WHOOP CEO, Will Ahmed: 50B Hours of Health Data, a 4 Million Member Data Moat, & the FDA Fight

(0:00) Welcome Will Ahmed, CEO of WHOOP (0:59) WHOOP's $500 Hardware Problem & the Subscription Pivot (6:59) Inside 50 Billion Hours of 24/7 Health Data (19:31) WHOOP's AI Coach, Journal Insights & GLP-1 Tracking (34:57) WHOOP vs. the FDA & Competitor Wearables (44:33) Lightning Round & LeBron James becomes a WHOOP Ambassador Thanks to our partners for making this possible! As wealth grows, complexity compounds. Between investments, tax strategy and estate planning, coordinating it all can feel like a full-time job. Creative Planning can help with the heavy lifting. Learn more at https://CreativePlanning.com/AllIn https://t.co/cnQMdfafb7 Starting a business? Northwest Registered Agent gives you everything you need to build a complete Business Identity including free tools and built-in privacy. Get more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/ALLINFREE Follow Will: https://x.com/willahmed Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@allin Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect #allin #tech #news

• 0:00Speaker 00

  On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. We have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So it's one of the largest health data sets in the world.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  For a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  You want people to love your product authentically. LeBron James is now Global Ambassador for Whoop. He was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it.

• 0:23Speaker 01

  You're starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.

• 0:38Speaker 01

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  All right, guys, welcome back to the All In Interview Program. And this is where guests we want to unpack for an hour or so, not talk about the news like we do every Friday. We want to go deep. And health and technology is one of those areas that's super interesting to all the besties. And I was really excited that my friend Will Ahmed from Whoop decided he would carve out an hour for me and the All In audience. You and I have spoken, I think, two or three times on the OG Podcast this week in startups that I've been doing for over 15 years there in the journey for Whoop. But let's start with just the footprint of Whoop as an organization now. Because I've known you for, yeah, well over five years, six years of this journey.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  How many members, ballpark-ish, how many people are using the Whoop? And how much data have you collected?

• 1:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Whoop, we build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I've been building this company now for 14 years. It was founded in 2012. And I think, like a lot of maybe overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. You know, it took about 12 years for us to get to a million members. And then another 18 months or so to 2 million, about six months to 3 million. And we expect to end the year around 4 million members.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  4 million members. And hey, listen, I'll tell people right out, the service at first seems expensive because I think it's like 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month. I mean, the approximate range here, what do I spend, 300 a year on this?

• 2:40Speaker 00

  Depending on what plan you're on, it's anywhere from 15 to $30 a month.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  I'm on the top top plan with the top top sensor. But you took a very thoughtful approach to saying, we're going to go for subscriptions, and we're going to take out the cost of the device. So you don't have this cost, losing the device anxiety. So take me to that decision. And to be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health, or even less than a dollar a day. But take me through that decision as a business to go with 30 bucks a month.

• 3:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, thank you. It's a unique business model. And in 2017, we had launched to consumers. It was a one-time fee, 500 bucks. At that point in the company's history, we had really built Whoop as like a performance brand. You know, it was known amongst the best athletes in the world, and we worked with all these sports teams. And we said, okay, we're going to go to consumers and target, you know, an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience. And over the course of the next 12 months of having that product in market, we really observed two things. The first is that people who bought Whoop would wear it for a long time. And that's always been a challenge in the wearables industry around drop-off rates and engagement.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  And fortunately for Whoop, that's been a strength of our of our product. But then the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. So we still had a sales problem. And because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, well, is there a business model here where the entry price is lower, so people can get introduced to Whoop? And if they fall in love with the product, then over time, it can be a good business for Whoop, too. And I think that immediately created all kinds of of growth for Whoop back in 2018 and 19. And we quickly became a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which of course is more attractive to investors. And then, you know, what I underestimate is how much it changed our DNA.

• 4:37Speaker 00

  Because when you're a subscription business, you become really obsessed with your existing members, arguably more so even than new members. And so it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.

• 4:53Speaker 01

  See, this is, I think, a critical observation for founders who might be watching. When you're selling widgets, you know, it's about distribution and, you know, marketing. But once you get a subscriber, hey, they're your customer next month and the following month and the following year. So you start obsessing about churn and engagement, right? The metrics kind of shift, right?

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. You get very focused on user engagement, how often people are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is, you know, how are you actually driving behavior change and health improvement? It changed our hardware cycles as well. So when you're a hardware business, you're incentivized to ship new hardware every 12 months, whether or not it's actually innovative, because you always need that next dollar from a hardware sale. And also, when you're a pure hardware company, you're not incentivized to be innovating on top of the existing product, right? Because you want to convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually with the opposite incentives.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  We want to launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, 18 months ago, may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring, or AFib detection, or advanced labs, which is now the blood work feature that we have in the app, or HealthSpan, which, you know, tells you your Whoop age and is a whole longevity feature. Blood Pressure Insights, which is a new capability that allows people to to look at their blood pressure every day. So these are all examples of new features that we've brought to market with hardware that's in market.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is like, you're taking on, as Whoop, the responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade, but it's not like some high-pressure thing, like your iPhone cycle, where they're constantly, you know, pressuring you to upgrade so they can make the money on the hardware. Now, let's talk about the innovation inside the software. And, you know, I've used everything, Fitbit, which was, I guess, Google Health, now Apple Watch. I've had all of it, Aura, over many, many years. And I settled on Whoop. Why did I settle on Whoop? Well, I bought your software, actually, which was hard for me to get my head around at first,

