it in the eighties. The CIA was using heart rate variability for lie detection tests. Doctors, cardiologists were using heart rate variability to predict whether
48:45 Speaker 00 former heart failure patients were going to have a heart attack again. So I'm thinking to myself, this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of, that feels like everyone should be measuring. And, and so that's really. That was one of the core insights in building Whoop was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously. And in particular, it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's readiness and how well you're sleeping. So those are two ways that Whoop is primarily using heart rate variability. You know, things that decrease heart rate variability, dehydration, bad diet, we just
49:26 Speaker 00 talked about alcohol, heavy exercise, you know, heavy psychological stress. Often, people are surprised how just the wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep out of whack or their heart rate variability out of whack. So it's a very powerful statistic. It's a fascinating statistic. And I'm mostly glad like a lot more people are measuring it.
49:52 Steven Bartlett? It seems to know us before we know ourselves.
49:55 Speaker 00 It's a nice way to describe it. One of the things I would say in building Whoop is feelings are overrated. There are things happening in your body that you can't feel. And I think heart rate variability is one of those, one of those key indicators where for most people, it'd be very hard to know what their heart rate variability was saying in any given moment. But it has turned out to be a good embodiment of what Whoop does, which is that feelings are overrated.
50:25 Steven Bartlett? I say that because I remember looking at my heart rate variability and seeing it was orange or red, I can't remember, and then asking myself why. And I go, oh, yeah, I know why. Because I was really, I think I was really stressed that day. I hadn't slept. And then I hadn't slept because we had a back to back to back schedule. So I was going to sleep at 4am and waking up at 8am for like three days in a row. And my heart rate variability just seemed to plummet. And that was when I speak to my sister and I go, listen, we need to, no meetings before 11 because I need to sleep. And it knew me before I, and it's funny because it, yeah, it changed my life by telling me something that maybe I wasn't listening to. It changed my routine by telling me something that was clear, maybe from a subjective, objective standpoint, but I clearly was ignoring, thinking that
51:09 Steven Bartlett? I was invincible.
51:11 Speaker 00 Well, I think COVID-19 was a big wake up call for people in that category, right? Of
51:18 Speaker 00 Of feelings are overrated because here you have a virus that you can get that you don't feel, you're not even sick, and yet you give it to someone else and they get deathly ill. We had a fascinating relationship with COVID-19 in being able to measure it because we detected a statistic called respiratory rate being super elevated. But I can't tell you how many screenshots and messages I've gotten over the last two years of people seeing this huge spike in their respiratory rate, you know, two, three days before ultimately testing positive for COVID. And it reaffirmed in a lot of ways the founding story of the company, although in a different direction. It wasn't about not knowing that
52:03 Speaker 00 you should train today or rest today. It was about not knowing that you were sick. It speaks to the potential of health monitoring and why it's so exciting.
52:11 Steven Bartlett? Another conversation I've been having recently with a friend is about blocking out certain types of light. How did you do that?
52:18 Speaker 00 Yeah, so blue light, essentially what emits from a cell phone, a television set, an iPad. I mean, blue light's frankly all around us and blue light essentially tells your brain to stay awake. And so, one way to offset that is to not be on devices into the evening. But, you know, I'm still, I think, largely optimizing my life around being a great entrepreneur or CEO. So for me, that doesn't quite feel like an option yet, or I haven't quite built that level of maturity. But what I do do is I wear these blue light blocking glasses, which have a red tint to them. And it's like a get out of jail free
53:00 Speaker 00 card for using devices into the evening. And then they start to make you sleepy. It's probably the single biggest thing that's boosted my REM and slow wave sleep on Whoop is wearing blue light blocking glasses. It's worth emphasizing for a second, like for your audience, why that matters. So if you spend like seven hours in bed, you're not actually getting seven hours of sleep, right? And if you think about the seven hours you spent in bed, it's divided up of time in which you're awake, you're in light sleep, you're in slow wave sleep, or you're in REM sleep. And awaken light sleep as stages go really are kind of irrelevant.
53:45 Speaker 00 Like they don't do much for your body physiologically. They're not restorative. But REM and slow wave sleep, that's like where all the magic happens. So REM sleep is when your mind is repairing cognitively. It's when you'll have deep dreams. So people who say they don't remember their dreams or they don't dream, they probably aren't getting enough REM sleep. So for human beings, REM sleep is like critical, right? Cause that's cognitive repair. Slow wave sleep, that's when your body produces about like 95% of its human growth hormone.
54:14 Steven Bartlett? It's deep sleep on whoop.
54:15 Speaker 00 Yeah.
54:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
54:16 Speaker 00 And so, you know, people think they they're getting stronger going to the gym, right? Really, you're just breaking down your muscles when you go to the gym. You actually get stronger when you go to bed during slow wave sleep because you're producing all your human growth hormone. So just to zoom out, if you're someone who's spending seven hours in bed, it might be that you get a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep of those seven hours. It could also be that you get like five and a half hours out of those seven hours. And often when you talk to people about sleep, they're like, oh, I just don't have time, blah, blah, blah. We're not even talking about more time. We're just saying, how do you take the seven hours that you're in bed and make them way better?
55:00 Speaker 00 And, uh, and so for me, blue light blocking glasses was one of those things. There's a couple of others, but yeah.
55:05 Steven Bartlett? This was the thing that made me fall in love with my whoop. I remember getting eight hours sleep, waking up and feeling great, looking at my whoop. And it said you'd had three hours REM sleep and me going, man, I smashed it.
