WHOOP: Will Ahmed

As a Harvard squash player, Will Ahmed discovered his game improved when he focused on things like sleep, diet, and time spent recovering from training. He was convinced that granular health and heart data would become invaluable to other athletes if it could be bundled into a wearable wrist strap. In 2012, Will founded WHOOP, and after three years the company launched its first model, with Lebron James and Michael Phelps as advocates. But WHOOP struggled to gain traction with mere mortals, and spent years overhauling its business model and fending off big name competitors. Eventually it became one of the most popular wearables on the market, with a valuation well above $3 billion. This episode was researched and produced by Katherine Sypher and edited by Neva Grant, with music by Ramtin Arablouei. Our engineer was Patrick Murray. You can follow HIBT on X https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected]. Sign up for Guy's free newsletter at guyraz.com http://guyraz.com and on Substack https://guyraz.substack.com/. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 0:46Guy Raz?

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• 1:32Guy Raz?

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• 2:16Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

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• 4:27Guy Raz?

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• 5:21Speaker 01

  I'll never forget this investor I met. And he had all these reasons for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, you know what? You are going to fail. You're going to fail because you don't listen.

• 5:38Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  And I remember for months I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn.

• 5:59Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how a college athlete changed the playing field for wearables by launching Whoop, a device that tells you things only your doctor once knew.

• 6:28Guy Raz?

  You've heard me say this before: The hardest thing about building a consumer products business isn't actually building the product, it's building the brand. But sometimes, both of these things are equally challenging, especially when you're trying to come up with a completely new kind of technology. Today's story is about a guy who spent many years trying to build a very, very complex product, and then, many years trying to compete against some of the biggest brand names in the world: Brands like Nike, and Under Armour, and Amazon, and Apple. The founder, Will Ahmed, started working on his idea back in

• 7:09Guy Raz?

  college: A new kind of wearable health tracker. Now, at the time, Fitbit was already out there, but Will wanted something more sophisticated: A device that could measure things you'd normally need a doctor or a lab for. For example, how your body recovers after training, or how your heart performs over time, or how well you sleep at night. And unlike other trackers, his was designed to be worn 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Now, there were plenty of moments when it looked like the Whoop device wouldn't make it. But today, it's one of the leading wearables on the market, and it's become a go-to for serious

• 7:51Guy Raz?

  athletes and fitness fanatics. As for Will, he grew up on Long Island in the 1990s and early 2000s. His dad was an immigrant from Egypt who worked in finance. His mom was a writer. And at Harvard, where this story really begins, Will played on the squash team.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  So interestingly, squash is a sport that is played around the world, but is best known for being huge in the Middle East. And actually Egyptians are some of the best squash players in the world.

• 8:24Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  And so my dad was a very serious squash player. He got a racket in my hands when I was little. And I learned how to play growing up on Long Island. It ended up helping me get into college.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  What I always have loved about squash is that it's intensely cardiovascular. So it's one of the hardest minute for minute workouts that you can find. And it's a fairly strategic sport as well, where you have to think carefully about where you're going to put the ball and where your opponent's going to put the ball. And so, you know, I've always loved it.

• 8:57Guy Raz?

  All right. You get to Harvard in 2008. You're an undergraduate there and you're also an athlete. So I imagine that, because you, I mean, sometimes people, you know, get into these schools and then they leave the sports team and just focus on school. But you stayed. I mean, this must have consumed a lot of your time as a student athlete.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you spend three or four hours a day training and I was just kind of burning it on all ends. So, you know, you work out really hard, you stay up late working or studying.

• 9:25Guy Raz?

  And from what I understand, you're good, I mean, you're a good player, but you weren't a star player. You weren't right on the team. Not to be, I hope I'm not like opening any wounds here, but you weren't right. Is that fair to say?

• 9:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was in the varsity lineup. There's nine players who make varsity. And, you know, I tended to be like the bottom of the lineup guy.

• 9:43Guy Raz?

  You were the captain of the team.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  And sure enough, I was captain of the team and that was a great leadership opportunity.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  I ask about this and not, again, the fact that you weren't the best on the team. It's important because I imagine wanting to get better, you were probably trying to do things that you thought would make you faster or jump higher or, you know, move your fast twitch muscles.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Guy Raz?

  Tell me what you were doing.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  Well, I was someone who would play extra games after practice or do extra court sprints or, you know, go to the gym or do interval training. And so I kept pushing more and more. And to your point, like, yeah, I wasn't one of the most talented players on the team. So I wanted to make up for it by being one of the fittest players on the team. And for the most part, I was one of the fittest players on the team, but not surprisingly, I was also someone who used to overtrain. And that's where you you sort of go through this period of getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then all of a sudden you you fall off a cliff and you don't necessarily know why.

• 10:44Guy Raz?

  What is overt so overtraining is sort of a weird concept, right? Because obviously the definition is clear, you're training too much. But I think most people hear that and think, well, what's wrong with that? I mean, you're doing a lot of exercise, you're moving your body, you're 20, 21 years old, 18, 19. I mean, were you noticing that you weren't improving?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  You get to a state where your body's not recovering relative to the amount of strain that you're putting on it, or the amount of stress that you're putting on it. So typically, what you want in a in a training cycle is to overreach for a period of time. There's a distinction between overreaching and overtraining. Overreaching is where you're pushing your body a little too far, but in the days that follow, your body can bounce back. And overtraining is where you extend your body through such a long period of time that you actually then go through a period where you cannot recover. And you actually have a lot of the same symptoms of being sick without necessarily having a cough or a sore throat.

• 11:44Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  And so what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be you'd be flat in a match that you should win. You know, you wouldn't have your bounce, you wouldn't have your explosive steps, you'd feel tired in the second game when you should be tired in the fifth game, you know? And the piece that we haven't talked as much about is really the other 20 hours of the day. And that's where I was actually failing more than on the training side.

• 12:06Guy Raz?

  What do you mean by that?

• 12:07Speaker 01

  Well, when I thought about what it meant to be a college athlete, I realized there was so much focus on what are we doing during the three hours that were four hours that were at practice or were training. But there was really not a lot of discussion around how are you treating your body the other 20 hours of the day? And I was someone who was going to bed at inconsistent times. You know, I would go out to a party on a weekend and drink alcohol. I would stay up late to do schoolwork. Like, I liked training and I was comfortable pushing myself very far. But I wasn't doing what needed to be done to recover properly. And so that got me into interested in this whole concept around recovery.

