Hello and
welcome to the North Star. I'm your host David Pharrell. And this is the North Star podcast in each episode. We explore the intersection between different ideas cultures and life philosophies. The guests are diverse, but they share profound similarities. They're Guided by Purpose Driven by curiosity and see the world with a unique lens and in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives.
What I'm not recording podcasts I write essays on my website / al.com send a weekly email newsletter called Monday musings and run an online writing school called rite of passage. I hope you enjoy the
show
will Ahmed is the founder and CEO of loop which has developed next-generation wearable technology for optimizing Human Performance and health. I found him through an excellent interview. He
posted with Rory McIlroy a winner of four major championships who was once the number one golfer in the world will is obsessed with health technology, like nobody I've ever come across so conversation topics range from the business of wearables to the challenges of tracking accurate sleep data, then he shared his Philosophy for why sleep and Recovery is more important data point for an athlete than exercise or stress which are really the traditional metrics, but my favorite part of the interview was
Hearing about wills philosophy of management and why he tries to hire people who have high intensity and high humility going to take that one for my back pocket and use it whenever I hire people so, please enjoy my conversation with whoop. CEO will Ahmed
So well welcome. I did have been following Loop for a while and now seeing your ads on television. And my first question for you is what is the piece of data that you wish that you had that you're annoyed you're frustrated that you don't have it that would make tracking performance and the human body much easier and more effective.
Well, that's a good question.
Question, I guess if I could wave a magic wand it would probably be it would be to know everything that someone has consumed in great detail. Like I think that I think that nutrition is a very interesting piece of the puzzle, but I think it's it's really hard to collect nutritional information one in a convenient way and to accurately and so I think that that is a data set also would be probably quite a differentiated data set from
What we're already collecting.
Yeah, one of the things you do is you ask deliberate questions. Where you on your phone before you went to sleep. What time did you go to sleep? What time was your last meal? What do you see in terms of the efficacy of asking people for stated responses and how much that varies from what they actually do.
Well, it does seem like the people who answer the journal that you just referred to, you know, so we have this this journal in the whoop app.
That can let you track 60 to 70 different lifestyle decisions behaviors diets things of that nature the people who answer that answer it every single day. So it's a very binary and what what's good about that is that it gives you a fairly robust data set the key in general. I think with data is that you don't want there to be holes in it. One of the reasons that whoop has a modular charger right? You can charge whoop without ever taking it off your body was
We were obsessed with this idea that you need the data 24/7. And in fact, if you had to take the loop strap off your body that would be a period of time when you weren't wearing the product and in turn we were afraid that that you might not put it back on. And so that's just one of many reasons or one of them would many solutions for why continuous data is is so important and when someone's actually willing to tell you every single day how much alcohol they had and at what time
time and the number of glasses you can actually really triangulate around different people's habits and how to optimize them. One thing that's been very interesting about alcohol alcohol in general is not good for you. Most people know that but it's actually quite interesting certain population of people on whoop. If they have one drink it actually can be beneficial to them where they may see positive results in their recovery.
And their sleep the next day the challenge is that one it's not everyone and to a lot of people don't just have one drink it might drift into two or three and at that point it almost definitely is as having a negative impact on your body. I bring that up because it just gets to the power of being able to change someone's Behavior which at the end of the day is what whoop is really trying to do we want to change behavior and improve health the power to being able to do that is to say if
if you are going to drink alcohol do it three hours before bed and try to have less than two drinks or so, you know to be very direct and that's feedback for David and maybe for you know for E McElroy. It's like you can't have any alcohol. He jokes on on our podcast that that having one glass of wine. His data is completely screwed up. So these things are like super personalized and I think that's why it's powerful to get as much data as you can to make robust
story.
Your podcast with Rory's one of the best podcast I've listened to in my life and thank you. What I remember so vividly was the way that his composure changed after he blew it at Augusta. And then when he won the US Open by six eight, whatever he did and I played division one golf my freshman year and one of the things that I talked a lot about with my coach was an idea called four-by-four breathing.
We would inhale for 4 seconds. We would exhale and then whenever I got nervous on the course, I would just return to that state of 4x4 breathing and I never had data on how my breathing affected my heart rate. What have you found in that world?
Well people who meditate in general have a much better heart rate variability. So we do see that people who practice some form of mindfulness some form of meditation have on
Average higher heart rate variabilities than other people. We also see that if you're someone who doesn't meditate and then you introduce meditation that to will lead to a higher heart rate variability and there's a lot of reasons for that in many ways heart rate variability is a measurement of your breathing in the moment. So it's not that surprising but I think it's quite powerful that the way you might just do a breathing exercise.
Or size for 10 minutes in the morning today is going to then later affect how you sleep, you know some 12 hours or 18 hours later. I think that's quite
fascinating. I've heard you talk a lot about how 20 30 years ago people weren't working out and now you go to hotel gym or go to hotel. Of course, there's a gym and I think similarly there has been an increase in meditation, but I don't know how much the stated.
Consistency is versus the actual revealed consistency as among just average people. So I wonder what it's like among athletes. Well, let's see. I mean I think
athletes are constantly tinkering. I think they're more they're tinkering more today than they were 10 years ago. I don't know if athletes are meditating more. I think that they're probably thinking about it more, you know athletes have always gravitated towards visualization. Some athletes will do this intuitively. Some will do it in a very rehearsed way.
