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so two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps [Music]
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Nike and apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space but when it comes to health monitoring we're
00:00:18
the best game in town that really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to
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solve one of the reasons whoop has been successful is there were a lot of counter-intuitive decisions along that
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Journey one obvious one is that would be interesting steal that it's worth emphasizing for
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your audience why that matters so there was a phase in building Loop where
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it was so much about the next Milestone that I was running almost exclusively on
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like a dopamine engine if the company has a great day you're feeling like a rocket ship and if whoop was failing I
00:00:53
was failing what's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see I was super stressed out I was
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drinking too much and I remember I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a
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sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they're like numb
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I actually drove myself to the hospital and they do um you know all these analysis on me and
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like it turns out I had a before this episode begins I just want
00:01:23
to say a huge thank you to all of our new subscribers 74 of you that watch this channel didn't subscribe before and
00:01:30
we're now down to about 71 so that helps us in a number of ways that are quite hard to explain but simply the bigger
00:01:36
the channel gets the bigger the guests get so if you haven't yet subscribed to the Diary of a CEO if I can have any favors from you if you've ever watched
00:01:43
this show and enjoyed it it's just to please hit the Subscribe button without further Ado I'm Stephen Butler and this
00:01:49
is the Diary of a CEO I hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself
00:01:58
well
00:02:04
as you look back on your your life and you connect the dots that led you to to do what you've done now with whoop and
00:02:11
your professional life um what are those dots well I I grew up on uh the North Shore
00:02:19
of Long Island um I was always into Sports and exercise I was super active
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kid uh my parents are very different my dad's an Egyptian
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immigrant a very Street Smart charismatic came to this
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country with very little Rose the ranks and finance over time my mom uh very analytical very
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book smart and and watching how they approached life I
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think was a fascinating way to grow up because they had very different uh tool sets to solve problems and
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uh I was always playing sports I was always exercising and that eventually LED my way to Harvard and uh and so I
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was a college athlete I got um recruited to play Squash at Harvard and over the course of my time there uh
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got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body how I could
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uh understand what it meant to train optimally how I could prevent over training which was a problem that I had
00:03:27
uh how I could really uh understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising and so
00:03:34
that took me down this Rabbit Hole of physiology research which we can get into but I read hundreds of medical
00:03:41
papers while I was uh in school and then ultimately wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human
00:03:47
body and then over the course of my time at Harvard built up the confidence to to
00:03:53
start a company which was a fairly crazy thing looking back on it and for the last 10 years I've been building this
00:03:59
company called whoop we went through that very quickly but a lot of those things are very very unusual one of the
00:04:06
first unusual things is I mean we all train we all a lot of people train and work out and stuff but we don't then
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fall into an obsession about how to optimize the performance of our training and ourselves what is it about you have
00:04:18
you been able to figure out in hindsight what it is about you and your makeup that made you so obsessed with that
00:04:23
particular topic well it struck me as something that uh
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really didn't make a lot of sense like you I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard exercising with no
00:04:37
information about what I was doing to my body and yet that's a school also that is totally obsessed with deeper
00:04:43
knowledge and so that in itself seemed like a like a deep irony and then I also
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was a pretty competitive person and I was someone who was over training right
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where you see you get fitter and fitter and fair you sort of fall off a cliff and you don't know why and that bothered
00:05:00
me like that bothered me that I didn't I didn't fully understand what I was doing to my body what was what was the missing
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ingredient so to speak and I just sort of started pulling at that thread and it
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really took me down a rabbit hole over training I've heard this time never been
00:05:19
sure if I've believed it because I don't really know what it is but for someone that doesn't know what that is what what
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is over training the technical definition is it's a continued state of overreaching that then leads to a period
00:05:31
where your body is essentially in a depressed state and what that will look
00:05:38
like physiologically is essentially you your body's run down you know activities
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that would normally feel somewhat easy uh are quite difficult
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um psychologically it makes you feel kind of lousy run down symptoms similar to being sick and depending on how over
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trained you are can last you know a week or could last month in my case that Norma didn't last longer than a couple
00:06:04
weeks but it it's kind of this ultimate betrayal right because you're pushing yourself so hard
00:06:10
to get stronger and fitter that you actually get to a place where you're completely
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broken down had I asked you at 14 years old say 14 16 years old what you were going to be
00:06:21
when you grew up what would you have responded I don't know that I would have known but if you looked at the things I
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was interested in so I was always playing with technology which in hindsight uh was quite predictive like I
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had the first I had the first iPod in my sixth grade class I remember so we're
00:06:42
about the same age so you probably remember when the iPod came out and like how cool that thing was thick but yeah
00:06:48
it was really thick and it had that like Wild Wheel a little before that I had a
00:06:53
Palm Pilot like a pom pilot seven it was like the original uh Palm Pilot that could get internet access when I was
00:07:00
around 12 or 13 I had one of the first uh voice recorders that you could speak
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into and it would type for you oh wow so it was like you know Siri but 20 years
00:07:12
ago uh and it didn't quite work unfortunately but I I had this real itch
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towards technology and then I think somewhere between the ages of like 18
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and 20 I I also saw this huge convergence happening with with smartphones with the way that computers
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to me seemed like they were sort of seamlessly moving from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket to
00:07:38
what I perceived to be eventually on your body or even in your body I thought that was a Natural Evolution so I
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definitely had this pull towards technology but I think throughout uh you know I was overcoming this feeling of
00:07:54
whether I should go into Finance because I grew up my dad was in you know in finance in fact after my freshman year
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at Harvard to most undergrads do you know different internships and whatnot after my freshman year I did an
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internship at a hedge fund my sophomore year I did an internship at an investment bank and my junior year I did
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an internship at a private Equity Firm so so like I did I was really flirting
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with going into Finance but I think I think this is what I was supposed to do
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from everything I've read it's quite clear to me that you're a very curious person and my brother is very
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interesting my oldest brother whenever we when we were younger he always wanted to understand everything and when he
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became interested in something he became obsessed in it and he went like right down into the rabbit hole as I read
00:08:43
through your story on multiple occasions whether it's meditation or others or how the business came to be or you know your
00:08:49
journey to trying to figure out how to optimize the body all of these struck me as a person that once they get
00:08:54
interested in something they go all the way down into the rabbit hole to find out the solutions is that accurate I
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think it's fair I think it also stems from this uh ability to throw myself out there
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um you know back to how your childhood influences your your future uh there's
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there's a story I don't know if I ever talked about this but uh fascinating story where I was in
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fifth or sixth grade middle school and we're doing what's called uh blue
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and gold day so I went to a school called Greenvale the colors are blue and gold and you have this like Fair
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essentially which is all sorts of different competitions races that sort of thing and uh there's a captain's race
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at the end of the day with like the the four people representing their their
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class so to so to speak to run the fast race and I was a I was a captain so I
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was very anxious about this final race and right before the final race was one
00:10:01
of the longer races like uh I think it was three or four laps and so
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uh you know if you were to run that you'd be quite tired and I that wasn't a race I ever ran but uh Timmy all of a
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sudden was sick and so he didn't show up for for this race and I remember uh
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Peter zaloum who's our science teacher he's walking around and he's yelling hey
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blue we need someone to run this race we need someone to run this race and I'm kind of like avoiding even making eye
00:10:31
contact with this teacher because I really don't want to run this race and it was like he zeroed in on me out
00:10:38
of a distance and just marched over and he said well you should run this right and I said no no I've got the captain's
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race I got to do that and he's like well 90 of life is showing up
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the other 10 is what happens when you get there and like in that moment I was like okay
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yeah I'm gonna go around this and I don't even remember what happened in that race I don't even remember the captain's race uh which in some ways
