Video URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDw8zT7pCdQ
so two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps [Music] Nike and apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space but when it comes to health monitoring we're the best game in town that really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve one of the reasons whoop has been successful is there were a lot of counter-intuitive decisions along that Journey one obvious one is that would be interesting steal that it's worth emphasizing for your audience why that matters so there was a phase in building Loop where it was so much about the next Milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine if the company has a great day you're feeling like a rocket ship and if whoop was failing I was failing what's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see I was super stressed out I was drinking too much and I remember I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they're like numb I actually drove myself to the hospital and they do um you know all these analysis on me and like it turns out I had a before this episode begins I just want to say a huge thank you to all of our new subscribers 74 of you that watch this channel didn't subscribe before and 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 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 this show and enjoyed it it's just to please hit the Subscribe button without further Ado I'm Stephen Butler and this is the Diary of a CEO I hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this yourself well 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 your professional life um what are those dots well I I grew up on uh the North Shore
of Long Island um I was always into Sports and exercise I was super active kid uh my parents are very different my dad's an Egyptian immigrant a very Street Smart charismatic came to this country with very little Rose the ranks and finance over time my mom uh very analytical very book smart and and watching how they approached life I think was a fascinating way to grow up because they had very different uh tool sets to solve problems and uh I was always playing sports I was always exercising and that eventually LED my way to Harvard and uh and so I was a college athlete I got um recruited to play Squash at Harvard and over the course of my time there uh got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body how I could uh understand what it meant to train optimally how I could prevent over training which was a problem that I had uh how I could really uh understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising and so that took me down this Rabbit Hole of physiology research which we can get into but I read hundreds of medical papers while I was uh in school and then ultimately wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body and then over the course of my time at Harvard built up the confidence to to start a company which was a fairly crazy thing looking back on it and for the last 10 years I've been building this company called whoop we went through that very quickly but a lot of those things are very very unusual one of the 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 fall into an obsession about how to optimize the performance of our training and ourselves what is it about you have you been able to figure out in hindsight what it is about you and your makeup that made you so obsessed with that particular topic well it struck me as something that uh really didn't make a lot of sense like you I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard exercising with no information about what I was doing to my
body and yet that's a school also that is totally obsessed with deeper knowledge and so that in itself seemed like a like a deep irony and then I also was a pretty competitive person and I was someone who was over training right 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 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 ingredient so to speak and I just sort of started pulling at that thread and it really took me down a rabbit hole over training I've heard this time never been 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 is over training the technical definition is it's a continued state of overreaching that then leads to a period where your body is essentially in a depressed state and what that will look like physiologically is essentially you your body's run down you know activities that would normally feel somewhat easy uh are quite difficult um psychologically it makes you feel kind of lousy run down symptoms similar to being sick and depending on how over 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 weeks but it it's kind of this ultimate betrayal right because you're pushing yourself so hard to get stronger and fitter that you actually get to a place where you're completely broken down had I asked you at 14 years old say 14 16 years old what you were going to be 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 was interested in so I was always playing with technology which in hindsight uh was quite predictive like I had the first I had the first iPod in my sixth grade class I remember so we're about the same age so you probably remember when the iPod came out and like how cool that thing was thick but yeah it was really thick and it had that like Wild Wheel a little before that I had a Palm Pilot like a pom pilot seven it was like the original uh Palm Pilot that could get internet access when I was around 12 or 13 I had one of the first
uh voice recorders that you could speak into and it would type for you oh wow so it was like you know Siri but 20 years ago uh and it didn't quite work unfortunately but I I had this real itch towards technology and then I think somewhere between the ages of like 18 and 20 I I also saw this huge convergence happening with with smartphones with the way that computers to me seemed like they were sort of seamlessly moving from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket to what I perceived to be eventually on your body or even in your body I thought that was a Natural Evolution so I definitely had this pull towards technology but I think throughout uh you know I was overcoming this feeling of whether I should go into Finance because I grew up my dad was in you know in finance in fact after my freshman year at Harvard to most undergrads do you know different internships and whatnot after my freshman year I did an internship at a hedge fund my sophomore year I did an internship at an investment bank and my junior year I did an internship at a private Equity Firm so so like I did I was really flirting with going into Finance but I think I think this is what I was supposed to do from everything I've read it's quite clear to me that you're a very curious person and my brother is very interesting my oldest brother whenever we when we were younger he always wanted to understand everything and when he became interested in something he became obsessed in it and he went like right down into the rabbit hole as I read through your story on multiple occasions whether it's meditation or others or how the business came to be or you know your journey to trying to figure out how to optimize the body all of these struck me as a person that once they get interested in something they go all the way down into the rabbit hole to find out the solutions is that accurate I think it's fair I think it also stems from this uh ability to throw myself out there um you know back to how your childhood influences your your future uh there's there's a story I don't know if I ever talked about this but uh fascinating story where I was in fifth or sixth grade middle school