• 7:25Speaker 01

  because you have this recovery score, you have the sleep score, you have stress. But and then there's this journal feature. It was a little complex for me compared to the other products. But ultimately, what I found was it gave me more value once I committed to the product. So what does committing to the product mean? I think if you put in and you fill out the journal every day, or just, you know, a couple of times a week, you get much more out of it. So let me have you explain what the most important metrics are here. Heart rate variability, the recovery score, high-stress sleep, et cetera.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  And then, and then work me into like some of the the the features around journaling and why that's important.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, the three main pillars on Whoop are around sleep, recovery, and strain. And so most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night. And that'll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency. Do they go to bed and wake up at the same time? Your hours of sleep, so how many of those hours were quality sleep versus the time that you just spent in bed trying to sleep? How much was restorative, slow wave sleep, REM sleep? You know, a pretty deep understanding of your body's overall circadian rhythm and how well you're sleeping. And then ultimately, your recovery score, which is red, yellow, green, 0 to 100%. By the way, I'm pretty pumped about mine today. I want you to know I'm ready for you.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 8:56Speaker 00

  93%.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  Hold on a second.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  I just had to show you that.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  93% is pretty good.

• 9:02Speaker 00

  That's really strong for me.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  That's very strong. For me, not so good. I'm on a 67.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  Okay, but you got a green dial.

• 9:10Speaker 01

  I got green, and my sleep was 83%.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:13Speaker 01

  And my strain today is incredibly low because all I've done is sit and do no work. But, you know, this is like, super critical for me to have these numbers now. I travel, I go to Japan, I go to Saudi, I go to Davos, you know, World Economic Forum. I'm all over the globe, and I'm trying to regulate my sleep. I'm trying to figure out, should I be on this sleep schedule or, you know, the other one? And I'm just trying to make sure I'm fresh for when I'm doing performative stuff, you know, like on podcasts or speaking gigs. And it's essential for me now. It's just essential for me. I can't live without it. The thing that was interesting that happened for me is you also have, under those three most important metrics there.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  The health monitor?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  You have the health monitor. Now, this is critical for me because twice now in the past, yeah, I think it's two or three times now, I have had, under health monitor, which has your respiratory rate, your resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and HRV, heart rate variability. Right now, I'm all in green. However, the other week, I'm going to tell you this story. It involves me going to the emergency room with chest pains. This is serious. Some people in the house, the kids or whatever, had a respiratory infection. I didn't get it, but I wake up one day and my respiratory rate is two breaths higher than normal. Instead of 16, it was like 18 or 15, it was 17.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  And then my skin temperature was like two degrees hotter, right? And

• 10:46Speaker 00

  And just for people listening, when your respiratory rate is elevated by two breaths like that, that's actually pretty meaningful because respiratory rate is normally a very boring statistic. It normally doesn't change at all.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  So it's like, hey, what's going on? Then it does it a second day in a row. So then I, you know, like do the warm bath. I got me sure I got my electrolytes. I'm thinking maybe I'm coming down with something. Anyway, I recover on Saturday, Sunday, Sunday night, I can't sleep. I start getting chest pains. I put the Tesla at 1:00 AM in self-driving and I go to the emergency room because I used to work on an ambulance. I know, hey, you know, when you have chest pains and you're 55 year old male, this could be serious or it could be indigestion. I go, I do every possible test. I go right to the heart center in Austin here and they do the CT scan. I think that's the, the big scan of your heart. EKGs, everything, I'm there from 1:00 AM until 7:00 AM.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Turns out I had inflammation in my lungs around my chest and my heart was being constricted. So I was experiencing chest pain. I was not having a heart attack, but there was something going on and I was alerted to it to, for two days in a row, without having any other symptoms, very strange, right? And it was the whoop those two days earlier, that Thursday, Friday, that on Sunday I was on high alert. I was like, something's going wrong with my system. It had done that. And the reason is three years ago, the same thing happened. My skin temperature is going crazy. And then in that case, I think it was my HRV. I'm like, what's going on? I got COVID.

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  So I have two, two bad scores. I'm in New York with one of my daughters and I was able to take that Paxlovid, which you can only take if you get to it early. So I'm like, F this, two days of like heat. I go, my wife goes, maybe you got COVID? I'm like, wow, that's so retro. I go right to Duane Reade, I take the test, I got it. I get Paxlovid all in the same day because the whoop told me. So you anticipated two acute situations for me. What other acute things are you starting to learn here? Now that you have four million people in the system. I understand now you're becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services and/or, you know, you're, you're starting to understand things before,

• 13:05Speaker 01

  let's say the, the rest of the medical community is, is learning them.

• 13:09Speaker 00

  Well, thanks for sharing that. I mean, that's an amazing story and I'm grateful you're feeling all right and grateful that whoop could, uh, could play a small role helping. I think it's, it's amazing. We now get these testimonials every, every day, every week from, uh, from members who have an experience like the one you described. I got a message last week from, uh, you know, a fit, healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw he had these elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal. You know, someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute, getting a heart rate of 120, 130 while he's sleeping. And, uh, and he goes in, uh, to see the doctor and, um, they do some tests and sure enough,

• 13:54Speaker 00

  uh, stage four Hodgkin lymphoma.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah. And, uh, and he was able to get treated for it and he's recovered from it. And, uh, and then, you know, another similar story where a member with their HRV, they'd been on whoop actually for I think close to a decade. So they had this incredible baseline and, um, and HRV for, for people who are less familiar.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, unpack that because you're the one who introduced me to this whole concept. And I, I have since gone down the rabbit hole.

• 14:24Speaker 00

  So HRV stands for heart rate variability. It's amount of time between successive beats of the heart. And, uh, and it's a little counterintuitive, but the more variability in time between successive beats of the heart, the healthier your overall system is operating. And it's this lens into your autonomic nervous system, which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. So sympathetic activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. It's what happens, you know, when you have a thought like there, there's a lion in the room or, you know, when you start to exercise or you're thinking about something stressful. Conversely, uh, parasympathetics, all the opposite, heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep.

