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The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan
537: He Made $3.6B Selling Fitness Trackers | WHOOP founder Will Ahmed [VIDEO]
00:53:31
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- [00:00]
Will Ahmed
Seventy percent of athletes overtrain. At some point you're getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then suddenly and unexpectedly you fall off a cliff and you don't know why. The question I asked though is why isn't there a better way to measure this? I kept coming back to this idea for whoop. What could you measure? Why don't athletes measure sleep and recovery? Why is everyone just talking about exercise? We knew that there were certain things that we needed to measure. I was building a business that on paper I really had no business being able to build. I was 22 years old and I was theoretically going to be on Nike and Apple and Under Armour. And so there was a lot of reasons why people thought I was going to fail at that. Six years into the company's history, we were completely changing the business model, which is another way of saying six years into building the business, we didn't have a business model. If that hadn't worked, the company probably would have failed, mind you. Like, three years after we made that decision, we were a multi billion dollar company. Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder podcast with Nathan Chan.
- [01:12]
Nathan Chan
Well, Will, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. The first question that I wanted to ask you was can you share your experience with over training and how that led to creating whoop?
- [01:27]
Will Ahmed
Absolutely, and thank you for having me. You know, I was always into sports and exercise growing up as a kid and I was, I was playing squash when I was at Harvard. I was a collegiate athlete and you know, training was something at that point I was fairly used to as an athlete. And yet it really wasn't something I felt I had mastered. You know, I spent hours a day training and, and I was someone who used to over train where you go through this period of time where you're getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then suddenly and unexpectedly you kind of fall off a cliff and you don't know why. Your body's very run down. You're, you kind of have a lot of the symptoms of depression without actually having depression. You're, you're just, your nervous system is very sympathetic, dominant, your amygdala response is heightened. There's just a lot of things about over training, they're uncomfortable and you kind of feel sick, but you're not sick. And by the way, 70% of athletes over train at some point. So it turned out to be fairly common. The question I asked though is why isn't There a better way to measure this? And if I'm going to spend hours a day training at something, why wouldn't I know what I'm doing to my body in a, in a more measurable way? And so I, I just got interested in, in physiology and, you know, what could you measure about the human body? I did a lot of physiology research as a student, read hundreds of medical papers, and over the course of my time as a student at Harvard, I came up with a set of ideas and principles that I thought could be relevant for not just training, but really understanding the human body. And so that was the, the physiology and, and sort of original research that led to founding whoop.
- [03:29]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's wild. So basically, WHOOP started as an academic paper at Harvard. Can you take us through that transition? Because that's very rare that. And this is your first business, right?
- [03:42]
Will Ahmed
First business, first full time job. Yeah, and I've been doing it, I've been doing it now for 12 years. And. Well, look, I think that my story in building WHOOP is one around finding a problem that you're obsessed with. I didn't actually know I was starting a company, but I did become deeply obsessed with solving a problem. And I think that that's a healthy, I think that's a healthy thing. I think, I think it's better to get really focused on solving a problem than to tell yourself, oh, I want to start businesses, I want to start companies, I want to make a lot of money as an entrepreneur. I don't think that's as effective as really falling in love with a problem to solve. And a good test for that is like, are you always thinking about it? When I was 19, 20, 21 years old, you know, quiet moments in my life, I would kept coming back to this idea for whoop. And you know, what could you measure? And why don't athletes measure sleep and recovery? And why is everyone just talking about exercise? And these are just things that I would think about in the shower, in the back of a cab, or when I was bored in class. And I think there's something to that. Like, I think the, where your mind wanders to when it's quiet I think is pretty important. And I think for anyone who's thinking about starting a business, really being honest with yourself, hey, is this something you're obsessed with? Is this something you really want to do? You really. It's a problem you feel deeply about because inevitably there's gonna be a lot of ups and downs to building that thing. And what you want is to keep getting drawn back to the problem that you're trying to solve and sort of that passion for the problem. And I found that when entrepreneurs are more driven by some kind of a financial outcome or something, it's harder to overcome those difficult states.
- [05:45]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree 110%. So talk us through that transition of taking the product and bringing it to life. What did the first version look like? How long did it take to get to the first version of Whoops?