55:15 Speaker 00 That's nice.
55:16 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. And then a couple of days later or the next day, getting eight hours sleep, waking up and feeling like shit. Looking at my whoop and it said, oh, you've got 30 minutes or something. And me going, ah, there is it because you think, oh, I spent eight hours in bed. So I must've had, yeah, as you say, like eight hours sleep. But it's when you, once you see that, you can't unsee it. It's like this whole 29 years of my life, I've been like, I've misunderstood something so foundational about my entire life.
55:43 Speaker 00 And the fun thing is you can optimize it. Like, once you measure it, you can manage it.
55:48 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, I kicked my girlfriend out of the bed. I said, goodbye.
55:51 Speaker 00 Well, you don't have to be, yeah, you don't have to be that extreme. But it's, uh, yeah, I do think it's empowering and like sleeps about a third of your life. Be good to take care of that third too.
56:03 Steven Bartlett? If just the difference I see on a day where I've just had bad REM sleep or bad deep sleep versus the days when I've had good, like my performance, my mood, everything is so different. It's a completely different human being.
56:15 Speaker 00 Well, so there's a fascinating phenomenon too, as it relates to stress. So research shows that the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala responses, right? Amygdala is like fight or flight, right? And so if you get a ton of REM sleep, it essentially softens your amygdala.
56:35 Steven Bartlett? Ah.
56:36 Speaker 00 It, it, it makes it less active. Funny enough, I did a podcast with Alex Honnold. Do you know who that is?
56:44 Steven Bartlett? Okay.
56:44 Speaker 00 So Alex Honnold's the famous rock climber who did Free Solo.
56:49 Steven Bartlett? Ah, yes.
56:50 Speaker 00 You know that documentary?
56:51 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, yeah.
56:51 Speaker 00 So he scales this crazy, you know, slab of, of mountain without a, without a rope. And he also happened to wear whoop. And so I was talking to him about risk and fear and all these sort of different concepts, stress. But it turns out that he gets like four and a half to five hours of REM sleep a night on whoop. And I was thinking like, how perfect is it that a guy who literally can rock climb and risk dying every single day has this like unbelievable outlier also ability to get REM sleep?
57:30 Steven Bartlett? Of course.
57:30 Speaker 00 And could those two things be related?
57:32 Steven Bartlett? The other term that I wasn't familiar with until I got a whoop was this idea of strain.
57:36 Speaker 00 Hmm.
57:37 Steven Bartlett? I am going to be honest, I, we talked a little bit before we started recording about my little fitness group.
57:41 Speaker 00 Yeah.
57:42 Steven Bartlett? The way the fitness group is designed is that it's ba, you get, it's like a league table. It's rewarded on consistency. We call it the fitness blockchain. So there's 10 of us in it. If you lose, you get kicked out of the group and someone new gets put in every month. It's quite vicious. You get put into another group, you have to wait for three months before you get one chance of getting back in. If you don't, you go into what we call chump hell. Long story.
58:00 Speaker 00 It's like a hardcore fantasy football.
58:03 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, it's crazy. We check, we check a lot of things. You have to submit your workouts every day as well, and then someone verifies, et cetera. Strain, currently in that group, you're rewarded for working out every day. Is that a good thing?
58:22 Speaker 00 Well,
58:25 Speaker 00 the way that we think about strain is to balance it alongside recovery. So the average amateur exerciser, let's call it the weekend warrior,
58:41 Speaker 00 probably has workouts that look too consistent in terms of intensity, or too consistent in terms of strain. So whoop has a scale from zero to 21. On whoop, that might look like a 12, or like a 13. Like, so every time they work out, it's a 13.
58:58 Speaker 00 And the reality is, when your body's run down, maybe you don't want to do anything, or maybe you should go for a walk. Like, just let your body recover. Give yourself the permission to catch a breather. But if your body's peaking, like, go crush it, right? Take on a 16, or a 17, or an 18. And I should also say, you know, strain is essentially looking at the amount of time that your body is in an elevated heart rate zone. So we're talking about primarily cardiovascular measurement of stress that you're putting on your body for any period of time. But back to your question, like, you probably don't want to do
59:41 Speaker 00 a high strain every single day unless your body's freakishly recovering. And there are people who do that, but they're mostly like professional triathletes, or whatever. And you also want to try to vary the strain level. So if you're at a 50% recovery, maybe you're doing a 10. If you're at a 75% recovery, you're doing a 16, or a 17, or an 18. And a lot of this goes back to in building the product, we wanted to make it actionable. A lot of wearables, maybe V1 wearables, sort of told you what happened. We were very focused on telling you what to do next, and how you can
1:00:19 Speaker 00 get better.
1:00:19 Steven Bartlett? On that point of recovery, then, how, if I'm training a lot, how can I improve my recovery outside of sleep?
1:00:27 Speaker 00 Well, a lot of it would be diet, hydration, potentially supplements if you're taking them, making sure you're taking the right ones. Because if you're taking the wrong supplements, it's actually a lot worse for you than taking none. You know, I think some type of mindfulness, or meditation, or breath work speeds up recovery. That's my own bias. We certainly see sleep consistency, so that's less about what you're doing during sleep, but actually more just routine. So going to bed and waking up at similar times. Even exercising at a similar time may help you recover faster because your body's getting used to it.
1:01:09 Steven Bartlett? Of all the, of all the metrics that are tracked on the Whoop, is heart rate variability the one you love the most?