00:11:01
emphasizes his point but that whole thread of just showing up is something I
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think about all the time why why do and this is I guess a lesson
00:11:12
for entrepreneurship because you saw some I was going to say and this is links to
00:11:18
Something in Your Story I was going to say you saw an opportunity but you didn't see an opportunity did you you were dragged by your obsession well
00:11:24
interest in building whoop yeah I definitely saw an opportunity to
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continuously measure the human body and I also saw an opportunity that uh
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Computing was getting to a size and and sort of sophistication where it could be smaller and smaller
00:11:40
uh but the poll that got me to building
00:11:46
this company and I think persevering over years was that it also was a
00:11:52
personal Obsession to really understand my own body yeah because when people typically recite
00:11:58
their stories of how they became an entrepreneur you get this kind of like they put I don't know a white piece of paper there and they're like what is the
00:12:04
opportunity in the market and and when I read the quote from you that said you're an entrepreneur before you realized you
00:12:09
were yeah that's true that books that narrative a little bit which I think entrepreneurs sometimes try and sell
00:12:16
because it makes them seem more intentional I can't replicate your curiosity and interest that made you go off in that
00:12:22
journey of optimizing the human body so I just think in society and culture generally entrepreneurs sometimes look
00:12:29
back and try and make their story sound like really really intentional when a lot of it in your case as is the case in
00:12:34
mine was like I was interested in this thing and I just kept on going because I loved it I think that's right I also
00:12:41
spent a lot of time like building the confidence to start the company like I really didn't know what it meant to
00:12:47
start a company and I mean I spent two years doing physiology research I then took another
00:12:54
class that was around if you have an idea how do you write a business plan for it and I remember like my senior
00:13:02
year I was doing like the third or fourth iteration of this business plan and I was meeting with the MIT Professor
00:13:08
a guy named Howard Anderson who taught the class and was like a venture capitalist and at that point I wasn't
00:13:14
even enrolled in the class I was just working on this business plan and he's like he just sort of stopped he said
00:13:21
well at some point you have to ask yourself is this a paper or are you starting a company right it sort of puts
00:13:27
you on the spot like why are you doing all this work and I think I I think I did a ton of work to feel as
00:13:34
prepared as possible to like have the confidence to take the leap and I'm so glad I did but you know when
00:13:42
I meet young people I try to encourage them to do as much work as they can to build up that confidence and also to
00:13:49
understand that there's a lot of things you aren't going to know in the process of building a company but once you make that
00:13:55
commitment the learnings come in fast right and I'm sure you've experienced that yeah yeah yeah and I see it all the
00:14:03
time especially in young people who um they're using perfectionism as a way to
00:14:08
procrastinate because they're they don't feel competent already yet to so you'll have
00:14:14
people that you know come come up to you and say I've been working on this idea for two years three years and they're
00:14:20
making all these assumptions which they could quite probably figure out in a week if they just went to Market to but it's a guys for fear I think sometimes
00:14:28
to guys have like I actually don't feel ready or I don't know I don't have the answers so I'm just preparing more I'm
00:14:34
waiting for that perfect moment yeah I think overcoming a fear of failure is a really critical step in life and
00:14:44
there's a lot of methods to think about for that I think for me it was doing a lot of
00:14:50
work I think it was following my passion in some ways the reason I
00:14:56
feel like I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was it was that it almost became an
00:15:02
inevitability that I was starting the company unless so a choice because it was like all I was thinking about in my
00:15:08
free time you know the things you do the things you think about before bed or in a shower you know the Quiet Moments
00:15:15
throughout life I think those are pretty telling and what role has that played that
00:15:21
obsession with that with solving the problem and solving that challenge and your general interest in it what role
00:15:26
has that played in your hardest times as in when things get really [ __ ] difficult and it's easy to quit
00:15:34
if you're someone that's authentically driven and authentically curious about that thing
00:15:40
must make it somewhat easier to carry on I think for sure it pulls you through like the the
00:15:47
obsession of solving a problem pulls you through I mean I struggled though for years uh
00:15:53
with building whoop it was it was really really painful and I think an important
00:16:00
thing for any entrepreneur but especially was for me was to disassociate my own identity from that
00:16:07
of the companies if you're and you you've been a young entrepreneur so you know this
00:16:15
like as a young entrepreneur I think a lot of your identity all of a sudden gets tied up in that thing you're
00:16:21
creating and for me that meant if woop was having a good day I was
00:16:26
having a good day if whoop was having a bad day I was having a bad day um and if whoop was failing I was
00:16:32
failing and that's a very unhealthy Association but it's also not true like literally
00:16:40
you can be taking great steps to improve as a leader or as a manager or even as a
00:16:45
recruiter and certain things will happen that may put your business sideways and conversely I'm sure you and I have
00:16:52
both met Founders entrepreneurs who have watched their company go like this but meanwhile they're spinning out of
00:16:58
control right and I think the faster that I could separate those two
00:17:04
identities my own and whoop the easier it actually became to build a successful
00:17:10
company is part of the reason you also our identity becomes attached to the company
00:17:16
because I was thinking about why that was that was definitely the case for me and the answer was because my entire net
00:17:24
worth was was this thing as well so coming from a background where I didn't have money my family didn't have money my entire net worth was this thing that
00:17:30
was going well so you can see how if the company starts to struggle it's like Steve's actually broken well I had that
00:17:37
too for auditory then some in some respects I still have it today just like given the nature of the yeah of the
00:17:43
value of the business the key uh the key at least for me in building the business
00:17:48
was Finding ways for myself to manage stress to manage uh the
00:17:56
difficulties that come with building a company without finding myself on that yoyo of the company's performance right
00:18:02
it can't be that uh if the company has a great day you're feeling like a rocket
00:18:07
ship and if the company's having a bad day you're feeling down and so a lot of my I think growth as an entrepreneur has
00:18:15
been figuring out how to have a steady hand and how to you know sort of stay calm through the chaos chaos yeah how
00:18:23
have you done that a few different things um I think the first uh and probably the
00:18:30
most profound for me in general has been learning how to meditate so in 2014 so I was about 24 years old
00:18:40
the company was maybe I don't know 30 or 40 people
00:18:46
um I think I'd raised maybe 20 million dollars something like that which certainly felt like a lot of money and
00:18:51
uh and I felt like I was really failing like as a leader I was super stressed
00:18:57
out I was drinking too much and uh and I remember having what I would later learn
00:19:03
was a panic attack um you know and I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a
00:19:10
sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they like are a
00:19:16
little bit numb you have this taste in your mouth I actually thought I'd been food poisoned because of the feeling was
00:19:22
so unusual outrageous and uh and so I drove
00:19:27
I actually drove myself to the hospital and I checked into the hospital and they
00:19:33
do um you know all these analysis on me and like it turns out I just had a panic attack but the fact that I end up in the
00:19:40
hospital from panic attack I was like all right wait a sec like I gotta really reset how I'm building this company and
00:19:46
growing and uh two days later I signed up for this meditation course
00:19:52
Transit on meditation and uh I've been doing it like every single day since
00:19:58
then about yeah about eight and a half years later when I sit here with CEOs who many of
00:20:04
which have had panic attacks yeah funny funny enough um and they'd talk to me about meditation I always seem to get a
00:20:10
similar response which I can't meditate my head's too busy for that well I think the busier your mind is the
00:20:16
more you need to meditate I so I learned how to meditate in 2014 and
00:20:24
I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well
00:20:30
um there's sort of a four-week check mark I think there's like a four month or maybe a one-year check mark and then
00:20:36
there's four years plus which is fortunately where I am today and the fascinating thing is
00:20:43
what you first observe in meditating um and I should just sort of clarify
00:20:48
what kind of meditation I'm doing so I spend about 22 minutes every morning doing this and you literally are
00:20:56
um you're breathing but then you start repeating a mantra and the idea of the Mantra is to start
00:21:01
clearing your mind out and you're just focusing on the Mantra but what inevitably happens is thoughts start to
00:21:07
drift in as you're saying the mantra and you get to have this moment where you
00:21:13
get to decide do I want to think about the thought or do I want to pass it along by going back
00:21:19
to the mantra so just right there in that moment you start to realize that you can filter your thoughts
00:21:25
you also get to choose to sit with certain thoughts right think how often
00:21:30
in your life you might have thoughts coming in you feel like you can't really control what you're thinking about right
00:21:36
you almost like don't have that Focus so that's the immediate benefit that you get that you feel while you're
00:21:43
meditating the more powerful benefit and this is what I meant about feeling certain
00:21:48
stages of having done it is at least for me it started to feel like I had a third
00:21:54
person you know sort of watching me and I would hear this voice in my head suddenly like
00:22:01
when I was about to get angry or when I was about to be upset or and it was sort of uh all of a sudden you're able to
00:22:08
sense what you're about to do or say before you do it so the immature version of me as an entrepreneur might find
00:22:16
himself saying things and being angry and reacting um and then sort of almost catching up
00:22:22
to the emotional state that I was in and trying to reel it back whereas the the
00:22:28
more meditated version of me I think has has been able to recognize
00:22:34
what I'm about to say something before I say it or feel something before I feel it and and that
00:22:40
it feels like a superpower did not grow over time that third person
00:22:45
ability with your Transcendental Meditation practice I think so I mean it's I imagine that
00:22:52
learning how to breathe and meditate is like any other skill and if you refine it for weeks versus months versus years
00:22:59
it it gets better and it's it's basically becoming conscious isn't it of what's going on in your mind you're
00:23:05
becoming more conscious of your thoughts and that their choices and you're not them yeah exactly I think it it's at
00:23:12
least helped me stay more in control of of my actions my feelings decisions I'm
00:23:19
making and and I really recommend it to anyone like I think it's I think it's a game
00:23:24
changer 2014 you cite um in a few things you've you've spoken on um as being a very
00:23:31
difficult year that's when you had as you said 20 to 30 employees you'd raise 20 million things were pretty crazy in
00:23:37
those early years um did you have doubt because when I think about the whoop story
00:23:45
it's competitor set are all massive [ __ ] Juggernauts and I've I've like from afar obviously when I got I got my
00:23:51
week two months ago I remember thinking how the [ __ ] have they done that in an environment where you've got these
00:23:57
big you know Steve Jobs founded companies and this company and they've all got billions and 200 billion in the
00:24:02
kitty yeah I'm like how did they get on my wrist how did they pierce and get you went into an incredibly competitive
00:24:09