Way, well, what's the difference between intuitively and rehearsed way intuitively would be Tiger Woods, you know walking down the Fairway of the 18th hole and just knowing to himself that he's going to Birdie the hole and like having a very clear image in his mind of doing that a sports psychologist would train a division one golfer how to do that in a coherent way. You know, there would be you would close your eyes there would be a
Thing technique you would you would really focus on the emotion behind that you'd really focus on the imagery behind that you would decide whether you wanted to be focused on that in the first person or the third person, you know, first person being I can see out of my own eyes the putt going in third person being I can see the crowd around me and I can see myself making the putt. So these are the sorts of things that in general athletes get exposed to especially in route to becoming a professional athlete.
I think probably more so in golf even than other sports because it is such an incredibly mental game and there's a lot of time in between shots, you know, a basketball player a lot of what a basketball player do is intuitive in the moment, right? LeBron. James doesn't necessarily need to visualize dunking on someone. He just in the moment recognizes when he should golf you've got minutes sometimes up to ten minutes before a shot. So you have to figure
What you're going to do with that time and so, you know my hunch and I've spent a fair amount of time with professional golfers. Now my hunch is that mindfulness and visualization are more popular within say professional golf than they would be say within professional basketball. They there's another general question is to okay? Well how pervasive is mindfulness today? I think a lot of people are flirting with it. I don't know if people have I would be more curious to know how many people have actually created and a practice around.
It I for example have been doing trance that'll meditation once or twice a day for six years straight. So I think of that as a as a practice, whereas, you know, if you download headspace and over the course of a week, you meditate three times for 10 minutes each and then you don't do it for a month. And then you remember you've got it and you do it once. I don't know if that's someone who meditates I think of that as someone who's trying to you know
experiment.
Why do you think that whoop has been so popular on the PGA tour? I know that you have a big deal with Major League Baseball. You have one with golf. What is it about those two sports that they have in common. I'm like particularly surprised because golf is so slow to change as a culture and whoop feels like a bright exception to that rule.
It's been a pleasant surprise for me because I also love golf and I'll say this.
This I mean the thing that makes whoop relevant for a professional golfer a professional football player or you or me is that it's very good at helping you figure out how all these different things in your life affect you and professional golfers. I think for a long time have taken for granted just how grueling it is as a sport. I mean it really is quite quite a lot of work, you know, when we play golf we show up to the range 20 minutes before the round.
And then we go play 18 holes with our friends when these guys play golf. I mean, it's like it's like eight hours at the range. It's it's then going to the gym. It's then getting on a plane and jumping over three time zones. It's then having a beer in the lobby. It's then getting into a hotel. It's then waking up the next day and doing it all over again. And then trying to compete under stressful conditions to win a tournament and maybe not playing that well, right so you have a situation which is actually a fair amount of
Of stress and it's not a big focus on recovery. And so I think that the reason we took off and golf is that these guys realized how much better they were at golf when they focused on sleep and recovery, and I think the other reason it's done so well is they all have the game. I mean they all have the game the hundredth best player in the world can shoot a 65 at the best course, right? And so they recognize that there's these other things that are going on.
That separate the hundredth best player from the best player. I've talked to a number of these guys who have gotten to be number one in the world and almost all of them will say that, you know, there's not that big of a gap between them and the hundredth person in the world and so being able to focus on these things like how well you're sleeping what you're doing before bed how your body is recovering. It actually can make an enormous difference in your performance.
What is a
a memorable conversation or moment that you've had with one of the great players like who's just the person who you see or like I love this guy.
I will say like I think professional golf in general is a unique group of athletes and that they're much more collaborative and this actually also answers why it grew so fast in golf, you know, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are not like texting each other tips, right? In fact, they really want the
A person probably not to be getting better. Whereas professional golfers are shockingly collaborative and like I'm on text threads with Justin Thomas and Rory McIlroy and they'll be sending out screenshots of their sleep before the US Open, you know, like look I'm in the green tile. Look I'm in the green and and
and in fact Justin got on
whoop because Rory told him to get on whoop, right and you know, here are two of the top five golfers in the world.
And what's been cool for me along with getting to those two guys and they're terrific guys is you know, I was I was inside the bubble during the whole PGA Tour return to golf and so it felt a little bit like joining a country club with a hundred and fifty of the best golfers in the world. I mean, there is no one there was just professional golfers and their caddies and the staff and and me and a you know, a few people from whoop helping them all get their there whoops traps and so, you know,
Sit in the locker room and players are coming in and out and you know you like I found myself having lunch with Tony finau and John ROM and Justin Rose one day and and you know, they were showing each other their their whoop data, which I thought was the coolest thing obviously where they, you know, John was talking about how he doesn't get enough REM sleep and Tony we had got 9 hours and 48 minutes of sleep and John was completely fascinated by how Tony could get that much sleep and then they were talking about their sleeping habits.
And it was cool one to get to spend time with these guys, but I think it was also quite fascinating to me that that was that's the culture within the PGA Tour and it's a very special culture. You know, I haven't I haven't seen that in other sports and I think the reason for it and I think I think Justin Thomas may have said this to me, but I think the reason for it is they don't feel like they're competing against each other as much as they're competing against themselves and the course and so
And they're winning percentage is obviously super low right just by nature of the sport. And so that just makes them all. I think a little bit more down to earth. We with each other you mentioned REM
sleep and my roommate founded a health startup went through y combinator the startup didn't work, but he said that it's notoriously difficult to get sleep data and when it comes to my or ring and my whoop the REM
M versus deep sleep data is very different what's going on there? And why is it so hard to capture sleep cycle data?