1:01:18 Speaker 00 Well, on a personal level, it was the thing that jumped off the page to me. You know, 10 years before it became even remotely mainstream. So I feel some relationship with it in the sense that like, I saw there was a lot of potential for this thing. On a, on a Whoop level, the product does now measure a lot of different things very well. So I don't want to say that any one statistic is the silver bullet. I think a lot of it is collecting all of this information in a form, in a format, by the way, that you're willing to wear 24/7, which has its own challenges we can talk
1:02:03 Speaker 00 about. And then creating scores or creating messaging to an end user that, that gets them to change behavior, gets them to improve health. That to me is the, if you think about the pyramid of, you know, sort of challenging things, the tip of the pyramid is a product that is changing your behavior and improving your health.
1:02:24 Steven Bartlett? Your company, the business you've built, I heard that your employees at Whoop get a bonus if their sleep is considered to be good on their Whoop. How much truth is there to that?
1:02:36 Speaker 00 It's a fun, it's a fun employee perk that we came up with. So everyone on Whoop is on a team together and you can opt into what's called the sleep bonus. And if you get 85% sleep performance on average throughout the month, you get a hundred dollar bonus, like on your pay stack. And so it's, it's mostly, it's mostly a fun thing, but it does speak to our culture, which is using the data we have in front of us, promoting sleep and good habits. Actually during COVID, we also came up with the red recovery policy, which was because we
1:03:20 Speaker 00 had a lot of people actually coming into the office during, even during the peaks of COVID, because we've built hardware, accessories, supply chain, things that you kind of have to do in person, very physical things. And so the red recovery policy was that if you had a red recovery, you actually needed to stay home because either you were getting sick, or you were at risk of getting sick because your body was rundown. So again, fun, fun ways to use the data in an actionable way and, and, you know, build it into the culture.
1:03:54 Steven Bartlett? When you talk about why your company has done so well, and it has one, you talk about there being a more scrappy kind of nature to the team, which sounds more like innovation. How does one go about, as your company grows, keeping that innovation that's so central to you winning? Because with growth often becomes like, I don't know, things move slower, bureaucracy, people waiting for Jenny to come back from annual leave. What are you doing from a culture standpoint?
1:04:24 Speaker 00 I think one of the reasons Whoop has been successful is we had a pretty clear perspective on what we were building and why. And the consequence of that is also what you're not building, right? Like Whoop is great at all the things that it does for all the things that it doesn't do. We are
1:04:43 Speaker 00 Not a smartwatch. We don't allow you to download a bunch of apps. We don't receive phone calls. You can't flag an Uber with your Whoop, right? But when it comes to health monitoring, we're the best game in town. And that really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. And it's carried us through to today. There were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that, like, along that journey. One obvious one is that Whoop is not a watch. And I can't tell you how many people have asked for Whoop to be a watch.
1:05:25 Speaker 00 And the reason it's not a watch is, is, there's a few different reasons, but just by putting the time on it, all of a sudden, you've created this enormous competitive landscape. And competing with watches is hard. Like, there's a lot of beautiful watches. There's also a lot of watches that serve different functions. Watch also says a lot about your identity. The other thing about a watch, and you'll notice this from every technology company, is the second there's a screen, there's this enormous scope creep that occurs for what the product's actually meant to do. And very quickly, you're in a product meeting where you're talking about email notifications and different screen colors and various ways to tell the time and whether or not you're going to be able to give it voice memos.
1:06:09 Speaker 00 And all of a sudden, you're talking nothing about health monitoring. And so if I look back in, you know, over the last 10 years, we made these decisions. Like, we made a decision to not be a watch and not have a screen on it. We made a decision on the flip side, though, to invent a modular charger where you could charge Whoop without ever taking it off. And that was super expensive and took, you made the product take way longer and cost a bunch of venture dollars. But again, it was back to that identity of health monitoring needs to be 24/7 to be the most effective. And if you take it off, all of a sudden, it's not 24/7 and you might not put it back on. So that was something we did that other people didn't do, right?
1:06:53 Speaker 00 Everyone was measuring steps. We didn't think steps was physiologically relevant. So we tried to stay true to our identity. And I think that helped us navigate a competitive landscape where a lot of people were copying each other or where companies may have had even too much resources. And those resources got them down into this very expansive place without being great at anything.
1:07:21 Steven Bartlett? Focus and first principles is what I had throughout that. What you said there, the first principles point about 24/7 monitoring.
1:07:28 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:07:29 Steven Bartlett? That's like a totally first principles thought because you said, well, health is a 24/7 thing, so we have to create a solution where you don't take the watch off. Convention says, no, just get charged and you take it off at night, you put it by your bed and you stick it on. So that approach and that conviction towards like thinking for yourself about this problem
1:07:49 Steven Bartlett? is much easier said than done for companies. Like I feel like one of the, you know, in all facets of our life, whether it's our relationships or intimacy or friendships or building companies or how we construct teams, thinking for yourself is what I heard there. You say it so easily, but it's why it's impossible for people to do, especially when they're thinking about innovation. Because, you know, you had all those moments where why doesn't this have a screen on it? It's also why I love it. It's probably also why the battery lasts longer. It's also why I'm so committed to it, as you've identified. But those are all like first principles that came from Whoop.
1:08:27 Speaker 00 I think what's different about your product is also what makes it special. And I think that true innovation often comes from a level of focus or discipline that's really uncomfortable. Like, having said everything I just said, I still think about Whoop as a watch on a near daily basis because it's something that pulls at me, you know? Because.