- [06:00]
Will Ahmed
So I founded the company in 2012 and that summer really started working on it full time with a few other people. And we were pretty ragtag team. I mean, we were all under the age of 24 years old. We didn't really know what we were doing, but we knew that there were certain things that we needed to measure. So we knew, for example, that we needed to be able to measure heart rate variability from the wrist. We knew that we wanted to measure heart rate as accurately as a chest strap, which was kind of the gold standard at that point for measuring exercise during motion. We knew that we wanted to be able to measure sleep. And there was a whole process for measuring sleep then that involves sleep laboratories and everything else. So really the first prototype we built was to de risk some of the challenges. I just explained to you, I think there's an important phase for early stage businesses of what do you have to solve at this stage to prove you're worthy of getting to the next stage or you're worthy of raising capital to get to the next stage. And the first thing we really needed to prove was that it was possible to collect some, some of these measurements in a non invasive form factor. So the most useful first prototype that we made was one which had a wristband, mind you, a big, ugly, cumbersome wristband that could measure heart rate variability from the wrist, which at that point hadn't really been done before. It wasn't something people really tried to do and it wasn't a particularly well understood phenomenon. And that measurement, being able to demonstrate that we could make that measurement non invasively was, was useful enough to help us be able to raise capital to say, okay, well we've now done this, we're going to take this ugly looking prototype and put it into a smaller form factor. And then once it's in a smaller form factor, we're going to sell it, and so forth and so forth. You have different versions of these milestones. But a lot of our early prototypes were less about making it look good and more about proving that we could overcome this engineering challenge.
- [08:16]
Nathan Chan
Got you. And would you, would you be able to share how much did that first prototype cost? Like how much did you put in to bring that to life?
- [08:26]
Will Ahmed
Probably 50 or $100,000. I mean we had raised about $300,000 and most of the capital was going towards figuring out how we could build that prototype. And it's worth saying like we raised another $400,000 after that and then we raised $3 million and then we raised $6 million. And each of these is like about a year later. But it really took until the $6 million for us to be able to get to a stage where we could manufacture it. So at each one of those additional financings, the 300k, the 400k, the 3 million, the 6 million, each one of those kind of had its own new prototype, so to speak. And the product was getting a little bit more accurate, it was getting a little less clunky looking and a lot of it was sort of de risking. Okay, we can now measure these things with this form factor. And when we make it look much more attractive, people are going to buy it because this many people buy this ugly other thing today.
- [09:44]
Nathan Chan
And who wrote your first check? And can you tell me about that experience? Because from, from research, you raising money was difficult, especially you know, 7, 8, 9, 10 years ago where it was a hardware focused product.
- [10:02]
Will Ahmed
Well, I think in general raising capital is difficult and maybe the mistake I made as a 22 year old was thinking, oh, it's just difficult for me. I think it's hard in general and it's something like anything that you get better at. It also gets easier as your business gets better. So you know, as your business experiences success, it becomes easier to raise capital. And in the early days I had to overcome a lot around raising capital. One, I had never raised capital, so I didn't really know what I was doing. And there's certain techniques that we can talk about that enhance your likelihood of raising capital. The second is I was building a business that on paper I really had no business being able to build. I was at 22 years old and I was theoretically going to be taking on Nike and Apple and Under Armour. And. And so there was a lot of reasons why people thought I was going to fail at that. And then the third reason why it was hard to raise capital is, well, we actually hadn't really done all that much yet. Like there wasn't much to point to. Like we didn't have sales, we didn't have products. We did, you know, so it was an uphill Climb from the beginning. And, you know, we can kind of unpack how you overcome some of that. But it's all just to say for your listeners who might be having challenges raising capital, like the first $400,000 that I ever raised was much harder than the last 400 million I raised. And, and I say that just to sort of let people know that just because you're having trouble raising capital at one stage of the business doesn't mean you're not later going to be someone who can raise tens of millions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars or more.
- [12:06]
Nathan Chan
So a couple of things I'd love to unpack. First of all, what are the key principles that you found? How to get better at raising capital. But then, yeah, what, what, what were those struggles?