Well, it's interesting. First of all capturing sleep data in it in that of itself is a fascinating concept because
If you go to a sleep laboratory and you get hooked up to all these different Contraptions most commonly known the polysomnographic which is really the sort of gold standard in sleep mode measurement. What happens is they they film you sleeping. They look at the polysomnographic data and then to sleep clinicians will actually degrade your sleep data and people don't realize this but those to sleep clinicians will actually agree with each other.
seven percent of the time so like that actually seems kind of low if you think about it, right like in terms of being able to accurately grade sleep data and we've gone to Great Lengths to be the most accurate sleep monitor on the market and if you look at our data alongside that gold standard, it's really really accurate and we look at it by variations of if polysomnographic said you were in deep sleep but for 48 minutes how
To boob say you're in deep Sleep. Okay, that's plus or minus two minutes. Okay, that's that's pretty encouraging and what's fascinating about REM sleep and slow wave sleep in particular and why it's important to measure these two periods of sleep is that REM sleep is when your brain is repairing. It's when you're you're improving cognitive performance, and if you're an executive if you're trying to perform at a high level mentally,
You need to be getting a lot of REM sleep and slow wave sleep is when your body produces about 95% of its human growth hormone. So people think you get stronger in the gym, you're actually kind of like tearing your muscles down in the gym. You get stronger during slow-wave sleep when you're repairing them and I bring this up because someone listening to this who doesn't measure sleep if you ask them how much sleep they get what they will invariably do.
They'll say well okay in the back of my little go. Well, I go to bed at 11:00 and I wake up at 6:00. So I get 7 hours of sleep every night and it's like, okay. Well actually if you were to measure that that's seven hours in bed. Right seven hours in bed does not actually translate to 7 hours and sleep. Maybe you spend seven hours in bed. And if you're pretty efficient, you're getting six hours and 15 minutes of quality sleep now within quality of sleep. There's still this notion of light sleep versus REM and slow wave sleep.
Beep and by the way, there's people who get 6 hours and 15 minutes of sleep and five and a half hours of that is light sleep right versus you could be getting six hours and 15 minutes of sleep and half of it is REM and slow wave sleep. And so when people say, you know, I think I'm a pretty good sleeper. I don't know that I need to measure this stuff or I know I'm a bad sleeper. I don't need to measure this stuff. I think it's the most short-sided point of view because it's a third of your life and you can actually change.
Each very small things and all of a sudden you're spending the same amount of time in bed. You're still the guy who goes to bed at 11:00 and wakes up at 6, but you now are going from having ten percent of that time in bed being REM and slow wave which is when you get all the value to having 50 or 60 percent and that alone can so meaningfully change the quality of your life and your performance. It is
shocking. Yeah. I think that one of the struggles that I
would imagine professional athletes have is I've heard that your sleep is noticeably worse when you're traveling and I don't know what they do to adapt to Hotel Beds, but I once heard you say that a way players in the NBA get an hour less sleep than home players. And what do you do for that? How do you have these controlled experiments? Maybe you basically say okay have a red light that I
Ring around and then I have the same pillow that I use and you try to replicate the environment. Maybe you try to do it with the your pre sleep habits, but I don't know what you do there.
Yeah, look, I mean it's part of the game and it's hard the study you're referencing. We actually did that with major league baseball and we found on average the away team got an hour less sleep than the home team. So everyone sort of assumes that the home team wins because of the crowd and familiar stadium and and you know sort of these like,
Known quantity things what if it's just that they get more sleep at home and that I think is quite quite an interesting concept. Now the other challenge that athletes have is they played late games, right? And if you play a late game and a lot of athletes are taking some kind of a stimulant for that game some kind of a shake or some kind of caffeinated thing. So you're having a caffeinated thing at like 7:00 p.m. I mean, you really don't want to have caffeine in your system after 2 p.m. So that just in it
Self is a huge challenge. The other thing is you're playing under bright lights in front of screaming fans, right? So then you've got you got blue light that stimulating your eyes and you got fans and adrenaline that's stimulating your body. So, you know, your cortisol levels are elevated. So it's it's kind of a perfect storm for someone not to be able to fall asleep and that's just independent from
All the travel and whatnot plus after they end the game. They need to get some food in their system to recover. So then your ending a game. It's a 10 p.m. You're getting food in your system 10:30. You actually don't necessarily want to fall asleep right after eating because the food that you eat your sleep it will be affected. If you eat close to bed your your body isn't as good at digesting food when you're sleeping and it also screws up your Sleep Quality. So anyway, that's a perfect.
Dorm for why it's hard, but it's also it to me. It underscores why it's so important to measure this stuff. I mean, I really believe we will look back on professional athletes not measuring sleep and Recovery as like the most insane thing ever. It'll it'll be it'll be like baseball players smoking cigarettes in The Dugout. It'll just seem that insane
where people smoking on airplanes. I always think about how that was possible that you get on.
An airplane and people just start torching it up at 40,000 feet. What are some of the constraints on getting inside the body in terms of like I was with a friend this morning. We went swimming at like 7:00 in the morning and the in the river and he took off his levels glucose tracker and then it basically by changing it up became waterproof, but that is like a needle I think in his arm, but then I can measure a lot of glucose spiking.
What do you think that you'd be able to achieve if you did that and we're were is that even possible like are the constraints just too bad the data privacy is just too much of a risk. How do you think about that?