• 15:08Speaker 00

  If you exhale for a long period of time, that's parasympathetic. And what you want is for, for sympathetic activity and parasympathetic activity to be coupled. And so your body's kind of constantly regulating its environment. And when that's the case, it, it means you have a higher heart rate variability, that the measurement will be higher. And we're measuring heart rate variability 24/7. It was really one of the, the key innovations in founding the company. Uh, I did all this medical research when I was a student at Harvard and heart rate variability was a thing that like jumped off the page to me because there was really interesting research on it, but it couldn't be measured 24/7. And, uh, and so that's where, um, you know, part of where whoop was born out of. Anyway, heart rate variability is something that we use for stress monitoring.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  It's something we use for our recovery score and, uh, and we baseline everyone on whoop. And then we're able to show you every day, are you within your baseline? Are you a little higher, you're a little lower? And when you look at trends of this over years, you start to get a sense for, is someone getting healthier over time or, or less healthy? It's a really important longevity indicator. Typically speaking, as you get older, your heart rate variability will drop. So, you know, people who are in their twenties, their heart rate variability will be anywhere between like 80 and 100 on average, 30s, you start to drop to 70, 40s, you start dropping to 50, you know, 50s, 60s, all of a sudden you're in, you know, 30s and below.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  And so if you can fight that trend, uh, that those averages and keep your heart rate variability even just flat over years, that's actually a sign of good fitness, good longevity. And, uh, anyway, back to the story I was telling you, the, um, this individual, they had a very steady heart rate variability that was within a specific range and all of a sudden it plummeted. So it was a healthy person that had a heart rate variability of about 100. And, uh, and then it was 50 all of a sudden for, for a period of time. Again, goes in, gets all these tests. He turned out to have testicular cancer.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  And so

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Now, was that known previously that HRV would in some way be a, a lead indicator for testicular cancer?

• 17:19Speaker 00

  I mean, I don't think so, you know? And that's, that's what's so fascinating about this moment in time is we've never had this much data on the human body continuously. One of the principles to founding whoop was 24/7 data. And it's, it's why we have a 14 day battery life now. It's why we, we invented a charger that you slide on to your whoop.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I was about to say, these are super important. And when you first told me about this on this week in startups, I was like, wow, I need to, I want to see how many steps I've done and the time. It makes no sense. And you were like, trust me, Jake, I'll, you know, there's a reason for this. And now that I've used it, it turns out you're absolutely right. The reason I have had so many long streaks, the only time I really stopped using this for the past couple of years is when I lost it and I had to order a new one. So I broke my streak, which was a bummer, but it is what it is. It's just a number.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Because you can wear it in the shower, you can wear it in the bath and you should. It turns out a warm bath is, we'll get to journals in a minute, super great for my recovery, for whatever reason, and my sleep. You never have to take it off and you can slide on the battery charger. So you can have essentially the opposite experience that I had with my Apple watch. The Apple watch was annoying because it's, I'm getting alerts and I'm getting alerts for things that I, app I installed two years ago. And it's just constantly bothering you. People think you're rude when you look at the watch and then the battery dies every, you know, whatever. For the Apple watch, I think I might've gotten to 24 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours a couple of times. But it's a terrible experience with this.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  I, I mean, I, I've made it 10 days, you know, 14 days, no problem. And I carry, I bought three battery chargers. I just keep, I keep one in my desk, I keep one on the bedside, one in my, my travel bag. It's like, these things aren't expensive. Um, and, and that's a key to it, I think as well. Yeah. Is the, the amount people wear these.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  On average, a whoop member wears whoop 23.6 hours a day. And as a consequence, we have, um, just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So it's one of the largest health data sets in the world. And now with the, you know, the advent of AI and what you can do with large data sets, it's just like a really exciting time to be working in this space.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Do all the AI companies, like the frontier models, want to buy this data from you in aggregate? Is that like, uh, a huge business for you guys eventually? How do you think about that or building your own models?

• 19:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, today we're building our own models, you know, foundational models with, in the company that are essentially training on top of this data.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  So So using open source models or you're, you're partnering with them?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  We're developing our own models, we've got open source models and, and what's amazing is, you've got this huge physiological data set, but then you also now have other data sets, right? So people are uploading their blood tests or they're doing advanced labs through whoop. They're uploading medical records. And, um, and so as an example, we're, we're now starting to see indications that through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  And so then, you know, you could give someone a very targeted, hey, we think you're, you know, we think you have high cortisol, you should get this one test. And, and it gets, you know, and it gets super, it gets super targeted, which is exciting.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Which the AI would be able to figure out. The AI is going to look at all this data and say, hey, maybe there's a cortisol issue or here's the possibilities, which is super fascinating. So not, you, you see your business in the future as this AI assistant. And you added an AI assistant, I think to the product less than six months ago. I'm addicted to it now.

• 21:04Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 01

  And you have these ongoing conversations. It logs the conversations. And so now it was, um, I'll be candid, pretty dumb at the start. It would be like, you could talk to it and you'd be like, yes, you had this rate. Okay. Thanks for that rate. But now it's gotten a bit more sophisticated because now when I tell it, I'm in Japan, uh, you didn't record my sleep. It's like, oh, okay. Here's what's happening. And it actually is understanding the product. And I, I guess you're doing some reinforcement learning. And it's got to be that these four million members, including myself, are now telling it where the product breaks down because when you, um, or where the opportunities are to add more features, however you want to look at it. But there's this constant struggle

• 21:50Speaker 01

  I was having with changing time zones and was my, um, was my sleep getting recorded properly so then I could get my recovery. And then I started asking, uh, and then it prompted me and said, hey, by the way, um, when are you leaving for Japan or whatever? And I was like, here's my flight. This is when I land. And it was like, you should sleep at the first half and then not go to bed when you get to Japan. Don't have caffeine at this time. So somebody in the company, I think explicitly started doing a time zone change, or did it just learn that and infer it? What did you, did you get specific about that? And how are you using the AI coach?