and we're doing what's called uh blue and gold day so I went to a school called Greenvale the colors are blue and gold and you have this like Fair essentially which is all sorts of different competitions races that sort of thing and uh there's a captain's race at the end of the day with like the the four people representing their their class so to so to speak to run the fast race and I was a I was a captain so I was very anxious about this final race and right before the final race was one of the longer races like uh I think it was three or four laps and so 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 sudden was sick and so he didn't show up for for this race and I remember uh Peter zaloum who's our science teacher he's walking around and he's yelling hey 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 contact with this teacher because I really don't want to run this race and it was like he zeroed in on me out 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 race I got to do that and he's like well 90 of life is showing up the other 10 is what happens when you get there and like in that moment I was like okay 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 emphasizes his point but that whole thread of just showing up is something I think about all the time why why do and this is I guess a lesson for entrepreneurship because you saw some I was going to say and this is links to 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 interest in building whoop yeah I definitely saw an opportunity to continuously measure the human body and I also saw an opportunity that uh Computing was getting to a size and and sort of sophistication where it could be smaller and smaller uh
but the poll that got me to building this company and I think persevering over years was that it also was a personal Obsession to really understand my own body yeah because when people typically recite 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 opportunity in the market and and when I read the quote from you that said you're an entrepreneur before you realized you were yeah that's true that books that narrative a little bit which I think entrepreneurs sometimes try and sell because it makes them seem more intentional I can't replicate your curiosity and interest that made you go off in that journey of optimizing the human body so I just think in society and culture generally entrepreneurs sometimes look 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 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 spent a lot of time like building the confidence to start the company like I really didn't know what it meant to start a company and I mean I spent two years doing physiology research I then took another class that was around if you have an idea how do you write a business plan for it and I remember like my senior year I was doing like the third or fourth iteration of this business plan and I was meeting with the MIT Professor a guy named Howard Anderson who taught the class and was like a venture capitalist and at that point I wasn't even enrolled in the class I was just working on this business plan and he's like he just sort of stopped he said well at some point you have to ask yourself is this a paper or are you starting a company right it sort of puts 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 prepared as possible to like have the confidence to take the leap and I'm so glad I did but you know when 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 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 commitment the learnings come in fast right and I'm sure you've experienced that yeah yeah yeah and I see it all the time especially in young people who um they're using perfectionism as a way to procrastinate because they're they don't feel competent already yet to so you'll have 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 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 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 waiting for that perfect moment yeah I think overcoming a fear of failure is a really critical step in life and there's a lot of methods to think about for that I think for me it was doing a lot of work I think it was following my passion in some ways the reason I feel like I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was it was that it almost became an inevitability that I was starting the company unless so a choice because it was like all I was thinking about in my free time you know the things you do the things you think about before bed or in a shower you know the Quiet Moments throughout life I think those are pretty telling and what role has that played that obsession with that with solving the problem and solving that challenge and your general interest in it what role has that played in your hardest times as in when things get really [ __ ] difficult and it's easy to quit if you're someone that's authentically driven and authentically curious about that thing must make it somewhat easier to carry on I think for sure it pulls you through like the the obsession of solving a problem pulls you through I mean I struggled though for years uh with building whoop it was it was really really painful and I think an important thing for any entrepreneur but especially was for me was to
