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- [00:11]
A
Join Willie Walker, Walker and Dunlop's Chairman and CEO as we bring you fresh perspectives about leadership, business, the economy and commercial real estate. Willie hosts a diverse network of leaders as they share wisdom that cuts across industry lines. His guests are experts in their fields, from leading economists and CEOs to Harvard and Yale professors and everything in between. Our one goal is simple, providing you with unique insights, unparalleled data and real time market analyses.
- [00:44]
B
Welcome to another Walker webcast. It is my great joy to have my friend Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of whoop, joining me today. I am a avid WHOOP user. Full disclosure, I also happen to be an investor and a very happy investor in whoop. And I'm really excited to talk to Will about WHOOP Fitness, the way he's built the company, the data that's coming out of WHOOP Straps, personalized health, lifespan recovery scores, HRV and a whole bunch of other things. Will welcome and thanks for joining me today.
- [01:29]
C
Thanks for having me. Will you.
- [01:31]
B
I see you're in your fantastic office in Boston looking out over Fenway Park. To any of you in Boston who know where Will's office is, you can almost hit Will's. If you, a really big slugger in Major League Baseball hits a, hits a home run out over the left field fence, it might land on Will's deck out behind him. And to anyone who has run the Boston Marathon before, Will's office is right below the very famous Sitgo sign, which many of us look for as we come around the corner to head towards the finish line in Boston. How are you, my friend?
- [02:11]
C
Good know, funny, funny story on the, on the distance between our, our office and Fenway park, you talked about hitting a baseball out of the park to our office, which I actually think would be impossible. But the flip side of it, which is hitting a golf ball from the top of our building into Fenway park, is something that I've discussed with with Rory McElroy and with the Fenway Sports Group. So maybe that'll happen one day.
- [02:40]
B
You're going to put a topgolf kind of, you know, the little targets on the far side and Rory's going to plop it right in there.
- [02:46]
C
Exactly.
- [02:46]
B
Yeah, I can already see it. It's going to be a, it's going to be a YouTube hit. So I got, as always, Will, so much to talk to you about. Just this week I was at a dinner up in Boulder and someone came over to me and started talking about the webcast and then we started talking about whoop and he said you know, I got a Whoop and I loved it. But, but the data basically told me that I was getting terrible recovery scores because I can't sleep. And after using for like three weeks, I just kind of, you know, I said, I can't keep getting this negative data back. And so he got rid of it. And I said to him, I sat down with him and I talked to him about how you can actually change your data. And I want to dive into that and I've got a bunch of data for the two of us to talk about on that topic. But before I, before I dive in, I want to a, give a quick summary of what I'd love to talk to you about. And then B, I want to start with a photo of two mutual friends of ours. But what I want start with is the, the mission of whoop. Then I want to talk about physiology, strain and recovery, which is really where you started as a squash player at Harvard, trying to figure out how to recover better. So I think that's a huge part to why the recovery scores out of the WHOOP are such a, not only an important data point for all of us who wear the whoop, but then also how the company started. Then talking about sort of mission creep and how you stay focused on the technology. I want to, for a moment, Will, talk about men versus women, the. And whether you're seeing anything from a. As it relates to fashion, as it relates to exercise, commitment, use of data between men and women. And then I've also, I know you're now global, so whether there's anything around the globe that you're getting out of the data that talks about the difference between when people go to sleep, wake up, how much they drink, things of that nature. Because I think that data is kind of interesting to people. I want to talk for a moment about the pro athletes that you work with and what makes them so unique competitive landscape. And then finally, I want to talk about the future vision for WHOOP and how AI and the massive data lake, if you will, that you are building with all this data will get into personalized health and personalized fitness. I woke up with an 87% recovery score this morning, Will. I was feeling very good about myself. I was thinking about canceling the webcast if I'd woken up with a 50% recovery score and was in the red. So I, I felt good on 87. Where were you this morning, by the way? Because you've got a young one at home. I'm assuming you're 61.
- [05:09]
C
Yeah.
- [05:09]
B
There you go 61. Yeah. You know, we're going to talk about groups in a moment because I've got a great group with my two, two of my three sons. And I want to show some data on that. Before we jump in though, two of our mutual friends, Arthur Brooks and Rich Roll and I went over to India to meet with the Dalai Lama last year. And I, I listened to both your interview with Arthur as well as Rich, which were both great discussions. And I just. You talked with Rich a lot about meditation and I thought that starting this discussion off with this fun photo, Arthur is tucked in the back right and, and you can see Rich down on the bottom left and I'm in the upper left. But my son Wyatt and I went with them to visit with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India, a year ago, and it was really a life trip. Let's start with the mission of whoop Will and talk about the. What you're trying to accomplish, if you will, as it relates to two big things there, Unlocking human performance and health span. How'd you come up with unlocking human performance as the mission for Whoop?