• 22:28Speaker 00

  We spun up a team on travel specifically because it's such a popular use case for a lot of our members. And, you know, our origins were with athletes, but now we've got this wide audience of aspiring people, you know, that's really the, if you think about who's whoop targeting, it's the aspiring. And that could be a great athlete, that could be someone who's fit, but it could also just be someone who wants to have more energy for their family and their job and their life hobbies and wants to live longer, right?

• 22:54Speaker 01

  Live longer.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  But the AI, uh, the AI coach is a big part of that. And it's a big part of our future. And, you know, we've been working on it for years now. I'm glad to hear that you feel like it's getting good. And about 80%

• 23:06Speaker 01

  I'd say it's like a seven and a half right now. Seven and a half out of 10. I think there's so much potential for it. Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 00

  As long as it's good enough for you to be engaging with it, it's just going to keep getting better with time. And we're getting better at that, too. And, uh, and so, you know, one thing that's really interesting, again, back to these data sets. So physiological data, we talked about, that's from the sensor. Then you've got the advanced labs and the blood testing. You've got the medical records coming in. But actually, this is, this is another very important piece of data, which is all sorts of user feedback, right? Like the journal itself. So about, um, just over 50% of our members journal every day.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  This is a good point to explain what the journal is.

• 23:50Speaker 00

  Yeah. So this is

• 23:51Speaker 01

  I'm sorry that I keep explaining your features, but I'm so passionate about the product as you can hear.

• 23:55Speaker 00

  No, you're doing great. So the, uh, the whoop journal is essentially 100 plus different behaviors, lifestyle decisions, um, you know, supplements, drugs, you name it, that someone might want to log. So popular things that people log every day are like, did I drink alcohol last night? Was I hydrated? Did I travel? Uh, you know, did I meditate? Was I happy? Was I sad? You know, was I stressed? Uh, and, and all of this anecdotal information also builds on, uh, on these data sets where, you know, if you wanted to come up with an algorithm for predicting whether someone would be happy, you would actually need a fair amount of data from someone on, uh, you know, on their overall mood as an example.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Uh, so anyway, we're excited about bringing all these different types of data sets together. And it's one thing that we feel uniquely positioned to do because not that many companies, um, you know, have people opening their app eight times a day and 80% of their member base interacting with the AI.

• 24:57Speaker 01

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• 25:40Speaker 01

  doing a whole like user session here. What's really interesting about it is you get these behavioral insights. And I think you get into behavioral insight when you've used it 10 times, five yeses, five noes. As an example, if you're doing creatine, somebody's paying attention at whoop. And, uh, I guess you got a lot of re, how many people working over there now?

• 25:59Speaker 00

  1,200.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  1,200. Whoa, that's, that's grown significantly.

• 26:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we grew.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wow. So when you pull up your, your behavioral insights and in the morning it will ask you and prompt you, because in the mornings when everybody opens this to check their sleep, score, recovery, it prompts you, you can start to figure out after this five and five, what impact that behavior has on recovery. So it turns out for a warm bath, uh, which was never my thing. I hate baths. Not my thing. Like I'm a guy like going in a bath, hanging out in a bath. I have no interest. I'm like, I'm like a guy from Brooklyn. Like, kind of feels weird to be in a bath with the candles.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  Any salts in the bath? Are you adding fragrance?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  I did add the, yes, you got me. I'm adding salts to the bath. Yes. And that's now also tracked.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  That helps.

• 26:48Speaker 01

  It helps. Warm bath, plus 7%

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  On my recovery. Have you ever heard of something like that?

• 26:56Speaker 00

  That's very high as a, as a response. So, you know, for folks who are trying to figure out what we're talking about, essentially when you log these things, whoop then will tell you what's positively or negatively affecting your recovery score. So a big wake up call for a lot of people ends up being alcohol because it'll show you that alcohol has this like hugely negative effect

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Disastrous.

• 27:16Speaker 00

  On your recovery.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  It's poison. I don't drink, so I never even log it. But I'm, you have a couple of beverages now and again, Will? And then what impact does it have on your super score?

• 27:25Speaker 00

  I feel like I've got a good relationship with alcohol, although it's got a negative 9% for me. So I'm now looking at, I'm now looking at my behavior insights. Here's a sneaky one for everyone.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Wait, have you considered having that drink while you're in the warm bath?

• 27:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, right.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  Maybe I should start adding more baths, but I do, uh, I do steam room. I do cold plunge.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  Oh yeah? How's that working out?

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Those are more neutral, but I like the way they make me feel. And there's a lot of longevity research on saunaying and contrast therapy. So second to alcohol for being the most negative for me is a late meal. So eating, eating within three hours of bedtime, we've now seen across the entire whoop population, is really detrimental to your sleep and your recovery. And it's because your body's still digesting for those first few hours that you're in bed. And as a consequence, you're not getting quality sleep.

• 28:18Speaker 01

  So you get high stress during the sleep, I would assume. Yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  That whole high stress thing. Here's mine. For some reason, vitamin D minus three. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I was putting a little vitamin D in, maybe that's a false positive.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  It could be that the days you took it were days that you were traveling or, you know, there could be something else going on.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a correlation here that we're not seeing yet.