1:08:54 Speaker 00 I can see a world in which it is a watch, but it's not a watch and I'm not building it as a watch. You know what I mean? So there is this, you know, sort of painful level of discipline that has to occur, I think, to be able to continue marching forwards. And we actually went a different direction where we've looked at invisible as a more compelling landscape. So obviously you can wear it on your wrist, but you can actually, you know, take it apart and depending on what garments you're wearing, right? So you take this clasp off, you can now put this sensor into different places on your body.
1:09:31 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
1:09:32 Speaker 00 So, yeah. So we've come out with shorts, boxers, bras, underwear, shirts that have it in your arm sleeve. And so you can just tuck this into a little pocket that allows you to wear it in different areas of the body.
1:09:48 Steven Bartlett? I didn't know that. So I could put it in my boxer shorts lining.
1:09:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:09:53 Steven Bartlett? Oh, that's dope.
1:09:54 Speaker 00 Yeah. Now, also kind of crazy to start a wearables company and realize you're designing boxers. But that goes back to your first principles point, I suppose, right?
1:10:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, exactly.
1:10:03 Speaker 00 Why would you design boxers? Well, because you need to create a way for them to wear it 24/7.
1:10:09 Steven Bartlett? Something else you said, which I've never had anybody say before, but it's so unbelievably true, is when people have bigger budgets, when like with success comes greater temptation to be and do everything and become everyone. And that's often when companies lose their way. It's because of their success, everyone goes, well, why don't we do, we've got these customers now. So why don't we do a this and a that and a this? And why don't we do a da da da da? Five of them. Have you felt that temptation?
1:10:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's, that's probably the biggest way that success is a bad teacher, is the degree to which it makes you think you can go into a bunch of things and abandon the level of intensity or focus that you took in building the original thing to be successful. So.
1:11:02 Speaker 00 But you know, that doesn't stop me from dreaming of ways that the company can go in totally different directions. You just, you have to check yourself. Like, you really do have to check yourself and make sure you've got the right level of focus if you're gonna go into it.
1:11:19 Steven Bartlett? That's been one of my biggest mistakes is we become successful, I then come up with new ideas. I then think more about the reward of the new ideas versus the actual cost, the cost of like, mental time for the whole team. The cost of like, everyone waking up and being in the shower and thinking about a different problem. And then we had a recent incident where we spent, I'm gonna say nine months, planning something, big, big new thing in one of my companies, offered someone a job to be the CEO of this, this new company. And then, I don't know what it was, something in my gut says, you're doing it again, Steve. You're losing focus. Cancel it all. And it's funny, because my team were so excited, Jack was so excited, we're all so excited about. But when I had that conversation with everybody
1:12:03 Steven Bartlett? about why we were cancelling this, because I know we should be focusing, there was this weird, Jack goes, do you know what, I was so excited, but I'm relieved. And we all knew, we all knew we'd got carried away with thinking more about the reward of disfocus than the cost of disfocus. I don't think disfocus is a thing. But has that happened to you when you've like, ran too far down a path with a new idea, and then range yourself back in because you realize the cost of focus?
1:12:30 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think there's, there's been certain aspects of product development, you know, go-to-market strategies where you know it's the right thing even, but you, you're again, you're not dedicating the right level of focus to it, or the team doesn't have the bandwidth for it, or the timing's not quite right, like.
1:12:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, I mean, focus, I think, is probably one of the most underrated skills for any leader. And I don't mean that just for them. It's more important that they create an environment of focus.
1:13:09 Steven Bartlett? How does one do that? If I join Whoop, how am I going to learn on the day before I join, the day I join, and thereafter every day, why I'm here, this vision, the focus? How are you teaching me that?
1:13:24 Speaker 00 Well, a lot of it comes back to the core mission of the company, right? Which is to unlock human performance, to improve health. A lot of it comes back to being really deliberate about the hardware that we build and why, the accessories we build and why. A lot of it comes back to the fact that Whoop is a subscription, right? We haven't touched too much on the business model, but transitioning the whole company and the whole business model to being a subscription versus a one-time hardware sale changed a lot for the company. But one thing that it really changed for the better is the DNA around launching new features, launching new analytics.
1:14:09 Speaker 00 You're no longer trying to get a customer on an 18-month cycle where you come out with the new widget, or a 12-month cycle where you come out with the new widget. You're trying to keep your customers every day, right? Because every day, they have a choice to cancel. And what in turn that does is it makes you very focused on releasing new features that are adding value. Now, you could have a conversation that's two or three depths deeper than this, which is around, well, should we go down the path of releasing these features or those features? Do those features feel less focused than these features, right? But all of a sudden, at least we're two or three levels down in terms of focus. And so that's where a lot of the debates are taking place,
1:14:53 Speaker 00 is within the lens of our already focused mission and areas of innovation, should we pursue different categories or different features? And I like to think it's very customer-centric because we have this deep relationship with our members where they're wearing the product 24/7. And I think rightfully so, we have to earn their subscription every month.
1:15:20 Steven Bartlett? Competition.
1:15:23 Steven Bartlett? You've got some big competitors. I mean, I saw the, I saw Apple's recent announcement that sleep is now going to be part of the Apple Watch, one of the new Apple Watches, maybe, I don't know, Apple Watch 8 or something. How do you think about competition and what role is that, that played in motivating you, terrifying you, all of these things?