market when you did that when you raised that 20 million did you have doubts about
00:24:15
yourself I think I developed doubts
00:24:20
um in managing the company like I always believed in the vision uh of what we set
00:24:27
out to build I mean dating to 2011 or 2012 when I was doing all the research like it was almost a straight shot from
00:24:35
2011 or 12 to today the paper I wrote In 2011 was titled the feedback tool
00:24:42
measuring intensity recovery and sleep and like literally today our three main metrics are strain recovery and sleep so
00:24:49
in terms of having a strong perspective on what the world should look like when the technology is built and actually
00:24:57
measuring all the things it needs to Super accurately I think building whoop was was more of a
00:25:03
straight line than than the average company where it was all kinds of zigs and zags
00:25:08
and chaos is uh learning one how to be a CEO and run the company to your point
00:25:16
learning how to navigate competition and we can talk more about that we've had some interesting experiences in that
00:25:22
category a big theme was actually being able to raise capital in part because of the competition right
00:25:28
like it was hard first of all for a number of years we were building the technology before we
00:25:34
ever were really generating Revenue and that's that's just a hard business to build and it also took us a lot
00:25:41
longer to get the product to Market than we thought it would right and so
00:25:46
you're in the scenario where you know you're you're saying to investors well we're getting there we're
00:25:53
getting there we're getting there and so the you know the first seven years of
00:25:58
the company I would say or enormously hard from just a technology development
00:26:04
standpoint from a capital raising standpoint in from a business generation standpoint because we you know we were
00:26:11
seven years in and then completely changed our business model on its head which was a bet the company moment you
00:26:17
know and uh and so there were just a lot it was a lot yeah and I told you at 22
00:26:24
the next was 22 when you founded the company yeah if I told you at 22 the next seven years would look like that
00:26:31
do you think you would have done it I think I would have done it yeah I mean
00:26:38
it was painful but I knew I was doing the right thing like I knew I was I knew I was in the right storm you know what I
00:26:44
mean like um there were a lot of feelings of being like my back against the wall
00:26:50
um there were a lot of feelings of uh doubt what were those feelings of doubt
00:26:57
you know are we going to get this thing to Market soon enough do are we going to figure out what the right way is to sell
00:27:02
it are we maturing as a as a team are we going to be able to attract more capital I mean again back to raising capital
00:27:09
we've raised about 400 million dollars in capital day but that's still
00:27:14
sense when you look at the companies we've been competing against to get to this stage and so I was I was nervous
00:27:21
about that piece of it and especially again as a young entrepreneur who's who is Raising capital for the first time
00:27:28
you said team and we there co-founders yeah how important is that in hindsight
00:27:34
because I feel like you don't find out the answer to how well you've chosen your co-founders until a couple of years
00:27:40
in yeah look I I had a great um CTO I had a great lead mechanical
00:27:47
engineer we've we've built the business together for 10 years or my CTO just just uh transitioned to new projects
00:27:55
but it's been an amazing ride and I think the the fact that we've been able to build
00:28:02
this technology that has you know through a variety of different uh third
00:28:07
parties been credited as being the most accurate wearable in the market speaks to the the technical chops of of the
00:28:15
founding team and I I don't take credit for that uh so I think it's uh it's a
00:28:21
remarkable accomplishment and I think it's also important when you're building a founding team to have a a fairly clear
00:28:28
set of responsibilities I get a little nervous when I hear of a founding team
00:28:34
and they're both like the business guy or they're both like the technical guy and kind of the same thing you know the
00:28:41
the advantage that we had in starting the company was each category of thing that we were trying to do was so hard
00:28:48
like inventing a wearable that could measure uh hurry variability as
00:28:54
accurately as an electrocardiogram or raise Capital at a time that you know
00:29:00
Nike e and apple and you know a dozen other companies were entering the space like
00:29:06
if I struggled with raising Capital like I wasn't gonna have a partner giving me a hard time if he struggled with
00:29:12
building the technology I wasn't going to give him a hard time like we just knew it was hard uh and we also knew
00:29:19
that the other wasn't going to be better at it so I think that there was an element of complementary uh skill sets
00:29:25
that's helpful if you were giving someone advice on how to pick a co-founder in terms of the
00:29:30
character traits that you look for in that person what would you suggest that they look for because it's a question I get asked all the time our co-founders
00:29:37
it's probably some combination of commitment intensity and humility
00:29:43
um the commitment piece is really important because
00:29:50
you're going to have a lot of very difficult things happen in the first six months let alone the first six years
00:29:56
and so you want to know that this person's committed to doing this and it's going to be hardcore and no matter
00:30:02
what happens we're going to get through it you know I I think startups really
00:30:07
only fail if the founders quit or you run out of money so like if you can overcome those two things
00:30:14
you've got a pretty good shot and and so commitment's critical and
00:30:19
then intensity and humility that's what I just generally look for in anyone that that I work for or work with you want
00:30:25
hard driving people you want people who recognize that it's going to take an enormous amount of work and discipline
00:30:32
to develop whatever product or service it is that you're creating for the first
00:30:37
time but you also want along the way um to have people who recognize that
00:30:43
with that intensity and with that intelligence with that depth they have the humility to recognize that
00:30:51
they may not have all the answers and in particular when you're building a company and a small company at that that
00:30:57
has a lot of different departments that intersect and then in the case of whoop I mean Hardware software analytics data
00:31:05
regulatory design marketing whatever you could have a meeting with four different
00:31:10
departments and it's really just four people and all of a sudden there's this massive Collision around how we're going
00:31:16
to send data from a whoop strap to an iPhone and like the product person has their
00:31:22
own perspective the iOS engineer has his own perspective you know the the Bluetooth expert has their perspective
00:31:28
the engineer has the mechanical engineer's own perspective and so there's this natural Collision of how
00:31:33
should we solve this problem and I think when you build teams with high humility they tend to come out with the answer
00:31:40
that's best for the company not like I came up with it so that would I think that's a pretty
00:31:47
good starting point commitment intensity humility when you think about the the most
00:31:53
difficult times so I know that you would have been through many many difficult times but when you when when I say that
00:31:58
when I say the most difficult time maybe a day maybe a piece of news you got
00:32:04
an email is there something that comes to mind as the most difficult day time moment well
00:32:10
there is a period of time of about 18 months where whoop never had more than
00:32:16
three months of Runway of cash in the bank yeah wow so picture that right because
00:32:23
um you know so much of building a business is having the runway to strategize and grow and recruit and and
00:32:32
I had the company had gotten into a weird moment where
00:32:38
we were still doing Innovative things but we hadn't found the next investor to
00:32:44
sort of carry the company through to the to the Future uh to a future round or
00:32:49
you know give us two years of Runway which is sort of what you'd want for any Capital injection and
00:32:56
we were making some deals happen there were there were compelling things happening in the business and so we were
00:33:01
able to stitch along a number of uh Investments but never enough capital and
00:33:09
so I just felt this enormous weight on my shoulders man like it was it was so
00:33:15
intense and uh and it also was it was a company size that you know it's one
00:33:22
thing to say okay 18 months and you never have more than three months of Runway something you said when you're like a 10 person team like we were like
00:33:29
a 50 70 person team something like that so you know that you feel a lot of responsibility as well when you're
00:33:35
operating through a period and essentially it got to the point where
00:33:42
um if we didn't get uh essentially a term sheet signed uh on a Wednesday
00:33:50
uh we were gonna go bankrupt on that Friday or file for bankruptcy on that Friday so imagine like two days from
00:33:57
from it all going away and I remember writing uh like even writing a note to
00:34:04
all of our investors about what a journey it had been and thank you like I
00:34:09
felt all the feelings of the company had failed without the company having failed and fortunately was able to get the deal
00:34:15
done on that day and uh yeah I'm so glad I did I've been there
00:34:20
I've been there for multiple payrolls I told this funny story about it being Payday on that day in the bank not our
00:34:27
bank at the time not releasing the funds we have 200 people um and them saying they'll only release the funds on that Friday when everyone's
00:34:34
expecting payment if I get a contract signed by one of our clients so I'm in London having drinks with this
00:34:40
client and we get to like you know a certain point at lunch but I'm like you wouldn't mind signing this contract send
00:34:46
it off but multiple times especially running a B2B agency business that was growing cash is always 60 days away
00:34:51
you've got to pay your bills today but what's the personal toll on you in those moments
00:34:56
that people don't see well I look back on that whole period
00:35:03
with like immense gratitude because it being able to overcome that and being
00:35:09
able to essentially pull through in a circumstance where I think almost uh any
00:35:15
other business would have failed it just it reframed for me going
00:35:21
forwards what it means to be facing a challenge like that was a real existential challenge like this whole thing's going
00:35:27
away we're all going home the technology is worth nothing right that's a that's like poof and so now it's like
00:35:36
okay the sales were lower this month in the last month or this great person on
00:35:42
our team got poached by that company or this epic competitor came out with this product like
00:35:48
there's there's some level of perspective that comes with all of those
00:35:53
you know big challenges because I just remember being able to work through the what I
00:35:59
deemed to be one of the biggest challenges did you get anxiety through that period
00:36:04
totally but I I also like I was able to build a whole lifestyle and process to
00:36:10
approach um stress and I do think that success
00:36:15
may come for people when they overcome a level of stress that would break most people
00:36:21
and so I'm a little critical of how um pop culture likes to talk about
00:36:28
stress which is if you're stressed you know take on way less of it right and
00:36:35
that that may be true in small doses but what we really want to learn is how to
00:36:41
cope with stress and how to manage through it and how to overcome it and I think also if you're stressed about
00:36:48
something it's also a signal that it matters to you and it's important right
00:36:53
so uh look it was that period of time was
00:36:59
uh enormously stressful painful
00:37:04
um I felt like I had to keep some of it to myself versus burden like a larger
00:37:09
team with it you know so that there's certain burdens I do think that um CEOs or leaders or entrepreneurs
00:37:17
carry or you're almost compartmentalizing something and you know you're gonna have to
00:37:23
to feel it I'm sure you know what that feels like yeah of course I think you know I did
00:37:30
that for my entire career and then I think the shift I've seen in in culture with leaders was covid when a lot of
00:37:37
companies the facts were clear like we have to close down if you're a High Street brand for example we have to close the doors so that's when I think a
00:37:44
lot of CEOs started being more honest with the state of play with their team members and would say things like listen
00:37:49
we're gonna have to let half the team go and this is how much money we have in the bank if we don't get here then we're gonna have to close down I I saw a big