- [12:18]
Will Ahmed
The first principle is that you want to meet a number of investors all at once. What happens for a lot of founders, particularly in the early stages, is they'll meet like a couple people and get an early read. And then those couple people will be like, yeah, it's interesting, come back to me. And then you'll meet a couple more people and then a couple more people. And so you lose the second principle, which is scarcity. You need to create some feeling of scarcity. Because if investors just think they can wait around to find, to see your business progress more, it's easier for them to sort of say, well, I'll check back in with Nathan in three months and maybe then I'll write a check, you know, because there's no feeling of like the train is leaving the station. And that really brings you to the third principle, which is you have to learn how to close. And closing is saying, we've got these terms and this much capital committed and we need to know whether you're in or out by this day. And more often than not, people can actually give you an answer in that period of time. And the person who keeps saying, I need more time and more time and more time never actually ends up investing. And in the time that it took to do the seventh call with that person, you could have met someone new and closed them. And that also goes back to, it's a numbers game. So first principle, it's a numbers game. Second principle creates scarcity. Third principle, close.
- [14:07]
Nathan Chan
And for raising that first round, how long did it take? And were there times where you felt like perhaps this, you won't be able to bring this product to life? Life. Because no one believes in you, because it sounds like it's a very capital intensive product to bring to life.
- [14:25]
Will Ahmed
It's hard to even say, you know, when did it, when did it close? Because it kind of felt like it just would kept going. You know, it never felt like we had raised enough capital. And I'm think I'm speaking right now about the first 12 months of the business where I felt like I was just perpetually fundraising as one of the activities that I was doing. And by the way, I don't recommend that either. I think you want to, like, say I'm going to fundraise from June to September, and then I'm going to close the round in September. You know what I mean? You want to just pick a time frame and attack it and tell everyone that's what's happening and then move on. So that was one challenge that, you know, that was one mistake I think I made. And another thing is like, you, you need to get your pitch down, and some of that takes reps as well. So if you've never pitched anything to raise capital for you, you know, you may take a few interactions to feel like, to feel out what's really resonating. And some of that is just iteration and some of that's just doing it a lot. And some of that's the feedback that you're getting in meetings. What are people responding to? What do people keep asking about? Okay, if everyone keeps asking about, well, how am I to deal with this competition? Maybe I should just talk about that up front and get out ahead of it, you know, so it's things like that.
- [15:56]
Nathan Chan
So talk to me about the first version of the product that was ready to sell and did you guys launch with the subscription? And what. Talk to me about the thinking behind.
- [16:12]
Will Ahmed
That first version of the product to sell was probably in 2014. And funny enough, we. We didn't make a lot of it. We were really focused on how do we create a foundation for. For ultimately what would become a brand, which is to say, how do we get, like, the world's most dynamic athletes to wear this thing? And we really targeted LeBron James and Michael Phelps and the best of the best, and we got those athletes to. To wear it, and they in turn really liked it. And that allowed us to continue broadening our apparatus in pro sports. It's worth saying it was harder to go after pro athletes. Like, it's a much slower and longer time to market, and pro athletes often think they deserve things to wear your product. But to me, it was the ultimate test of whether we had actually successfully tackled the problem of measuring the human body. Because if we could truly measure the human body and truly tell you, are you recovered? How much strain are you taking on your body? How well are you sleeping? Like, if we could actually tell you these things, then athletes would really need it. And so we held a very high bar for, we're not giving this product away for free. This is a product that people need to buy, even if you're Michael Phelps. And from there, we were able to build a whole brand around performance.
- [18:02]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, it's. It's really incredible, the athletes and the ambassadors you have for the Whoop brand. Can you share some stories from the early days, like getting in touch with LeBron and. Or Michael Phelps and convincing them, like, any crazy stories, you can share that.
- [18:21]
Will Ahmed
Well, the key to getting to anyone really famous or well known is finding someone in that person's life who has a big influence on them, but other people don't necessarily know. So in the case of a professional athlete, everyone knows their agent and their coach and, you know, maybe their spouse or their partner. So the challenge with those people is those people are inundated. Those people get five requests a day in 2014. 15. The personal trainer was actually not that well known of a. Of a. Of a person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that a personal trainer was the right person to evaluate WHOOP for their athlete. And so our. Our strategy was to go to personal trainers and explain Whoop to them and explain why they should use Whoop with their athletes. And so that was the strategy we adopted. In LeBron's case, it was a guy named Mike Mencias who's still his trainer. In Phelps's case, it was a guy named Keenan Robinson. And we've done that with other athletes, too.