- [06:21]
C
Well, the original mission of Whoop, this now dates back 13 years, was to unlock human performance. And in that context, we were particularly focused on athletic performance. You know, we worked with the world's best athletes. People like Michael Phelps and LeBron James were two of our first hundred members. We partnered with sports leagues and teams, worked at the Navy seals. We, we really focused initially on the most aspirational and high performing individuals in the world, particularly from an athletic context. And in that sense, unlocking human performance was winning a gold medal or an NBA championship. Right. It was the pinnacle of athletic performance. And I think what we observed in the years that followed was a broadening of our definition of human performance. Human performance became helping people get back in shape, helping women understand pregnancy, helping executives manage stress and travel, and, you know, helping society at large understand lifestyle decisions like alcohol consumption and diet. And so human performance started to mean a much broader set of everyday performance and health as it relates to everyday performance. And then in the last three years, as the company has grown globally and as it has become quite a consumer business, you know, a general consumer business, we got interested in longevity and we got interested in this idea of helping our members not just live longer, but live longer and better. And this idea of performing better over a long period of time. And that felt like such a, a core pursuit for our technology that we updated our mission to include it. So, you know, today the mission is to unlock human performance and health span. And it really speaks to this idea that we want our members to live longer and healthier lives. And we recently came out with a very public goal which is we want to add a billion healthy years to our members lives, to society at large, to uh. And so the way we measure that is the day you get started on whoop. What is your whoop age? And then as of the day of the reading, you know, what's your plus or minus from there? And this year we expect we'll add about 400,000 healthy years. And mind you, that includes, you know, people that are going the wrong direction. So it's an, it's a net measurement and, and look, I mean it's hard to get more excited about a mission than that. And I think overall the technology that we're building is laddering up to this idea of healthspan, which is helping people really understand their physiological age and how all their behaviors and lifestyle decisions affect them and giving them the tools and the information to improve from there.
- [09:41]
B
What's your health span score right now?
- [09:45]
C
Well, you know, if I could have chosen one to launch it, I might have chosen a different period, seeing as that I had a newborn and surgery back to back. But I am 30.5. I'm five and a half years younger. Yeah, I'm not bad.
- [10:03]
B
No, it's great.
- [10:05]
C
But I have a feeling yours is quite good.
- [10:07]
B
I'm trying, I'm trying to get to a decade, which is, it's killing me because I'm sitting right at, I'm 58 and a half and I'm sitting right at 50. And so I'm trying to get into the 40s. And, and you can, you can see it moving. I mean, I, I, I'm, I'm getting negative scores and trying to do things to get it so I can get myself back into the 40s. But it really is a, a super neat feature that's come out in your latest iteration as well as other things. Healthspan's one of them. Ekg, the journaling. You always had the strength training piece to does feel that the, with the launch of the 4.0, will you really, you, you, you took it to a much broader application base, if you will. In other words, like for an athlete like me, getting hrv, getting strained, getting recovery were data sets that allowed me to understand, okay, take it easy on the bike today, go hard in the gym, whatever the case might be. But it now feels like it's broadened out to a much, much Wider user base, if you will. How's that been as it relates to sort of the uptake in the sense that the, the marketing has been, generally speaking, from my take, focused on athletes. How's it been moving, if you will, more mainstream?
- [11:25]
C
Well, we, we recently launched the Whoop 5.0 and the Whoop MG and, and we're seeing the most growth the company's ever experienced, the highest sales we've ever experienced and the highest engagement we've ever experienced. So it's really looking very good. And for those who are less familiar with whoop, it's really a membership. And so you sign up for an annual membership and the harbor is included with that. And depending on what plan you're on, you might be on a different membership. Historically, Whoop was just one tier and everything was included in that and that was 240 bucks a year. And we, with this new launch, we came out with actually a lower tier and a higher tier along with the existing. And so the lower tier is now $180 a year. And that's, I would say, targeting a younger, sportier audience. And it's, you know, it's got functionality around strain and recovery and sleep and strength training and it's got all the AI capabilities that we're working on. And then, you know, our, our middle tier, our default tier, if you will, we've introduced Health Span and this WHOOP Age, there's the health monitor and the stress monitor along with everything I just described. And then we came out with Whoop Life, which is now our highest tier. That's $360 a year. And so that's got some of our medical capabilities, ECG monitoring, AFIB detection, those are FDA cleared features. We came out with Blood Pressure Insights, which is a very innovative feature, allows you to, to get a daily estimate of your blood pressure, which is very accurate. And so from a growth standpoint, we've grown with the newer tiers having a younger and sportier audience now joining. And then we also have an older new demographic joining that maybe has acute health issues or medical issues that they want to pay attention to. So it's been a great TAM expansion launch alongside a bunch of new capabilities.
- [13:39]
B
So it's my understanding that my WHOOP strap takes down about a hundred megabytes of data on me every day. That's the equivalent of an hour and a half of music or 250 high resolution photographs. What do you do with all that data, Will? I mean there's, it's, you know, unlike the Apple watch, which I'm assuming doesn't take down nearly that same amount of data. You're taking that and providing to people like me such a comprehensive view of our health and how we're living.
- [14:16]
C
What.
- [14:17]
B
What are those algorithms doing with that hundred megabytes of data?