• 12:46Guy Raz?

  Got interested in the idea of essentially saying, well, what if we could know? Like, I can measure my heart rate, right? But what if I could, I could know like what my body was doing 24 hours a day, essentially?

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, the first question I asked is, how would you prevent overtraining? Because that was a very personal thing. And so that got me interested in this concept of like, okay, well, what is overtraining? Overtraining is a mismatch between the strain that you put on your body and how recovered your body actually is. If your body's super recovered, you can put a lot of strain on it. You're probably not going to overtrain. And I realized that I didn't know that much about recovery. And so I started just looking into, well, how could you measure recovery? And that very simple question is what took me down the next 13 years of my life.

• 13:39Guy Raz?

  Right. Because this is a problem you have. And by the way, it is, it's interesting because most 19, 20 year olds can recover quickly. I mean, it's just genetically, just your body, where you are in life, you can recover much better than you can in your 30, 40, 50, and so on. But you're getting interested in this idea of recovery. And that sets you down a rabbit hole of like, wait, maybe could we continuously measure certain metrics in our body? How did, how did you go from being focused on recovery to thinking about measurement?

• 14:11Speaker 01

  Well, the immediate thing that I realized is that to understand recovery, you have to understand all the time outside of training. And once you kind of opened your aperture to that idea, you realize, well, maybe training is just a piece of this puzzle, you know? What is sleep? Oh, wow. Well, sleep is actually this hugely important component to recovery. So then I started researching sleep. And what I found from all this physiology research, and I probably read about 500 medical papers by the time I graduated, was that

• 14:46Speaker 01

  There were really three pieces of technology that provided valuable data points. Unfortunately, those pieces of technology, for the most part, were uncomfortable and not accessible.

• 14:57Guy Raz?

  What were those pieces of technology?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  The first was the PSG machine, which is the gold standard for measuring sleep. So if you are trying to figure out whether you have sleep apnea, your doctor might tell you to go get a sleep lab test.

• 15:09Guy Raz?

  You go to a lab, they put a bunch of monitors on you, they put a mask on you or a breathing apparatus, right?

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're going to be videotaped while you sleep, and it'll be the worst night's sleep of your life. That was a machine, though, that could really accurately measure not just how much time you spent in bed and how many hours of sleep you got, but it could go deeper. It could understand of the sleep you got, how much of it was restorative sleep, which is to say, how much was slow wave sleep versus REM sleep? And it turned out, as it pertains to recovery, restorative sleep was actually that magic period of time. So I got very interested in, okay, well, how could you get to, how could you measure restorative sleep? And then the second machine was the electrocardiogram, you know, $20,000 piece of equipment. And then the third piece of equipment was a consumer product, but it was a consumer

• 15:57Speaker 01

  product that was invented in the 80s, and that was the heart rate monitor or the chest strap.

• 16:02Guy Raz?

  Right, you could run a treadmill, right? It was like, Polar is a brand that does it, these straps you put around your chest.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, the biggest thing I was focused on was, if you could measure anything, what would you measure? And then the second order question became, is it possible to measure these things the way I want to measure them? Which is continuously and non-invasively.

• 16:24Guy Raz?

  Right. 24/7, like?

• 16:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's the difference of seeing a picture of someone and seeing the movie of their, of their life. And I started meeting with engineering labs in, in Boston and in Cambridge. And so these would be like engineering for hire firms, where you could go to them with an idea and they would prototype something for you.

• 16:46Guy Raz?

  So wait, you started to identify some of these, these labs, and you'd go in and say, hey, I'm Will, like, what was, pretend like I'm, I'm at the lab, what would you say to me?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say, hey, Guy, I've got this great idea to continuously measure the body, and here are the three pieces of technology that I want to largely replace in a small continuous form factor, likely to be some type of a wristband. And I'm curious how you would approach this and whether you could help me with the engineering problem.

• 17:18Guy Raz?

  All right. So this is around like 2011-ish, I guess, when you start to kind of have these conversations. And just to put this in context, at this point in history, there is a product called the Fitbit, which is out there, and it's a fitness tracker. And then there's another product that's starting to come out called a Jawbone. But those products were measuring mainly what?

• 17:42Speaker 01

  Steps.

• 17:43Guy Raz?

  Steps.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  Mainly movement. And my obsession was much more physiological, or even medical, you could argue, which is I wanted to deeply understand what was happening inside the body. And I had a real aversion to steps, especially then in the sense that I didn't think that steps answered anything about the strain recovery equation that we talked about before, which is to say that how much stress you're actually putting on your body is a different question than how much you've moved your arm.

• 18:18Guy Raz?

  So, all right, when you took this idea to some engineering labs to see if they could help you with a prototype, did any of them say, well, that's impossible. You can't measure those things on your wrist. It's just not possible to do all the things you want to do. That's why you have to go to a sleep apnea lab, for example?

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would say probably two thirds of them were dead ends, just in the sense that like, I looked like a kid with a science project.

• 18:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  There was an important qualifying question, though, that they all had before they went any deeper, which is What's your budget for this project?

• 18:55Guy Raz?

  Do you have any money?

• 18:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Because they'll do it. I mean, if you're like, hey, yeah, I've got a couple hundred grand, they'll do whatever you want.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. And you probably look like the dumbest guy in the room. Like, you know, here's, here's a bunch of money to answer this question no one's answered. So, yeah, for the most part, I was getting rejected. But, but I was, I was just looking for, for believers at that point. And I had grown pretty convinced that this was going to exist. It was obvious to me that this is where the world was going. Computers, over the course of my lifetime, had gone from being on your desk to on your lap, to in your pocket, and inevitably, it seemed to me they were going to become on your body.

• 19:35Guy Raz?

  Hmm. But how, how did you learn? What, what gave you the confidence that, that there could be an invention that could actually gather all of this data and information simply by being on a wrist?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Well, when I met with some of these engineering labs, one of the techniques they suggested was using light.

• 19:55Guy Raz?

  Light reflecting off the skin?