- [19:45]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, you've recently partnered with Cristiano Ronaldo to use whoop. Can you share just like the benefits or feedback of. Of having someone that is that well recognized as a. As an athlete recommending, you know, being a partner and an ambassador for your product? Like, what. What does that do for a business?
- [20:15]
Will Ahmed
Well, Ronaldo's in his own category, in a sense, because he is the most followed human on the planet. So the thing to know is there's a lot of levels of a list. You know, you'll meet a celebrity, and I don't care what they've done. They're going to think they're a list. But there's like 10 levels of a list, and. And there's no level higher than Ronaldo. You know, he's got a billion people who follow him on the Internet. And they're very engaged with him, and he's very recognizable, and he has a deep relationship with his fans. And look, he deserves that. He's built that. Now, in the case of Whoop, we realized that he had been wearing Whoop for two years. And. And so then a question came up of, okay, well, is there something to do together? Obviously, he likes the product. Back to our earlier conversation about having athletes, you know, authentically use it. This was a great example of that. Right? We had never sent him a whoop. We had never paid him to wear a whoop. He just liked Whoop. He wore it all the time, and it contributed to his recovery and his training and the way he thought about performance. So I went to go meet him in Riyadh, and we spent maybe a couple hours together at his home, and we got along really well. And then it became, you know, a question of whether there was a partnership to do something together. The principle, though, that I operate with is, is there an authentic story here? Right. I think that consumers deserve more credit than they're given. I think that consumers can sort of tell whether someone endorsing a product actually likes it or uses it. And for whoop, we've always looked for partnerships where an athlete or some high profile person or scientist or a researcher, they are authentically bought into the product. And that was really fortunately what we found with, with Cristiano, and, you know, he's now become an investor and a global ambassador.
- [22:38]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I like, like, I shared offline, massive fan of whoop. Been using the product for, I'd say about a year to a year and a half. I've kind of jumped on the train where it's kind of now it's becoming really like a mass market brand and product. A lot of my friends are wearing it. I love the community element, how you've gamified that. I think it's awesome. And, like, you know, friends can check in and friends can see if I've had a big night out because they can see my recovery is just like, in the red. And I've got the skull like you just, like, you can see. And it's really showed me just, like, things like what alcohol can do to you. And even just like, I can measure. I now know, like, with my own research, my own personal research, the power of sauna and cold, because my HRV levels always spike up the next day. And I can also see my recovery, like, from the insights that I get. So I love. I'm a data driven person, so I love the product And a massive fan. But I'm curious, have you guys always had a subscription model? Why did you choose that over traditional product sales? It was an interesting, it was an interesting thing. Like when I went to purchase the product, I was like, oh, okay, so I get the product for free, but it's a subscription. And I've always thought that's interest. Interesting. And, and what led to that decision?
