WHOOP: Will Ahmed

Summary

Summary of "WHOOP: Will Ahmed" Episode from How I Built This with Guy Raz

Release Date: July 21, 2025

In this compelling episode of How I Built This, Guy Raz delves into the entrepreneurial journey of Will Ahmed, the visionary founder behind WHOOP—a cutting-edge wearable health tracker designed to revolutionize how athletes monitor their performance and recovery. Throughout the conversation, Ahmed shares the trials, tribulations, and triumphs that shaped WHOOP into a leading brand in the wearable technology market.

---

1. Introduction to Will Ahmed and WHOOP

Guy Raz sets the stage by introducing Will Ahmed, highlighting his background as a college athlete from Harvard who sought to create a more sophisticated wearable than the existing options like Fitbit. Ahmed's ambition was to develop a device capable of measuring intricate physiological metrics traditionally reserved for medical settings, such as heart rate variability (HRV), sleep quality, and recovery states.

Notable Quote:

“The hardest thing about building a consumer products business isn't actually building the product, it's building the brand.”
— Guy Raz [05:00]

---

2. Early Passion and Inspiration

Ahmed recounts his formative years growing up on Long Island, where his father's passion for squash instilled in him a love for the sport's intense cardiovascular demands and strategic depth. Balancing academics and athletics at Harvard, Ahmed's relentless training regimen laid the groundwork for his later focus on recovery and performance optimization.

Notable Quotes:

“I was not 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.”
— Will Ahmed [07:08]

“I spent three or four hours a day training and I was just kind of burning it on all ends.”
— Will Ahmed [06:14]

---

3. Realizing the Need for Recovery Metrics

During his time as a student-athlete, Ahmed experienced the negative effects of overtraining—where excessive strain led to inadequate recovery, impacting performance adversely. This personal struggle sparked his interest in developing a device that could continuously monitor physiological states to prevent overtraining.

Notable Quote:

“Overtraining is a mismatch between the strain that you put on your body and how recovered your body actually is.”
— Will Ahmed [08:07]

---

4. The Genesis of WHOOP: From Idea to Prototype

In the summer of 2012, Ahmed, then a recent Harvard graduate, founded Bobo Analytics (later rebranded as WHOOP). Determined to push the boundaries of wearable technology, he sought to measure deeper physiological metrics. Despite initial rejections from engineering labs due to the complexity of his vision, Ahmed's unwavering belief led him to assemble a dedicated team comprising talented individuals like John Captalupo, Aurelian Nikolai, and Martin Oberhauser.

Notable Quote:

“What took me down the next 13 years of my life was trying to measure recovery.”
— Will Ahmed [10:36]

---

5. Navigating Early Challenges and Competition

As Ahmed and his team developed the first prototypes, they faced significant hurdles—from technical limitations like battery life and data accuracy to mounting competition from established brands like Nike and emerging tech companies. The introduction of products like the Nike Fuel Band intensified the pressure, leading to moments of self-doubt and the realization that their initial business model might be flawed.

Notable Quote:

“Nike made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology.”
— Will Ahmed [41:12]

---

6. Pivoting the Business Model: Embracing Subscriptions

Facing slow mass adoption despite high engagement among early users, Ahmed identified that a one-time purchase model was unsustainable. This insight led to a pivotal shift—transforming WHOOP into a subscription-based service where the hardware was provided for free, and users paid a monthly fee for continuous access to data insights and coaching.

Notable Quote:

“It was the subscription that was going to save the company.”
— Will Ahmed [55:51]

---

7. Overcoming Setbacks and Competing with Giants

In 2018, Amazon entered the wearable market with a product strikingly similar to WHOOP, dubbed the Amazon Halo. Despite the apparent threat, Ahmed chose not to engage in costly litigation. Instead, he reinforced WHOOP's brand by focusing on superior data accuracy and maintaining a steadfast commitment to the mission of enhancing human performance and health span.

Notable Quote:

“You can only control what you can control. If you're stressing about things you're not in control of, you've lost the plot.”
— Will Ahmed [66:58]

---

8. Building a Prestigious Athlete Network

Leveraging relationships with top-tier athletes like Michael Phelps, LeBron James, and Cristiano Ronaldo, WHOOP established credibility and prestige. These endorsements not only bolstered the brand's reputation but also created a ripple effect, attracting a wider consumer base seeking to emulate the professionals.

Notable Quote:

“We have an amazing roster of professional athletes that have invested in the company.”
— Will Ahmed [67:53]

---

9. Vision for the Future: Expanding Beyond the Band

While WHOOP remains primarily known for its wristband, Ahmed envisions expanding the product portfolio to further unlock human performance and enhance health span. This includes potential new devices and platforms that continue to provide deep physiological insights, maintaining WHOOP's position at the forefront of wearable health technology.