- [14:22]
C
Well, I think there's sort of two primary functions of all the data we collect. The first is creating a great member experience for you and millions of other members, and that is one, figuring out how to summarize all this information and, you know, giving you a recovery score or a strain score or sleep score. But if you got more time, you know, you'll see all your zones of heart rate, or you'll see your HRV or you'll see, you know, what stages of sleep you got. So it's essentially summarizing information in layers. And, and I think that's an important concept when you collect a lot of data is don't necessarily assume people want to see all the data immediately. Think about what's the most important thing if you have 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes, right? And. And look at it through that lens. So I think that's something WHOOP has done reasonably well. The second reason to collect all this data is, is from a research standpoint, and we're really on the eve, I think everyone feels, I certainly feel of a lot of artificial intelligence breakthroughs, particularly as it pertains to health. And if you think about what are the characteristics to build AI for health, a lot of it comes down to, you know, the LLMs and the experience and the data. And, and from. From an LLM standpoint, you're seeing a lot of that get commoditized, which is to say that there's a lot of really powerful models out there that are becoming open source or becoming accessible for a fraction of what they cost to build. And where there's opportunity for differentiation is on experience and on data. And so those are two areas where we're really leaning in. And we believe that with all the data we've collected, which is a very unique data set, we'll be. Be able to have real breakthroughs in terms of what this data means, in terms of being able to change people's behavior or their understanding of their health or, you know, even save lives on a future state. You know, just sort of intuitively, if you think about how an LLM is predicting the next word in a sentence, you could imagine the whoop version of an LLM predicting the next heartbeat. And, well, does that become the path to predicting heart attacks? Right. So and that's a very simple way to think about it, but there's a bunch of versions of that that we're really excited about.
- [17:14]
B
I will tell you when I, I just went and had my physical, I don't know, two months ago, and I sent my GP all my WHOOP data before I went in to meet with her. And it was, it was fascinating how it, it just changed the discussion, Will. It just, rather than going in, and she looks at me and asks me a bunch of questions and says, you look like you're in good shape. And then we go do blood work. And then she follows up with me afterwards because I'd shipped her all of my WHOOP data ahead of time. She was able to sit there and says, well, looks like you're getting plenty of exercise, looks like your sleep is okay, but you could do better. And we had this. And she also, you know, the question on alcohol consumption, she already knew the answer to how I had brought my alcohol consumption down significantly. And I've got a slide that I want to jump to in a moment that shows just that and how much of an impact that can have on, on one's data. The gentleman I was talking to the other night, Will, was talking about the fact that he sleeps very poorly and kind of got the data out of WHOOP and just said, I don't want to look at this. And I can't tell you the number of people that I see who are, you know, industry colleagues of mine who say I had a whoop, but you know, I woke up every morning with these terrible recovery scores. And what it basically told me was I drink too much and I don't want to be told every single day that I drink too much. So I got rid of the whoop. Have you ever, have you ever thought about that, the data, and seeing the data on a day to day basis, unless you are somebody who is really, really healthy, that it could almost be too negative and that you would think about modifying the data. And I know that's kind of a weird thing because you'd never actually manipulate the data. But as you said previously, Will, the way you display it, the kind of data people want, I've heard a lot of people who just say, I tried it and it just kind of depressed me. It kind of made me wake up in the morning and tell myself, wow, I don't feel great today. And they therefore don't go back to it. Is there anything that you can do to make it all a little bit more palatable, if you will?
- [19:13]
C
Well, I think whoopit was a tool and like any tool, you have to learn how to use it and that's building a relationship with your data. And I think some people are better than others at seeing numbers that may or may not be positive and learning how to react to that information and grow from it. I think that you, as a general principle, if you're going to tell someone something's not good, you also want to tell them how to fix it. And that's something I think whoop's getting better at, or we try to get better at every year. And particularly we're doing a lot of AI coaching now to essentially build. Think of it as a 24, 7 coach, trainer, doctor, nutritionist that sits on top of all of your data and you can just constantly be asking questions of, or it can proactively be telling you what to do with this data. So I do think it's important that if you show someone something's not good, you give them a set of information and tools to think about it. Now, having said all that, not everyone is ready for change. Not everyone wants to be healthy. Believe it or not, if someone sees how destructive alcohol is to their body and thinks it's whoop's fault, well, you know, that's going to be a challenge to overcome, I think. I think that for the most part I hear the opposite story, which is I didn't actually realize these things about my body. I didn't realize I spend a third of my life sleeping and I actually had no idea whether I was good at it or not. I didn't realize how much it would, you know, positively impact my recovery and my physiology and how I handled stress. If I just went to bed and woke up at the same time, or if I got morning sunlight, or if I drank more water, or if I cut out alcohol, you know, and so on and so forth. And so overwhelmingly I tend to hear people when we talk about this group that's not sure if they're healthy or not. What I generally hear from that group is they start using WHOOP and they identify a couple things that are like low hanging fruit and they're able to action those things. Now we're not doing a good job though. If someone sees data and they don't really know what to do about it or they feel hopeless, that's certainly not the way we want WHOOP as a tool to be used. We want it to be a tool where first step is awareness. You start to realize all these things about your body that you didn't know before. And that alone, I think, is empowering and kind of a breakthrough in the 21st century. And then the next step from that is to improve on it and to build on it. And if you've been on WHOOP for long enough, I mean, I've obviously been on WHOOP forever, over a decade of continuous physiological data. You also recognize there's ebbs and flows to it. I just went through a period in which my wife and I had a newborn. I got surgery for the first time in 30 years for a little injury, and we had a big product launch. Okay. That's a period of time where I'm going to be less optimal than if I'm, you know, training for some squash tournament and, and, you know, in, in, in different circumstances. So I think a certain awareness as well, about, you know, what stage are you in life, what are you going through? And having a mindset around adapting to that stage, too, helps.