• 28:40Speaker 00

  But by the way, you can ask, you can ask whoop that. You can say,

• 28:44Speaker 01

  That's a great idea.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  I'm seeing vitamin D minus three. Does that make sense? What could be going on? And maybe it'll, it'll look at your travel alongside that.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Okay, this is a modest difference. And it's a correlation, not evidence that vitamin D caused the change. Your recent recovery has ranged 27% to 87%, but you haven't logged vitamin D in this 14 day stretch. So there's no recent impression. Are you giving your thoughtful cross bath? Okay. So I got a little more work to do on that one. Uh, but plus five strain is minus five on recovery. That makes total sense.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  Yep. So when you work out, your body needs to recover.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Plus 1% of the day in high stress zone, minus 9% on recovery. So you know, through my temp, what, what, the, the stress score comes from what? Temperature, heart rate, HRV?

• 29:32Speaker 00

  Primarily HRV, but it's also using other sensing.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Got it. So, and that's kind of your, is that your special sauce there? Proprietariness in the, in that, uh, the, the stress score?

• 29:42Speaker 00

  The stress score itself is something that we invented. Of course, we based it on physiological research. And I would say that's one of the hard things about this space, which is how do you take medical research that's credible? And then a lot of data, because you're going to be dating, getting data from consumers, and then great design, right? Because at the end of the day, you have to design something to ultimately have a score that people want to look at. And, uh, and so there's a lot of science to it, but there's also art to it. And I think it's, I think it's something whoop has been very good at. You know, the recovery score and our, now our health span score is, is the most screenshotted page in the app.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Makes total sense. Yeah. When you share that. Um, consistent bedtime, plus four, caffeine, plus four, creatine, plus four, uh, morning sunlight, plus three. So now that I have this, I also do some meditation with the com app and with waking up or on my own, that also, I don't have enough data in there yet because I keep forgetting to log it. But you, it does log my skiing. So I use slopes.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  And so slope, you, you're a skier, Will? Or no?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  I ski, but not, it's on, I'm not using an app for skiing. So my sense is you ski more than I do.

• 30:54Speaker 01

  I mean, I try to get to 30, 40 days a year.

• 30:56Speaker 00

  Okay, there you go.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  But two hours a day. So it's like executive skiing, uh, CEO skiing, if you catch my drift. Do a podcast before, a little work after.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  And you're doing it in Japan.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  I do five, 10 days in Japan is the goal. The rest are at my ski house.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  That's elite skiing.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So you can come with me and Tucker Carlson if you're into it. It's a really weird trip.

• 31:16Speaker 00

  Great, great.

• 31:17Speaker 01

  The other nice thing is it pulls in my slopes data and puts it as an activity. So you have an activity tracker. And the activity tracker is really great. You get to, you know, I do these long walks in Japan or when I'm in New York, I love to do long walks. My age, long walks and rucking and farmer's walks are like the key to longevity, I'm told. But the great thing is now it knows that and it's making a training program for me around that. And it asked me the AI, what's my goal? I said, my goal is to not get injured and ski better. And these are the exercises I know are going to help. It's now the AI understands my goals, kind of coaching me and setting up plans. And then

• 32:00Speaker 01

  low and behold, one of the things I think I had asked you for, maybe on DM somewhere on Twitter or something. You know, I take a GLP. So I started tracking it. I take a light GLP, lost 43 pounds.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Wow, congrats, man. That's awesome.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Well, yeah. And I mean, let me tell you, that makes a difference. When you're 213, you get to 170, skiing, sleeping, everything. I wish I had whoop during that journey.

• 32:21Speaker 00

  Did your resting heart rate go down a lot?

• 32:24Speaker 01

  You know, I wasn't fully on whoop for the majority of that. So that would have been so cool to have. You know what? I'll gain the 40 pounds back and then lose it. But now I'm on a maintenance dose and you just released a GLP tracker that has in it all the cohorts of things you want to make sure you're doing when you're taking GLP, including protein consumption. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how GLPs are kind of making their way into the ecosystem here.

• 32:50Speaker 00

  Well, in general, you know, I think in line with this theme of we want to have a lot of data under the whoop umbrella so that we can actually give you the right insights. If you're taking a GLP-1, that's a pretty meaningful, you know, shift to what's going to happen for your body. And one of the challenges with GLP-1s is that typically speaking, about 50% of the weight that someone loses is fat and 50% is muscle. And, you know, so that's how sometimes people could end up getting quite frail, even though they've lost a considerable amount of weight. And, uh, and so it's good for whoop to know that you're on a GLP-1. And then in turn, it's really going to push you to, to get some activity and hopefully a little bit of strength training, even if it's just body weight

• 33:32Speaker 00

  in so that you don't end up losing that muscle. And I think that's also where the, the appropriate diet with protein and, you know, we've heard some anecdotal success around people taking creatine while they're on GLP-1s, uh, I think is, is super important. And, you know, just to say like, we have all this data and, uh, and we take it very seriously and we want it to be secure and private. We've actually gone through the, uh, here we go.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm just, you know, I mirrored my phone. Here's my actual whoop. You can see my resting heart rate and all that, but I added my GLP there. Um, and it said, you know, you got to get to 9,800 steps now. You got to do two strength activities a week, hydration seven days a week, protein. And then just check off that you took your GLP. And it took me through a little script to say, um, you know, how often do you take it, et cetera?

• 34:24Speaker 00

  And there would have been a process here, I imagine, where the AI was asking you about some of this and you ultimately confirmed you wanted to do these things and have a plan, right?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, and I'm at 300 days on my streak here. But the other thing you added, um, you added, uh, I guess badges a little bit more, kind of like Peloton has like insane number of badges. And so you get to see where you're at and like, I am a rucking machine on my, uh, I'm in the top 1% of people doing ruck, rucking and farmer. So that's like a little competitive thing.