- [24:05]
Will Ahmed
It's a great question. In 2016 and 17, we were selling WHOOP as just one time hardware. You'd sign up for $500 and you'd get all the services, so to speak. And what we saw is that we observed really two things. The first is that people who bought WHOOP would wear it for a long time. Now that was actually a big deal because a lot of people who wore other wearables wouldn't wear them for a long time. You know, other products had what we would call really bad drop off rates. So if you bought the wearable three weeks later, three months later, you were no longer wearing it. We didn't have that problem. We had, we had really good user engagement. But the second thing we observed, and this is of course not good, is we weren't selling a lot of products. Like our sales were low and. Yeah. And so we asked ourselves, well, what's wrong? Like what's not working here? And a lot of it was the sticker shock of the upfront cost and the lack of awareness of the brand. And so we asked ourselves, okay, is there a business model here where we could charge less up front, but if people really fell in love with the product, it could benefit us in the long run and there could be a subscription to go with it. So that was the, that was the initial seed of the idea. And, and then we played with different business models within that. It's worth saying, like I don't recommend most entrepreneurs innovate around their business model. That's something that worked for WHOOP and it might work for your business. But it's generally an unusual thing if the way you sell the product becomes super differentiated. But it became that for us. I mean, we transitioned to being a subscription versus a hardware fee and everything got better. I mean, our sales went up and to the right, our brand awareness grew. Even our internal, the way we operated the company, it became much more customer centric. What can we do for our members today? It's not just about the new people we got on the product, it's about keeping our existing people on the product. And so all of those were really, I think Benefits to, to building a subscription. I get asked by founders a lot, you know, should I build a subscription for my business? And I think it's a real question. It definitely depends on your business. One good question to ask is whether your product or service is something that's used daily or at most weekly. Typically speaking, people who are paying subscriptions for stuff need to be using that product regularly. Another question to ask is actually whether you can afford you the business can afford to have a lower entry point and make more money over time. Because the crazy thing is the faster you grow, the faster you actually might run out of cash because you're going to be acquiring people really quickly, but they're potentially signing up for less than your whole product cost to make. And so you need to have a balance sheet or the ability to raise capital that allows you to absorb those costs. And we were able to do that. But it's just worth noting like that's another challenge to think through.
- [28:16]
Nathan Chan
Mm. Because even when I looked at it and I understand this space and I was thinking, geez, the unit economics, like, like how like that must have like people must return it. Like all these different things, right. Because you're, you're giving the product for free plus a trial as well. I think I got a 30 day trial. And so yeah, I was like, wow, this is crazy how they're able to, to afford to do this and in. And how long did it take to kind of get the unit economics right or to know? Because that would have been pretty scary, right?
- [28:54]
Will Ahmed
I mean, look, it was very scary just to say it. You know, six years into the company's history, we were completely changing the business model. Which is another way of saying six years into building the business we didn't have a business model. And and so yeah, a lot of, a lot of building a company is just surviving the next shot on goal. I mean it really is. Like if that hadn't worked, the company probably would have failed. And mind you, like three years after we made that decision, we were a multi billion dollar company.
- [29:37]
Nathan Chan
So I'm curious as well, tell me about kind of the manufacturing and scale part because you talked about the balance sheet and cash flow. Were there any times you had manufacturing setbacks that almost derailed the company? How'd you overcome that?
- [29:56]
Will Ahmed
We had huge manufacturing setbacks during COVID when we were launching a new product. We so a whoop, right? Which for those watching is this little sensor on my wrist. It, you know, it's got a lot of amazing capabilities. Sleep recovery, exercise, strain, stress Pulse socks, all these different measurements. 247 coaching. I just bring that up because it has 150 components for being a pretty small product, like 150 unique little pieces that make it possible. And if you have 149 components out of 150, you literally cannot make a whoop strap. And it's just worth reminding yourself how much work that creates for your supply chain team and for your manufacturing team and for your quality team, because you need, you now need all of those components to be performant. And during COVID we had a component we thought we had a million of, and it turned out we had zero of it. And so all of a sudden we couldn't make whoop straps. And that was, that was a very painful phase for the company. Fortunately, we had raised a lot of capital before that, but it was, it was really challenging.
- [31:32]
Nathan Chan
So how'd you overcome it?
- [31:33]
Will Ahmed
Well, you know, chew glass and stare at the abyss. I mean, there was a little bit of like just white knuckle that. I mean, it was really hard. Every, every day we were on calls late, early with different manufacturing partners around the world, supply chain partners, trying to find this component. Our engineering team was re engineering the product, trying to figure out how we could make the product without the certain component. We were trying to figure out how we message to our members that we didn't have as much of the product as we thought we did. We ended up giving people a lot of discounts and renewals, and we put our members first during the whole thing. But look, you announce a new product, everyone wants to buy it, and then all of a sudden you realize the manufacturing plan you thought you had, you don't have. And by the way, it's a global pandemic and it's the worst supply chain ecosystem in 30 years. That's like, it was just a perfect storm of stuff.
- [32:46]
Nathan Chan
I think these kinds of challenges that you have where it's just like so tough, so hard. Like, I've had them where, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night, your heart beating really fast. Have you had that? Like, because it's just so much stress. Do you feel that if you're not having them as a founder, you're probably not pushing hard enough?