disassociate my own identity from that of the companies if you're and you you've been a young entrepreneur so you know this like as a young entrepreneur I think a lot of your identity all of a sudden gets tied up in that thing you're creating and for me that meant if woop was having a good day I was 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 failing and that's a very unhealthy Association but it's also not true like literally you can be taking great steps to improve as a leader or as a manager or even as a recruiter and certain things will happen that may put your business sideways and conversely I'm sure you and I have both met Founders entrepreneurs who have watched their company go like this but meanwhile they're spinning out of control right and I think the faster that I could separate those two identities my own and whoop the easier it actually became to build a successful company is part of the reason you also our identity becomes attached to the company because I was thinking about why that was that was definitely the case for me and the answer was because my entire net 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 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 too for auditory then some in some respects I still have it today just like given the nature of the yeah of the value of the business the key uh the key at least for me in building the business was Finding ways for myself to manage stress to manage uh the difficulties that come with building a company without finding myself on that yoyo of the company's performance right it can't be that uh if the company has a great day you're feeling like a rocket 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 been figuring out how to have a steady hand and how to you know sort of stay calm through the chaos chaos yeah how have you done that a few different
things um I think the first uh and probably the most profound for me in general has been learning how to meditate so in 2014 so I was about 24 years old the company was maybe I don't know 30 or 40 people um I think I'd raised maybe 20 million dollars something like that which certainly felt like a lot of money and uh and I felt like I was really failing like as a leader I was super stressed out I was drinking too much and uh and I remember having what I would later learn was a panic attack um you know and I was driving my car and I'm on the highway and all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision like starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they like are a little bit numb you have this taste in your mouth I actually thought I'd been food poisoned because of the feeling was so unusual outrageous and uh and so I drove I actually drove myself to the hospital and I checked into the hospital and they 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 hospital from panic attack I was like all right wait a sec like I gotta really reset how I'm building this company and growing and uh two days later I signed up for this meditation course Transit on meditation and uh I've been doing it like every single day since then about yeah about eight and a half years later when I sit here with CEOs who many of which have had panic attacks yeah funny funny enough um and they'd talk to me about meditation I always seem to get a similar response which I can't meditate my head's too busy for that well I think the busier your mind is the more you need to meditate I so I learned how to meditate in 2014 and I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well 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 there's four years plus which is
fortunately where I am today and the fascinating thing is what you first observe in meditating um and I should just sort of clarify what kind of meditation I'm doing so I spend about 22 minutes every morning doing this and you literally are um you're breathing but then you start repeating a mantra and the idea of the Mantra is to start clearing your mind out and you're just focusing on the Mantra but what inevitably happens is thoughts start to drift in as you're saying the mantra and you get to have this moment where you get to decide do I want to think about the thought or do I want to pass it along by going back to the mantra so just right there in that moment you start to realize that you can filter your thoughts you also get to choose to sit with certain thoughts right think how often in your life you might have thoughts coming in you feel like you can't really control what you're thinking about right you almost like don't have that Focus so that's the immediate benefit that you get that you feel while you're meditating the more powerful benefit and this is what I meant about feeling certain stages of having done it is at least for me it started to feel like I had a third person you know sort of watching me and I would hear this voice in my head suddenly like 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 sense what you're about to do or say before you do it so the immature version of me as an entrepreneur might find himself saying things and being angry and reacting um and then sort of almost catching up to the emotional state that I was in and trying to reel it back whereas the the more meditated version of me I think has has been able to recognize what I'm about to say something before I say it or feel something before I feel it and and that it feels like a superpower did not grow over time that third person ability with your Transcendental Meditation practice I think so I mean it's I imagine that learning how to breathe and meditate is
like any other skill and if you refine it for weeks versus months versus years 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 becoming more conscious of your thoughts and that their choices and you're not them yeah exactly I think it it's at least helped me stay more in control of of my actions my feelings decisions I'm making and and I really recommend it to anyone like I think it's I think it's a game changer 2014 you cite um in a few things you've you've spoken on um as being a very difficult year that's when you had as you said 20 to 30 employees you'd raise 20 million things were pretty crazy in those early years um did you have doubt because when I think about the whoop story it's competitor set are all massive [ __ ] Juggernauts and I've I've like from afar obviously when I got I got my week two months ago I remember thinking how the [ __ ] have they done that in an environment where you've got these big you know Steve Jobs founded companies and this company and they've all got billions and 200 billion in the kitty yeah I'm like how did they get on my wrist how did they pierce and get you went into an incredibly competitive market when you did that when you raised that 20 million did you have doubts about yourself I think I developed doubts um in managing the company like I always believed in the vision uh of what we set 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 2011 or 12 to today the paper I wrote In 2011 was titled the feedback tool measuring intensity recovery and sleep and like literally today our three main metrics are strain recovery and sleep so in terms of having a strong perspective on what the world should look like when the technology is built and actually measuring all the things it needs to Super accurately I think building whoop was was more of a straight line than than the average company where it was all kinds of zigs and zags and chaos is uh learning one how to be a CEO and run the company to your point