- [22:48]
B
I want to dive into a little bit of data to expand upon what you just said there. So, as you can see, I'm just going to share some of my data because I've listened to a number of your conversations and you obviously can't share anyone else's data. So I thought I'd throw a little bit out there of my own. So, as you can see here, my recovery score from this morning on the first slide on the left. And then obviously, step trackers, lots of people have had that from a Fitbit and other things of that nature. And you can see there, my average over the last month has been 14,000 steps a day. But as you can see, as I've gone from vacation to back in the office, those steps have come down quite a bit. Will the one on the left here is my VO2 max. I want to talk about that because my 52 on my VO2 max is begrudgingly consistent, as you can see there. Over the last month, it's been a straight line and I'm working hard to get my V2 max up. And I want to put a pin in that for a second. If you go to the right one, my resting heart rate at, at 40 beats per minute over the last month.
- [23:50]
C
That's badass.
- [23:51]
B
Is. Is pretty consistent and good. So my, my, my heart rate variability and I want you. I want to, I want to go into both VO2 max as well as heart rate variability because I think a lot of people listening don't Quite understand which HRV is and at where my 93 over the month is, is a pretty good HRV and then if you go to the right one on that, that's stressful and that's showing that, you know, yesterday in a day that was a pretty hectic day because of being able to track it and because of the way that I live my life, while it spiked up at a couple of times, a 0.3 stress meter during an entire day. I actually went back and looked last week when we did earnings on Thursday and I was actually still below 1.0 on my stress meter even on a day that had a lot of relative stress. For me, this is what I want to really dive into for a moment with Will. So Will, what I did was I went back and looked at because a lot of people sit there to your point about how can you improve? And so what I did is I went back and looked and what I used to do was I would do a lot of exercise and then I would drink alcohol and not get a lot of sleep. And I for years accepted that I was just getting bad recovery scores. And as you can see, month of August last year I had a 42% average recovery score. And the month of October last year I had an average of a 34% recovery score. In April of this year I cut down on alcohol dramatically and I started to focus on my sleep. So look at the left hand side about how I raised my recovery scores. Those previous months were all red and all yellow and now they're all yellow and all green. And then the really cool one and what I call the money slide here, Will is on the right. Look at what that improvement as it relates to my recovery score going up to 64% did to my HRV going up from, from here is that that's 51 up to 140. And this is during one week. And then check out what it did to my resting heart rate. My resting heart rate dropping down dramatically during just that one week. So as I got recovery, my HRV went through the roof and my resting heart rate came down. And I looked at that data and I just sort of said to myself, okay, you might want to start to focus on these variables a little bit more. Coco, take that down. I want Will to dive into just, well, basically all the data set that I just showed you because I think it is really telling about how I for two years just sat there and exercised and thought that I was doing fine of having a lot of strain, but wasn't getting the recovery, had that kind of recovery score. And then what I was shocked with was not only did it help my Recovery score, which is just a number, but how it impacted my heart rate variability as well as my resting heart rate.
- [26:45]
C
Yeah, I mean, fascinating data that you shared there. I mean, one thing I'll just say is hard driving individuals like you also struggle a lot with behavior change and rest. And you know, you're a CEO, you're an endurance athlete, and your mind is good at pushing your body further than it necessarily should or wants to go. And that's part of how you've been successful throughout your career as an executive or as an athlete. And I think that showed up in the, in those first data sets that you showed right where you were essentially redlining for a month. Your, your recovery was like a little bit over red. It was around 34%. And yet, you know, you were probably pretty functional. You probably, you know, were getting by at work and doing all your exercise and you know, there weren't necessarily quote unquote problems in your life, but, um, you were just super suboptimal from where you could have been. And I don't know, absent seeing that in the data, that you would have really changed anything, you know, and again, it goes back to that sort of hard driving Persona. You're a certain Persona the way there's many different Personas on Whoop. But the hard driving Persona often needs to see it to recognize, okay, wow, you know, I can figure out certain lifestyle decisions or habits to get myself in the green more often here. I don't have to just run myself down. And, and so when you showed that transformation, I mean, that's quite profound. And what I would imagine is you also just feel so much better and maybe in a way that you didn't fully realize was right in front of you.
- [28:31]
B
Very much so. Very much so. And I, and I do think that the, the interesting thing about it will, is that, I mean, I've listened to you talk to the pro athletes that you have both had on your podcast, as well as just posts that you put out on, on social about it. And one of the, the most dramatic things that I see is how they recover. And when you think about, when you think about things like steroids, like all the, all the steroid use back in the days when steroids were being used in pro cycling, it wasn't to get additional wattage into the pedals. It was for recovery. It was, EPO was used for recovery. And recovery is the key. And so you sit there and by the way, just talking about recovery and you whoop. I would say it was fun for me to see that Tadeh Pogachar, who just won the Tour de France and is the greatest cyclist in the world right now and potentially of all time, actually wears whoop when he's training, which is great because it. It just shows that the data that he's getting from it as it relates to strain and recovery is just so incredibly useful. But one of the things I've heard you talk about is when you sat down with LeBron, and when you sit down with people like Mbappe, it's not just the fact that they're going at strain scores of 20 to 21 on a daily basis. It's that they're running super high recovery scores because of the way they take care of their bodies. Yeah.