00:37:55
shift then and it inspired me a lot about being transparent with my teams but I mean for the whole of my professional
00:38:01
career yeah I just come I just Brave face it was like you would have no idea if it was the best day or the worst day
00:38:06
because my face was the same so you got good at holding it in 100 but my business partner didn't and he became an
00:38:13
alcoholic so he as he's talked about many times he turned to alcohol us we lived in the same house together sure
00:38:19
and he would I there were times when I went downstairs at 3am and went into the laundry room and he was there drinking yeah and you know so we were we were
00:38:26
both coping in different ways I was kind of compartmentalizing and kind of just I called it a video game mindset where
00:38:31
it's what you've talked about I was I was holding the controller I think my business partner was inside the game yeah you know what I mean as in like
00:38:38
there was a a chord between me and what was going on did you develop any like lifestyle hacks
00:38:45
um I've got to be honest no not at the time and now I think I have more
00:38:53
but at the time no I was just trying to get to the next day and I
00:38:59
think I have a natural sort of predisposition to in the worst moments
00:39:04
ever just purely focusing on what I can control part of me which bother is a big deal yeah yeah I I only know this in
00:39:11
hindsight because I wonder why in honor if I told you about the worst day we ever had in the business years later my business partner says why
00:39:18
were you so calm on that day well well I had very few choices so not the worst day we ever had in the
00:39:23
company my choices were so small and they were so obvious as they often are it's like if the room's on fire like
00:39:29
the doors over there and the buttons there I think about that all the time as like are you controlling all the
00:39:34
controllables and often if you are or even just you know
00:39:40
setting sitting down in your mind or even putting on paper hey what are all the things I control about the situation
00:39:45
what are things I don't that can be a very calming exercise it's very focusing yeah even talk about that
00:39:51
day we made the cash flow problem I knew what my objective was get this guy to sign this piece of paper yeah what's there to worry about I have no time to
00:39:58
worry so um so yeah that was a but you developed lifestyle hacks to help you
00:40:05
we talked about meditation which was a big one um
00:40:11
exercise big one uh I got into hot cold transitions
00:40:19
gratitude's a big one so take me through your day then because I think this will reveal a lot of your
00:40:25
habits sure so let's take a a given day in Boston yeah
00:40:33
the day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting
00:40:38
into a a framework for you know the next day
00:40:43
um a few days a week I work out with a trainer early in the morning so I'll
00:40:48
actually pack everything up for that well I've got my my workout clothes out I'll have the what I'm gonna wear to
00:40:54
work the next day um I'll I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm gonna
00:41:02
focus on the next day and and then like sleep because you know
00:41:08
building whoop you think a lot about sleep I uh you know I sleep in a really cold
00:41:14
bedroom uh really dark bedroom why cold and dark
00:41:19
it's just shown to give you higher quality sleep yeah and I try to go to bed at a
00:41:25
somewhat consistent time this is a little trickier because my wife's kind of a night owl and I like to go to bed a
00:41:31
little earlier but uh so I'll probably go to bed between I don't know 11 30 and midnight and then I'll wake up at around
00:41:39
6 30 and controversial question about your wife then does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed it
00:41:46
doesn't because we have uh we've got good intimacy like we've got good bad
00:41:52
cuddle habits you know it's like a cuddling ton yeah yeah we we
00:41:58
we've done a good job co-existing in a bedroom environment although that's an interesting thing you can track on whoop
00:42:04
so if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner you can literally record that in
00:42:11
the whoop journal in the app uh so in a second I want to hear what's in your
00:42:16
movement well you probably check while you're chagging against uh so
00:42:23
cold room a consistent bedtime um
00:42:28
yeah and then I wake up and I'm like out the door really quick shower workout
00:42:33
clothes got my stuff I always give my wife kisses before I leave that's like a nice relationship hack uh while she's
00:42:41
while she's sleeping and then uh I work out for an hour with my trainer I'll do
00:42:47
uh steam room after that freezing cold shower I do a breakfast that's mostly
00:42:54
like egg whites it's mostly proteins like egg whites like avocado bacon that
00:43:00
kind of stuff two points there so the first was working out in the morning yeah is there any like dates where
00:43:05
science around that being advantageous so back to being able to control the controllables I like to work out in the
00:43:12
morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to
00:43:17
okay what I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning and I'm supposed to pill I like squash
00:43:24
that evening and then a couple things come up around 6 p.m and all of a sudden
00:43:30
I realize I'm not gonna get out the door and so then you know you know you don't exercise so the nice thing about working
00:43:35
out first is like okay I've checked that box and then the other thing was this the cold water
00:43:41
cold water yeah talk to me about why you do that and how that helps so
00:43:46
there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy
00:43:51
even if in the moment they're a little painful and uh for me being in the cold is one of those things like I feel a
00:43:58
huge jolt of adrenaline from it uh it also forces me to breathe properly and I
00:44:06
think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces You to Breathe properly is good for you uh and
00:44:14
then I feel kind of happy after doing it like like this little injection of happiness and so I end a hundred percent
00:44:21
of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible the colder the better
00:44:27
and then the the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect depending on where I am
00:44:32
is uh I mean there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a
00:44:38
sauna a few days a week it is likely to increase longevity
00:44:44
I would say I like the cold more than the hot but anyway all right Sam the opposite
00:44:50
my my girlfriend is a breath practitioner oh okay Coach so obviously you understand what comes with that and
00:44:55
cold water is a big part of what she um encourages on me so she jumps in these ice baths and I'm like I'm trying not to
00:45:02
feel amazing I might put my toe in and I'm like coming up with reasons but now she's got me into it so so what kind of
00:45:08
breath work do you do um I didn't even know the name of it she's got her own method she teaches
00:45:14
classes she's doing classes in London at the moment big groups one-on-one sessions she's doing
00:45:19
um she does sessions with lots of people that come on this podcast in fact oh cool because they end up getting getting
00:45:24
to know her so but yeah I don't know what type of breath work it is but it's an hour in a room
00:45:30
like the yeah the double inhale yeah Game Changer
00:45:36
just yeah I think they're cool I think it's amazing yeah that's a huge industry that's that's feels like a wave coming
00:45:42
into Shore because this word breath work showed up like 18 24 months ago over here and now it's everywhere with like
00:45:47
Wim Hof that's a good point I mean Wim Hof yeah I think Wim Hoff pushed a lot
00:45:53
of it especially around the cold and I look I think it's taking off for a
00:45:59
good reason in part because again back to controlling things you can control you can literally control your breath in
00:46:05
a second and there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things
00:46:11
that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability and heart rate
00:46:19
variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system it's
00:46:24
the amount of time between successive beats of the heart so it's a little confusing but if your heart beats at 60
00:46:30
beats per minute it's not beating every second like it might be 0.7 seconds and then 1.3 seconds and then 0.6 seconds
00:46:37
and 1.4 seconds and it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing
00:46:44
because it's a sign that your body is able to regulate in its environment and your autonomic nervous system
00:46:51
literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity now sympathetic
00:46:58
is activation so that's heart rate up blood pressure up respiration up
00:47:04
um often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising right now parasympic
00:47:10
is all the opposite hurry down blood pressure down respiration down it's what helps you fall asleep
00:47:16
but where this all comes back to breath work is literally inhaling
00:47:22
that's sympathetic that's parasympathetic
00:47:28
so just by controlling your breathing you can decide whether you want to be
00:47:33
sympathetic dominant parasympic dominant you can increase your heart rate variability you can decrease it and
00:47:39
that's something that's in your control and heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a
00:47:46
lens into how restored your body is I noticed that because my friend Logan
00:47:51
said he went up for a night out he got drunk it was a yeah yeah and then he
00:47:57
screenshotted his his whoop dashboard the next day and was and put it into our chat and went [ __ ] because everything
00:48:04
was red and and he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important but I couldn't quite
00:48:09
understand um and I remember trying to trying to read about why it was important but I knew you were coming here so I thought
00:48:15
I'd ask you myself because you I've heard you talk about the importance of heart rate variability I understand now what it is but why is it such an
00:48:22
important indicator and what are the things that we do that make it plummet so the fascinating thing about hard
00:48:28
variability is it's been measured since like roughly the the 80s and
00:48:34
the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that uh Olympic power lifters were using heart
00:48:40
rate variability to determine how much they should lift So based on whether they had a low or high heart rate
00:48:46
variability in the morning and they'd get hooked up to an electrocardiogram like this is an intense thing and then they would go decide how much they were
00:48:53
going to lift based on what their reading was I think that's kind of interesting turned out cyclists were doing it in the 80s the CIA was using
00:49:00
heart rate variability for lie detection tests doctors cardiologists were using heart
00:49:06
rate variability to predict whether former heart failure patients were going to have a heart attack again
00:49:12
so I'm thinking about myself this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of that feels like everyone should be measuring and uh and so that's
00:49:21
really that was one of the core insights in building whoop was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability
00:49:26
continuously and in particular it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's
00:49:34
Readiness and uh how well you're sleeping so those are two ways that whoop is primarily using heart rate
00:49:41
variability uh you know things that decrease heart rate variability uh dehydration bad diet
00:49:49
we just talked about alcohol um heavy exercise uh you know heavy uh
00:49:57
psychological stress often people are surprised how just The Wrong conversation with their
00:50:03
partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep out of whack or their heart rate variability
00:50:09
out of whack so it's a very powerful statistic it's a fascinating statistic and I'm mostly got
00:50:15
like a lot more people are measuring it it seems to know us before we know ourselves to know how to describe it one
00:50:23
of the things I would say in building whoop is uh feelings are overrated there are things
00:50:29
happening in your body that you can't feel and I think heart rate variability is one of those one of those key
00:50:35
indicators where for most people it'd be very hard to know what their heart rate variability was saying in any given
00:50:41
moment but uh it has turned out to be a good
00:50:46
embodiment of what whoop does which is that feelings are overrated I say that because I remember looking at my heart
00:50:53
rate variability and seeing it was orange or red I can't remember and then asking myself why and I go oh yeah I
00:50:58
know why because I was really I think I was really stressed that day I hadn't slept and then I hadn't slept because we
00:51:03
had a back to back to back schedule so I was going to sleep at 4am and waking up at 8am for like three days in a row and
00:51:09
my heart rate variability just seemed to plummet and that was when I speak to my sister and I go listen we need to no