1:15:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, so when Whoop was starting, Nike, which is a company I looked up to with great admiration, was just coming out the Nike Fuel Band. Adidas was coming out with the Me Coach. Under Armour, about a year or two later, was going to spend a billion dollars, spends a billion dollars, acquiring three different companies in the space. They were coming out with their own wearable. They bought a running company, a company called Endomondo, a company called MyFitnessPal. So they had a whole strategy around health
1:16:20 Speaker 00 tracking. There was a company called Fitbit, which was about to go public for, you know, many billions of dollars. A company called Jawbone, which had raised a billion dollars. It was rumored Apple was entering the space. It was rumored Microsoft was entering the space. So, competition was always in this backdrop, but I, I found, I never found myself that swayed by what the competition was doing. In fact, if there's any company I'm most
1:16:58 Speaker 00 critical of their strategy in the wearables space, it was Nike. Because Nike is, I think, one of the best brands in the world. And they built that brand, have you read the book Shoe Dog?
1:17:11 Steven Bartlett? I haven't, I haven't.
1:17:13 Speaker 00 It's a great book. Anyway, it's Phil Knight's book. But they built that brand by storytelling and authenticity. And the authenticity being the people who wore their shoes ran faster and jumped higher.
1:17:28 Speaker 00 And so that was the company I was the most nervous about because I was afraid if they could build a wearable that their world's best athletes actually wore, they could then tell that story to the masses and be successful. But they took a huge shortcut. And that shortcut was they just built a product they thought the mass market would like. And so it wasn't a product that LeBron James was going to wear or Serena Williams or Tiger Woods. I mean, they had all the best athletes in the world. And so the clue to me that that product was going to fail was that it didn't stick to their identity. They didn't have the story at the top. They didn't have any of their top athletes wearing it. And on the flip
1:18:08 Speaker 00 side, the opportunity I saw was if we could get the world's best athletes to wear Whoop, we could in turn build our own brand around performance and around an aspirational product. And if you go back and like, looking back on it, that was a, that was a very stubborn perspective, like, and, you know, even a little bit arrogant to say that, no, we're going to build this technology and the world's best athletes are going to pay us for it because it's going to be that good. I also, though, think it was a fairly rational perspective because if you build a product that someone needs to wear 24/7 and they don't love it,
1:18:53 Speaker 00 there's no amount of money you're going to be able to give them to keep that thing on their body. Let's be honest. And in many ways, I saw that with the Fuel Band. On the flip side, if, if you can really deliver value around sleep or recovery or, you know, these measurements that at the time a professional athlete had never had, they're very likely to pay for it because that's a huge value add in their overall performance. So that was our very early go to market strategy. And it was also part of the way that we differentiated ourselves from other products. The last thing I'll say about this is, and again, inspired by Nike.
1:19:34 Speaker 00 The idea that you could build a brand or a product that says something about your identity, like the difference between a cotton shirt that's plain versus a cotton shirt with a swish on it, like the person who's wearing the swish feels something different. The person who observes the person wearing the swish thinks something different. That was a phenomenon that resonated for me at a very young age. But when I looked at the health monitoring landscape, to me, it felt like health monitoring was actually definitively not cool. And wearing a health monitor, there was almost a stigma associated with it, unfortunately. So how can you build a technology that people wear 24/7 that has
1:20:16 Speaker 00 a positive identity associated with it? And that goes again back to the professional athlete strategy. If we can get the world's best athletes to authentically wear it, then we can tell a story about how health monitoring is aspirational.
1:20:29 Steven Bartlett? It's interesting because I sat here with Scott Galloway earlier on, and Scott talked to me about how, once upon a time, maybe 30 years ago, because of the way we learned about products and the lack of TripAdvisor and review sites and Amazon reviews, the big, the big companies could, could sell a fairly mediocre product based on just pumping advertising, like traditional advertising, like TV and stuff. So you'd go out and buy the Procter and Gamble soap or whatever, just because you'd been overwhelmed with advertising from it. In the modern era, when we're all, we have social media accounts and we have, you know, ways to broadcast from the palm of our hands and we have WhatsApp so we can speak to our friends about ideas and products and stuff. It's, he was saying to me, it's become more about the product and it actually being great than the advertising
1:21:14 Steven Bartlett? dollars spent. So he said, it's no, it's no surprise that the biggest companies in the world, like the Teslas, they don't, they don't advertise. It's about you telling me about how much you love your Tesla. And the way that I came to learn about my Whoop was my friend Ash, a year ago, raving about it, like you'd paid him. I think you paid him. The way, the way he was going on about it was like you had paid him personally.
1:21:38 Speaker 00 That's great.
1:21:38 Steven Bartlett? And then obviously, you know, and then he eventually gets me into it and we have a fitness group, so we start talking about it. You can't pay for that. It's a better product. And I think now more than ever, that's become much more important to the consumer.
1:21:50 Speaker 00 I think that's right. I think there's a certain authenticity that consumers gravitate to, whether they're intentionally recognizing it or not.
1:21:59 Speaker 00 And yeah, for us, that's been core to our identity. We've had very unusual relationships with athletes and I think in large part because we've been able to build the technology that they get value out of.
1:22:15 Steven Bartlett? LeBron James is one of them that's often cited as being a whoop wearer. That must have been pretty surreal to see him wearing it.
1:22:21 Speaker 00 So two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps.
1:22:24 Steven Bartlett? Fucking hell.
1:22:25 Speaker 00 And this was in like end of 2014, early 2015. And it was also a very difficult time for the business, as we talked about earlier. But I remember I was sitting at home with my parents. At this point, I think the jury was out in their mind, whether me starting this company was a good idea or not, like a couple of years in, like I had raised money, but you know, was there a business? And this amazing thing happened where a commercial came on and it was LeBron James in a Kia commercial, wearing a whoop strap.