- [30:01]
C
I mean, athletes of that caliber are competing 24, 7. You know, you see them when they're in competition for two hours or four hours or whatever it may be. But what you don't see is the other 20, 22 hours of the day where they're doing everything they can to recover and optimize. And I do remember, again, going back to the origins of the company, it was pretty surreal working with Phelps and LeBron in like, 2014 and 15, because if you also think about it, they were probably arguably two best athletes in the world at that time. And it also says something interesting about them, for what it's worth, that they were willing to try. Whoop. Right. You could have a certain arrogance of, I'm the best in the world. Why would I try this thing I've never heard of? But they actually had the opposite, which was, no one knows about this yet. I'm trying to find that 0.1% gain or 1% gain. And so I do remember the first time that I saw their sleep data versus other people's sleep data. And I remember real, you know, it was just one of those reaffirming moments because you could just look at, you know, 10 graphs on a wall and you could point to the one that was LeBron's sleep data. And it was because it looked so much better than the others. And so guys like LeBron are world class sleepers as much as they are world class performers. And that rate of recovery was staggering. Where I remember doing a marathon poorly and not training properly for it, but I had a red recovery for a couple days afterwards. And the strain of that was probably, I don't know, a 20.2 or something. For those not familiar, the strain scores out of 21. And. And I remember, like a training week where LeBron did, like, it was like 19.9, 20.2, 20.5, 20.7. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And then on the fourth day or fifth day after that training, he still woke up with a green recovery. And I thought, wow, that's really badass. Like, to be able to recover after that much stress that you're putting on your body. So rate of recovery is a. Is a real phenomenon in. In sports. And, you know, in some ways, it was. It was sort of the first big innovation that WHOOP brought to market was this idea of, hey, we're going to measure recovery. No one was talking about recovery 12 years ago.
- [32:38]
B
Talk about heart rate variability for a second, Will. So you all did actually a really cool study on one of the Tour de France teams, where you went and took a look at the data that was coming out of the VF team and you talked about heart rate variability. And when they did the average heart rate of the team before the Tour de France, they were at an HRV of 139 milliseconds. The average HRV for Whoop members is about 64 milliseconds. And after the first week, the average resting heart rate, they were all in low 40s and had gone up to 51 beats per minute, and the average HRV had dropped to 73 milliseconds. So a significant change in their physiology in that first week. Yet when they. When they took one day of rest during the Tour de France on stage 10, they get a rest, the average resting heart rate in HRV actually were better than when they began the race at 40 beats per minute and 152 milliseconds. So amazing how those athletes, even though they were straining so hard, you give them one day of rest and they just come ripping back to where they were. Explain heart rate variability to those who hear you and me talking about it. And why is it such an important metric?
- [33:56]
C
So heart rate variability is literally the amount of time in between successive beats of the heart. If your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute, it's not necessarily beating every second. It's a little counterintuitive, but it might be beating at 1.2 seconds and then 0.8 seconds and then 0.6 seconds and then 1.4 seconds. And that variability in the time between successive beats is a good thing. And the reason it's a good thing is because. Hurry. Variability is a lens into your autonomic nervous system. And your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. You can think of sympathetic as activation. So it's like, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up when you're exercising, or you even have a stressful thought, oh my gosh, the building's on fire. That's going to trigger sympathetic response. Parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. That's what helps you fall asleep when you inhale, that's sympathetic, Hurry it up. When you exhale, that's parasympathetic. Hurry down. And what you want is for every sympathetic for there to be a parasympathetic response. And that's what creates this variability. And therefore a higher heart rate variability will suggest that your body is in a better state of rest or peak performance or flow state. The context of what you're doing matters a lot because it's a very sensitive measurement as I just described. And you can use heart rate variability to understand an athlete's body the day of a big event. You can use heart rate variability to understand stress in a given moment. You can use heart rate variability to understand the health of the heart. And there's a, there's really a profound body of research, I would say, that's growing around heart rate variability because it's such a valuable measurement and frankly, only until, you know, eight years ago, 10 years ago, could it even be measured accurately and noninvasively for a long time. Heart rate variability required an electrocardiogram to measure and a hospital setting. So one of the big innovations of WHOOP was to be able to measure this, this really important metric 24, 7.
- [36:33]
B
And the new whoop which I'm wearing here has on it also the ability to do an ekg. How I, I, I, I take my ekg, I get the data, kind of look at it doesn't really tell me that much. Where's that headed, Will? Why, why, why did you all put the EKG monitor on the latest, the 5.0.
- [36:56]
C
Well, the earliest days of the company, we wanted to take medical technology and put it in a non invasive form factor. And so the first few versions of that were looking at the capabilities for measuring heart rate variability, which as I mentioned previously, needed an ecg. So putting that in a small form factor to do recovery. The PSG machine, which is the gold standard for sleep monitoring, putting that in a small form factor accurately measures sleep. The chest strap, which is not a medical device but is medical grade and measures heart rate while you exercise. And taking that capability and putting it into a small form factor to measure strain. So just like that, you had recovery Sleep and strain from three instruments that otherwise were very hard to use, cumbersome, antiquated, et cetera. And as a general rule, we're looking at every medical technology through that lens. And, and so the electrocardiogram and the, the ability to, you know, really understand your hard information and to be able to detect afib atrial fibrillation, which is something that 1 to 2% of the population actually has and can lead to strokes and other real issues. To be able to detect that in a, again, non invasive form factor, that seems like a really big deal. And so we prioritize doing it. Same for, for blood pressure, where historically you needed a blood pressure cuff to be able to measure your blood pressure. We spent three years and tens of millions of dollars innovating around how you could measure it non invasively from the wrist. And so we launched that as a wellness feature, Blood Pressure Insights to give people a daily estimate. And we're going to keep going down that path where you know, virtually everything that you see in a doctor's office that's measuring you, we're going to try to do non invasively and continuously.