00:51:15
meetings before 11 because I need to sleep um and it knew me before I and it's funny because it yeah it it changed my
00:51:22
life by telling me something that maybe I wasn't listening to it changed my routine by telling me
00:51:27
something that was clear maybe from a subjective objective standpoint but I clearly was ignoring thinking that I was
00:51:34
invincible I think covid-19 was a big wake-up call for people in that category
00:51:40
right of um of feelings are overrated because here you have a virus that you can get
00:51:48
that you don't feel you're not even sick and yet you give it
00:51:53
to someone else and they get deathly ill we had a fascinating relationship with covid-19 in being able to measure it
00:52:01
because we detected a statistic called respiratory rate being super elevated
00:52:06
but I can't tell you how many screenshots and messages I've gotten over the last two years if people seeing
00:52:12
this huge spike in their respiratory rate you know two three days before ultimately testing positive for covid
00:52:19
and it reaffirmed in a lot of ways the founding story of the company although
00:52:24
in a different direction it wasn't about not knowing that you should train today or rest today it was about not knowing
00:52:30
that you were sick it speaks to the potential of Health monitoring and why it's so exciting
00:52:36
another conversation I've been having recently with a friend is about blocking out certain types of light I
00:52:42
heard you do that yeah so uh blue light essentially what emits from a cell phone
00:52:48
a television set an iPad I mean blue lights frankly all around us and blue
00:52:54
light essentially tells your brain to stay awake and so one way to offset that is to not be on
00:53:02
devices into the evening but you know I'm still I think largely optimizing my
00:53:07
life around being a great entrepreneur or or uh CEO so for me that doesn't
00:53:12
quite feel like an option yet or I haven't quite built that level of maturity but what I do do is I I wear these blue
00:53:19
light blocking glasses which have a red tint to them and uh it's like a get out
00:53:24
of jail free card for using devices into the evening and uh and then they start to make you sleepy
00:53:31
it's probably the single biggest thing that's boosted my REM and slow wave
00:53:37
sleep on woop is is wearing blue light blocking glasses it's worth emphasizing for a second like
00:53:43
for your audience why that matters so if you spend like seven hours in bed
00:53:50
you're not actually getting seven hours of sleep right and if you think about
00:53:55
the seven hours you spent in bed it's divided up of time in which you're awake you're in light sleep you're in slow
00:54:02
wave sleep or you're in REM sleep and awake and light sleep as stages go
00:54:08
really are kind of irrelevant like they don't do much for your body physiologically they're not restorative
00:54:14
but REM and slow wave sleep that's like where all the magic happens so REM sleep is when your mind is repairing
00:54:20
cognitively it's when you'll have uh deep dreams so people who say they don't
00:54:25
remember their dreams or they don't dream they probably aren't getting enough REM sleep so for human beings REM sleep is like critical right because
00:54:32
that's cognitive repair slow wave sleep that's when your body produces about like 95 of its human growth hormone is
00:54:39
that deep sleep on woop yeah yeah and so you know people think they're getting stronger going to the gym right really
00:54:46
you're just breaking down your muscles when you go to the gym you actually get stronger when you go to bed during slow wave sleep because you're producing all
00:54:52
your human growth hormone so just to zoom out if you're someone who's spending seven hours in bed
00:54:59
it might be that you get a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep of
00:55:04
those seven hours it could also be that you get like five and a half hours
00:55:10
out of those seven hours and often when you talk to people about sleep they're like I just don't have time blah blah
00:55:15
blah we're not even talking about more time we're just saying how do you take the seven hours that you're in bed and
00:55:22
make them way better and uh and so for me blue light blocking classes was one of those things there's
00:55:28
a couple others but yeah this was the thing that made me fall in love with my whoop I remember getting eight hours
00:55:34
sleep waking up and feeling great looking at my whoop and it said you'd had three hours REM sleep and be going yeah smashed it that's nice yeah and
00:55:41
then a couple of days later or the next day getting eight hours sleep waking up and feeling like [ __ ] looking at my
00:55:47
whooping it said oh you've got 30 minutes or something and me going ah there is it because you think oh I spent eight hours in bed so I must have had
00:55:54
yeah as you say like eight hours sleep but it's j when you once you see that
00:55:59
you can't unsee it it's like this whole 29 years of my life I've been like I've
00:56:05
misunderstood something so foundational about my entire life and the fun thing is you can optimize it like once you
00:56:11
measure it you can manage it yeah I kept my girlfriend at the bed I said goodbye well you don't have to go yeah you don't
00:56:17
have to be that extreme but it's uh yeah I do think it's empowering and like sweeps about a third of your life
00:56:24
be good to take care of that third too but just the the difference I see on a
00:56:30
on a day where I've just had bad REM sleep or bad deep sleep versus the days when I've had good like my performance
00:56:35
my mood everything is so different it's a completely different human being also there's a fascinating phenomenon
00:56:42
too as it relates to stress so research shows that the more REM sleep you get the less heightened your
00:56:49
amygdala response is Right amygdala is like fight or flight right and so if you
00:56:56
get a ton of REM sleep it essentially softens your amygdala um it it makes it
00:57:02
less active uh funny enough I did a a podcast with Alex Honnold do you know who that is so
00:57:09
Alex honnold's the famous uh rock climber who did free solo Oh you know
00:57:14
that documentary yeah yeah so he scales this crazy uh you know slab of of mountain without a without a rope and he
00:57:22
also happened to wear a whoop and so I was talking to him about uh risk and fear and all these sort of
00:57:30
different concepts stress but uh it turns out that he gets like four and a
00:57:36
half to five hours of REM sleep a night on woop and I was thinking like how perfect is
00:57:43
it that a guy who literally can rock climb and risk dying every single day
00:57:49
has this like unbelievable uh outlier also ability to get REM sleep of course
00:57:54
and could those two things be related the other time that I wasn't familiar with until I got away was this idea of
00:58:00
strain I I'm gonna be honest I we talked a little bit before we started recording about my little fitness group yeah the
00:58:06
way the fitness group is designed is that it's but you get it's like a league table it's rewarded on consistency we
00:58:12
call it the fitness blockchain so there's 10 of us in it if you lose you get kicked out of the group and someone who gets put in every month
00:58:17
it's quite vicious you get put into another group you have to wait for three months before you get one chance of getting back in if you don't you go into
00:58:22
what we call chump hell story it's like a hardcore like fantasy football yeah it's crazy um we track it we track a lot
00:58:29
of things you have to submit your workouts every day as well and then someone verifies Etc
00:58:34
um strain currently in that group you're rewarded for working out every day
00:58:41
is that a good thing well
00:58:49
the way that we think about strain is to balance it alongside recovery
00:58:55
so the average amateur
00:59:00
uh exerciser let's call it the weekend warrior uh probably has workouts that look too
00:59:08
consistent in terms of intensity or too consistent in terms of strain so whoop
00:59:14
has a scale from 0 to 21 on whoop that might look like a 12. or like a 13. like
00:59:19
so every time they work out it's a 13. and the reality is when your body's run
00:59:25
down maybe you don't want to do anything or maybe you should go for a walk like just let your body recover give yourself the
00:59:32
permission to catch a breather but if your body's peaking like go crush it right take on a 16 or a
00:59:41
17 or an 18. and I should also say that you know strain is essentially looking at
00:59:47
the amount of time that your body is in an elevated heart rate zone so we're talking about a primarily
00:59:54
cardiovascular measurement of stress that you're putting on your body for any period of time
01:00:00
but back to your question like you probably don't want to do
01:00:05
a high strain every single day unless your body's freakishly recovering and there are people who do that but they're
01:00:11
mostly like professional triathletes or whatever and you also want to try to vary the in
01:00:17
the The Strain level so if you're at a 50 recovery maybe you're doing a 10 if you're at a 75
01:00:23
recovery you're doing a 16 or 17 or an 18. and a lot of this goes back to
01:00:29
in building the product we wanted to make it actionable a lot of wearables maybe V1 wearables
01:00:36
sort of told you what happened we were very focused on telling you what to do next and how you can
01:00:43
uh get better on that point of recovery then how if I if I'm training a lot
01:00:48
um how can I improve my recovery outside of sleep a lot of it would be diet and hydration
01:00:55
uh potentially supplements if you're taking them making sure you're taking the right ones
01:01:01
um because if you're taking the wrong supplements that's actually a lot worse for you than taking none uh
01:01:06
you know I think some type of mindfulness or meditation or breath work speeds up
01:01:13
recovery that's that's my own bias uh we certainly see uh sleep consistency so
01:01:20
that's less about what you're doing during sleep but actually more just routine so going to bed and waking up at
01:01:26
similar times even exercising at a similar time may help you recover faster because your
01:01:32
body's getting used to it of all the of all the metrics that attract on the whoop is heart rate
01:01:38
variability the one you love the most well on a personal level it was
01:01:46
the thing that jumped off the page to me you know
01:01:52
10 years before it became even remotely mainstream so I feel some
01:01:58
relationship with it in the sense that like I saw there was a lot of potential for this thing
01:02:06
on a on a whoop level the product does now measure a lot of different things very well so I don't
01:02:13
want to say that any one statistic is the Silver Bullet I think a lot of it is collecting all of this information in a
01:02:21
form fact in a format by the way that you're willing to wear 24 7 which has its own challenges we can talk about uh
01:02:29
and then creating scores or creating messaging to an end user that that gets
01:02:35
them to change Behavior gets them to improve health that to me is the if you think about the Pyramid of you know sort
01:02:41
of challenging things the tip of the pyramid is a product that is changing your behavior and improving your health
01:02:47
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01:03:42
out more I've had so many people tag me on Instagram even on Telegram and in my
01:03:48
Twitter DMs in a picture of them starting their heal journey and it's one of the most amazing things in my life
01:03:54
that I get to do a podcast which of course needs money to to fuel and I have a sponsor like Hill who I genuinely
01:04:00
believe is going to help every single person who starts their heel Journey change their life because this podcast
01:04:06
the central intention of this podcast is to help people live better lives it gives me my protein it gives me my
01:04:12
vitamins minerals it's plant-based it's low in sugar gluten free it does all of that in a small drink that tastes good
01:04:19
there are other products there's Foods there's the hot and savory collection many other things but for me this ready
01:04:24
to drink is the absolute savior of my diet throughout the week where I'm moving at such Pace look I don't want to
01:04:30
labor the point but if you haven't tried he'll give it a try and if you do tag me Instagram wherever you try it give me a
01:04:37
tag anyway back to the podcast your company um the business you've built
01:04:44
I heard that your employees that would get a bonus if their sleep is considered to be good on their whoop how much truth
01:04:51
is there to that it's a fun uh it's a fun employee perk that we came up with
01:04:58
so everyone on woop is on a team together and you can opt into What's called the
01:05:05
Sleep bonus and if you get 85 percent uh sleep performance on average throughout
01:05:12
the month uh you get a hundred dollar bonus like on your pay stock and so it's
01:05:18
it's mostly uh it's mostly a fun thing but it does speak to our culture which
01:05:24
is using the data we have in front of us uh promoting uh sleep and good habits