1:23:01 Steven Bartlett? Jesus.
1:23:02 Speaker 00 And I thought, isn't that the coolest thing? Like you wouldn't even take it off for a Kia commercial. And, and it also made me feel good in front of my parents.
1:23:10 Steven Bartlett? Did they accept that it's a real business from that point onwards?
1:23:12 Speaker 00 I think it helped marginally.
1:23:15 Steven Bartlett? Have they accepted it yet?
1:23:16 Speaker 00 But interestingly, it was, it was something that for a couple of years did buy us time for, for like building a real business was the fact that we could get all these really high profile athletes to wear the product without endorsing them. It demonstrated, I think to investors or others that, okay, there's something real about this technology that's different.
1:23:38 Steven Bartlett? On that point of investors, you've raised 400 million in capital roughly?
1:23:42 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:23:43 Steven Bartlett? 400 million dollars in capital. How important is it when it comes to picking your investors to pick the right ones? Cause I've seen this kind of make and break companies.
1:23:52 Speaker 00 I think it's really important that you're aligned with the investors on what the purpose of the company is and, you know, as a consequence, also what the purpose of the capital is. We certainly had investors along the way who wanted to put money into the business, but wanted it to go in a different direction than what I thought was the right direction. And so I'm grateful that I never took that capital. I think it gets more complicated when you've got a believer and that believer invests in you and your business. And then whatever you're building takes longer, or the revenue hasn't quite come in yet. And all of a sudden, the believer starts to become a non-believer. That's where you start to learn who your investors really are.
1:24:37 Speaker 00 You know, I think that's where you start to learn how functional a board of directors is. Like, when things are, when things are bad, how's everyone behaving? And so, it's super important in the selection process, certainly with with investors. And I think reference checks are really important. And I think alignment on what you're trying to do with the capital, what your identity is as a company. But I think equally important is learning how to manage your board and your group of investors when stuff isn't going well.
1:25:09 Steven Bartlett? We have something in common, which is you don't like networking. It's my idea.
1:25:14 Speaker 00 That's good research. That's how I know you're good at this.
1:25:17 Steven Bartlett? I fucking hate networking. And then when I read you didn't like networking, I thought, ah, that makes two of us.
1:25:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think it's overrated. It's often advice, too, that's given to young people. I think if you find a particular problem, industry, like fill in the blank, something you wanted to solve, a passion of yours, it pulls you into meeting the right people. And that's where showing up is really important. That's where going to the thing that you're half invited to, you need to go, you know what I mean? Versus being invited to something that you're not sure about, or whatever. Pulling yourself into those environments is critical.
1:26:02 Steven Bartlett? Another piece of advice you gave to CEOs was this, which I found fascinating, which is there's a difference between hearing and listening. What did you mean by that?
1:26:10 Speaker 00 So, back to some of the earlier stages of the company. I mentioned it was hard to raise capital for the business. And, you know, I heard no a lot. Like, I was rejected a lot in building this company. And
1:26:26 Speaker 00 The coping mechanism for that, especially when I would, I would say I was a slightly more immature leader, the coping mechanism for that was to kind of put up a wall to negativity. To the point where I wasn't listening to it and I wasn't hearing it, right? It was like it wasn't there. And that was an effective and highly, that was an effective coping mechanism for a very short term period that would not at all have allowed me to scale a business. And I had a, an advisor and really mentor at the time who said to me, you know, Will, you don't have to listen to what people say, but you should just hear it. And that was a helpful and very simple way for me to just reframe
1:27:12 Speaker 00 the way that I thought about negative feedback. Like, okay, this person disagrees with me. I'm going to absorb that. I'm going to sit with it. I'm going to wrestle with it. And interestingly, now over the course of 10 years, you know, disagreement is almost a source of excitement for me because it allows me to ask myself this question of, how do I know what I know? Why do I feel so strongly about something? And it really makes you, again, wrestle with it and hopefully debate it with someone who's smarter than you, who's going to prove you wrong. I mean, that I think is what's so exciting about building a dynamic team and, you know, taking on whatever challenge you've got.
1:27:52 Steven Bartlett? That speaks to the importance there of humility again, doesn't it? And why that's such an integral thing when you're hiring or picking co-founders. You know, I've also heard you say that customers are really great at telling you what's wrong, but not very good at telling you the solution to what's wrong.
1:28:05 Speaker 00 I think that's important. I think it's a very helpful framework. I mean, back to starting the company, I went out and met with all these coaches and athletes and asked them, okay, if you could have any technology improve your performance, what would it be? And they were all super focused on exercise type equipment. Could be measuring stress, could be GPS analysis, could be video analysis, form analysis. It was, it was hyper focused on the thing, the sport, the exercise. But when I asked them, what are your biggest problems managing a team or being an athlete? It almost always came back to some form of availability.
1:28:47 Speaker 00 So injury or overtraining, like not being optimal on the day you needed to be optimal.
1:28:54 Speaker 00 And so I thought there was a huge mismatch between the solutions they were asking for and the problems they were describing. And for me, that's something I just try to think about when I'm listening to customers or when I'm thinking about products is,
1:29:11 Speaker 00 am I, do I clearly understand what the problem is? Or am I focused too much on what a solution could be? Am I hearing too much of the solution or am I hearing the problem? And if you hear the problem, then all of a sudden you're building something pretty different.
1:29:26 Steven Bartlett? Interesting. You hear the problem and then you can kind of first principles up to solve the problem versus accepting probably the convention oriented solution.