- [39:17]
B
Is there any way to do blood glucose monitoring non invasively?
- [39:24]
C
Yes.
- [39:26]
B
I would assume that that's, that's gotta be a, I mean that area as it relates to the number of people in the United States who have type 1 and type 2 diabetes is A, is an enorm market. And so that would be my assumption that getting that and being able to measure that non invasively would be an incredible feature to the whoop strap.
- [39:47]
C
Yeah, it's, it's actually a fascinating space. So there's about 40 million people in the US who should be wearing a CGM. Do you know how many people do wear a CGM? No. 3 million.
- [40:02]
B
And to those who don't know what a CGM, it's a continuous glucose monitor.
- [40:06]
C
Yeah. And so what that suggests to me is there's a problem with the form factor and the way that the technology is collecting information and the way the data is being used. I think there's probably an issue at each layer of the hardware and the software and the data analysis. And so that's, you know, something that we're looking at.
- [40:31]
B
Super cool. Talk for a moment, Will, about the data and the potential use of the data in betting. I, I sit there and think about these star athletes who wear the whoop strap and I wonder if, you know, I don't know, like let's, let's do, let me, let me use an example of someone who I don't think wears the whoop strap, but boy, it'd be interesting to see his whoop data, which would be Conor McGregor. Okay, so McConor, McGregor is going to do some fight. He's had a little bit too much fun the night before. And you get a hold of that data and you're betting on how Conor McGregor is going to do in his cage fight. I can only imagine that data would be very useful to someone who is trying to place a bet on that, on his performance that day. There's got to be implications of either, you know, people who are scouting players and want to understand what's this player's physiology like, what are their habits like, etc. Etc. I'm, I'm, I'm assuming someone who's a college coach would love to sit there and say to you, hey, I've got some recruit who I'm looking at and I want to see what he or she does on a daily basis as it relates to recovery and strain and things of that nature. And similarly, on the betting side, how do you, I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm certain you control the data tremendously, but how do, I mean, in, in just one other piece which people may not know, is you've also had whoop scores going up live on television during PGA events so that people can see the strain and stress that the players are going under as they line up to take a putt, which is fantastic data. And if you were actually betting on it, you could sit there and potentially run some algorithm that would tell you that when Rory goes and gets over a putt and his, his, you know, his strain score goes to a certain level, he might have a more difficult time making that putt. What are, what are the implications for all this stuff, Will?
- [42:26]
C
Well, I've long believed that this physiological data, particularly of athletes, is, is a, is a tool that could be used to enhance the fan experience and to bolster entertainment. You know, I'm, I love sports, I love watching sports, but I'm actually quite critical of, of the sports industry. And I think if you look at a broadcast of, I don't know, an NBA game today versus 20 years ago, the only real thing that's changed is the picture. And there just hasn't been that much innovation around that overall entertainment experience. And I don't mean to pick on the NBA. I think it's true of virtually every sports league or sporting event. And, and so I, I, I do get excited about the idea of live heart rates of players during broadcasts and potentially even over time knowing sleep scores or recovery scores of key players. Now, there's a lot to unpack in what I just said. You really have to get a lot of people to go along with it. And in, in many cases that also means be compensated for it. You know, the, the, the data has a value if it's going to be made public. And so we recognize that when we've done live heart rates of golfers, for example, we've had relationships with the golfers, we've had relationships with the PGA Tour, and we've had relationships with the broadcaster like NBC or other. So we've had to go out and kind of make the whole thing happen. Not to mention we built the technology from scratch to create a heart rate to go from Rory McElroy's wrist to your television set in real time. And, and so there's, there's a lot there. I think the gambling piece would follow from what I just said, but I wouldn't say that I'm most excited about that as like the entry point. I think, I think that has kind of even more implications that players would need to be aware of and compensated for accordingly. And it starts to tear a little bit at the, the team oriented nature of a sport.
- [44:46]
B
So.
- [44:48]
C
You know, does Patrick Mahomes want the world to know how recovered he is before a playoff game? Would that potentially change how the defense approaches the game if they knew when he had a high recovery he runs more, and if he had a low recovery, he runs less. Again, I'm, I'm sort of making some of this up, but you get, you get the idea where, okay, maybe that data would be valuable to Patrick in the sense that he get paid a lot to share it, but it might also undermine the ultimate mission of the team, which is winning. And, and so that's where there's an element of individual sports maybe being easier than team sports. And, but look, this is, you know, it's exciting. I mean, this is on the cutting edge. No one else is really doing it. And we're fortunate in that we have all these relationships and the technology and you kind of need all of that to make it happen.
- [45:46]
B
Is there any difference in male, female usage of whoop straps? Is your user base pretty much 5050 or is it more heavily skewed towards males?