Notable Quote:

“Our core mission is to unlock human performance and Health Span.”
— Will Ahmed [68:51]

---

10. Reflections on Resilience and Success

Looking back, Ahmed attributes WHOOP's success to unwavering resilience, a clear mission, and the ability to adapt strategically. Despite numerous near-failures and the persistent challenges of competing against industry giants, the dedication to providing valuable, accurate data kept the company on course.

Notable Quotes:

“There's been a lot of near-death experiences. I think there's been a lot of moments where quitting may have seemed responsible.”
— Will Ahmed [69:50]

“What's important is that the idea was right, and I'm still trying to fulfill the vision I had as a 21-year-old.”
— Will Ahmed [70:27]

---

Conclusion: A Testament to Vision and Perseverance

The episode underscores the importance of vision, adaptability, and resilience in entrepreneurship. Will Ahmed's journey with WHOOP exemplifies how a clear mission and commitment to solving real problems can overcome significant challenges, even in the face of formidable competition. WHOOP's evolution from a complex prototype to a trusted brand among elite athletes serves as an inspiring blueprint for innovators aiming to make a lasting impact.

---

For listeners seeking to explore the intricate journey of building a brand in a competitive tech landscape, this episode offers invaluable insights into the blend of passion, perseverance, and strategic pivots that drive success.

Transcript

[Guy Raz]

Wondery subscribers can listen to How I Built this early and ad free right now. Join Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. I recently stayed at an incredible Airbnb in Palm Springs and I thought to myself, wow, I could live at this place. Have you ever been enjoying your stay at an Airbnb when you suddenly ask yourself, wait a minute, could I do this too? Find out how much your place is [e-mail] airport host listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, and new ways of thinking. Audible has an incredible selection with over 1 million audiobooks, podcasts, and audible originals all in one easy app. Enjoy Audible anytime while doing other things household chores, exercising on the road, commuting, you name it. Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free 30 day Audible trial and your first audiobook is free. Visit audible.combilt.com if you've started your own business, you know just how many challenges there are, big and small. I mean, look at how I built this building. This show came with a lot of trials, late nights, very, very early mornings. But even though there were challenges getting started, there is something that makes setting up a new business easier. Getting connected with AT&T business it doesn't matter what your business is dealing with, AT&T business helps to make it much, much easier. And that's the point of a provider in the first place. Making building your dream easier. Wake up to the power of ATT [e-mail] that's business.att.com.

[Will Ahmed]

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 gonna fail. You're gonna fail because you don't listen.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Welcome to How I Built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today, how a college athlete changed the place playing field for wearables by launching whoop, a device that Tells you things only your doctor once knew. 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 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, seven 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 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 the story really begins with Will played on the squash team.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

Wow.

[Will Ahmed]

And, and so my dad was a, 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, you know, ended up helping me get into college.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Will Ahmed]

But what I always have loved about squash is that it's intensely cardiovascular. So it's a, it's one of the hardest minute for minute workouts that you can find. And it's a, 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, and so, you know, I've always loved that.

[Guy 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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 really not to be. I hope I'm not like opening any wounds here. But you weren't, right? Is that fair to say?

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

You were the captain.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

I ask about this and not again the fact that you weren't the best in 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Tell me what you were doing.

[Will Ahmed]

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 over train. And that's where you sort of go through this period of getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then all of a sudden you fall off a cliff and you don't necessarily know why.

[Guy Raz]

What is over? So over training 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, 8, 19. I mean, were you not seen that you weren't improving?

[Will Ahmed]

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 over training. Overreaching is where you're pushing your body a little too far, but in the days that follow, your body can bounce back. And over training 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. And so what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be flat in a match that you should win. 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. 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.

[Guy Raz]

What do you mean by that?

[Will Ahmed]

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 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. I like 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 interested in this whole concept around recovery.

[Guy 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 know, like, what my body was doing 24 hours a day? Essentially, yes.

[Will Ahmed]

Well, the first question I asked is, how would you prevent over training? 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 over train. And I realized that I didn't know that much about recovery. And. 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?

[Guy Raz]

Right. Because this is A problem you have. And by the way, 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 you go from being focused on recovery to thinking about measurement?

[Will Ahmed]

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 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.

[Guy Raz]

What were those pieces of technology?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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?

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah. And you're gonna 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 product that was invented in the 80s and that was the heart rate monitor or the chest strap.