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was very exciting, and the techniques were called photoplasmography. But that was very exciting because those sensors were actually very inexpensive. And in 2002, summer of 2012, one of the first things that the group of us did that was sort of hacking around with this idea was we bought these little light sensors from the, from the internet that you could put on your fingertip and could kind of get at your heart rate, like, you know, while you were resting. And so that was like a big eureka moment, where it was like, okay, wow, this isn't, this isn't totally crazy. Like, this, this isn't defying physics, so to speak. There was one other thing that I think is important to the, the sort of college student-turned-entrepreneur.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  I took a, a class at MIT's business school called New Enterprises, where you go in with an idea and they essentially teach you how to write a business plan. And that business plan was, you know, became this like 75 page document that I wound up being quite proud of. And it also allowed me, when I met with, you know, people I was trying to recruit to work with me for the summer, like a, you know, very talented computer scientist or an engineer, it gave me some credibility to be able to show up with a business plan and a physiology paper. And it's like, here, here's what we're gonna do, and here's the data that's gonna take.

• 21:24Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. And, and that business plan, was the idea that you were gonna create something designed for athletes? Was that, was that the original idea?

• 21:35Speaker 01

  The original idea was we were gonna start with athletes, and then eventually we were gonna build a product for everyone. And then eventually, we'd go into medicine.

• 21:43Guy Raz?

  All right. So this is 20, I think 2011, which is your senior year, 2011 and 2012. You basically set up an LLC or some kind of a business, I think already in 2011, which was called My Bobo, but was, becomes Bobo Analytics.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:00Guy Raz?

  And, and so this is the, your second semester of your senior year, and you've got this business name, and you've incorporated it, and you've decided that you are gonna go out and seek some money from friends and family. Why did you, I mean, this is kinda nuts, right? You're a senior in college, you have no track record, you're not even a technology, you're a very smart guy, obviously, but you're not a technology guy, and you're gonna go ask people for money to, to help you start this thing. I mean, that's pretty bold, is not exactly the word I wanna use. It's kind of, yeah, an affront, in a sense. What did you, when you went, who did you ask money from, and what did you promise them in return?

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing that anyone who backed me saw was a, was a, a deep commitment. This was not like a side hustle. This was the hustle. And the advantage to betting on a 22 year old is they don't have a lot else going on.

• 22:56Guy Raz?

  No. You went to your, presumably it's your dad and your...

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. I went to my, my parents, my best friends.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Former bosses that I worked for. And look, I was met with more rejection in a short period of time. You know, call it the first six months of telling the world I was going to do this than I had experienced in my entire life. And all these people are like, this is, this is a bad idea. Like you are pitching a very complicated concept. You are not a doctor, an engineer, a computer scientist, a designer. Essentially, all the things that it takes to build this business, you are not. And by the way, around that time, there were rumors that Nike was entering the space and Apple was entering the space.

• 23:44Guy Raz?

  Right. I mean, this is 2012 and you already have the Fitbit. You've got Jawbone, which would become one of the biggest kind of eventually was a huge, raised $900 million over time. It's a massive Silicon Valley company that had gone from like Bluetooth speakers to wearable trackers. And you're like, obviously a smart guy, but who are you? Right? That, that's a fair question to ask in 2012.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Very fair question. And I was asked it a lot and I was confronted with it a lot. And most days, my belief system got me through it. And other days, I was just kind of feeling like a loser. And I think that's the pain of being an entrepreneur is, is you can feel pretty crazy sometimes.

• 24:34Guy Raz?

  All right. You managed to convince enough people to give you $300,000 to start this company. And the idea was, of course, you're going to start to build the technology to enable this, which is really a shot in the dark. Cause there's no, there's no guarantee this could work. And one of the people that you recruited was a fellow student. Why did you want him to work with you?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, there were, there were three people that in the sort of summer of 2012 really mattered. And they would go on to matter a lot to Whoop. John Capulupo, Aurelian Nicolai, and Martin Oberhauser. And John Capulupo was 19 years old and taking at the time, one of the hardest math classes in the country.

• 25:20Guy Raz?

  Wow, he was really smart and he's somebody that you wanted somebody with that kind of brain working with you.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yes, I wanted that kind of horsepower. And his father was a professor of exercise physiology.

• 25:34Guy Raz?

  Perfect, that's like a bonus on top.

• 25:36Speaker 01

  Right. And, and, and then about a week or two into our summer, and I should say that we were working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is important to the story because so many people that we ended up getting to, so many people that I cobbled together to work on this at summer were Harvard students. And John was living, you know, just off campus. And I was saying to him, hey, you know, it'd be great if we could, you know, prototype some of these ideas we're having for heart rate monitoring. And he was like, yeah, you know, it's funny, there's this really talented mechanical engineer, he's like living on my couch. He had a job somewhere, he's Romanian, something didn't work out, but he's like literally living on my couch.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And the Romanians were kind of their own entity at Harvard because every year there was like two or three of them that would get in, which meant they were like the smartest students out of Romania. And I said, yeah, hey, let's bring him on down. And so Aurelian Nicolai shows up at the Harvard Innovation Lab and reveals to me all of his 3D printed prototypes.

• 26:43Guy Raz?

  Of what?

• 26:43Speaker 01

  So he, he had built like a whole, a whole structure, like a mechanical arm that could pick things up with little 3D printed parts. And, and so I could immediately tell that this guy was a total whiz at 3D printing. And the exact answer that we needed to this prototyping problem.

• 27:01Guy Raz?

  All right, let me add some context here because there was this thing you mentioned, the Harvard Innovation Lab, and I think that was, it was started. Around this time, I guess it was designed to like help kids like you who had cool ideas. And they, in this setup, like, it's not like they were like, sure, but we need like 5% equity in your business. It was just like, yeah, great, come and work here.

• 27:21Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, the third person I want to give credit to is a guy named Martin Oberhauser. And Martin Oberhauser is a very talented designer. And there was a belief that I had from the earliest days of building this company, which was that the way that we were going to visualize the data was actually going to end up becoming one of the most important characteristics of the business. And I did what everyone else would do as a sort of 22-year-old looking for a designer. I went to Google and Googled best information graphics designer in the world. And the second link in 2012 was this profile of a guy named Martin Oberhauser.

• 28:03Speaker 01

  And I called him. And, you know, Martin, in not so many words, said he's already working with a few other companies. Since we're based in the States, it makes it harder.

• 28:13Guy Raz?

  Yeah, where was he based?

• 28:14Speaker 01

  He was based in Hamburg, Germany. And, you know, he essentially just blew me off. And so the next day, I called him back again and I said, look, if I flew to Hamburg, would you just meet with me for an hour?