- [45:57]
C
We have slightly more men than women. I think that's changing over time where we're seeing more women join the platform over time. I think some of that is form factor and whether people want to wear something on their wrist or not. And, and we use some different strategies over time for how we think we'll see a lot more women on the platform. I mean, the interesting thing is the wellness space skews towards women. It's like, I think 70, 30, a woman's more likely to buy a wellness product than a man.
- [46:33]
B
It's interesting because I do, clearly, I think men love wearing the whoop strap and kind of wear it with pride. And I think women sit there and say, I should have a watch or bracelet or something else on. And I know you've done a lot with your team to make the whoop become more of a. Of, if you will, a fashion item with the ability to change the clasp color with the band color. And you're, you're constantly innovating as it relates to the wearable aspect of it and then also embedding it in clothing, which allows for women to wear it not on their wrist, but inside of their bra or inside of their waistband to be able to continue to have the sensor running, even though you might not be showing it on your wrist. But I just. That was one of the, one of the things I want to know about. What about differences between, you know, sleep patterns? Because you're now a global company. Will, you've got. I heard you talk about the fact that in the Middle east, average, you know, sleep time is like 1am in Doha or something. What other, what other thing have you all been able to glean as far as generalities as it relates, either alcohol consumption, sleep patterns, things of that nature between populations around the globe?
- [47:41]
C
The Middle east has the latest bedtime. So it's just pretty, I mean, it's pretty interesting. I think it's like between 1 and 2am in Doha, in Dubai, in Riyadh. So they, they certainly have later bedtimes.
- [48:01]
B
But do they wake up later as well? I mean, are they getting full sleep or are they. They just.
- [48:06]
C
They're just shifted. They're shifted. And, and look, you know, they also consume a lot of caffeine. There's a little more smoking in the Middle east, but there's less alcohol. So some of those might, you know, those lifestyle elements might also be. Be factors. Ireland is still winning on alcohol consumption, so congratulations to. To the Irish. They haven't lost the crown.
- [48:36]
B
That. That data comes out of journals or.
- [48:38]
C
Are you deducing that out of recovery scores from journals? Yeah, we have a pretty comprehensive set of data on alcohol. What do you think's the city in the US that had the most alcohol consumption in 2024. Oh, man.
- [49:00]
B
I'm gonna throw out there.
- [49:01]
C
Boston, D.C. d.C. Well, now.
- [49:06]
B
Now that we have the National Guard in there, well, you know, maybe. Maybe the National Guard's gonna go in and do something about all the drinking in D.C. i would have thought it.
- [49:14]
C
Would have been something like Vegas, but it actually makes sense that it's D.C. in an election year. I feel like there's a lot of cocktail parties, people are out and about.
- [49:27]
B
And, and, and exacerbated strain score. Stress scores as well, I'm assuming.
- [49:32]
C
Yeah. We also get interesting data on events. So, you know, like the election night in the United States has like, very high stress scores, late bedtimes, low recoveries. The next day when there's a big sporting event, you know, you'll see the fan bases of each city have disrupted sleep.
- [50:00]
B
It's super cool.
- [50:01]
C
The worst recovery of the year is January 1st, so that's not that surprising. New Year's the second worst one in the US Is the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which I thought's a funny one.
- [50:20]
B
Yeah.
- [50:22]
C
And interestingly, the highest recovery is like two days after New Year's. So people get their acts together after, after, after. They.
- [50:31]
B
They all go use their first gym membership that they've just signed up for. And that will last for like, two months.
- [50:36]
C
Yeah.
- [50:38]
B
One of the things will. That I've. That, that I've started to do is groups. So we have a group here at Walker Dunlop of Whoop Wearers. And it's fun to see everyone's data. There are two of my three sons, Wyatt on the left and Charlie on the right. They are both avid whoop wearers. And they and all their buddies from college and from high school all have become whoop addicts. And one of the things that I found to be really fun is that you can see on the right hand slide of this. I've got here my recovery score versus the, the boys. And as you can see on recovery scores, we're sitting kind of on top of each other. Go to the next slide if you would. So the, on the, on the, on the, on the strain score, as you can see on this slide, I'm. I'm handily beating my two sons who are complete gym rats. So I feel very goodwill that I'm at a. A 19.4 strain score. That's a 19.1 strain score over the last month.
- [51:33]
C
Wow, that's a big number.
- [51:34]
B
That is a. On an average. On a average basis, that's a pretty big one. But as you can see on a sleep basis, These are two guys who are on summer break, probably out partying a little bit. And my, my, my sleep and recovery scores sit right on top 18 and 20 year old sons. But I will say to anyone who's listening to this, one of the things I'm really excited about is that my two sons are those two and my third one as well. But my, those two are very into physical fitness. But I also have the ability to see how they're, how they're partying because of their recovery scores. And as a result of it, you know, we kind of have laughs about it when they've gone out and had a really fun night with their buddies. But as they head back to college and if they decide to stay in this user group with me, I'll be able to see whether, you know, it was maybe a little bit too fun. Tuesday night they went into a bad recovery score on Wednesday morning. Which quite honestly, as a parent who has three kids in college, it's really fun to not only have that sort of competitive data between the three of us and who's straining harder or recovering better and sleeping better and talk about it as a family, but then also knowing sort of when, you know, where, when and where they are as it relates to how much they're partying at college. Which is great.