[Guy Raz]

Right. You could run a treadmill. Right. It was like Polar is a brand that does it. These straps that you put around your chest.

[Will Ahmed]

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, right?

[Guy Raz]

24, 7.

[Will Ahmed]

Like, 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 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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

All right, so this is around like 2011ish, I guess, when you start to kind of have these conversations and just to put this into 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 steps?

[Will Ahmed]

Steps 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.

[Guy 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 that, do all the things you want to do. That's why you have to go to a sleep apnea lab, for example.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, I would say probably 2/3 of them were dead ends. Just in the sense that, like I looked like a kid with a, you know, science project.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

For this project, do you have any money? Right, yeah. Cause they'll do it. I mean, if you're like, hey, yeah, I got a couple hundred grand, they'll do whatever you want.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, sure. And you probably look like the dumbest guy in the room. Like, you know, 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 I was just looking 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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Light reflecting off the skin.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, that was very exciting in the techniques called photoplesmography. But that was very exciting because those sensors were actually very inexpensive. And in 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 sort of college student turned entrepreneur. I took 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 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 going to do, and here's the data that's going to take.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay. And, and that business plan was the idea that you were going to create something designed for athletes was that the.

[Will Ahmed]

Original Idea, the original idea was we were going to start with athletes and then eventually we were going to build a product for everyone and then eventually we'd go into medicine.

[Guy 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 business, I think already in 2011, which was called my Bobo, but was becomes Bobo Analytics.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Guy 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 going to go out and seek some money from friends and family. Why did you. I mean, this is kind of nuts, right? You're a senior in college, you have no track record, you're not even a technology. You're very smart guy, obviously, but you're not a technology guy. And you're gonna go ask people for money to help you start this thing. I mean, that's pretty. Bold is not exactly the word I want to use. It's kind of an affront in a sense. Who did you ask money from and what did you promise them in return?

[Will Ahmed]

I think at the end of the day, the biggest thing that anyone who backed me saw was 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.

[Guy Raz]

No, you went to your. Presumably your dad and your.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy 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 raised $900 million over time. It was a massive Silicon Valley company that had gone from like Bluetooth speakers to wearable trackers. And you're like, obviously smart guy, but who are you? Right. That's a fair question to ask in 2012.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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, because 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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, woop. John Captalupo, Aurelian Nikolai, and Martin Oberhauser. And John Capitolupo was 19 years old and taking at the time one of the hardest math classes in the country.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Perfect. That's like a bonus on top, Right.

[Will Ahmed]

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, so many people that I cobbled together to work on this that summer were Harvard students. And John was living just off campus. And I was saying to him, hey, it'd be great if we could prototype some of these ideas we're having for heart rate monitoring. And he was like, yeah, 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. 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 Nikolai shows up at the Harvard Innovation Lab and reveals to me all of his 3D printed prototypes of what. 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.

[Guy 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. 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yes. Now, the third person I want to give credit to is. 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. And I called him and 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.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah. Where was he based?

[Will Ahmed]

He was based in Hamburg, Germany. And 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?

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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 gonna do.

[Guy 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. I just got back from a trip to Germany and I stayed at an awesome apartment right in the heart of Munich, right on the Marienplatz. And it was like one of the coolest places I had ever stayed at where I could cook and enjoy the city and hear it and feel it and just walk right out into the main square. Right there was a beautiful place. And to be honest, I really didn't want to leave. The next time you're away from your own home, consider hosting your space on Airbnb. Hosting on Airbnb provides you with an extra income stream, plus your earnings could even help offset the cost of your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how [e-mail] host if you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. But when decisions begin to feel daunting, one thing that has helped many entrepreneurs is knowing that they have the right platform with all of the tools they need to succeed. Shopify Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.combilt go to shopify.combuilt shopify.combilt it's an interesting time for business. Tariff and trade policies are dynamic, supply chains are squeezed and if your business can't adapt in real time, you are in a world of hurt. You need total visibility from global shipments to tariff impacts to real time cash flow. And that's Netsuite by Oracle, your AI powered business management suite trusted by over 42,000 businesses. NetSuite brings accounting, financial management, inventory, HR into one suite. So you have one source of truth giving you the visibility and control you need to to make quick decisions. If I was juggling hr, accounting and inventory, I would use Netsuite to keep it all straight. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, download the free ebook Navigating Global Trade. Three insights for [e-mail] built that's netsuite.com built. 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah. We started working out of the innovation lab and the first prototype was a ridiculous looking product.

[Guy Raz]

Was it a wrist band thing?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yes. That box did a lot of the processing. Got it. 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 of what this is going to look like when all the data shows up.