- [33:09]
Will Ahmed
No, I don't think so. Well, look, I don't think you need to be someone who wakes up in the middle of the night with your heart palpitating. You know, I do run ultimately a company that's focused on improving health. And so the. There's a lot of Things you can do to prepare yourself to take on more stress. You know, do I think that in order to be a successful founder or CEO, you need to take on an enormous amount of stress? Yes. But I also think there's tools that you can develop to cope with that stress. And those tools aren't explicitly just, you know, alcohol and caffeine. Like, there's other tools at your toolkit. And. And look, there was a phase for me in building this company where those were kind of my only tools. You know, when I was 24, I had raised maybe $20 million at that point. I had a team of 25 people, and I. I was super stressed and strung out, and I was not comfortable running the company. And I had one incident where I just. I ended up in the emergency room from a panic attack. And I just bring that up to say that, like, if you're not taking care of yourself, you're going to spin out of control. I wasn't at that stage in my life doing a good job managing the stress of building a company. And mind you, my responsibility today is objectively a lot greater than it was when I was 24. But I don't feel that same stress. I feel like I can cope with that increased responsibility, whereas before I had less responsibility and I couldn't even cope with it. Right. And so it's all to say that if you can learn tools and techniques to manage your stress, you in turn can keep getting better at this and also keep pushing the business further and further and further.
- [35:29]
Nathan Chan
So can you share what some of those tools were?
- [35:32]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, absolutely. Some of these tie back to. To things that we have researched at WHOOP as well. But for me, first and foremost. Excuse me one second. For me, first and foremost, it was learning to develop a practice of meditation. I really didn't know what meditation was, but I had read online that it had helped people with stress. And so that was my entry point into learning meditation. And it was something I really fell in love with. This is now 11 years ago. And I started doing twice a day for 20 minutes. And it just helped me quiet my mind in a way that I had never experienced in my life. And it also gave me an outlet to look at my thoughts and pass through my thoughts and really just sort of sit with my challenges without providing a lot of judgment towards them. And the benefit I found, not just from the act of doing it itself, is that in other areas of my life, it felt like all of a sudden I had like a someone in the third person looking at me. You know, before, it used to be I would get angry, and next thing you know, you're yelling and, you know, all of a sudden you're kind of catching up to the moment you're in. You're like, whoa. That, like, escalated quickly. Whereas, you know, after I started meditating, I would hear this voice in my head like, oh, Will's about to get angry. Before I got angry. And so it just made, it made. It made getting angry almost like a decision, like, okay, do I want to run in this direction or am I going to be more mellow? And that in turn became very rewarding and powerful. And in a sense, it made everything feel like it was slowing down. Whereas before, it felt like everything was sped up and I was trying to keep up. All of a sudden it felt like I could sit back and kind of watch what was going on and be a little bit, or a lot more, I should say, intentional. So that was tool number one. Tool number two is around sleep. We could talk about sleep for as long as you'd like, but the punchline is you need to get high quality sleep. In particular, you need to get restorative sleep, which is REM and slow wave sleep. And if you don't know how much restorative sleep you're getting, I would just encourage you to measure your sleep. And once you start measuring your sleep, you're gonna have a baseline for that, and then you're gonna be able to tweak a few things, and all of a sudden your baseline will be a lot higher. And by the way, you'll feel a lot better. The third tool is exercise. I think it's really important to stay fit and active even as you're taking on something that's, that's ambitious. So having a regular exercise practice, and then this varies by, by individuals. I, I find for me, having a whole, like hot, cold practice can be really helpful with stress. So I like to do sauna and steam, and then I'll do a cold plunge, and all of a sudden I'll just feel my whole mood is improved and is better. Those. That's something that might be more personal to me, but there's enough evidence to show that contrast therapy is something that, that can be beneficial. It certainly helps if your personal life is good. I mean, people don't really talk about that for some reason in a business setting. But, you know, if you're in a deeply committed relationship with your partner versus if that's kind of spinning out of control and you're fighting all the time at home, and, you know, XYZ issues with your parents or in laws or kids or, you know, none of that's going to make running a business easier or better. So having a certain level of stability in your life also is a remarkable tool for being able to drive hard as an entrepreneur.