learning how to navigate competition and we can talk more about that we've had some interesting experiences in that category a big theme was actually being able to raise capital in part because of the competition right like it was hard first of all for a number of years we were building the technology before we ever were really generating Revenue and that's that's just a hard business to build and it also took us a lot longer to get the product to Market than we thought it would right and so you're in the scenario where you know you're you're saying to investors well we're getting there we're getting there we're getting there and so the you know the first seven years of the company I would say or enormously hard from just a technology development standpoint from a capital raising standpoint in from a business generation standpoint because we you know we were seven years in and then completely changed our business model on its head which was a bet the company moment you know and uh and so there were just a lot it was a lot yeah and I told you at 22 the next was 22 when you founded the company yeah if I told you at 22 the next seven years would look like that do you think you would have done it I think I would have done it yeah I mean 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 mean like um there were a lot of feelings of being like my back against the wall um there were a lot of feelings of uh doubt what were those feelings of doubt 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 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 we've raised about 400 million dollars in capital day but that's still sense when you look at the companies we've been competing against to get to this stage and so I was I was nervous about that piece of it and especially again as a young entrepreneur who's who is Raising capital for the first time you said team and we there co-founders yeah how important is that in hindsight
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 in yeah look I I had a great um CTO I had a great lead mechanical engineer we've we've built the business together for 10 years or my CTO just just uh transitioned to new projects but it's been an amazing ride and I think the the fact that we've been able to build this technology that has you know through a variety of different uh third parties been credited as being the most accurate wearable in the market speaks to the the technical chops of of the founding team and I I don't take credit for that uh so I think it's uh it's a remarkable accomplishment and I think it's also important when you're building a founding team to have a a fairly clear set of responsibilities I get a little nervous when I hear of a founding team 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 the advantage that we had in starting the company was each category of thing that we were trying to do was so hard like inventing a wearable that could measure uh hurry variability as accurately as an electrocardiogram or raise Capital at a time that you know Nike e and apple and you know a dozen other companies were entering the space like if I struggled with raising Capital like I wasn't gonna have a partner giving me a hard time if he struggled with 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 that the other wasn't going to be better at it so I think that there was an element of complementary uh skill sets that's helpful if you were giving someone advice on how to pick a co-founder in terms of the 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 it's probably some combination of commitment intensity and humility um the commitment piece is really important because you're going to have a lot of very difficult things happen in the first
six months let alone the first six years and so you want to know that this person's committed to doing this and it's going to be hardcore and no matter what happens we're going to get through it you know I I think startups really only fail if the founders quit or you run out of money so like if you can overcome those two things you've got a pretty good shot and and so commitment's critical and then intensity and humility that's what I just generally look for in anyone that that I work for or work with you want hard driving people you want people who recognize that it's going to take an enormous amount of work and discipline to develop whatever product or service it is that you're creating for the first time but you also want along the way um to have people who recognize that with that intensity and with that intelligence with that depth they have the humility to recognize that they may not have all the answers and in particular when you're building a company and a small company at that that has a lot of different departments that intersect and then in the case of whoop I mean Hardware software analytics data regulatory design marketing whatever you could have a meeting with four different departments and it's really just four people and all of a sudden there's this massive Collision around how we're going to send data from a whoop strap to an iPhone and like the product person has their own perspective the iOS engineer has his own perspective you know the the Bluetooth expert has their perspective the engineer has the mechanical engineer's own perspective and so there's this natural Collision of how should we solve this problem and I think when you build teams with high humility they tend to come out with the answer that's best for the company not like I came up with it so that would I think that's a pretty good starting point commitment intensity humility when you think about the the most difficult times so I know that you would have been through many many difficult times but when you when when I say that when I say the most difficult time maybe a day maybe a piece of news you got
an email is there something that comes to mind as the most difficult day time moment well there is a period of time of about 18 months where whoop never had more than three months of Runway of cash in the bank yeah wow so picture that right because um you know so much of building a business is having the runway to strategize and grow and recruit and and I had the company had gotten into a weird moment where we were still doing Innovative things but we hadn't found the next investor to sort of carry the company through to the to the Future uh to a future round or you know give us two years of Runway which is sort of what you'd want for any Capital injection and we were making some deals happen there were there were compelling things happening in the business and so we were able to stitch along a number of uh Investments but never enough capital and so I just felt this enormous weight on my shoulders man like it was it was so intense and uh and it also was it was a company size that you know it's one 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 a 50 70 person team something like that so you know that you feel a lot of responsibility as well when you're operating through a period and essentially it got to the point where um if we didn't get uh essentially a term sheet signed uh on a Wednesday uh we were gonna go bankrupt on that Friday or file for bankruptcy on that Friday so imagine like two days from from it all going away and I remember writing uh like even writing a note to all of our investors about what a journey it had been and thank you like I felt all the feelings of the company had failed without the company having failed and fortunately was able to get the deal done on that day and uh yeah I'm so glad I did I've been there I've been there for multiple payrolls I told this funny story about it being Payday on that day in the bank not our 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 expecting payment if I get a contract