• 34:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go. You gotta maintain that now. You gotta keep rucking every day.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Okay. So let's, let's talk about you and your relationship with the FDA. A little controversy here. It's been covered over and over again. All these devices, I guess, are not under medical devices. And maybe you could explain to us how this FDA looks at you versus other device, medical devices and how that's changed over time. But, um, you have blood pressure insights, BPI, uh, and you launch it. The FDA was a little bit like, hey, um, we're not happy here. And then you have the ECG, heart screening, uh, stuff and all of these devices, whether it's my Apple Watch.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Medically cleared.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  And that's medically cleared. So, and when you do that, these things, you always get this disclaimer, hey, listen, we're not in the heart attack business. So when I had those, uh, things, it's up to me to interpret that or a doctor. But talk to me about the tension and how it's been going across the two administrations. Cause now you've lived through, you know, uh, Trump, go, go, rah, rah. President Trump is like, uh, all in on disrupting, uh, and he, and he put a Kennedy in there to do that. And, and he's a bit of a disruptor himself and he's very pro business. Uh, and then Biden, obviously maybe a little, um, more regulation, less pro business, definitively less pro business. But I don't know in the medical space how that happened. So

• 36:27Speaker 01

  talk to me, it's not a politics show, but you're all running into regulation now.

• 36:31Speaker 00

  Well, just to say, like, it's been a, certainly a long process for whoop and working with the FDA. And we've worked with them in a lot of different um, contexts, which I'll talk about here in a second. And, you know, the history of very innovative technology with, you know, somewhat dated regulatory policies is a history that has controversy from time to time. So I'm not surprised that we've had some challenges or disagreements along the way, but I'm actually really happy with, with our relationship with the FDA today. Now, four years ago, I really wanted to be able to do blood pressure monitoring. And historically you needed a cuff for that. And it was really, um, a pretty difficult signal processing problem. There was no product on the market that could measure blood pressure accurately from the wrist.

• 37:16Speaker 00

  And so we set out to see if we could do it. And one of the ways that we collected a huge data set on it, uh, was in a collaboration with our members where we, uh, asked members if they wanted to participate in a stress, sleep and blood pressure study. And, uh, as part of that, we actually had 70,000 people enroll. So think about, you know, the ability to generate studies at, at huge scale, fast. Uh, and, uh, and so people were actually uploading their blood pressure readings, um, every single day for a number of weeks. And what that allowed us to do was to build out a pretty powerful data set on, uh, on blood pressure monitoring.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  And also to be able to train that alongside all of the physiological data that we were already collecting. Anyway, fast forward, we get to a period where all of a sudden we've got a very powerful algorithm, um, for measuring blood pressure. And that's one of the things that we do. I think very well at whoop is, you know, we pick a hard physiological signal and then we say we want to be able to measure it as accurately or within a similar accuracy as a medical device. Uh, and then we look to bring that to consumers. And there was controversy around blood pressure monitoring before we launched because prior to launching it, uh, historically, blood pressure had been under the category of physiological signals

• 38:37Speaker 00

  that needed to be a quote unquote, medical device. And just as some, you know, background for, for listeners, the FDA is really supposed to evaluate, um, products that have a medical diagnosis. And, um, and then if you're not providing a medical diagnosis, then it falls under a category called wellness. And, uh, and there's like a pretty good, you know, history for this with, with, uh, heart rate monitoring, for example, where if you do heart rate monitoring for exercise, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring for sleep, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring, uh, for, um, you know, AFib detection or heart attack prediction, okay, that needs to be regulated.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  So the FDA in the past had a pretty clear distinction for heart rate. This is wellness. This is medical, right? With blood pressure, they said that if you're measuring blood pressure, it has to be medical. But the problem with that is there's an avalanche of research that supports that, not surprisingly, blood pressure affects your stress, it affects your sleep, it affects your overall well-being. And we felt like there was a pretty clear lane for us to introduce a blood pressure feature that was a wellness feature. And so we launched the feature, the FDA, uh, you know, came back and said that they felt like it needed to be regulated. They actually sent us a warning letter. There was a big disagreement that played out that was quite public about it.

• 40:07Speaker 00

  But we, you know, we stuck to our guns and, uh, and I ultimately, uh, really believe in, in the way that we approached it. And, uh, through a long process, uh, the FDA actually has since updated their guidelines, I think based on our case, but also based on feedback from the industry, uh, that supports that, uh, blood pressure can also have wellness applications. And, uh, and so, you know, our blood pressure insights feature is still available for consumers. And just to say it, we have, um, we have these conversations with the FDA across a lot of different categories. Whoop also has medical clearances from the FDA. So

• 40:48Speaker 00

  our ECG feature where you can literally do an ECG from your wrist by just putting your fingers on the whoop. That's an FDA cleared product, 510K. And so in some cases, we're going through a process of clinical trials to get FDA approval. In other cases, we want to bring a product to market faster. And we also believe it's a wellness application. And so that's kind of a healthy, I think, process for innovative companies like Whoop to be pursuing with the FDA.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Why don't you guys, I know you guys have some sort of integration with this Omron blood pressure cuff. I saw, like, I was like, looking it up. Why don't you guys just make your own blood pressure cuff? Or listen, we're at a $10 billion valuation here. We got 4 million members, 250 on average a year, let's say. Got a billion in revenue. Like, let's just buy this company, Omron, or let's get in the blood pressure cuff business. And let's get in the scale business while we're out of it. Like, I trust the brand. I just want the Whoop scale. I want you to be the person who puts the features in. I want you to control it. I want it to work. I don't want to have to go through Apple Health in the back door to get my Fitbit scale uploaded.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  And I just want, I want a Whoop branded blood pressure cuff and a Whoop branded scale.