• 28:29Guy Raz?

  What, sorry, can I just pause? This is that first summer that you're starting out. And at this point, it's just you, John, and John was going to be the chief technology officer. Aurelian, this Romanian student, was gonna, he was like a mechanical engineer type. Again, just kind of crazy. Like, why were you fixated on this one guy who was going to be so expensive?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I think if there's something I've learned in building this business, it's that you have strong moments of intuition and

• 29:01Speaker 01

  If they have a good track record, you have to trust them. When I got on that plane to Hamburg, I knew that this guy was going to be our lead designer.

• 29:09Guy Raz?

  All right, but you got, amazing, you get to Hamburg. How did you convince him to join you?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's worth saying that I got a lot of credit for getting on the plane. You know, when someone shows up to your doorstep like that with that much sort of chutzpah, if you will, there is a credibility moment with it. And so I think I passed a certain test in his eyes, which was that I was pretty serious about this. And I was a little bit crazy, you know, in a good way, maybe, but I was, I was going to do things.

• 29:41Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Will launches Whoop and then reaches out to two of the world's best athletes to help make a name for it. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that. With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents.

• 30:23Guy Raz?

  Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply.

• 31:06Guy Raz?

  AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on. NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new,

• 31:51Guy Raz?

  expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.

• 32:31Speaker 02

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• 33:16Speaker 03

  Download the PrizePix app today and use code WONDERY, that's code WONDERY, to get $150 instantly in lineups if you win your first $5 lineup. PrizePix, run your game. Must be present in certain states. Visit prizepix.com for restrictions and details.

• 33:38Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of 2012. Will has just graduated college and he's assembled a team to build the device that will become Whoop.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we started working out of the Innovation Lab. And the first prototype was a ridiculous looking product.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  Was it a wristband thing?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it had to connect to a computer and then it had a long wire that connected to a box, a sketchy looking box. And then it had another wire that came out of it that eventually connected to a goofy looking wrist-based sensor.

• 34:16Guy Raz?

  And it's got a big box that says "BOBO" on it and a cord coming out of it. Okay, that box was the interface between the wristband and the computer?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yes, that box did a lot of the processing. And the breakthrough with that box was that it could measure heart rate and heart rate variability under certain circumstances. It was still very much a prototype. Now, look, what was the point of the prototype? The point of the prototype was to prove to ourselves, as much as to anyone else, that it actually doesn't defy physics, this idea that you could measure the human body accurately from a wrist-worn thing. And so that was a big breakthrough for us in this feeling of it's possible. And at that time, I had also now gotten pretty far along in the design process

• 35:10Speaker 01

  of what this is going to look like when all the data shows up.

• 35:14Guy Raz?

  Why was HRV, heart rate variability, so important? Why did you think that that was the measurement? And by the way, I'm assuming the other products, at least at this point out there, were not doing that. So why was that so important?

• 35:30Speaker 01

  I can go into much more detail about heart rate variability, but the punchline is if you can measure this thing and baseline it to a human, you could understand in any given moment the state of their body. Is your body at peace? Is it recovered? Is it stressed? And it also became obvious if you could measure heart rate variability during a control. A control being under the same circumstances every day, you could then get a really good sense for the person's state of recovery.

• 36:00Guy Raz?

  I mean, you start working on this in the summer of 2012, right? And you were going to basically end up working out of this innovation lab at Harvard for 18 months, probably to the end of 2013. When did you start? When do you remember starting to see encouraging signs that actually the technology you were working on was promising?

• 36:23Speaker 01

  I think it was a stage in which I had gotten very focused on what each successive prototype needed to be able to demonstrate to help us raise capital. I think that it was, it was pretty obvious to me that this was a business that actually was much more capital intensive than I had realized. And so I was in what I would call a perpetual state of fundraising for the first 12 months of the business, which probably was a horrible way to raise capital.

• 36:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 01

  But it was clear to me that I needed to be able to hit proof points to be able to show that it was possible. And so one of the hardest things about building this company was we were building software and hardware like on complete islands. Just I was with the design and with the software, I was always assuming the hardware was going to arrive, so to speak. And so that's where the first prototype, being able to measure hurricane variability helped. That's where the, the following prototype, which came, you know, maybe six months after that and we'd raised another 400 grand. That prototype was able to do it without all the shenanigans of a wire and, you know, a computer attached to your arm and so forth.

• 37:34Guy Raz?

  You got a wireless version of this?

• 37:36Speaker 01

  We got a wireless version of it. Now, it had a four hour battery life and it was totally unclear whether it could be manufactured at scale, but we believed it would be, of course. And so onwards.

• 37:49Guy Raz?

  One of the things that I think a smart advantage you had was you could take this, once you got a Bluetooth version, you could ask athletes at Harvard, particularly the squash team, to try it out, right? And you could kind of use them as guinea pigs.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, college athletes, recreational athletes, but I mean, like, data collections, you know, where you put a whoop on a wrist and you put a chest strap on them and you get them to go exercise.

• 38:18Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  But athletes have very different body types. Athletes are diverse. And then a lot of sports happen outdoors, and a lot of sports have what's called non-periodic motion. So you can think of running and walking as having periodic motion, which is like, your arms are moving in a certain rigid way. Whereas a sport like basketball or squash, your arms are kind of moving all over the place. Anyway, I bring all these things up because the challenge to heart rate monitoring is the darker the skin, the harder it is, the hairier the skin, the harder it is, and the more non-periodic motion, the harder it is. And if you're outdoors, that's harder than indoors.

• 38:57Guy Raz?

  Oh, sorry. That's because of the light?

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's because of the light. I'll give you a simple way to think about it, which is the technique of photoplasmography is essentially shining light underneath your skin, which is reflecting off of your capillaries. And the frequency with which that returns to a photodiode can be interpreted to be your heart rate, or even estimate other physiological metrics.

• 39:23Guy Raz?

  So essentially, the light, wow, I mean, that's interesting. The light, based on, because it's reflecting, right? And it's, but it's affected by skin tone?

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally from other products, which were like, looking at, you know, 30 white men walking on a treadmill indoors. And we're like, each one of those is the easiest thing, right? Whereas if you took people with darker skin, outdoors, playing basketball, you'd have a much harder data set to reconcile. And our advantage, although at the time it felt much harder, was that we built an algorithm with the foundation for the hardest conditions. And it also forced us to collect a lot more data than other products because we had this high bar for accuracy. And by the way, there's a lot of disadvantages to doing

• 40:20Speaker 01

  that. It requires more battery life. It means you have more data to send. It means there's a lot less things you can do. We didn't have a high resolution screen, in part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection.