[Guy Raz]

Why was HRV heart rate variability so important? Why did you think that that was the measurement? 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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, fundraising for the first 12 months of the business, which by the way, is a horrible way to raise capital. 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 speak. And so that's where the first prototype, being able to measure heart rate 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.

[Guy Raz]

You, you got a wireless version of this.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

One of the things that I think 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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. Yeah, 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.

[Guy Raz]

Sorry, that's because of the light.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, it's because of the light. I'll give you a simple way to think about it, which is the technique of photoplesmography 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.

[Guy 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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 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.

[Guy 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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 Jawbone. 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. I think the Nike Fuel band comes out in 2013. You guys are still working on just the underlying technology here.

[Will Ahmed]

Didn't that stress you out 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, right, because when you.

[Guy Raz]

Would go to investors, they would say, well, I mean, come on, Nike is working on this. How are you going to compete with Nike?

[Will Ahmed]

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 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.

[Guy 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, a Fuel band, how did you convince anybody to give you money?

[Will Ahmed]

So you remember how I said they were, they were right in a way and they were wrong in a way? Yeah, the way, the way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling, selling 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 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. 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 5 years old. Nike is the. 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 us 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, a belief. And I selling the belief. So cool.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

All right, so you, are you. 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 going to offer. And I think it was around 2014 when you changed the name to Whoop. You go from Bobo analytics. Call it Whoop. Just briefly, what. What's the. How did you come up with that name?

[Will Ahmed]

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 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.

[Guy Raz]

But I wonder, before you even had a product, right? Cause it would be three years. Like, it wasn't until 2015 when you actually had something that was ready for. 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. But meantime, all these competitors are coming out with products. Do you remember a feeling of just really just anxiety about wanting to get something out there?

[Will Ahmed]

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 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 was strung out. And at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay, so you have. In 2015, I think it's the end of summer 2015, you have the first version ready for launch. And 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 gonna be expensive. It was gonna be $1,000 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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 your resting heart rate, your heart rate variability, sleep quality.

[Guy Raz]

And just to be clear, you would see this on your iPhone. It was. It was 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

The coaches could see their. How their players were recovering and arresting, etc.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Who. Who did you want. Who was your, like, Barbie Dreamhouse athlete that you wanted to get this on?

[Will Ahmed]

LeBron James and Michael Phelps were the two.

[Guy Raz]

Okay, how are you going to get to. I mean, first of all, those guys have huge endorsement deals, millions and millions of dollars. Like, how are you even going to get to them? And even if you do get to them, they're going to say, presumably, well, I'll do it, but you got to pay me a million dollars or 5 million, whatever, or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like, how would you do that?

[Will Ahmed]

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 Mencias was his longtime personal trainer, still is today, and he started wearing lube, and he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron.

[Guy Raz]

So that's how you started. You got him on the wrists of the personal trainers just so they could try it out. Yeah, I mean, Michael Phelps and LeBron James are 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. I mean, first of all, let's just talk about LeBron James. LeBron Forsyk. 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Well, in the case of the trainers, we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it again because we believed that the product was valuable. And at the end of the day, it's kind of obvious whether someone likes whoop. Because wearing something 247 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 whole team were wearing it, and it came out that they were wearing it in games, and that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA.

[Guy Raz]

It wasn't allowed by the NBA?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah. A lot of it goes back to the origin of wanting to create a product that you wear 247 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 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. 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.

[Guy Raz]

Got it. Okay. So you have this product, it's doing well with athletes and they like it, and you're ready to put out a version for consumers. This is a 2016. And again, for people who aren't familiar with hoop, I think a lot of people listening are, it's basically a strap. I mean, it looks like, I mean it looks like a, you know, cloth strap around your wrist. It's very simple. When it was ready for consumers. Right. It didn't quite take off initially, as 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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 Woop 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. Yeah, but one of the challenges was that we weren't paying athletes, so we didn't technically have the rights to likeness and image.

[Guy Raz]

Right, but you couldn't do advertising with them.

[Will Ahmed]

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, we were selling the product for $500.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, it was a lot more than.

[Guy Raz]

An Apple Watch at the time.

[Will Ahmed]

Well, more than an Apple Watch. Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

Yeah.

[Will Ahmed]

And so, you know, in hindsight we probably shouldn't have expected to sell a lot of. 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 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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Yeah, that's a big problem.

[Will Ahmed]

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?

[Guy Raz]

And you're five years in now.

[Will Ahmed]

Oh, yeah.