• 42:06Speaker 00

  Well, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, in a lot of categories, we are debating, do we want to build this ourselves? We want to partner with someone or are we going to make an acquisition? And often we've defaulted to either building or acquiring versus partnering. In the case of blood pressure cuffs, we felt like that was a fairly commoditized technology. And there is, you know, medical efficacy there. So, you know, if people want to do a calibration with a cuff to set up their Whoop, which will then measure it without the cuff, because at the end of the day, we kind of want to replace the cuff. That, you know, that feels like a fairly healthy system. And it's also worth saying that we feel like we've earned the right to accumulate all this data

• 42:50Speaker 00

  because we have very strong data policies. So we do not sell data. You know, you are not the product, Jason. Like, you're, the membership is the product.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 43:00Speaker 00

  And that's a huge, I think, distinction in this space, especially when you have, you know, big technology company.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Google and Apple, yeah, let's just call it what it is. You may not want to say it, but I can. They're, they're, they make their money advertising and Apple, Apple's a pretty good steward of data. I'll give them that. But, you know, they make it on really expensive hardware. So you are unique in both cases in terms of business model. You're in our corner, which I love. Because Apple's going to make a competitor, huh? They know their watch kind of sucks and their software sucks. Like, Apple Health is terrible.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  The Apple Watch is the most successful smartwatch in the world. And so I think in terms of the category that they built to own, I think they, I think they've been successful. I think it's an important product for them. It's a, it's a product that does a lot of things. And so if you want text messages and emails and to be able to call.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  It's too much. But they're going to make, you worried it keep you up at night that they're going to make a Whoop competitor?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  Well, I have enormous respect for Apple. I think they're one of the best in the world at hardware and software. I think a lot of companies have entered our space and had challenges with, with the screenless wearable or other wearable products. You know, it's interesting, 10 years ago, there were more competitive products in the market than there are today.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  That's true, actually. Yeah, you had a lot of people trying this.

• 44:18Speaker 00

  People forget the whole Jawbone kind of Fitbit era. There was a whole.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  Class of Nike and Adidas and Under Armour.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, how dumb was it for Nike to stop pursuing that? My God, that was such an obvious smart thing for them to do. They had a good start and then they gave the business to Fitbit, I believe. And then they just got out of it. All right, listen, it's time for lightning round.

• 44:39Speaker 00

  Oh, wow.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Lightning round with Will.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  You got to be honest here. Here we go. Brian Johnson or Andrew Huberman? Pick one.

• 44:47Speaker 00

  For podcasting, Huberman.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Who's making a bigger contribution to the science and technology?

• 44:53Speaker 00

  I think Huberman has a wider audience. I think Brian has pushed people's imagination of what they should be measuring. And I think both of those are really helpful.

• 45:03Speaker 01

  Cold plunge, cold shower. Cold plunge, cold shower. Make a difference?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  I'll say cold shower because it's very accessible. And it's something that people can do every day. And you do it for even 30 seconds, 60 seconds, you're just going to feel a lot better.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, wakes you up. Red light therapy or just the classic hot sauna?

• 45:22Speaker 00

  I like the hot sauna.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it gets hotter. I think the red light thing is just marketing nonsense.

• 45:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay. Zone two cardio. This is for our age. I think you're 40 now, Will. Are you 40 yet?

• 45:37Speaker 00

  37.

• 45:38Speaker 01

  37, all right. So I'll round you up to 40. I'm rounding myself down to 50. Zone two cardio or lifting? What do you think? You've got to pick one for my age and for your age.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  I think this depends a lot on what someone's goals are. But in general, I think that everyone should be lifting more weights and probably doing, you know, if they have an hour to exercise, they should spend more time lifting and less time on an elliptical.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 46:03Speaker 00

  Because people, yeah, because your muscle mass is such an important test for longevity.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  The alarm in Whoop is quite sophisticated, Will. You can wake up based on recovery, sleep score. So the recovery score, the sleep score, or with a, with a hard, you know, 6:00 AM. Should you go recovery, sleep score, or with a hard alarm? So you get your sleep consistency. Which one? Pick one of the three.

• 46:31Speaker 00

  If you're on vacation, you can go with recovery or sleep. But if you're trying to run a tech company, you better pick an exact time.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Okay. All right. Coffee first thing in the morning? Wait 90 minutes. Which one? Wait 90 minutes for your coffee or just drink the damn coffee and live your life?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  I personally drink the coffee.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's go. All right. Strain score, sleep score, recovery score. Which one do you obsess over most of the, of the big three? Which one do you obsess over? You can't say they're all your children. You love them all equally.

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Recovery. I mean, I wake up every morning waiting to see that, that color of that dial.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  I love it. All right, listen, there's your hour with Will from Whoop. Great product. I give it my highest endorsement. Eight Sleep, I'm an investor in. I love that product, too. Those are my two favorite health products. And hey, at the time of this recording, you have a little announcement about the king. No, not President Trump. I got you, not King Trump. But LeBron James now playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. A big announcement, yeah?

• 47:42Speaker 00

  Well, we're announcing today LeBron James is now a global ambassador for Whoop. So he's been on Whoop, interestingly, for 11 years. And we never had any formal relationship with him. We love that he wore the product. Frankly, it was, it was really important in the early days that he did wear the product because he was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it. And so it was incredibly validating that this incredible athlete was willing to try a technology from an unknown company called Whoop. And, and it gave us a lot of hope that we were on to something. But it's been extraordinary to see his career over two decades plus. And he's the, he's really the pinnacle of performance and longevity.

• 48:26Speaker 00

  And, and so he joins a roster of ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo and Patrick Mahomes and Lewis Hamilton and Arina Sabalenka, Nelly Korda, so on. So it's a great group.

• 48:40Speaker 01

  Now, you had a philosophy, though, early on. We talked about this in our previous discussions, that like, you're not going to pay athletes to wear it, you know, and you're not going to beg them to wear it because they're the customers. They're the ICP, the Ideal Customer Profile. So is this like a, maybe a change in thinking? Or is this like a unique one of one case? Hey, he's been on the product for 11 years without a formal relationship. And, you know, he's in that era now. He's going to, you know, retire in a couple of years. But hey, man, he's probably going to go into this Kobe Shaq post-playing era where, where he gets in deep into business. So what's the thinking here? And how do you think about athletes writ large?