01:05:31
actually during covid we also came up with the red recovery policy which was
01:05:37
because we had a lot of people actually coming into the office during even during the peaks of covid because we
01:05:42
built Hardware accessories supply chain things that you kind of have to do in person very physical things and so the
01:05:48
red recovery policy was that if you had a red recovery you actually uh needed to stay home
01:05:56
because either you are getting sick or you are at risk of getting sick because your body was run down so again fun fun
01:06:04
ways to use the data in an actionable way and and you know build it into the
01:06:09
culture when you talk about why your company has done so well and it has one you talk
01:06:15
about there being a more Scrappy kind of nature to the team which sounds more like innovation
01:06:22
how does one go about as your company grows keeping that Innovation that's so Central to you winning because with
01:06:30
growth often cut becomes like I don't know things move slower you know bureaucracy before being for Jenny's
01:06:36
come back from annual leave what are you doing from a culture standpoint I think one of the reasons whoop has
01:06:42
been successful is we had a pretty clear perspective on what we were building and
01:06:48
why and the consequence of that is also what you're not building right like whoop is graded all the
01:06:55
things that it does for all the things that it doesn't do we are
01:07:00
not a smart watch we don't allow you to download a bunch
01:07:05
of apps we don't receive phone calls you can't flag an Uber with your whoop right but when it comes to health
01:07:13
monitoring we're the best game in town and that
01:07:18
really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve and it carried us through to today
01:07:27
there were a lot of counter-intuitive decisions along that like along that Journey
01:07:33
um one obvious one is that whoop is not a watch uh and I can't tell you how many people
01:07:39
have asked for whoop to be a watch and the reason it's not a watch is is there's a few different reasons but just
01:07:45
by putting the time on it all of a sudden you've created this enormous competitive landscape and competing with watches is hard like
01:07:52
there's a lot of beautiful watches there's also a lot of watches that serve different functions watch also says a lot about your
01:07:58
identity the other thing about a watch and you'll notice this from every technology
01:08:04
company is the second there's a screen there's this enormous scope creep that
01:08:10
occurs for what the product's actually meant to do and very quickly you're in a product
01:08:16
meeting where you're talking about email notifications and different screen colors and various ways to tell the time
01:08:23
and whether or not you're going to be able to give it voice memos and and all of a sudden you're talking nothing about health monitoring
01:08:29
and so if I look back and um you know over the last 10 years
01:08:34
we made these decisions so like we made a decision to not be a watch uh and not
01:08:39
have a screen on it we made a decision on the flip side though to invent a modular charger
01:08:45
where you could charge your move without ever taking it off and that was super expensive and took
01:08:51
you made the product take way longer and cost a bunch of hundred dollars but again it was back to that identity of
01:08:58
Health monitoring needs to be 24 7 to be the most effective and if you take it off all of a sudden it's not 24 7 you
01:09:04
might not put it back on so that was something we did that other people didn't do right
01:09:10
um everyone was measuring steps we didn't think steps was physiologically relevant
01:09:16
so we we tried to stay true to our identity and I think that helped us
01:09:21
navigate a competitive landscape where a lot of people were copying each other or
01:09:26
where companies may have had even too much resources and those resources got
01:09:32
them down you know into this very expansive place without being great at anything
01:09:37
focus and first principles is what I heard throughout that that what you said there the first principles point about
01:09:43
24 7 monitoring yeah that's like a totally first principles thought because you said well health is a 24 7 thing so
01:09:51
we have to create a solution we don't take the watch off convention says no just get charged and you take it off at night you put it by your bed and you
01:09:56
signal so that approach and that conviction towards like thinking for yourself about
01:10:03
this problem is much easier said than done for
01:10:08
companies like t i I feel like peop one of the you know in all facets of our life whether it's our relationships or
01:10:14
intimacy or friendships or building companies or how we construct teams thinking for yourself is what I heard
01:10:21
there um you say it so easily but it's wise it's impossible for people to do
01:10:27
especially when they're thinking about innovation because you know you had all those moments where why doesn't this have a
01:10:33
screen on it so also why I love it it's probably also why the battery lasts longer it's also why I'm so committed to it as you've identified but those are
01:10:40
all like first principles that came from whoop I think what
01:10:45
what's different about your product is also what makes it special and I think that true Innovation often comes from a
01:10:52
level of focus or discipline that's really uncomfortable like having said everything I just said
01:10:59
I still think about whoop as a watch on a near daily basis because
01:11:05
it's it's something that pulls at me you know because
01:11:10
I can see a world in which it is a watch but it's not a watch and I'm not building it as a watch you know what I
01:11:16
mean so there is this uh you know sort of painful level of
01:11:21
discipline that has to occur I think to be able to continue marching forwards and we actually went a different
01:11:27
direction where uh We've looked at invisible as a more compelling landscape so obviously you
01:11:35
can wear it on your wrist but you can actually you know take it apart and depending on what garments you're
01:11:42
wearing right so you take this clasp off you can now put this sensor into different places on your body so really
01:11:49
so yeah so we've come out with shorts uh boxers bras underwear uh uh shirts that
01:11:58
have it in your arm sleeve and so you can just tuck this into a little pocket that allows you to wear it in different
01:12:04
areas of the body I didn't know that so I could put up my boxer shorts lining yeah oh nice dope
01:12:10
yeah now also kind of crazy to start a wearables company and realize you're designing boxers but that goes back to
01:12:17
your first principal's point I suppose right yeah exactly why would you design boxers well because you need to create a
01:12:24
way for them to wear it 24 7. something else you said which I've never had anybody say before but it's so
01:12:30
unbelievably true is when people have bigger budgets when six like with success comes greater temptation to be
01:12:36
and do everything and become everyone and that's often when companies lose their way is because of their success everyone
01:12:43
goes well why don't we do we've got these customers now so why don't we do this and that and this and why don't we do it five of them
01:12:50
have you felt that temptation yeah absolutely I mean uh I think it's
01:12:56
that's probably the biggest way that success uh is a bad teacher is the degree to
01:13:04
which it makes you think you can go into a bunch of things and abandon the level
01:13:09
of intensity or Focus that you took in building the original thing to be successful
01:13:16
so but you know that doesn't stop me from dreaming of ways that the company can go
01:13:23
in totally different directions you just you have to check yourself like you really do have to check yourself and
01:13:29
make sure uh you've got the right level of focus if you're going to go into it that's been
01:13:36
one of my biggest mistakes is we become successful I then come up without new
01:13:41
ideas I then think more about the reward of the new ideas versus the actual cost
01:13:46
the cost of like mental time for the whole team the cost of like everyone waking up and being in the shine
01:13:52
thinking about a different problem and then we had a recent incidents where we spent I'm going to say nine months
01:13:58
planning something big big new thing in one of my companies
01:14:04
offered someone a job to be the CEO of this this new company and then I don't
01:14:09
know what it was something in my gut says you're doing it again Steve you're losing focus cancel it all and it's funny because my
01:14:16
team was so excited Jack was so excited we're all so excited about but when I had that conversation with everybody about why we were canceling this because
01:14:21
I know we should be focusing there was this weird jack because you know what I was so excited but I'm relieved and we
01:14:27
all knew we all knew we'd got carried away with thinking more about the reward of this
01:14:32
Focus than the cost of this Focus I think this focus is a thing but has that happened to you when you've like ran too
01:14:39
far down a path with a new idea and then range yourself back in because
01:14:45
you realize the cost of focus yeah I think there's there's been certain aspects of
01:14:51
product development you know go to market strategies where
01:14:58
you know it's the right thing even but you you're again you're not dedicating the right level of focus to
01:15:05
it or the team doesn't have the bandwidth for it or uh the timing's not quite right like
01:15:11
yeah I mean Focus I think is probably one of the most underrated
01:15:17
uh skills for any leader and not and I don't mean that just for them it's more important that they create an
01:15:24
environment of focus how does one do that if I if I join whoop how am I going to learn
01:15:32
on the day before I join the day I joined and thereafter every day why I'm
01:15:37
here this this Vision the focus how are you how are you teaching me that well a
01:15:42
lot of it comes back to the core mission of the company right which is to unlock Human Performance to improve health a
01:15:50
lot of it comes back to being really deliberate about the hardware that we build and why the accessories we build
01:15:56
and why a lot of it comes back to the fact that whoop is a subscription
01:16:03
right we haven't touched too much on the business model but transitioning the whole company and the
01:16:10
whole business model to being a subscription versus a one-time Hardware sale changed a lot for the company uh
01:16:17
but one thing that it it really changed uh for the better is the DNA around
01:16:22
launching new features launching new Analytics you're no longer trying to get a
01:16:28
customer on an 18-month cycle where you come out with the new widget or 12-month cycle where you come out with a new
01:16:34
widget you're trying to keep your customers every day right because every day they have a choice to cancel
01:16:39
and what in turn that does is it makes you very focused on releasing new features
01:16:46
that are adding value now you could have a like a conversation
01:16:52
that's two or three depths deeper than this which is around well should we go down the path of releasing these
01:16:57
features or those features do those features feel less focused than these features right but all of a sudden at
01:17:04
least we're two or three levels down in terms of focus and uh and so that's where a lot of the debates are taking
01:17:09
place is within the lens of our already focused Mission and and areas of
01:17:15
innovation should we pursue different categories or different features and I do I think like to think it's it's very
01:17:22
customer-centric because uh because we have this deep relationship with our members where
01:17:28
they're wearing the product 24 7. and I think rightfully so we have to earn
01:17:33
their their subscription every month competition
01:17:39
you've got some big competitors I mean I saw the I saw Apple's recent announcement that sleep is now going to
01:17:45
be part of the Apple watch one of the new Apple watches maybe on the Apple watch hate or something how do you think about competition and
01:17:51
what role is that that played in motivating you terrifying you all of these things
01:17:56
yeah so when whoop was starting uh Nike which is a company I looked up to
01:18:03
with great admiration I was just coming out with the Nike fuel band
01:18:08
uh Adidas was coming out with the me coach uh
01:18:15
Under Armor about a year or two later was going to spend a billion dollars
01:18:20
spends a billion dollars acquiring three different companies in the space they were coming out their own
01:18:26
wearable they bought a a Running Company um
01:18:31
a company called Endomondo a company called MyFitnessPal so they had a whole strategy around Health tracking
01:18:40
there was a company called uh Fitbit which was about to go public for you
01:18:46
know many billions of dollars a company called Jawbone which had raised a billion dollars
01:18:51
uh it was rumored Apple was entering the space it was rumored
01:18:57