1:29:35 Speaker 00 I thought the best way to solve problems around athlete performance was measuring the other 20 hours of the day. And at the time, that was super counterintuitive.
1:29:45 Steven Bartlett? That, again, that word counterintuitive seems to be, come up over and over again when I read your story about being a contrarian and being counterintuitive. And this goes back to the point about innovation and thinking for yourself. Because when you don't think for yourself, you just accept convention. That seems to be a really consistent thread throughout your whole journey. Not easy to do. Not easy to do, especially when things get tough and everyone goes, see, convention was right, Will.
1:30:11 Speaker 00 I think it's important to develop a process for conviction. And then to, to really sit with something that you're convinced about and pressure test it and bat it around and even let other people pressure test it. But if you have a track record of that conviction working out, then you really have to, you have to stick to it because it's ultimately what's going to make you successful.
1:30:37 Steven Bartlett? Sometimes I worry about that. That, you know, you can, you can be, you can win so many times in a row that you might stop listening and you might, you know.
1:30:49 Speaker 00 Well, it's worth noting that
1:30:52 Speaker 00 the level of conviction that we've talked about on certain things.
1:30:55 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:30:57 Speaker 00 Is not a level of conviction that I feel like all the time about a lot of things. You know what I mean? And, and I think it's worth, it's really worth emphasizing that, like in building this company, I've had doubts about an enormous number of things. So it's important not to look at any entrepreneur and think, oh, that person has all the answers. Like, I haven't met that person yet. I, I just think it's, it's a really useful process to figure out what are the things that you feel the most strongly about in the product or service that you're building? Because when you figure those specific things out and then you dig your heels in on them,
1:31:42 Speaker 00 a lot of magic can happen around it.
1:31:45 Steven Bartlett? What's something you think you're wrong about with Whoop? Or you might be wrong about? Have you got a creeping suspicion that there might be something fundamental to Whoop that you might have been wrong about in terms of your hypothesis?
1:31:57 Speaker 00 Well, I think a lot of the answers to that are also things that we're actively working on and building. So it's a little bit, sort of a little bit closer to the secret sauce, if you will, than, than maybe your, your question intended.
1:32:14 Steven Bartlett? I'm more than happy for secret sauce.
1:32:16 Speaker 00 There's a natural tension that occurs when you grow as fast as Whoop has over the last, call it three years, four years, and where your market goes from being a certain level of elite athletes to fitness enthusiasts to everyone, where you have to ask yourself, how much are you designing the product for everyone versus one of these segments? And so there's, there's certain aspects of the, the rate at which we would help someone who's trying to lose weight versus someone who's trying to improve sleep versus someone who's trying to run a marathon versus someone who's training for the World Cup.
1:32:58 Speaker 00 Like the rate at which we're curating the whole experience to that individual experience, I think is that's an aspect that I ask myself a lot about. How are you thinking about that at the moment? I believe it should get much more personalized. And even the degree to which certain statistics that you see or don't see may evolve depending on your core goal. So that would be an example of, you know, an area that we're working through and wrestling with. I have no doubt that people have approached you to buy Whoop. No comment. So I'll tell you a story.
1:33:42 Speaker 00 In 2000, and we talked a lot about competition in 2000, and I want to say like 17, 18. It was around that time that Whoop had clearly built great technology, but we hadn't quite figured out the distribution side of the business or even the business model. We were approached by Amazon and Amazon was interested in first investing in the company, but then they also got interested in potentially acquiring the company. And we weren't interested in selling the business at the time, but in the process of evaluating an investment, we shared a fair amount about the company, right?
1:34:26 Speaker 00 And certainly information that you wouldn't want to share to Amazon. A potential competitor slash Amazon. And fast forward two years later, they came out with a product that was a direct knockoff of a Whoop strap. That's not like Amazon. Yeah. Well, you know, you feel it differently when it happens to you, that's for sure. But look, it goes back to some of the resolve of the of the company and the, I think the culture at Whoop, where we do feel kind of David versus Goliath. We are comfortable with people coming after us and we're not threatened by competition.
1:35:06 Speaker 00 Because the day they announced that it was almost like a running joke within the office, it wasn't, okay, we're screwed. It was.
1:35:16 Speaker 00 That's gonna fail, you know, and we're gonna, we're gonna see to it that we succeed. So anyway, it was like almost energizing that, that they did it. And of course, it's nice now to, to see that the product I think hasn't quite been as successful as they would have liked, or maybe I don't think they're releasing a future version of it.
1:35:37 Steven Bartlett? When your team said that's gonna fail, what gives you that, that conviction? What is it about what you see in your walls and knowing about what's going on in their walls? That makes you go, you know, we're still gonna win?
1:35:51 Speaker 00 I mean, I don't want to be critical of Amazon. I think Amazon is a pretty amazing company and I'm sure has an enormous number of amazing people. I think what, what's inspired, what inspired Whoop in that moment is the same thing that inspired us for 10 years, which is that we see things a little differently. If, if someone is gonna try to copy everything that we've done before, they're still not gonna have the special sauce for what we're gonna do next. And even when we created our Whoop 4, on the circuit boards, we wrote, don't bother copying us, we will win. And it was this great, it was this great like call out to the engineering team.
1:36:33 Speaker 00 And in fact, every single engineer who worked on Whoop 4, their initials are on the circuit board.
1:36:39 Steven Bartlett? Oh, really?
1:36:40 Speaker 00 So a real sense of ownership. And the funny thing, of course, about putting a line like that on a circuit board is the only person who's ever gonna see that circuit board is someone who's trying to copy it.