Well, it's funny the things that humans are good at dreaming up tend to end up being reality and everyone seems convinced that at some point you're going to have sensors inside your body. So it's almost more fun to just assume. It's going to happen II do feel that like it would be worth doing to the extent that you're getting a data set that you can't otherwise get but it does introduce new challenges as well. Like I've looked at implantables a little bit. They have a one massive challenge is just
Battery life like how are you going to keep this thing powered that is inside your body. And so then you ask yourself. Well, could it be powered by your body your blood flow or could it be powered by movement? You know, some would have certain watches work where they they're powered by mechanical movement. The reality is that just independent from this question of can you measure more by being inside the body the mechanical engineering and the battery questions of that are actually
Are actually bigger bigger problems, you know, for example so much of what whoop does better than other products is data collection and data granularity, but it would be impossible to collect that level of data if the sensor was trying to power itself, you know, because again, we wanted to have the product be something that you never had to take off. Well wouldn't it be so clever if if it was charging itself through movement? It's just the battery requirements are in a different stratosphere.
What a you know, a little mechanical watch requires
one of the things that frustrates me quite a bit about wearables industry. I mean, I'm not like I have 3 wearables on right now and I'm trying to figure out what I like about it what I don't like about it and one of the things is that I feel like none of the individual platforms are actually working together and I think that this is how a lot of markets actually develop where there's a lot of markets that sort of come up and they all have these
Very specialized tasks and they all optimized on these very narrow domains. And whoop is very clearly optimized for leichhardt tracking and raw performance data. The Apple watch has a more casual Fitness or for for sleep. And so it's a bit frustrating that there's no sort of easy way to link all the apis and have a centralized database. And also there is the challenge in the space that you have the big tech companies who want to be on your body.
on has you know come in and they want to compete with you guys and then there's obviously Apple which is just sort of like not quite the default option, but
It seems like those two big companies. Like I remember Pebble came out a couple years ago. And I think that one of the big lessons that a lot of people took from Pebble was don't compete against Apple. They're going to beat you. So what is your take on the industry given that it doesn't seem like there's good centralization and what it's like playing against these big tech companies.
Well, there's a lot of ways to answer that but I think the first thing that comes to mind is what is your core purpose? What is your why is your product exists and for whoop, the reason we've built a vertically integrated system is that we believe it's the very best way to drive Behavior change and improve health. So that's how we define success. That's how we Define our value proposition. And if you look at people have been on whoop for a year, they have dramatically declining resting heart rates.
Increase in heart rate variability so they're sleeping longer and they're sleeping more consistently and those are actually dramatic improvements in health. So there's there's a lot of signs that what we're doing is working as we think about adding layers to that story. It's bringing in more data sources that could help us again unpack what you need to do to be a better version of yourself. What can we tell you to do I think a lot of behavior change comes from some?
Um, you know some intervention of sorts, it's not just enough to say you didn't sleep. Well last night. It's you want to show you tell someone what can you do to sleep better? It's not enough to say that maybe you know, a low carb diet is good for you or paleo is good for you or kito's good for you. It's you have to explain that it's working if to show that it's working or show that it's not working. So this this sort of coaching layer to me is where is where whoop wants to live and see
Extent that we can get other data sources to improve that we are going to and there's a lot of different ways to think about what those data sources will be and some of this I have to keep a little confidential but we want to build a platform where you are going to be able to improve your health and I appreciate some of your critiques on you know, why are you wearing three different products? I think there's a fair amount of overlap between or
Aura and whoop. So in that case, it's less obvious why to wear both of them? I think in the case of whooping the Apple watch they are actually serving different functions and I think the lesson from Pebble was not necessarily don't compete with apple. I think the lesson from Pebble was don't do too many things in an average way and you know, they built a smartwatch that didn't do anything really. Well. It did a lot of things in a pretty average way.
And they also chose to build wearable technology wearable technology is one of the single hardest things to build because you have to be good at like at least five things. You have to be good at Hardware you're good at saw for you to get an analytics. You have to be good at design and you probably need some aspect of branding or Community maybe both
so that just makes the space insanely hard Nike failed in the space Adidas failed in the space Under Armour failed in the space Microsoft filled in the space. Google's had a lot of start stops, but they failed in the space until failed in the space base is went out of business job. I want to business there's a graveyard of stuff that failed in this space and it's in part because it's really hard but I think it's also impart because it's a lack of focus. You have to be in my opinion.
Very very succinct about why you're going to exist and for whoop, there's a million reasons why we don't have a watch face. There's a million reasons why we don't let you do push notifications and why the thing doesn't vibrate when your phone just got a text message. We want to live on two paradigms. We want whoop to either be cool or we want it to be invisible and nothing in between and that's a pretty strong point of view.
I think if you look at a lot of wearable technology was lost in the middle and you know, the design of this stuff is pretty important. How many things do you wear? 24/7? Not a lot
right many. Yeah, I think whoop is my only won cuz I it is the only one because it's the only one that stays on my body. I charged my Apple watch and my aura ring every day. I can't work out with my word ring because I can't lift weights with it. So Loop is actually the only thing which is kind of crazy,
right so
That's fairly intentional and it's again, I think quite hard and given just how few things you wear 24/7 it emphasizes the difficulty of
it.
Talk about cool and invisible.
So cool is creating something that aesthetically you're willing to wear.
And I think that anything you wear 24/7 says something about you would have been other fads that people have worn and it's somewhat continuous way the Livestrong bracelet. I know Lance Armstrong's very out of style these days but there was a time when wearing a Livestrong bracelet said a lot about you, right you could kind of prototype someone once you saw that thing on their wrist and
In many ways. We're seeing the same thing develop with whoop where if you meet someone who wears whoop, all of a sudden you start to paint a picture of someone who's aspirational maybe athletic but definitely aspirational and in my opinion, that's a good thing. I think you want to have a strong brand Association, especially if you're developing a wearable technology ask yourself what it would mean to you to see someone wearing an Amazon wearable or a Walmart wearable.