- [52:51]
C
Yeah, there's a really interesting dynamic with families and I think what you described is, is one version of it, which is just a healthy relationship with exercise and sleep and being able to check in on one another. And I can also imagine it moving in, you know, different medical directions too, where, you know, you could get an alert if a family member has an AFIB detection or some other event that whoop detects, you know, whether it be, you know, some meaningful health issue. You can imagine it from a behavior standpoint where you could have groups that are working on their age and it's like a list of who's got the most years off of their age and everyone's competing on that dimension. And I've gotten some fascinating member testimonials and emails over the years. I remember a father recently sent me an email thanking me for whoop. But it was really around this idea that his son is, I think, autistic and non verbal, as his father described it. And by being able to see his son's recovery score every day, it created this bridge for them to have conversations about how he was, how the son was feeling and otherwise there was no, there was no kind of starter conversation, so to speak, in, in and around health. But whoop by presenting some numbers and information created that bridge to all of a sudden, you know, bond a father and son over, over their health. And so anyway, that's just one example, but I thought it was kind of a beautiful and unexpected use case.
- [54:40]
B
It's really neat. It makes me, I mean, as CEO of a company, I am faced from time to time with hard discussions about health with members of our team, either that they are going through or that family members are going through. And the ability to have predictive data to potentially avoid some of these very traumatic experiences is something that having been brought into more conversations than I would if I were not in the seat that I'm in, you know, what a, what, what a, what a valuable tool. And I will tell you it's, it's really interesting to see will the number of people both inside of our company and then also companies that we work with who there really is this sort of, I mean people kind of show their arm off. They're sort of saying, I take my health and wellness seriously by, by, by, by wearing the whoop. And it, and it's really interesting for me to see people who, you know, and I, and I, you know, I send you photographs all the time. When I see various people wearing a whoop that surprise me that there's some politician wearing a whoop or there's some, you know, performer wearing a whoop. Athletes I fully expect to be wearing whoops. But it's, it's really, I think this whole phase of personal wellness and personalized health is coming at us so quickly that the positioning of the company and the data that you're being able to pull, what's whoop look like 10 years from now, Will, you know, I think.
- [56:15]
C
Everyone senses that the relationship is they.
- [56:19]
B
Have.
- [56:21]
C
With a doctor is going to change and that there's going to be some future version of health insurance that is going to be more consumer facing. And then you kind of have to ask the question, well, if that's going to exist in the future, is it more likely that a health insurance company gets very consumer facing and transparent or is it more likely that a consumer company that is transparent and has a stronger brand moves in the direction of looking like a health insurance company? And my bet is it's going to be the latter. It's going to be a consumer facing company that starts to become your doctor's office and your relationship with medicine and health. And so in many ways that's the direction that WHOOP is building towards. We have this, you know, public goal now of Adding a billion healthy years to our members life. And, and you know, one huge element of that is the behavior change and the data that we talked about. But another huge element of that is, you know, alerts around things that have gone wrong and, and you know, being able to prevent heart attacks and disease states and illness states and you know, really target people who have, who might have a problem and, and you know, be quite transparent about that. So my sense is that a lot of this will happen much sooner than 10 years. I think the world's changing really quickly and I think a lot of people are looking for different solutions when it comes to their overall healthcare. I think there's a general feeling that healthcare looks more like sick care. What do I actually have to do to stay healthy or be healthy or be able to play with my grandkids? And that feels like something very different than what exists in the medical space today.
- [58:31]
B
Very much so. Well, as somebody who, I have an Instagram site, not my normal ones, it's called live to 120. And as someone who is focused on trying to live a productive life until 120, which I have no idea whether I'll get there. And given that I fell on my bike on Sunday and went straight over the handlebars and hit my head pretty hard and I'm perfectly fine from it. But as you talk about health insurers, my mind went to, I'm probably a pretty good bet as it relates to, you know, my overall health is great except for the fact that I do things that make it so that I get these sort of catastrophic failures every once in a while. And so if you're trying to, if you're trying to figure out whether Willie Walker was a good health risk, I think you'd look at my whoop data and say, yeah, he takes really good care of himself except for the fact he goes over his handlebars every once in a while and could end up in the hospital. But I do think that the, the data that's coming out of it is going to be incredibly helpful to people like myself and as well to the overall medical industry. And I'm super appreciative of you taking the time to talk to me about the whoop the data where you're going. And I will say that as someone who has watched the company extremely closely, your journey as an entrepreneur has been fantastic. And I've heard you talk extensively, Will, about the things you've learned along the road. You started this company right out of college and have just done a fantastic job of both staying focused on the space that you wanted to stay in and not allowing for your mission to creep outside of it and then second providing the leadership to your now over 1,000 employees at Whoop that has made the company one of the true pioneers in this space against a competitive set which you and I didn't have time to dive into today but is as ferocious and competitive and with unlimited capital to go up against every day. And so with that I would just say kudos to you and thanks for taking the time and I very much look forward to seeing you on my next trip to Boston.
- [60:34]
C
Willie, thanks a lot for having me. I always enjoyed doing this with you. Appreciate all your guidance, guidance and mentorship along the way. So thanks a lot.
- [60:43]
B
It's great. Well have a great day everyone. Thanks for joining us. Go go get a whoop and well I'll see you soon.
- [60:49]
C
All right. Thank you. Thanks everyone.
- [61:13]
B
Sa.