- [40:07]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I agree definitely on the last, like, yeah, all of those. But you're right, nobody ever talks about it. And, you know, I went through a really bad, tough breakup, and I definitely wasn't thinking straight, like, and, and. And it affected the business for sure.
- [40:23]
Will Ahmed
Yeah, I think that can happen often. And the other thing for people to know is that your state of being does not actually correlate directly with the success of your business. You know, when I was early at it, I kind of thought, well, if Whoop does well, I'll do well. If Whoop does poorly, I'll do poorly. If Whoop's winning, I'm winning. If Whoop's losing, I'm losing. You know, it was sort of like we were one in the same. But I've now been doing this long enough to realize that those are actually two very different dimensions. And I've also met a lot of entrepreneurs. And by the way, I've met entrepreneurs whose business is super successful. Like, objectively, the business is doing great, but they're spinning out of control. Whether it's stress or whether it's chaos in their personal life or whatever, they're not doing great even though the business is doing well. And I've seen the opposite where you invest in a company and the entrepreneur is super grounded and trying to make it happen. And yet it's just a really hard business. And for reasons out of the entrepreneur's control, the business fails. I mean, you know, imagining opening a hotel in, you know, April of 2020, like that business is going to fail. I don't care what you do as an entrepreneur. Right. So there's. There isn't as direct a correlation between the identity of the business and the identity of the founder. And I think that's an important distinction to make. I will say, though, in order for a business to really scale, you need to learn how you are going to grow and change and improve.
- [42:22]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, 100%. Especially look as the CEO and the leader, the person that's steering the ship. I found from my personal experience, 100%. What you're saying your own personal growth is a direct correlation and reflection of the business's growth. What are you doing to constantly level up?
- [42:43]
Will Ahmed
Well, I think, first of all, it's a mindset Right. Mindset is I'm going to try to get a little better today. Mindset is I need to surround myself with people that are going to push me further. Mindset is if I have a challenge in front of me, it's an opportunity to grow. I mean, just that those three mindsets right there, game changers. Because if you take a mindset of oh, I've got a challenge, why is this happening to me? Which by the way, that's a reasonable frame that a lot of people have when things go wrong. It's just going to put you in a mode of sort of this victim mentality, excuses, you know, these things that, that ultimately aren't going to help you overcome whatever you have to deal with. And the reality as you know, is like in order to get better at your job, you have to be tested, you have to do things that you've never done before, you have to be put in uncomfortable situations. And so there's a certain, like, embrace you have to have for that I think in order to, to grow as a CEO. And then, you know, the last thing is along with being around the, you know, great people and having that mindset, I do think it really helps to be drawn by your mission because when you're of service, that's when you're going to do the best work. It's not about what I can achieve, it's about what we're providing to the world. What product are we giving you, what service are we giving you? And for whoop, that's always been an easy one because it's a mission around improving health and unlocking performance. And so we get these amazing testimonials from people who are like, whoop saved my life or whoop changed my life or I lost all this weight or I went to see a doctor because of my data and oh my God, I'm now in the emergency room. And thank you. Like those are really powerful, life changing stories. And so when you're facing a lot of adversity, knowing that's what you're for and that's what you're about and those are the people you're actually going to help. I think it makes a huge difference.
- [45:11]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, I'm curious just around the leadership piece because you are a first time CEO, what's been the hardest leadership lesson you've learned and how did it change your approach to building a team?
- [45:24]
Will Ahmed
The hardest team building thing by far I think is when you've worked with someone who is phenomenal to get you from A to B, but they're not the right person to get you from B2C. And as a first time founder and CEO, those are the decisions that you will delay, you won't make fast enough and, and that end up becoming very emotional and painful, I think. And it's just to say that it is really hard. Like you know, you're in the trenches with someone for five years and you did all this stuff together and now you need to go to another mountaintop and they don't have the equipment for that mountaintop and they don't know that. But you see it and maybe other people around you see it and so you have to make that decision. That's really hard. Definitely the hardest thing, you know, hiring great people, that's a skill that you develop. Finding people in the early days who are compatible with you, who you really like, who are complimentary to you. You know, you're great at product, find someone great at engineering, you're great at sales, find someone great at finance. Like, you know, find people who have skills that you don't have and committed. You want to start a business early on. Find the missionaries, not the mercenaries. You want people who believe in this thing, they're going to be by your side, they're in it for the equity, you know, they're playing the long game, that's that those are the hiring principles. And look, if you have someone who's unethical or someone who's not meeting the bar, gotta fire that person and that's also gotta be an easy decision for you. But the, the real hard one that I described is the person who was great for a long period of time, who's no longer right for the company. That's very hard.