• 40:35Guy Raz?

  So basically, you had to solve all these problems. You had to figure out, well, how is this going to work on, you know, an athlete who's darker than an athlete who's lighter? Like, you had to solve, these are not insignificant problems you had to solve, given, you know, that there are all kinds of athletes.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Totally. And it was a great example of the more you learn about something, the less you know. I mean, just as you kept going deeper, there were all these things you'd uncover. You know, people with tattoos are harder to measure, and so on and so forth.

• 41:07Guy Raz?

  Well, while, I mean, again, you're doing this very patiently, very methodically. And meantime, Fitbit is exploding, even though it's doing a somewhat different thing. But, you know, in the minds of most consumers, they were probably saying, oh, if you met somebody, they were just assuming you were building another fitness tracker. You've got Fitbit, you've got Jawo. And then you learn that like, the biggest companies on earth, like Nike, for example, are pursuing their own bands, their own wristbands that track different metrics. You know, I think the Nike Fuel Band comes out in 2013. You

• 41:49Guy Raz?

  guys are still working on just the underlying technology here. Didn't that stress you out?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Considerably. And it made it much harder to raise capital and to recruit employees. And essentially, it made it much harder to get people to buy into this story I was saying.

• 42:06Guy Raz?

  Right, because when you would go to investors, they would say, well, come on, Nike is just working on this. How are you going to compete with Nike?

• 42:14Speaker 01

  Totally. And in a way, they were right, and in a way, they were wrong. They were right in the sense that the story I was actually telling, when you really unpacked it, was we were going to build a brand like Nike, and we were going to start with the world's best athletes. And then we were going to go to consumers using the story that we had built a performance brand. And the idea that I was going to literally use the playbook of the company that was launching a competitive product is pretty hard to wrap your head around. So I could get why a lot of people struggled with that. I'll never forget this investor I met my spring of my senior year, because at that point, it actually had been announced that the Nike Fuel Band was coming. And I confessed to him that Nike was going to enter the space. And he had all these

• 42:57Speaker 01

  reasons for for why we should take the technology in a different direction, or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. We should just try to build software. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, You know what? You are going to fail. And you're going to fail so badly. And I'll tell you the number one reason you're going to fail. You're going to fail because you don't listen. And I remember for months, I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn.

• 43:30Guy Raz?

  So knowing that Nike was going to come out with its own band, which it had for, I think it was out for five years, the Fuel Band. How did you convince anybody to give you money?

• 43:42Speaker 01

  So you remember how I said they were they were right in a way, and they were wrong in a way?

• 43:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  The way the way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing, was that Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was a it was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology. And the strategy that Nike, in my opinion, should have taken was much more similar to Whoop, which was no, we're going to do the hard work. We're going to measure the hard things. And then we're going to tell this story from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and LeBron James on down. And that would have been. I think successful.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  And so I had so much relief the day I tried the Nike Fuel Band. Because it was just another step counter. And it was a huge missed opportunity, I thought, for, by the way, a brand that I have admired since I was five years old. Nike is the company that actually taught me what a brand was. You know, like I, you wear a white cotton T-shirt that's blank versus a white cotton T-shirt with a Nike swoosh. Why do I feel different in the one with the swoosh? And it's because the swoosh stood for something. And that's a brand.

• 45:04Guy Raz?

  A belief.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  And I thought that was so cool. Yeah, I thought that was so cool. And it did influence a lot of how we built the company.

• 45:11Guy Raz?

  All right, so you are, you're aware that the big sort of sports brands are getting into this thing. But you're really just keeping your head down and focusing on what you're gonna offer. And I think it was around 2014 when you changed the name to Whoop. You go from Bubba Analytics, call it Whoop. Just briefly, what's the, how did you come up with that name?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Whoop was a word that in college, all of my friends and I would say to express energy or excitement. You know, people would say like, oh, how are you feeling? And you'd respond, oh, I got whoop, I feel good. And it was this like upbeat word that people would say, it made them smile. And there was a certain virality to the word that was hard to explain. When other people heard it, they then wanted to say it.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  But I wonder, before you even had a product, right? Because it wouldn't be three years. Like, it wasn't until 2015 when you actually had something that was ready for, you know, ready to put out into the world, which we'll get to. But three years, right? And of course, you're building something very complex and, but meantime, all these competitors are coming out with products. Do you remember a feeling of just, just really just anxiety about wanting to get something out there?

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, it was probably the most anxious period of my life. When I look back on it, I was, I was totally upside down physiologically, which is sort of ironic because I was trying to build a product that improves your, your, your sense of balance. But I, yeah, I was drinking too much coffee. I was tired all the time. I was stressed all the time. I was drinking too much alcohol. I, I was strung out. And at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them.

• 46:59Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But you managed to attract some investment. I mean, it's, it's not insignificant, you know, $6 million in, you know, June of 2014 and then a bit more by the end of that year. I mean, there were clearly people who were, who were believing you, but still compared to your competitors, you're vastly, you know, being vastly outspent.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. We had raised $10 million probably total by the end of 2014 and then we had probably raised 25 million total by mid 2015.

• 47:30Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So you have, in 2015, it's, I think it's the end of summer 2015, you have the first version ready for launch. And, and the, the game plan here is we're not going to launch this as a mass consumer product. We're going to launch this as a product for athletes, for college athletes, professional athletes. What data would an athlete have access to if they wore this? Because it was initially, it was going to be expensive. It was going to be a thousand bucks per player. We'll get into the business model in a sec, but what was the offer here? What would you get by wearing it?

• 48:07Speaker 01

  You would get strain, sleep and recovery measurements with a certain level of depth behind each metric. So with sleep, you'd get sleep staging and time in bed and hours of sleep that you got. With recovery, you'd get a score zero to 100%, red, yellow, green. You'd know you're resting, heart rate, your heart rate variability, sleep quality.

• 48:27Guy Raz?

  And just to be clear, you would see this on your iPhone. It was, it was a, a band that had no interface, no screen, but it was tethered by Bluetooth to your iPhone and you would see it on your phone. That was the initial model.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Yes. It would send data to an app via Bluetooth. And then we also built a web app. That was designed for coaches.