1:36:52 Speaker 00 So, you know, I think there's, I think there's ways to roll with these things and, you know, challenges ultimately are what help you find your identity.
1:37:01 Steven Bartlett? What is the end then? What is the end goal for you? You're an entrepreneur, you've done this for more than a decade now. Entrepreneurs start thinking about taking money off the table, about selling, about, you know, going and working on some other challenge in the world. Where, where is your brain? I know this is a difficult question to answer and I know what it is, but you've got team members and investors and, but where are you at? What can you tell me?
1:37:21 Speaker 00 I think one thing that's potentially unique for Whoop versus other businesses that, that I could have started or, or an entrepreneur might start, is that it's actually gotten exponentially exciting as it's grown. Like I'm as energized today running the company as I've ever been running the company. And I've met founders who, for no fault of their own, are actually just in a different place with that. Like, they're 10 years in, or even six years in, and they kind of feel like they've hit their peak of the mountain, and it's time to bring someone else in, and they'll stay involved as a chairman, or maybe it's the right time to sell it. For me, it's really as energizing a time as I can remember building it. As you have more and more people
1:38:06 Speaker 00 on the product as well, it creates, I think, more and more momentum for it. It's also a product that you see people wearing all the time. So, like, everywhere I go, I now see Whoop, which is pretty amazing, just given that, once upon a time, it was an idea on a piece of paper. And so, I still find that energizing. I've got an amazing team. And the future for health monitoring, I think, is really to be able to predict something about your health that you otherwise couldn't feel, that is either going to improve your
1:38:48 Speaker 00 life, or it's going to save your life. Like, I think the potential of health monitoring is so profound that, you know, it determines my full-time attention for now.
1:39:04 Steven Bartlett? We have a tradition here where the previous guest asks a question for the next guest. They don't know who they're asking the question for. And I don't know the question until I open the book. The question that's been left for you is, this is kind of funny. They maybe didn't realize your age when they wrote this, but they said, "What would you tell your 25-year-old self?" I'm going to change this to, "What would you tell your 22-year-old self?"
1:39:34 Speaker 00 Keep going. You know, it's going to work out. I think, learn to separate.
1:39:44 Speaker 00 Gratitude from complacency. I think.
1:39:50 Speaker 00 I think there was a phase in building Whoop where it was so much, or even just growing as an entrepreneur, where it was so much about the next milestone and getting to that next milestone, that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine, right? And you tell yourself, okay, getting to this milestone's a really big deal and you're going to be really happy when you get to this milestone. And that has, that has an important physiological effect in that it literally creates dopamine because you're anticipating this thing.
1:40:26 Speaker 00 But then when you get to that thing, if it's not the thing that you thought it was going to be, there's this huge letdown. And so.
1:40:36 Speaker 00 In the process of living on that sort of dopamine wheel, I learned that you really need to introduce gratitude and be appreciative of all the steps and people and products that are happening along the way. And I think there's a misperception for entrepreneurs, at least I think there was slightly a misperception for me, which is like, okay, if I stop too much to appreciate where I am, or this moment, or what's happened.
1:41:06 Speaker 00 I'm not going to have the drive to get to the next thing. And that's actually not true at all. Like you can be very appreciative of where you are today and still entirely driven to get to the next milestone in your, in your mind. So I suppose to, to re-answer the question, it'd be learning how to, to balance gratitude with drive.
1:41:29 Steven Bartlett? And that makes the whole journey sustainable.
1:41:31 Speaker 00 Totally, yeah.
1:41:33 Steven Bartlett? That's how you can go for like multi-decades and still, and not get burnt out or.
1:41:37 Speaker 00 That's how you sprint the marathon.
1:41:40 Steven Bartlett? Well, thank you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for making a product which is just exceptional. And, you know, it probably sounds like I'm kissing ass or I'm like making this up because you're here, but I genuinely, I mean, you can check my account.
1:41:53 Speaker 00 By the way, we don't check accounts.
1:41:54 Steven Bartlett? I know privacy is like number one for you, but it's just a joke.
1:41:58 Speaker 00 Thank you for being on Whoop and I appreciate the way you do this. You do a nice job.
1:42:02 Steven Bartlett? No, I'm so unbelievably curious and it was such amazing timing that we got to have this conversation shortly after I became obsessed with my Whoop because I have so much to ask you, not just about the watch, but about building a company that has taken on these incumbents and done such an unbelievable job of it. And I think now I know I finish this conversation, understanding why. And it's about that, that focus on the vision. It's about having really clear principles that are driven from a real, real sense of like authentic curiosity. Obviously, hard work on all of these things and great people are huge factors, resilience, grit and all those things. And then it's again about the innovation that's behind which comes from those principles, which has allowed you to continually think from first principles because the Whoop is very different. And so
1:42:46 Steven Bartlett? that, that for me is clear, like a, like a book, like Harry Potter, it means it's come from a very singular vision of the world. It couldn't have been, this is not the byproduct of huge amounts of consensus.
1:43:02 Speaker 00 That's fair. Yeah.
1:43:03 Steven Bartlett? See what I mean? Because a group of people would not have thought of this.
1:43:05 Speaker 00 That's right.
1:43:06 Steven Bartlett? They would have give, put a screen on it with the thing. But so it's really remarkable to meet you and I have no doubt that, you know, this company is going to continue to go from strength to strength. So thank you for being here.
1:43:14 Speaker 00 Thank you, Stephen.
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