[Guy 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy 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. Bigger isn't always better, especially with AI. Supersized models can drain your budget fast. Smaller ones are smart and can help cut AI costs up to 90%. Right size. Your [e-mail] the AI built for business. IBM. Finding great candidates to hire can be challenging. You get too many resumes and not enough candidates with the right skills or experience. But not with ZipRecruiter. ZipRecruiter finds amazing candidates for you fast. And right now you can try it for [e-mail] built ZipRecruiter's smart technology identifies and connects you with top candidates. Quickly ditch the other hiring sites and let ZipRecruiter find what you're looking for. The needle in the haystack. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it for free at this exclusive web ZipRecruiter.com Biltine Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com BILT ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. 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. Huge. The problem is that's not translating into sales. But eventually Will starts to figure out what's wrong.

[Will Ahmed]

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 start unpacking that and, 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.

[Guy Raz]

But the band is free, the whoop.

[Will Ahmed]

Strap is free, and I Fell in love with that idea and I became convinced that that was gonna save the company. And the engagement data would suggest that I was right, but. 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. Samsung was entering the space, Microsoft was entering the space. And at the same time, my conviction level that we were onto 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.

[Guy Raz]

In some ways you were actually really lucky that you were under the radar, right? Because no one, 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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, 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, these sorts of things.

[Guy Raz]

Things.

[Will Ahmed]

And so, yeah, we probably weren't ready for that in 2016, but we got ready for it.

[Guy Raz]

All right, let, 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Yes.

[Guy Raz]

Yep.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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. 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 whoops, to our surprise.

[Guy Raz]

Why? What was the reason?

[Will Ahmed]

This may be a disappointing answer, but I've had so many investors pass on WHOOP in the last 13 years that all the answers kind of blur together. And so I don't remember what their reason was for not investing. And it could have been a dozen things, frankly.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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 frontman 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 just were continually on life support. We would continually find a little more capital or a couple good things would happen and people would get a little more excited. And I was perpetually fundraising and getting told no.

[Guy Raz]

A lot will during that time. It's just so fascinating, and especially 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 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 totally. And I imagine that you had to accept terms sometimes that were hard to swallow.

[Will Ahmed]

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 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 far less money up front. And so it was. The only way out of this problem was to have more capital on the balance sheet.

[Guy Raz]

Right? Because Instead of charging 500 bucks for it, you were now saying, okay, it's going to be free, but you're going to get, you're going to. 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Totally.

[Guy Raz]

All right, I want to turn back to the Amazon story because they were sort of toying with the idea of investing and they decided not to. And that goes away. And you keep working on new iterations, new versions of your product and the Whoop 2.0. And then 3.0 comes out. Then Amazon announces they're making a monitor strap, a wearable band that you feel looks quite shockingly similar to the Whoop.

[Will Ahmed]

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. 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 would crush you.

[Guy Raz]

And just you could do an image search of this. It looks pretty much like a whoop.

[Will Ahmed]

They. 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. Wow. 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.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy Raz]

In tiny letters on the circuit board.

[Will Ahmed]

On the circuit board, yes. Along with every engineer's initials. And the joke was, 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.

[Guy Raz]

It's interesting because of course, Amazon is one of the greatest brands in modern history. It's an incredible company and has sort of changed the way we live. But they have, you know, from time to time, they tried a smartphone, didn't work, they tried this. And for anyone who doesn't know, it doesn't exist. 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 probably could have destroyed your company because you would have spent years in litigation, tens of millions of dollars, trying to fight this. And for Amazon, surrounding error, I mean, they can fight you and certainly make the case that this is Not a copy. Or you can decide to lean further into your 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.

[Will Ahmed]

Yeah, 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. Strategy, you've probably also lost the plot.

[Guy Raz]

You know, 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. 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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

[Guy Raz]

Patrick Mahomes is in there, and eli.

[Will Ahmed]

Manning, Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Virgil Van Dyke, 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, you.

[Guy Raz]

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

[Will Ahmed]

Thank you.

[Guy 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.

[Will Ahmed]

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. Whoop. Saved my life and it's just hard to find a mission that, that feels that valuable.

[Guy 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?

[Will Ahmed]

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.

[Guy 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 Apple, 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 [e-mail] or on substack. This episode was researched and produced by Kathryn Seifer with music composed by Ramtin Erabloui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Kerry Thompson, Chris Masini, J.C. howard, Sam Paulson, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built this. If you like How I Built this, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short [e-mail] survey and now a next level moment from ATT Business. Say you've sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep day. You've got AT and T5G so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and International Sleep Day is tomorrow. Luckily, AT&T 5G lets you deal with any issues with so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you. AT&T5G requires a compatible plan and device coverage not available everywhere. Learn [e-mail] 5G Network.