• 48:51Guy Raz?

  So the coaches could see their, how their players were recovering and resting, et cetera?

• 48:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. But my biggest focus was really trying to get the, the world's best athletes.

• 49:02Guy Raz?

  Who, who did you want? Who was your like Barbie dream house athlete that you wanted to get this on?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Uh, LeBron James and Michael Phelps were the two.

• 49:10Guy Raz?

  Okay. How are you gonna get to, I mean, first of all, those guys have huge endorsement deals, millions and millions of dollars. Like, how are you gonna get to them? And even if you do get to them, they're gonna say, presumably, well, do it, but you gotta pay me a million dollars or five million, wherever, or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like, how would you do that?

• 49:31Speaker 01

  So those two people had a lot of infrastructure around them. And you're right, they had a lot of offers and these things. And the secret to getting to them, just to say it, was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. It turned out in 2015, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them and spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron, like Mike Mancius was his longtime personal trainer, still is today. And he started wearing whoop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron.

• 50:13Guy Raz?

  So that's how you started? You got him on the wrist of the personal trainers just so they could try it out?

• 50:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:18Guy Raz?

  I mean, Michael Phelps and LeBron James were among your first hundred users. I mean, we're not talking about really good athletes. We're talking about the greatest athletes in their sport.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:29Guy Raz?

  I mean, first of all, let's just talk about LeBron, LeBron for a sec. I mean, he's a Nike athlete. They had a product that arguably was a competing product. Like, I guess it's LeBron James and he can do whatever he wants, but wasn't that complicated? Didn't that create friction?

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Well, the way that it didn't was that we had no relationship with him. We had no relationship at the time with Michael Phelps either, and many of these athletes. I mean, they were essentially just a buyer of the product.

• 50:57Guy Raz?

  You charged them for this or you gave it to them? I'm assuming you would give it to them.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Well, in the case of the trainers, we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it. And again, because we believed that the product was valuable. And

• 51:11Speaker 01

  At the end of the day, it's kind of obvious whether someone likes Whoop. Because wearing something 24/7 is like, it's really hard. It's just really hard to do. It's just hard to build a product that people wear 24/7. And so if they're actually still wearing it 24/7, they like it. And so our engagement metrics became the lifeblood of our story. And I remember there was a year where LeBron and his old team were wearing it. And it came out that they were wearing it in games. And that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA.

• 51:46Guy Raz?

  It wasn't allowed by the NBA.

• 51:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it wasn't allowed by the NBA. And so that created this whole scandal around Whoop. And ironically, created more interest from other sports leagues. And so shortly thereafter, we did this very cool partnership with Major League Baseball. And we grew in the NFL. And so there was, it did turn out to be true. That if you start with literally the very best athletes in the world, there is a massive trickle down effect.

• 52:14Guy Raz?

  And was there, even then, at that point, you know, once, let's just say a year in, you know, when the Apple Watch is becoming more and more popular. I mean, you've got a screen, a screen free device here. I mean, it's measuring different things and more things, but there's no screen, right? And a screen is like a shiny, this sort of the shiny object sort of screaming out there. I have to imagine even at this point, you had investors saying, okay, what are you guys going to do? A screen now?

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot of it goes back to the origin of wanting to create a product that you wear 24/7. And wanting to create a product that has super accurate data. And it turned out, as we really unpacked it, that having a screen was not going to help either of those. In fact, it might hurt it. So what do I mean? Well, first of all, this idea that you wear it all the time. If you put a screen on the product, then it's a watch. And if it's a watch, then you can't wear another watch, right? And if you're...

• 53:16Speaker 01

  If you're having to decide which watch to wear, you're going to take Whoop Off sometimes. And furthermore, as we started to unpack the watch capabilities, you kind of quickly start saying yes to a lot of functionality. First, it's saying, well, maybe you should know when your phone's ringing or push notifications or emails. And next thing you know, you're building a smartwatch, right?

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 01

  And one of the ways that we built a product that people use is by just discarding the notion of having the most features. We were not going to have the most features. In fact, we were going to have very few features. We were going to be singularly focused on fitness and health monitoring.

• 53:56Guy Raz?

  Got it. Okay. So you have this product that's doing well with athletes and they like it and you're ready to put out a version for consumers. This is in 2016. And again, for people who aren't familiar with Whoop, I think a lot of people listening are. It's basically a strap. I mean, it looks like, I mean, it looks like a cloth strap around your wrist. It's very simple. When it was ready for consumers, right? It didn't quite take off initially. Maybe you had expected it to, or maybe you didn't. I don't know. But were you surprised that it was sort of slow to get mass adoption?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I was doing. I mean, there are moments in the history of Whoop where, looking back on it, I'm reminded that this is my first full-time job, let alone the first company I've started. So I think launching to consumers was one of those wake-up calls. The bet at the time was, hey, we've built this brand with professional athletes, the world's best, and a bunch of fitness enthusiasts are going to want the product that's used by the pros.

• 55:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  But one of the challenges was that we weren't paying athletes. So we didn't technically have the rights to likeness and image, right?

• 55:26Guy Raz?

  But you couldn't do advertising with them.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  But we weren't doing advertising with them. And by the way, we also didn't really know how to do marketing yet. And maybe most importantly,

• 55:36Speaker 01

  We were selling the product for $500.

• 55:39Guy Raz?

  So compared to like a Fitbit, which is like 100 or 150, that was a lot.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a lot.

• 55:44Guy Raz?

  More than an Apple Watch at the time.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Well, more than an Apple Watch, yeah.

• 55:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  And so, you know, in hindsight, we probably shouldn't have expected to sell a lot. But look, we observed two things. The first was that people who wore Whoop, which is to say they bought it and then they put it on, would wear it for a long time. And this user engagement was, uh, unique. I mean, it was a market, the wearables industry, just to say it, is a market that's been plagued by engagement, which is to say someone buys a Fitbit and then three weeks or three months later, it's in a drawer.

• 56:19Guy Raz?

  They were just really cheap and that was it. People would buy them and use them and then stop using them.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we didn't have that engagement problem, but we had a big problem, which was that people weren't buying it.

• 56:31Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that's a big problem.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Now you start to look at the incorporation year of Whoop and you start to look at how much money we've raised and, you know, you start to squint a little bit like, what, why hasn't this business figured out how to generate revenue at a material level?