I don't want to say anything critical but all of a sudden it just creates a different framework in your mind of what is this person stand for what is this person's priorities because this isn't again just a utilitarian piece of technology. It's something you're choosing to wear on your person to wear on your body. And for those reasons, I think the brand Association and the design of the product or are even more important than than is immediately obvious. Everyone says, oh industrial design is important, but it's actually in this.
Specific case with wearable technology even more important and so we spent a long time figuring out how would this thing be completely customizable and it's not an accident that like you can very quickly just take this sensor apart and swap in and out all sorts of different bands and have this be completely logoed to the moon and back. So we want this to feel like a great representation of Who You Are
and Invisibles the other Paradigm and that's one that I'm quite excited about and we're doing a lot of work on that which is really all I can
say.
Nice technology becomes technology when it's invisible when we don't think about it. And you know, this is something that I'd like to do some philosophy about actually like I would at some point in life like to spend a couple years exploring the how invisible Technology's impact us. And I mean that in actually at very different way than whoop, but I think there's another kind of invisible. I think the invisible you're talking about is like electricity.
E you sort of assume it's there. You don't really think about it. You turn on the lights without even thinking about it and it just sort of operates in this ambient fashion. There's another kind of invisible that I'm very interested in. It was just like clocks and mirrors these technologies that we no longer think about and I have a thesis that clocks created a culture of anxiety mirrors created a culture of narcissism and I would love to go study a lot of those ideas, but I'm reminded of a another famous saying that if you
Are serious about software you want to go build your own Hardware talk about some of the challenges of building each of those and then we'll work through some of those five things that you mentioned
before.
It's funny. So, you know, I started whoop when I was a senior at Harvard and that was 2012. I mean technically the company was founded in 2011 and for nine years an enormous number of people told me not to build Hardware. I mean an overwhelming number of people told me not to for sure and the Slick investor point of view on This was oh you should
Leverage existing hardware and build the algorithms on top of it and it's fascinating to me. How many people thought that was like a novel point of view like a smart point of view. Like they had invented that point of view in the moment and they were so proud of it like almost like we couldn't have thought of that ourselves, you know, and like it's so I understand that it's sort of this this thing that people believe which is that if you can create the the simplest path,
To Victory, maybe that's going to be the quickest return and the best best bet. But in fact if you were actually trying to build something that is I think truly new is truly trying to disrupt a space or a market to be able to control every piece of the puzzle to have it be vertically integrated is such an enormous advantage and the other advantage to it is it's so ambitious.
And I didn't necessarily realize quite how ambitious it was at the time when I was sort of like realizing what I wanted to do, but it's so ambiguous that it actually attracts really really great talent and really really great people because they're like this is this is kind of badass. We're going to build every layer of this thing from scratch and we're going to control every Bell and whistle. And and now when we want to innovate there's all these different axes that we can play on we can we can be innovating within the way we're collecting the
Data within the rate at which were collecting the data within the sensing that we're doing within like the rate at which we're transferring it. It's there's just an enormous power that comes to being able to own the entire stack.
What's an example of that from like a product that you've already launched like help me understand like what is something that you have done that you wouldn't have been able to do had you not own the stack?
Well, I'm I mean most of what you see on just the whoop overview screen we wouldn't be able to do without
Owning the stack and part because our Hardware is differentiated. But like okay, let's let's take for example the fact that in 2015 Fitbit came out with a their first wearable that could do heart rate. And so, you know again fill in the blank clever investor. Oh great. This is an opportunity for you guys to sort of shelf the hardware developments now, you can just take heart rate from Fitbit and put your algorithms on top of it.
And let's just assume for a second that people were willing to wear a Fitbit forever, which we've now seen as is not the case people aren't willing to wear a Fitbit forever. But let's pretend they were the heart rate granularity with which they were collecting. The data was inaccurate under different forms of motion. So if you're trying to serve an audience that is initially athletic and doing a lot of different sports, you actually can't control the accuracy of that heart rate data.
Can't validate that the heart rate that you're putting into a score is actually weighted properly. So if you want to give someone a strain analysis for a run or for weightlifting or for basketball and you can't trust the data that's going into it or you can't wait the probability of any given moment how accurate it is, then you can't in turn give someone a score that's actionable or real and then just sort of like shit and shit out.
And I mean for a long time I wore a chest strap 24/7 a heart rate monitor chest strap because that actually gave me fairly accurate heart rate data, which I could in turn create an accurate strain score with because the chest strap for all the issues with it was an accurate heart rate monitor now, that's like a very simple point of view like that's a very simple analysis. It gets so much more complicated. The reason that whoop is able to give you a recovery.
Gor that that is that is accurate to your your state of being an accurate how restored you are is sort of a few layers of things one. It's the fact that we measure heart rate variability. But so you might immediately say, oh well, but but this other product measures heart rate variability, you could use that other product to give you a recovery score. Well wait, we measure heart rate variability continuously, but we only take the heart rate variability reading for Recovery during the last five minutes of your slow wave sleep.