um Microsoft was entering the space so competition was always in this backdrop
01:19:05
but I I found I never found myself that
01:19:10
um swayed by what the competition was doing in fact if there's any company I'm most
01:19:15
critical of their strategy in the wearable space it was Nike because Nike is
01:19:23
I think one of the best brands in the world and they built that brand have you read the book Shoe dog I haven't I
01:19:29
haven't it's a great book anyway it's Phil Knight's book but they built that brand by
01:19:35
uh storytelling and authenticity and the authenticity being the people who wore
01:19:41
their shoes ran faster and jumped higher and so that was the company I was the
01:19:48
most nervous about because I was afraid if they could build a wearable that their world's best athletes actually
01:19:54
wore they could then tell that story to the masses and be successful
01:19:59
but they took a huge shortcut and that shortcut was they just built a product they thought the mass Market
01:20:05
would like and so it wasn't a product that LeBron James was going to wear or Serena Williams or Tiger Woods I mean they had
01:20:11
all the best athletes in the world and so the clue to me that that product was going to fail was that
01:20:16
it didn't stick to their identity they didn't have the story at the top they didn't have any of their top athletes
01:20:23
wearing it and on the flip side the opportunity I saw
01:20:28
was if we could get the world's best athletes to wear whoop we could in turn
01:20:33
build our own brand around performance and around an aspirational product
01:20:40
and if you go back and like looking back on it that was a that was a very stubborn
01:20:45
perspective again and um you know even a little bit arrogant to say uh that
01:20:52
now we're going to build this technology and the world's best athletes are going to pay us for it because it's going to be that good
01:20:59
I also though think it was a fairly rational perspective because if you build a product that
01:21:05
someone needs to wear 24 7 and they don't love it there's no amount
01:21:10
of money you're going to be able to give them to keep that thing on their body let's be honest and in many ways I saw
01:21:16
that with the fuel band on the flip side if if you can really deliver value around
01:21:23
sleep or recovery or you know these measurements that at the time a professional athlete had never had
01:21:31
uh they're very very likely to pay for it because that's a huge value add in
01:21:37
their overall performance so that was our very early go to market strategy and it was also part of the way that we
01:21:43
differentiated ourselves from other products the last thing I'll say about this is and again inspired by Nike
01:21:51
the idea that you could build a brand or a product that says something about your
01:21:56
identity like the difference between a cotton shirt that's plain versus a cotton shirt with a swish on it like the
01:22:03
person who's wearing the switch feels something different the person who observes the person wearing the swoosh thinks something different that was a
01:22:09
phenomenon that resonated for me at a very young age but when I looked at the health monitoring landscape uh
01:22:17
to me it felt like Health monitoring was actually definitively not cool and wearing a health monitor there was
01:22:24
almost a stigma associated with it unfortunately so how can you build a technology that
01:22:30
people wear 24 7. that has a positive identity associated with it
01:22:36
and that goes again back to the professional athlete strategy if we can get the world's best athletes to authentically wear it then we can tell a
01:22:43
story about how health monitoring is aspirational it's interesting because I sat here with Scott Galloway earlier on and Scott
01:22:49
talked to me about how once upon a time maybe 30 years ago um because of the way we learned about
01:22:54
products and the lack of trip advisors and review sites and Amazon reviews the big the big companies could could
01:23:01
sell a fairly mediocre product based on just pumping advertising at like traditional advertising like TV and
01:23:07
stuff so you'd go out and buy the Procter and Gamble soap or whatever just because you'd been overwhelmed with
01:23:13
advertising from it in the modern era when we're all we have social media accounts and we have you know ways to
01:23:19
broadcast from the palm of our hands and we have WhatsApp so we can speak to our friends about ideas and products and stuff it's he was saying to me it's
01:23:26
become more about the product and actually being great then the advertising dollars spent so he
01:23:31
said it's no it's no um surprise that the biggest companies in the world like the Teslas they don't they don't advertise it's
01:23:38
about you telling me about how much you love your Tesla and the way that I came to learn about my whoop was my friend
01:23:44
Ash a year ago raving about it like you'd paid him I think you paid him
01:23:50
the way he was going on about it was like you had paid him personally that's great and then obviously you know and
01:23:57
then he eventually gets me into it and we have a fitness group so we start talking about it you can't pay for that
01:24:02
it's a better product and I think now more than ever that's become much more important to the consumer I think that's
01:24:08
right I think there's a certain authenticity that consumers gravitate to whether they're intentionally
01:24:13
recognizing it or not and yeah for us that's been core to our
01:24:18
identity we've had very unusual relationships with athletes and uh I
01:24:26
think in large part because we've been able to build the technology that they get value out of LeBron James is
01:24:32
one of them that's often cited as being a whoop wearer that must have been pretty surreal to see him wearing it so
01:24:38
two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps [ __ ] you know and this was in like end of 2014
01:24:43
early 2015 and uh it was also a very difficult time for the business as we
01:24:49
talked about earlier but I remember I was sitting at home with my parents uh
01:24:57
at this point I think the jury was out in their mind whether me starting this company was a good idea or not like a
01:25:03
couple years in like I had raised money but you know uh was there a business
01:25:09
and this amazing thing happened where a commercial came on and it was LeBron
01:25:14
James in a Kia commercial wearing a whoop strap and I thought isn't that the coolest
01:25:20
thing like you wouldn't even take it off for a Kia commercial and uh and it also
01:25:25
made me feel good in front of my parents did they accept that it's a real business from that point onwards I think it helped marginally if they accepted it
01:25:32
yet but interestingly it was uh it was something that for a couple years
01:25:37
did buy us time for for like building a real business was the fact that we could
01:25:42
get all these really high profile athletes to wear the product without endorsing them it
01:25:48
demonstrated I think to investors or others that okay there's something real about this technology that's different
01:25:55
on that point of investors you've raised 400 million in capital roughly yeah 100 million dollars in
01:26:00
capital how important is it when it comes to picking your investors to pick the right ones because I've seen this
01:26:06
kind of make and break companies I think it's really important that you're aligned with the investors on
01:26:12
what the purpose of the company is and you know as a consequence also what the purpose of the capital is we certainly
01:26:19
had investors along the way who wanted to put money into the business but wanted it to go in a different
01:26:24
direction than what I thought was the right direction and so I'm grateful that I never took that capital
01:26:31
I think it gets more complicated when you've got a Believer and that believer invests in
01:26:37
you and your business and then whatever you're building takes longer or the
01:26:43
revenue hasn't quite come in yet and all of a sudden the believer starts to become a non-believer
01:26:48
that's where you start to learn who your investors really are you know I
01:26:54
think that's when you start to learn how a functional a board of directors is like when things are when things are bad
01:27:00
how's everyone behaving and so it's super important in the selection
01:27:07
process certainly with with investors and I think reference checks are really important and I think alignment on what
01:27:14
you're trying to do with the capital what your identity is as a company but I think equally important is
01:27:20
learning how to manage your board and your group of investors when stuff isn't going well we have something in common
01:27:27
which is you don't like networking it's my idea how that's good research that's
01:27:32
how I know you're good at this I [ __ ] hate networking and then when I read you didn't like networking I thought ah
01:27:39
that makes two of us yeah I think it's overrated it's often
01:27:44
advice too that's given to young people I I think if you uh
01:27:50
find a particular problem industry like fill in the blank something you want to
01:27:56
solve a passion of yours it pulls you into meeting the right
01:28:01
people and that's where showing up is really important that's where going to
01:28:06
the thing that you're half invited to you need to go you know what I mean versus being invited to something that
01:28:12
you're not sure about or whatever pulling yourself into those environments is critical
01:28:18
another piece of advice you gave to CEOs was this which I found fascinating which is there's a difference between hearing
01:28:24
and listening what did you mean by that so back to some of the earlier stages of
01:28:29
the company um I mentioned it was hard to raise capital for the business and
01:28:35
you know I heard no a lot like I was rejected a lot in building this company and
01:28:42
the coping mechanism for that especially when I was I would say I was a slightly more immature leader the coping
01:28:49
mechanism for that was to kind of put up a wall to negativity to the point where
01:28:56
I wasn't listening to it and I wasn't hearing it right it was like it wasn't there and that was an effective and highly it
01:29:05
was an effective coping magic mechanism for a very short term period that would
01:29:10
not at all have allowed me to scale a business and I had a uh an advisor and and really Mentor at
01:29:18
the time who said to me you know well you don't have to listen to what people say but you should just hear it
01:29:24
and that was a helpful and very simple way for me to just reframe
01:29:29
the way that I thought about negative feedback like okay this person disagrees with me I'm
01:29:35
going to absorb that I'm going to sit with it I'm gonna wrestle with it and interestingly now over the course of
01:29:40
10 years you know disagreement's almost a source of excitement for me because it
01:29:46
allows me to ask myself this question of how do I know what I know why do I feel so
01:29:53
strongly about something and it really makes you again wrestle with it and hopefully debate it with someone who's
01:29:59
smarter than you is going to prove you wrong I mean that I think is what's so exciting about building a dynamic team
01:30:04
and you know taking on whatever challenge you've got that speaks to the importance of humidity again doesn't it
01:30:11
and why that's such an integral thing when you're hiring or picking co-founders you know I've also heard you
01:30:16
say that um customers are really great at telling you what's wrong but not very good at telling you the solution to what's wrong
01:30:22
I think that's important I think it's a very helpful framework I mean back to starting the company I went out
01:30:28
and met with all these coaches and athletes and asked them okay if you could have any technology improve your
01:30:35
performance what would it be and they were all super focused on exercise type
01:30:41
equipment could be measuring stress could be GPS analysis could be video analysis form analysis it was it was
01:30:49
hyper focused on the thing the sport the exercise but when I asked them what like
01:30:56
what are your biggest problems managing a team or being an athlete it almost always came back to some form of
01:31:03
availability so injury or over training like not being optimal on the day you
01:31:10
needed to be optimal and so I thought there was a huge mismatch between
01:31:15
the solutions they were asking for and the problems they were describing and for me that's that's something I just
01:31:21
try to think about when I'm listening to customers or when I'm thinking about products is
01:31:27
am I do I clearly understand what the problem is or am I focused too much on what a solution could be
01:31:34
am I hearing too much of the solution or am I hearing the problem and if you hear the problem then all of a sudden you're building
01:31:40
something pretty different interesting you hear the problem and then you can
01:31:46
kind of first principles up to solve the problems accepting probably conventional
01:31:51
orientated solution I thought the best way to solve problems around Athlete Performance was measuring the
01:31:57