• 56:47Guy Raz?

  And you're five years in now.

• 56:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:49Guy Raz?

  I imagine you had enough faith in the product that you thought this is going to be fine. But still, like, I'm sure there were people, maybe not so subtly, asking you that question. Okay, you're five years in here. You're not, your sales aren't great. What's going on?

• 57:06Speaker 01

  So there was a period of time in 2017 where we were asking ourselves the same question. Like, what is wrong? Like, why, why aren't a lot of people buying this?

• 57:15Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Whoop changes its business model and another massive company enters the wearables market, Amazon. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 57:40Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Whoop has had some pretty big wins. Michael Phelps and LeBron James are using the device, which is huge. The problem is, that's not translating into sales. But eventually, Will starts to figure out what's wrong.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  It took us some time to realize that we had the wrong business model. Perhaps we were totally wrong to be selling this as a one-time fee. And so then we started playing with this idea of, okay, well, what if the hardware cost X and the subscription cost Y? And you started unpacking that. And the more time that I tinkered with the idea, the more I got obsessed with the idea of what if it was just completely a subscription? The whole thing was a subscription. The hardware was just included. And you're signing up for the data and the platform and the insights, the coaching.

• 58:32Guy Raz?

  But the band is free.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  The Whoop strap is free. And I fell in love with that idea. And I became convinced that that was going to save the company. And the engagement data would suggest that I was right. But it was still pretty unproven. It was a company that wasn't yet good at marketing. And to your point, we're five years into building it, didn't have a big revenue stream. It wasn't like competition was gone, by the way. We still had all these companies in the space. At this point now, they were more tech companies, actually, than fitness companies. So 2012, 13, 14, 15 were kind of defined by Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma entering the space. Now, Apple was heating up. They'd seen success with their first watch or two.

• 59:18Speaker 01

  Samsung was entering the space. Microsoft was entering the space. And at the same time, my conviction level that we were on to it, we were just one turn away, my conviction level was at an all-time high. And so that was a very painful 18 months.

• 59:36Guy Raz?

  In some ways, you were actually really lucky that you were under the radar, right? Because no one, I mean, when people talked about fitness trackers, Whoop wasn't in the conversation in 2016, 2017. They were talking about these other companies you mentioned, the Apples and Samsungs, Fitbits and so on. And of course, that would change eventually. But in some ways, you were kind of lucky that you were under the radar and perceived maybe by those other companies as like, oh, well, this is really more of a medical device for professional athletes, because they weren't working on, I guess they weren't really focused on offering the same data.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  I think that's right. But I do think that by having the first launch kind of be such a snooze fest, it gave us a chance to launch again for the first time. You know, I meet hardware founders and they talk a lot about how their first product's going to sell 100,000 units in the first year. And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer market to just teach you this, what's the state of play? And buy you some time to get to that second or third iteration. The worst thing that could have happened to Whoop and would have killed the company ironically,

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  was selling 100,000 units in 2014, 15, 16, even 17, probably. Because we weren't ready for that big a number of people to come on and for all the challenges that would come with it. And there's a sort of like gradual infrastructure that you need to build as a hardware company. You need to get in lockstep with your manufacturing line. You want to have the infrastructure to support customer support and membership services and these sorts of things. And so, yeah, we probably weren't ready for that in 2016. But we got ready for it.

• 1:01:33Guy Raz?

  All right. Let's, let's talk about 2018, right? Because this is an important year. You get, I mean, you're still kind of under the radar, right? I mean, you're raising money and you're showing Promise, you know, that year you attract money from the NFL Players League Association. But one, one interesting thing happens that year, which is you're approached by Amazon. They have a fund called the Alexa Fund and they, they come in to talk to you about maybe investing in you, which is, must be really exciting because it's Amazon. I mean, if Amazon is going to be an investor, well, you know, it's like the next stop, you know, the moon, right? I mean, so when they came to you, you must have been pretty excited.

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  Totally. And look, we had a distribution problem. And so, you know, who's bigger than Amazon when it comes to distribution?

• 1:02:24Guy Raz?

  What did they say? They said we're interested in, in making an investment?

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:28Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they did a lot of diligence on Whoop and it started with their deal team.

• 1:02:34Guy Raz?

  They came in to really go into your, they went into your data room, really kind of looking at your numbers and your technology and?

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Guy Raz?

  Were they talking about a possible like dollar figure of what they might invest?

• 1:02:46Speaker 01

  I don't remember the exact dollar figures, but I can tell you that in 2017 and 18, I was trying to raise probably 10 or 20 million dollars. And so they would have probably been a candidate to take all of that or lead that. Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them and they included their product team in the diligence. And then they ultimately did not invest in Whoop, to our surprise.

• 1:03:13Guy Raz?

  Why? What was the reason?

• 1:03:15Speaker 01

  This is maybe a disappointing answer, but I've had so many investors pass on Whoop in the last, you know, 13 years that, that all the answers kind of blur together.

• 1:03:25Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  And so I don't remember what their reason was for not investing and it could have been a dozen things, frankly.

• 1:03:33Guy Raz?

  Do you, do you remember caring that much about it or just being like, okay, whatever?

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  At that point, I had gotten pretty numb to people passing on Whoop or. As it often felt to me rejecting me because I spent so much time as the sort of front man for these pitches and that 18 month stretch of like beginning of 2017 to mid 2018, whoop was on fumes. I mean, we never had more runway than three months for an 18 month period of the company, which is just, it's hard in hindsight to figure out how that ended up being possible. But we were, we just were continually on life sport. We would continually find a little more capital or a couple of good things would happen and people would get a little more excited. And I was perpetually fundraising and getting told no and a lot.

• 1:04:23Guy Raz?

  Well, during that time, I get this is, it's just so fascinating and especially now, now that we know what the product is today, which we're going to get to and how, just how it's triumphed. But at that time, I mean, you were raising like there's a, there's this kind of conventional wisdom about raising money now. You'll hear founders say, raise money when you don't need it because that's when you have the most leverage. But here you were raising it because you really needed it.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:04:49Guy Raz?

  And I imagine that, that, you know, you had to accept terms sometimes that were hard to swallow.

• 1:04:57Speaker 01

  You know, remarkably in the company's history, we've never done a down round. And it's hard to actually explain how that's possible when I think back on it. But the, we had people who were using the product who were quite euphoric about it. But the irony was that the unlock for the business was going to be moving to a subscription. And what's the problem with a subscription? You get no more, you get far less money upfront. And so it was the only way out of this problem was to have more capital on the balance sheet.