And the reason that's important is that heart rate variability is a very noisy statistic my heart rate variability right now in this moment may say nothing at all about my ability to perform in a somewhat athletic context later. But in fact was a very good predictor if you looked at it while I was sleeping last night and not just sleeping but during slow-wave sleep. So we take it every few in the last five minutes of slow wave sleep because slow wave sleep is when your body is literally repairing and as we talked about before it's when you're producing human growth hormone.
and by doing that and doing that night overnight overnight overnight, we're able to build a control and that control then can you know be weighted against itself and that in turn can lead to a recovery score and so
If we had just grabbed what a random piece were random Hardware had said was your heart rate variability. We wouldn't know at what point in the day. It was captured. We wouldn't know how accurately it was captured. And for those reasons alone. It would just be a completely worthless measurement. So the idea that we could then build a score on top of it that could then have a coach to tell you what to do off of it. You know, you're green. You should exercise this hard or your red. You should you should rest. I mean again, it wouldn't it wouldn't have worked.
Would have it would have all fallen over there would have been no efficacy.
We are talking earlier about let me just sort of summarize it at the risk of being too terse about other people telling you to be Capital light business you going vertically integrated and dealing with Hardware which means that you're running no more Capital intensive business the same thing could be said looking forward to your talk about coaching. Do you think that you would hire personalized coaches? So like I would work with
whip coach and then I my subscription instead of $30 a month be $100 a month or do you think that there then there's like an opportunity at the software only layer to basically automate a lot of the coaching experience that basically have a handful of critical data points that say Hey your strength scores been too low for the last 8 Days your HRV keeps going down. We think that with how much your training you are now at nine out of ten risk for injury. Is that how you see this going or what are you thinking about what the coaching?
Well, we're exploring a lot of
different Avenues of coaching. I mean the first layer which is getting much more robust is just that we have a membership services team that in very short order you as a member will just be able to text directly in the app and that team you could ask anything from why isn't my Bluetooth pairing to hey, I got an unusually low heart rate variability today. What does that mean? So that in itself is going to be an interesting human layer of coaching.
And we're going to build on top of that. And so I'm excited to see where that takes it broadly speaking. I think the most accurate coach for looking at your whoop data will ultimately be the whoop AI that sits on top of all this information because that's the God view algorithm that can understand not just all these different things that are affecting me but the other 10,000 people on Wooh Pooh look identical to me right and and the learnings from
From that data set to and so yeah, I'm quite encouraged that we're going to be able to build a coach that is going to actually be able to tell you exactly what you need to do to improve and that is going to be an AI it's not going to be
a human.
Cool Switching gears here. Whoop is its own kind of media company. I see the content trap of book behind you and you now have a podcast how have you thought about building a media company within what has been your thinking behind doing that?
We wanted it from early like from a very early on we wanted whoop to be a brand and that's a that's sort of a risky thing to say at an early stage of a business, especially like before you have meaningful revenue and what not, but it does create an orientation and and for us it was very important that when when whoop grew up and we're now pretty close to being a you know, a mature company that
People would associate whoop with human performance and if they were going to ask themselves a question about human performance regardless of whether they were customer of whoop. They would want to come to whoop to answer that question. So, how do I sleep better? That's a question that if someone asks, we want them to come to whoop regardless of whether or not they were whoop and that's in part what it means to be a brand is to have credibility around, you know, your universe and
You know, so so some of these different categories that we've invested in like we have the locker which is a Blog where we write about a lot of this stuff. We have a podcast where we interview thought leaders athletes Executives on what they're doing. We have really detailed analysis on different types of scores and different types of physiological measurements. All of that is to build a Content engine that people can use to better understand their bodies regardless of whether they wear whoop or not.
What of course has happened is that now Society has also caught up, you know eight years ago. I was talking about heart rate variability. No one cared what the hell heart rate variability was five years ago. We were still talking about heart variability. But if you searched for it whoop was on the 25th page today, if you search for heart rate variability, whoop is one of the answers for what is heart rate variability, right? And so, you know, that's SEO and whatever but it's it's building real estate that you believe.
Is going to be valuable and then it's realizing that not only do is that real estate a thousand acres rather than one acre from when you started a lot of people want to come to your real estate. And so that's what it's been for us around content and that and that's how we thought about it.
So what's it like to play Augusta National?
I played Augusta National in May of 2012 and a friend of mine at Harvard's father was a member and we went down there and it was I mean, it was surreal, you know, they comb the squirrels. It's a it's a it's it's a special place. It is a beautiful place. It does feel like the home of golf. It's worth the hype.
Wipe and you can't really help like walking around that golf course, but like feeling a little bit of magic in the air the whole that I thought was insanely hard that again. It seemed actually less hard on television was 16 the par 3. Wow. So the whole the whole that tiger put it to like three feet when he won last year that that whole thing was I mean that whole green is is really hard and I
She dropped a ball from where tiger made so well the day we played at just to back up for a second was where they put the pin on Sunday of the Masters. You know, it's that pin that's like kind of tucked towards the water. And so I dropped a ball just for fun from where tiger had made that crazy chip 2005-2006. Yeah, and that ship is so hard. It's like a smile thinking about it. It was like I think I chipped it to like 30.
E 5 feet and I mean I'm you know, I'm not a terrible golfer. I'm like a three or four handicapped and I think I chipped it too. It was definitely I was definitely outside of of 20 feet and I just it was just so cool that he he chipped that in and under the situation that he did. So yeah, look it was amazing to get to play that Golf Course incredibly grateful.