other 20 hours of the day and at the time that was super counter-intuitive but that again that word
01:32:03
counter-intuitive seems to be come up over and over again when I read your story about being a contrarian and being
01:32:09
counter-intuitive and this goes back to the point about Innovation and thinking for yourself because when you don't think for yourself you just accept
01:32:15
convention that seems to be a really consistent thread throughout your whole journey not easy to do
01:32:21
not easy to do especially when things get tough and everyone goes see convention was right will
01:32:28
important to develop a process for conviction and then to to really sit
01:32:34
with something that you're convinced about and pressure test it and bat it around and even let other people
01:32:40
pressure test it but if you have a track record of that conviction
01:32:46
working out then it you really have to you have to stick to it because it's ultimately what's going to make you
01:32:52
successful sometimes I worry about that that you know you can you can be you can
01:32:58
win so many times in a row that you might stop listening and you might you
01:33:05
know oh it's worth noting that the level of conviction that we've
01:33:10
talked about on certain things yeah is not a level of conviction that I feel
01:33:18
like all the time about a lot of things you know what I mean and
01:33:24
and I think it's worth it's really worth emphasizing that like in building this company I've had doubts about an enormous number of things
01:33:30
so it's important not to look at any entrepreneur and think that person has
01:33:36
all the answers like I haven't met that person yet I I just think it's
01:33:41
it's a really useful process to figure out what are the things that you feel
01:33:47
the most strongly about in the product or service that you're building because when you figure those specific
01:33:55
things out and then you dig your heels in on them a lot of magic can happen around that
01:34:01
what's something you think you're wrong about with whoop or you might be wrong about if you've got a creeping suspicion that there
01:34:08
might be something fun fundamental to whoop that you might have been wrong about in terms of your hypothesis
01:34:14
well I think a lot of the answers to that are
01:34:20
also things that we're actively working on and building so it's a little bit sort of a little bit closer to the
01:34:26
secret sauce if you will then then maybe your your question intended I'm more than happy for Secret Sauce there's a
01:34:33
natural tension that occurs when you grow as fast as woop has over the last call it
01:34:39
three years four years and where your Market goes from being a
01:34:44
certain level of elite athletes to Fitness enthusiasts to everyone where
01:34:50
you have to ask yourself how much are you designing the product for everyone versus one of these
01:34:57
segments and so there's there's certain aspects of the
01:35:04
the rate at which we would help someone who's trying to lose weight versus someone who's trying to improve
01:35:09
sleep versus someone who's trying to run a marathon versus someone who's training for the World Cup
01:35:15
like the rate at which were curating the whole experience to that
01:35:20
individual experience I think is it that's an aspect that I
01:35:26
asked myself a lot about how are you thinking about that at the moment I believe it should get much more
01:35:31
personalized and even the degree to which certain statistics that you see or don't see May evolve depending on your
01:35:38
core goal um so that would be an example of
01:35:44
you know an area that we're working through and wrestling with I have no doubt that
01:35:50
people have approached you to buy whoop no comment
01:35:55
so I'll tell you a story in 2000 and
01:36:02
we talked a lot about competition in 2000 and I want to say like 1718 it was around that time that up had clearly
01:36:09
built great technology but we hadn't quite figured out the distribution side
01:36:14
of the business or even the business model we were approached by Amazon
01:36:20
and Amazon was interested in
01:36:26
first investing in the company but then they also got interested in potentially acquiring the company and we weren't
01:36:33
interested in selling the business at the time but in the process of evaluating an investment
01:36:40
we shared a fair amount about the company right and certainly information that you wouldn't want to share to
01:36:46
Amazon a potential competitor Amazon and fast forward two years later they came
01:36:54
out with a product that was a direct knockoff of a whoop strap that's not like Amazon yeah well you know you feel
01:37:04
it differently when it happens to you that's for sure but look it goes back to some of the resolve
01:37:11
of the of the company and the I think that the culture at whoop where we do feel kind of David versus Goliath
01:37:18
we are comfortable with people coming after us and we're not threatened by competition because the day they
01:37:24
announced that it was almost like a running joke within the office it wasn't okay we're screwed it was
01:37:32
that's gonna fail you know and we're gonna we're gonna see to it that we succeed so in any way it was like almost
01:37:38
energizing that uh that they did it and of course it's nice now to to see that
01:37:45
the product I think hasn't quite been as successful as they would have liked or maybe um
01:37:50
I don't think they're releasing a future version of it when your team said that's going to fail what gives you that that
01:37:58
conviction what is it about what you see in your walls and knowing about what's
01:38:04
going on in their walls that makes you go you're not we're still going to win I mean I don't want to be critical of them I think Amazon
01:38:11
is a pretty amazing company and I'm sure has an enormous number of amazing people I think what
01:38:18
what's inspired what inspired whoop in that moment is the same thing that inspired us for 10 years which is that
01:38:23
we see things a little differently if if someone is going to try to copy
01:38:28
everything that we've done before they're still not going to have the special sauce for what we're going to do next
01:38:34
and even when we created our uh whoop4
01:38:39
on the circuit boards we wrote um don't bother copying us we will win
01:38:45
and it was this great it was this great like call out to the engineering team and in fact every single engineer who
01:38:52
worked on who before their initials are on the circuit board oh really so real
01:38:57
sense of ownership and the funny thing of course about putting a line like that on a circuit board is the only person
01:39:04
who's ever going to see that circuit board is someone who's trying to copy you so you know I think there's I think
01:39:11
there's ways to roll with these things and um you know challenges ultimately are what help you find your identity what is
01:39:18
the end then what is the end goal for you you're an entrepreneur you've done this for more than a decade now entrepreneurs
01:39:24
start thinking about taking money off the table about selling about you know going and working on some other
01:39:29
challenge in the world where is your brain I know this is a difficult question to answer and I know what it is for you on team members and investors
01:39:35
and but where are you at what can you tell me I think one thing that's potentially unique for whoop versus
01:39:40
other businesses that that I could have started or or an entrepreneur might start is that it's actually gotten
01:39:47
exponentially exciting as it's grown like I'm as energized today running the
01:39:53
company as I've ever been running the company and and I've met Founders who for you
01:39:59
know no fault of their own are actually just in a different place with that like they're 10 years in or even six years in
01:40:06
and they kind of feel like they've hit their peak of the mountain and it's time to bring someone else in and
01:40:11
they'll stay involved as a chairman or maybe it's the right time to sell it for me it's uh
01:40:18
it's it's really as energizing a time as I can remember building it as you have more and more people on the product as
01:40:24
well it creates I think more and more momentum for it
01:40:29
it's also a product that you see people wearing all the time so like everywhere I go I now see whoop
01:40:37
which is pretty like pretty amazing just given that uh once upon a time it was an
01:40:43
idea on a piece of paper and and so that you know that's still I still find that energizing
01:40:49
I've got an amazing team and the future for health monitoring I
01:40:54
think is really to be able to predict something about your health that
01:41:01
you otherwise couldn't feel that is either going to improve your life or it's going to save your life like I
01:41:07
think Health the potential of Health monitoring is so profound
01:41:14
that uh you know it determines a full-time my full-time attention for now
01:41:21
we have a um tradition here where the previous guest asks a question for the next guest
01:41:26
um they don't know who they're asking the question for and I don't know what the question until I open the book the question that's been
01:41:32
left for you is this is kind of funny
01:41:38
um they maybe didn't realize your age when they wrote this but they said what would
01:41:43
you tell your 25 year old self I'm going to change this to what would
01:41:49
you tell your 22 year old self keep going you know it's going to work out
01:41:55
I think learn to separate
01:42:00
gratitude from complacency I think
01:42:07
I think there was a phase in building Loop where it was so much or even just growing as an entrepreneur where it was
01:42:12
so much about the next Milestone and getting to that next
01:42:18
Milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine right and you tell yourself
01:42:26
okay getting to this milestone's really big deal and you're going to be really happy when you get to this milestone
01:42:33
and that has a that has a an important physiological effect in that it literally creates dopamine because
01:42:39
you're anticipating this thing um but then when you get to that thing
01:42:45
if it's not the thing that you thought it was going to be there's this huge letdown
01:42:50
and so in the process of living on that sort of dopamine wheel
01:42:56
I learned that you really need to um introduce gratitude and be
01:43:03
appreciative of all the steps and people and products that are happening along the way
01:43:08
and I think there's a misperception for entrepreneurs at least I think there was slightly a misperception for me which is
01:43:15
like okay if I stop too much to appreciate where I am or this moment or what's
01:43:20
happened I'm not gonna have the drive to get to the next thing that's actually not true
01:43:26
at all like you can be very appreciative of where you are today and still entirely driven to get to the next
01:43:32
milestone in your in your mind so as opposed to to re-answer the
01:43:38
question it'd be learning how to uh to balance gratitude with Drive
01:43:45
and that makes the whole journey sustainable totally yeah that's how you can go for like
01:43:51
multi-decades and still and not get burnt out or that's how you sprint the marathon
01:43:57
well thank you thank you for your time thank you for making a product which is just exceptional and you know it
01:44:03
probably sounds like I'm kissing us or I'm like making this up because you're here but I genuinely I mean you can check my account
01:44:09
by the way we don't check accounts I know previously is like number one for you guys
01:44:14
so thank you for being on Loop and I appreciate the way you do this you do a nice job no I'm so unbelievably curious
01:44:20
and um it was such amazing timing that we we got to have this conversation shortly after I became obsessed with my week
01:44:26
because I have so much to ask you not just about the watch but about building a company that is taking on these incumbents and done such an unbelievable
01:44:33
job of it and I think now I know I finished this conversation understanding why and it's about that that focus on
01:44:40
the vision it's about having really um clear principles that are driven from a real real sense of like authentic
01:44:47
curiosity obviously hard work and all of these things and great people are huge factors resilience grit and all those
01:44:53
things and then it's again about the Innovation that's behind me which comes from those principles which has allowed you to continually think from first
01:44:59
principles because the whip is very different and so that that for me is clear like a
01:45:05
like a book like Harry Potter it means it's come from a very singular vision of
01:45:10
the world it couldn't have been this is not the byproduct of huge amounts of um
01:45:17
consensus that's fair yeah see what I mean because a group of people would not have thought of this that's right they would have put
01:45:23
a screen on it with the thing and but so it's really remarkable to meet you and I have no doubt that you know this company
01:45:28
is going to continue to go from strength to strength so thank you for being here thank you Stephen quick one I have some
01:45:33
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