• 1:05:29Guy Raz?

  Right. Cause instead of charging 500 bucks for it, you were now saying, okay, it's going to be free, but you're going to get, it's going to be like 30 bucks a month or whatever it was going to be, which is much more affordable for somebody to sort of try it out.

• 1:05:43Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 1:05:44Guy Raz?

  All right. I want to turn back to the Amazon story because they, they were sort of toying with the idea of investing and they decided not to, and that goes away. And, you know, you keep working on new iterations, new versions of your product and the whoop 2.0 and then 3.0 comes out. And then.

• 1:06:07Guy Raz?

  Amazon announces they're making a monitor strap, a wearable band, that you feel looks quite shockingly similar to the Whoop.

• 1:06:22Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing, I actually found out because so many investors had hit my email up with it when the announcement came out. So it was like that morning, you wake up in the morning and you're looking at your phone and all of a sudden I've got like six emails from shareholders being like, Will, have you seen this? And it was really a bit of a condolences message, too, because everyone believed Amazon, which had unlimited distribution and unlimited resources, if they entered the space, was going to be quite problematic for Whoop.

• 1:06:55Guy Raz?

  Would crush you. And just, you could do an image search for this. It looks pretty much like a Whoop.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  They knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the lead, the lead product manager from Amazon, when it came out, posted on Twitter, "Whoop, there it is," announcing the new Amazon halo.

• 1:07:21Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  Which just was like a sickening level of like, we're above the law, so to speak. And look, you know, it's sad to say this, but they were above the law. Like, we weren't going to go after them legally. We were-

• 1:07:31Guy Raz?

  You can't sue them. They have endless resources to fight that lawsuit.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  We were going to win in the court of public opinion and with consumers.

• 1:07:40Guy Raz?

  But you would lose so much money trying to fight that case.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we didn't touch it. But it became a rallying cry internally. I had already seen how Nike and Adidas and Under Armour and Puma and Microsoft and Apple were supposed to be the death of Whoop. And this was another company that, at least in my opinion at that moment in time, was not going to beat us. It was also around the time that we were designing the circuit board of our next generation product. And so I wrote on every 4.0 circuit board, "Don't bother copying us, we will win."

• 1:08:19Guy Raz?

  In tiny letters on the circuit board?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  On the circuit board, yes, along with every engineer's initials. And the joke, the joke was if, if anyone actually found this message, they probably had nefarious reasons because they were opening our hardware to look at our circuit board. And they were going to see this message and that made us so happy.

• 1:08:40Guy Raz?

  It's, it's interesting because of course, Amazon is, you know, one of the greatest brands in modern history. It's, it's an incredible company and, and has sort of changed the way we live. But they have, you know, they've, from time to time, they tried a, a smartphone didn't work. They tried this and for anyone who doesn't know, doesn't think the product was discontinued, the halo eventually. But it's interesting because on the one hand, you could have gone down the path of saying, all right, we're just going to go after them and try and sue them. But that, that probably could have destroyed your company because you would have spent years in litigation, tens of millions of dollars trying to fight this. And, and for Amazon's surrounding air, I mean, they can fight you and, and certainly make the case that this is not a copy. Or you can decide to lean further into your

• 1:09:24Guy Raz?

  brand and just say, you know what? Forget about them. We're just going to focus on building and doubling down on brand and really making sure that people see that what we're offering is, we believe, a better product.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I think my, my sort of personal philosophy is you can only control what you can control. And if you're stressing about things that you're not in control of, you've lost the plot a little bit. And I think it's a pretty good company strategy too, which is to say, like, if you spend too much time looking at what the competition is doing or letting the competition dictate your strategy, you've probably also lost the plot.

• 1:10:05Guy Raz?

  I'm curious about, again, going back to the athletes. I mean, initially, it was like, hey, we're offering this really cool thing that will give you a competitive advantage. But now, you know, now you've got, I mean, Michael Phelps, I think, does endorsements for you and Ronaldo. And so I imagine that some of these athletes, if not many of them, are investors in the company now.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have an amazing roster of professional athletes that have invested in the company.

• 1:10:34Guy Raz?

  Patrick Mahomes is in there and Eli Manning.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Virgil van Dijk, Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald. And for me, like, I've gotten to make friends with a lot of these, you know, global superstars. And they've offered a lot of good advice to me personally and also to the business.

• 1:10:56Guy Raz?

  You know, and I don't always say this on the show, but because I want to be neutral, but you have a great product.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:11:04Guy Raz?

  And it offers great information, but it's one product, right? It's the band, it's the wearable. And is there a future where, you know, you've got seven different products or, you know, or other, other things that you're selling just to kind of diversify? I mean, is that a concern? Is that a necessity for you guys or maybe not?

• 1:11:30Speaker 01

  I think we'll, we'll add products to our portfolio to the extent that they contribute to that core mission, which is to unlock human performance and health span. You know, a challenge with the definition of lifespan is it just means how long do you live? But what we like about health span is it really reflects the quality of how long you live. I mean, I get, you know, I get messages every single day from people who talk about how Whoops improved their life or increasingly, you know, probably at least once a week now, Whoops saved my life. And it's just hard to find a mission that feels that valuable.

• 1:12:10Guy Raz?

  Well, when you think about, you know, the journey you've taken where you are now, because, I mean, there have been a lot of close calls where you guys could have gone under and here you are, a really established, super well-respected brand. How much of where you got to now do you attribute to that hard work and how much do you think has to do with getting lucky?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  I think there's certainly a resilience that the company's had, or I've had over the last 13 years. I think there's been a lot of near-death experiences. I think there's been a lot of moments where quitting may have seemed responsible. I think I benefited from being young and naive for a lot of it. And I do think, at its core, the idea was right. And in some ways, I'm still trying to fulfill the vision that I had as a 21-year-old. I mean, that's pretty cool.

• 1:13:08Guy Raz?

  That's Will Ahmed, founder of Whoop. By the way, while Whoop is probably best known for helping you track the strain and recovery from doing sports, it also tracks your response to other things like acupuncture, circus arts, commuting, cuddling with a child, cooking, and even public speaking. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer, with music composed by

• 1:13:53Guy Raz?

  Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Chris Messini, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, and Elaine Coats. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.