That's probably the top thing on my entire bucket list playing Augusta National, you know, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about and I think that Bryson to Shambo is been sort of at the frontier of this. I know I've been talking to the Cincinnati Reds pitching staff because I wrote an article about Bryson and it went sort of viral and a lot of people in Major League Baseball in particular started reaching out and a lot of what we've been talking about is how being more analytical can
make your intuition better and let me give an example here. So there's been an interesting thing that's happened in the world of Chess where a lot of the top players have been watching Jess a is play and what's happened is it has reoriented people's intuition for those who watch a lot of computer chess and there's a lot of moves that look ugly to the human eye, but that are actually very effective moves and
My theory is that what you want to do is you want to practice analytically and then you want to improve your intuition. But then when you perform you want to be intuitive, so you're talking about LeBron James earlier the way he's intuitive on the course same thing with Bryson. He wants to be more of an artist on the course, even though he's very scientist very science-minded off of it. How would you think about some of those trade-offs? Maybe we could even talk about your time playing playing squash like how
how much did you think about being analytical versus intuitive?
Yeah, I mean I
agree with you that I think in general you want practice to be analytical and you want performance to be intuitive which I think is what you were getting at. You know, I think it's very hard to execute when you're being when you're too conscious of what you're of what you're doing the Holy Grail which athletes get to every once in a blue moon is this concept of a flow State and the flow state is the very definition of it being completely intuitive.
I mean everything you're doing just comes completely naturally and you're you're almost like watching yourself in the act and I remember having one squash match like that where I beat. I won my match against Trinity and Trinity at the time. They hadn't lost a match for 12 straight Seasons. It's the longest Dynasty and in all of college sports. They won something like insane number of matches straight and I had I won my individual match we still lost as a team, but I remember
Were truly appreciating what this idea of a flow state was and it's a fleeting thing. I mean you almost feel like you're watching yourself to the thing and you're like Amazed by how easy it feels and it's a hard thing to get back to Josh white skin rights really well about this whole concept so I think yeah, I think you have it right? I think you know the question becomes.
What are flow States outside of sports right? How can you be analytical about your performance has an executive but then all of a sudden embody someone who's doing it intuitively or executing intuitively, I think in general my process for running group is very intuitive. But but then again you have these moments where you're consciously
Looking at your calendar and you're thinking okay. Well I say that recruiting is very important right now. But how many hours a week? Am I actually spending recruiting and you sort of like, okay. Well, that's that's all sort of the where the analysis needs to come in because you need to sort of
recalibrate. Well, I think there's another cut on this that whoop shows that there's times where your feelings about. Can I play today can just be wrong and you can look at HRV.
And what people are saying and what they actually think is just wrong and so there's times whoop his proven that our intuition leads us astray.
A hundred percent and and look, I mean one of the core reasons that whoop exist today was this belief that feelings are overrated. Mmm feelings are overrated. And if you're a hard-driving person, it's particularly true because your feelings can betray you because your mind can betray you I mean, this is why you see talented entrepreneurs burnout. It's why you see great athletes over train and get injured because their minds are able to push themselves to a place that actually
Isn't all that productive. I started whoop because I over trained as a college athlete and I wanted to know what they should I train hard or what they should I not trained at all and I think this this point about feelings being overrated is being actually really Amplified during covid-19 covid.
I think has changed consumer psychology in a big way in this regard where you can be carrying a virus that you can't feel your asymptomatic and you can give it to your grandmother and it can kill her and unfortunately, this is happening every day in the world. That is a shift in Psychology is quite powerful and the realities that you can measure things about your body to understand whether there's a meaningful shift occurring in your body and
It's why I'm so bullish on the whole the whole space and the whole concept of Health monitoring is that I think you know, I think it's inevitable that Health monitoring can make people so much more aware so much healthier can improve healthcare costs. It can make you know can shift a lot of things to being preventative versus Curative, which is where you save a lot of money. I think it can be good in every
way. Yeah. I'm going to give you a thought experiment that I called the Paradox of battery.
And it's probably my single biggest complaint about whoop. I think that the battery lasts too long and let me tell you why
this hasn't thought about this
ridiculous, but battery life is more effective if you have to charge it every day because it becomes a habit. And the reason why I don't have great data on my whoop. The reason why I lose my charger all the time is well partially because it's mobile, but I really just forget to charge it because I
Charge it every day. And so I think that there's something very weird going on there with consumer behavior that analytically wouldn't make sense. You would think that the longer the battery the better the product might not be the case.
Well, it depends what you're solving for, but I'll give you the empirical answers to that Paradox great the empirical answer so that Paradox are that in fact having a five-day battery life versus a day and a half which is what we used to have our generation to was about a day and a half two days. So it was one of those things where you had to charge it every night like you had to build that behavior.
Today with a five-day battery life versus then with the sort of day and a half more people are are able to consistently upload data to the server. So what that means is that having a longer battery life has improved efficacy of data collection, despite what your point of view on on building a habit what we've also seen though, is that more people are buying battery packs.
So our battery packs sales on a per person basis have also increased and I think what that signals is what you just described is that the behavior of not having this sort of habit every day of charging means that you'll put your charger somewhere and then four days later, you'll forget where it is and you'll have lost your charger. And so that in turn is why people are also now buying more battery packs and I think that in general we're going
Keep trying to extend the battery life and I think it were probably okay with people buying battery packs to although I'd like to get
cheaper, you know, it might also flip at some margin, right? So let's just I'm not saying it's true. But let's say that my thought experiment is true. It might be the case that at 17 days now, it becomes easier like certainly if you had an unlimited battery, then you'd never run out of battery or if you only had to charge once a year and you had it the same place like that would probably be better.
