Transcript
A (0:10)
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.
B (0:43)
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.
C (1:28)
Thanks for having me. Will you.
B (1:30)
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?
C (2:10)
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.
B (2:40)
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.
C (2:45)
Exactly.
B (2:46)
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.