• 49:18Speaker 00

  I think in general, if your business is pre-marketing, so to speak, like, you're not in a stage where you're doing big television advertisements and so on and so forth, you should be really careful paying anyone to use your product. You know, you want people to love your product authentically. And in our case, it just so happened that early on, our target market was these professional athletes. And so we needed them to organically love the product. And by the way, because you have to wear it 24/7, there's no amount of money I'm going to be able to pay an athlete to wear something 24/7 if they don't like it.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  On the flip side, it was like, well, if it actually works and it's measuring their sleep and recovery and they play better, you know, they should want to pay for it. So that was our attitude for a long time. And, you know, we had a number of these individuals who are best in class of their sport and global people that wanted to invest in the company because they loved it so much.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Amazing.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  And from there, we also developed relationships where we could use their name, image and likeness, which has a value associated with it.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Heck, yes.

• 50:24Speaker 00

  That we recognize to be able to do advertising. And so, you know, they've been amazing partnerships. And I'm very grateful that LeBron James is, is part of the Whoop roster.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Wait, are the players allowed to wear these during games?

• 50:40Speaker 00

  That's something the NBA is still looking at.

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Got it. Yeah, because they're not allowed to wear jewelry. They've got to take all that off because of injuries. So but they could put it because you can wear it on your armband. They could embed it in like a wrapper. So maybe some of them have snuck it on the court. Who knows?

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Well, you probably saw the Australian Open stuff.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. Tell me.

• 50:59Speaker 00

  Well, in the Australian Open, the tennis tournament.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't watch tennis.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  A number of players were asked to take their whoop off while they were playing. And it was, I think, in part because the Australian Open didn't know what they were wearing. But they were just wearing it, you know, under their armbands and everything else. And the ITF, which is the International Tennis Federation, actually had approved whoop to be worn in matches. So the Australian Open was kind of out of line. And then, next thing you know, the other majors have come forward saying that wearables can be worn. So I think there's this sort of natural evolution of resisting it, safety checks. And by the way, they're right to want to be restrictive about what can be worn.

• 51:45Speaker 01

  It's not. I don't. I don't think it's a safety thing if you're wrapping it around your your armband or something like that.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  I agree. I mean, obviously, I agree.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what's going on in the background. Your your marketing department is probably getting shaken down. They're probably like, hey, you know, we'd love to have whoop involved. It'd be terrible if something happened to an athlete wearing 1.2 ounces. But if you were to put a logo behind them for $10 million, Will, we might have a different opinion.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  You know, all the ins and outs.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  It's not my first time at this rodeo.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  I know they shake down when I hear it.

• 52:18Speaker 00

  How are how are things for you in in early stage venture? Are you? Are you starting to lead these billion dollar seed rounds? Or you're you're staying true to the the accelerator model?

• 52:29Speaker 01

  You know, it's nobody wants to do year zero work, so I have leaned into that. But then, you know, at the end, we have the syndicate and we have 4,000 members of it. And we would syndicate our early stage seed deals. Hey, if you want to get involved in this, you know, JACO is putting in 100K. You might want to put in 5K. They kept asking me, can you get me into ZipLine? Can you get me into Whoop? Can you get me into SpaceX, Anthropic, whatever it is? So we started a late stage practice that we just started this year at the syndicate. Thanks for asking. And we did. We did ZipLine. We did Icon Homes, the 3D printed homes. These are all billion dollar companies, $5 billion companies in vast space. So when I know the founder, the CFO gives its approval.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Because you have to deal with this, right? People doing off the books transactions and SPVs and buying out early employees and other, you know, early investors. You have to deal with some of this SPV madness.

• 53:20Speaker 00

  I'll say this. It's complicated when your business is failing and it's complicated when your business is winning. So it's always complicated.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  I think just my advice to everybody with these SPVs, off the books, whatever, is just

• 53:34Speaker 01

  build a relationship with the CFO of the company and just get their blessing for it and let them know what you're doing. And if they really don't want you to do it, then you're going to have to accept that, right? Like, it's their company. I don't like this idea of going behind the back of the company and.

• 53:49Speaker 00

  The other thing to be wary of are these secondary brokers who they claim they've got shares from someone at a price.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  And they go around saying that, but they're really just trying to create a market. And so.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  Happens to me all the time.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Because I literally like I'm on the board of a company that's worth a couple billion dollars. And they come to me and I say, OK, great. Who is it with? Because I got I'm on the board of the company. I talk to the CFO and, you know, I can help coordinate with you. And then crickets. And I'm like, hmm, they're fishing. It's always a fishing expedition. This thing didn't really exist 10, 15 years ago. Like, the only time I ever saw it was Facebook and then Uber. When Masayoshi Son came in, he he was like, hey, guys, I need you to sell some of these or I'm going to invest in Lyft. And we were like, OK, I gave him 10% of my shares at the time. I was like, sure, I'll take a little 10% off the top just to keep Maso from investing.

• 54:40Speaker 00

  What a run. What a run that business has had. But.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, and right now, like, trading at an all time low PE and they're surging. And they have. Yeah, it's really weird to watch what's happening, like the anti-AI trade. DoorDash, Uber, Figma, you know, a lot of these companies getting taken to the woodshed a bit. And some of them are just like not impacted by it. But AI is going to change everything. Lots of great investment opportunities. We'll see you all next time on the All In Interview Program. Go get a whoop. Get yourself a whoop. Perfect Christmas gift.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  Appreciate you doing it, Will. Love the product.