ER so I don't know be really interesting to look at a habit curve of that as we begin to close. I think that one of the things is like there's a very David and Goliath element of whoop, which which I think that you're into and I think that it shows that you have been first to Market with a lot of Innovations and you've beaten a lot of companies that have a lot more money. Theoretically that shouldn't be possible. What are you doing differently in terms of the structure of the business we
Talked about control and Pace earlier. We talked about delegating down we talked about your obsession. What else comes out there? Well, we have had a strong
point of view on the space. And for a while that point of view was quite contrarian. I'm in eight years ago when I spoke to coaches and athletes just to start with that market about what they wanted. They kept talking about exercise. I mean, oh, could you give me more information on GPS? Could you give me a more information on sweat? Could you give me more information?
I'm on video analysis. And and when I ask them well, what are your problems it always came back to training optimally and injuries like player availability and there's a learning in this by the way, which which you learn as an entrepreneur over time. You always want to ask customers for what their problems are. You don't want to ask customers what their Solutions our customers are very good at describing their problems. They often can may be misleading.
You sometimes when they try to build that solution and it's really the role of a great product team is to come up with the solution. So I believe that the solution for those problems was actually understanding the other 20 hours of the day. I think you have a lot of information already on exercise, but I don't think you know anything about how people are sleeping and recovering and I think if that got a hell of a lot better, maybe you could even exercise more so that was the contrarian point of view that sleep and Recovery were more important.
into performance than performance itself or exercise and
The other contrarian point of view was that the data needed to be really accurate.
There were so many opportunities to make a quick Buck. I mean we saw this with the companies that just came quick to Market with step counters and we were so stubborn about it. We're still stubborn about it today. Like we don't think steps is relevant. It's a completely irrelevant metric in my opinion in part because it's not even measuring steps. It's measuring how much your arm moves and again you look at all the products even the Apple watch. It's measuring steps, which I think's the silliest thing so,
What one key to being different is truly being different. I mean you have you have different points of view we've had different points of view. We invented a recovery score when no one was talking about recovery, you know, and I think the other bit is we wanted to Anchor whoop around performance and Athletics, I believe that one secret to owning Health monitoring was to not look like a tech company but to look like a sports apparel brand when whoop grows up. We want to look like Nike we don't want to look like
soft and by the way, that was another decision that was a you know, it was like more expensive and hard which is some sort of been a recurring theme and like, you know, if whooping failed a couple of years ago, the critique would have been what you were you tried to do was to was too hard and and we almost did fail, you know, it's it's taken a lot of resilience to get where we are today, but that turned out to be a you know, an incredible anchoring, you know, the fact that these professional athletes organically where and by whoa
Poop is so incredibly validating and we believe for the longest time that you know, there was no amount of money. We could pay an athlete to wear whoop. If they didn't get value out of it and on the flip side we believed if we truly could tell them like exercise hard to their don't exercise at all or go to bed at this time or wake up at that timer or this supplements good for your this supplements bad for you. If we could truly deliver on that value, then they would pay us for the product. And so those were some of the the
points of view that we had that I would say, we're hard-driving points of view, you know, look we were just looking at all the same information but we're looking at it very differently than other companies and it's you know, it's served as well. And now I think we have a pretty passionate Community that's building on itself and it's a community that likes the affiliation with whoop, which is a internal sort of self-fulfilling cycle where you've got something where people like the feeling of the brand they like what it says about them.
So I was wearing it. So then in turn they wear it more so that they get more of their friends to wear and then you've all of a sudden you've created a flywheel
last question. Go back to you to you when you're senior at Harvard 2012. What do you think you would say to yourself? If you could tell yourself one thing that you've learned whether it's about health exercise science how to live how to run a business. What is it that you think is the the kernel of wisdom that you've learned since actually founding this company.
Don't give up. I mean keep going. I think truly you know, that that was really my attitude for the last 10 years, but it is hard man. I mean it's very hard and you know this you spend time with other Founders and and your entrepreneurial yourself like it's hard. It's lonely there's times where you really feel like you can't do anything right an enormous the other thing about building something that's ambitious that I didn't fully realize is the number of people
That will tell you you can't do it. The number of people that will tell you that you're going to fail. There's something about crazy ideas.
Being a good thing. Right? Like it's a crazy idea that you would want to rent your bedroom out to a stranger. But that's Airbnb, right? That was a crazy idea. But like if you have these sort of wild ambitious points of view on the world in part, they don't exist because a lot of people don't think they can exist and what that intern does is it makes you a magnet for criticism and a negative feedback.
And and that was hard for me. I think over the years. It was it's also hard if you're a very young person because so much of your identity is a business person is also tied up in the company. It's why I think you can sort of develop an unhealthy relationship with your work in turn because you know so much of your identity again is tied up in the success of the thing that you've spent so much time building. So there's a real vulnerability. I think that I'm getting at that at least I felt it very
this points of time in building the company that I just you know, I would say to all founders out there keep going, you know believe in yourself.
Keep going. Well. Well, thank you very much congrats on on pushing through it's really cool to see Rory and Justin Thomas and these Partnerships with Major League Baseball. You're working on something that
I don't think I would have believed would have existed either so I'll put myself in the in the doubters and you've proved me wrong. So
congratulations David. Thank you for having me. This has been a pleasure.
He again, it's David here one more time before you leave. I want to tell you about my online writing school called rite of passage. Now. It's nothing like the boring writing classes. You took in school. It's made for Curious people just like you who want to write more think
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