- [47:37]
Nathan Chan
Hard things about hard things.
- [47:39]
Will Ahmed
Correct.
- [47:39]
Nathan Chan
Yeah, that's a great book and yeah, I know that all too well. And in retrospect, how do you get that person to perhaps have someone above them but then it's awkward like. Yeah, I know exactly that. So look, we have to work towards wrapping up. We're almost at time. Couple asked questions or just really one. For aspiring founders, what's one piece of advice that you would give when it comes to navigating the complexities of hardware startups? And then what are you excited about next?
- [48:10]
Will Ahmed
For hardware startups, I think is the key part of that question. The challenge with building hardware is that you're going to make decisions today and you're then going to see how they actually pan out 12, 18, 24 months later. And that's a really important thing to just know as you're making decisions. A lot of times it's easy to say, oh, if we had this capability, that would be very innovative. But you might be thinking that'd be very innovative today. Is that actually going to be innovative in two years when it comes out? So I think there's an element with building hardware where you have to actually be more ambitious. You have to really take on a certain level of risk when it comes to your hardware. Now the other challenge though, with hardware is you need to be maniacally focused. So take on risk here, but then don't do a ton of other things. In the case of whoop, we said we were going to be the best at health monitoring, really accurate, but we're not going to be a watch, we're not going to be a step counter. It's not going to do phone calls, it's not going to notify you if you got an email, not a smartwatch. Like, there were all these things we said no to, to just be great at this one thing. And that's a very hard, it's a very hard process. And then you have to be comfortable with this idea that you're really trying to predict the future. And a lot of, I think a lot of founders sort of dance around that idea when they're building hardware. You're not going to ab test your hardware. Like, you have to come up with an idea of what the future looks like and that future needs to be right. And I think it's healthy to actually be honest about the fact that that's what you're doing. You're making a bet on what the future looks like. And to say otherwise is a little naive. So those are some of the things I would keep in mind with hardware. And then beyond that, it's, it's probably finding investors who are sympathetic to how hard it is to build hardware. You're going to have delays, you're going to have issues in manufacturing, you're going to have quality stuff happen. It's better to have investors who kind of know all of that's going to happen than have investors who react unrealistically or very negatively when that stuff happens.
- [50:55]
Nathan Chan
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for sharing, man. And one last question. What are you excited for next and we'll wrap?
- [51:00]
Will Ahmed
Well, I'm super excited about the potential of wearable technology. You know, I think that health monitoring has the potential to really shift a lot of curative costs to being preventative and, and going from having people be all of a sudden dealing with the fact that they have cardiovascular disease versus making lifestyle decisions to be really healthy or, you know, all of a sudden they've had a heart attack versus being notified, hey, you're gonna have a heart attack in 30 minutes. You know? And so it's. I get very excited about how proactive continuous health monitoring can be and how it can make the world a healthier place.
- [51:42]
Nathan Chan
Amazing. Well, look, Will, I could talk to you all day, man. We got a wrap. But thank you so much for your time. Congratulations on all of your success. Thank you for building an amazing product. Thank you for adding steps to the latest version. I think that's a great move. Big, big fan of your product. Everyone listening, watching. You got to sign up for whoop. But thank you again, Will Nathan.
- [52:03]
Will Ahmed
Thank you for having me.
- [52:04]
Nathan Chan
If you love this episode, make sure to check out my interview with Emma Greed on how solving a problem she was so passionate about led to the creation of skims and Good American.
- [52:14]
C
And so I do think it's. So much of it starts with, like, addressing things that bother you that you find, you know, you've got to create a solution for because, you know, at the end of the day, you've got to be passionate enough and sometimes crazy enough to go round and round and round to actually solve a problem.