signed by one of our clients so I'm in London having drinks with this 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 it off but multiple times especially running a B2B agency business that was growing cash is always 60 days away you've got to pay your bills today but what's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see well I look back on that whole period with like immense gratitude because it being able to overcome that and being able to essentially pull through in a circumstance where I think almost uh any other business would have failed it just it reframed for me going forwards what it means to be facing a challenge like that was a real existential challenge like this whole thing's going 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 okay the sales were lower this month in the last month or this great person on our team got poached by that company or this epic competitor came out with this product like there's there's some level of perspective that comes with all of those you know big challenges because I just remember being able to work through the what I deemed to be one of the biggest challenges did you get anxiety through that period totally but I I also like I was able to build a whole lifestyle and process to approach um stress and I do think that success may come for people when they overcome a level of stress that would break most people and so I'm a little critical of how um pop culture likes to talk about stress which is if you're stressed you know take on way less of it right and that that may be true in small doses but what we really want to learn is how to cope with stress and how to manage through it and how to overcome it and I think also if you're stressed about something it's also a signal that it matters to you and it's important right
so uh look it was that period of time was uh enormously stressful painful um I felt like I had to keep some of it to myself versus burden like a larger team with it you know so that there's certain burdens I do think that um CEOs or leaders or entrepreneurs carry or you're almost compartmentalizing something and you know you're gonna have to to feel it I'm sure you know what that feels like yeah of course I think you know I did 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 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 lot of CEOs started being more honest with the state of play with their team members and would say things like listen 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 shift then and it inspired me a lot about being transparent with my teams but I mean for the whole of my professional 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 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 alcoholic so he as he's talked about many times he turned to alcohol us we lived in the same house together sure 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 both coping in different ways I was kind of compartmentalizing and kind of just I called it a video game mindset where 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 there was a a chord between me and what was going on did you develop any like lifestyle hacks um I've got to be honest no not at the time and now I think I have more but at the time no I was just
trying to get to the next day and I think I have a natural sort of predisposition to in the worst moments 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 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 were you so calm on that day well well I had very few choices so not the worst day we ever had in the 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 the doors over there and the buttons there I think about that all the time as like are you controlling all the controllables and often if you are or even just you know setting sitting down in your mind or even putting on paper hey what are all the things I control about the situation what are things I don't that can be a very calming exercise it's very focusing yeah even talk about that 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 worry so um so yeah that was a but you developed lifestyle hacks to help you we talked about meditation which was a big one um exercise big one uh I got into hot cold transitions gratitude's a big one so take me through your day then because I think this will reveal a lot of your habits sure so let's take a a given day in Boston yeah the day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a a framework for you know the next day um a few days a week I work out with a trainer early in the morning so I'll 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 work the next day um I'll I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm gonna focus on the next day
and and then like sleep because you know building whoop you think a lot about sleep I uh you know I sleep in a really cold bedroom uh really dark bedroom why cold and dark it's just shown to give you higher quality sleep yeah and I try to go to bed at a 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 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 6 30 and controversial question about your wife then does your sleep deteriorate with your wife in the bed it doesn't because we have uh we've got good intimacy like we've got good bad cuddle habits you know it's like a cuddling ton yeah yeah we we we've done a good job co-existing in a bedroom environment although that's an interesting thing you can track on whoop so if people really want to know whether or not they sleep better or worse with a partner you can literally record that in the whoop journal in the app uh so in a second I want to hear what's in your movement well you probably check while you're chagging against uh so cold room a consistent bedtime um yeah and then I wake up and I'm like out the door really quick shower workout clothes got my stuff I always give my wife kisses before I leave that's like a nice relationship hack uh while she's while she's sleeping and then uh I work out for an hour with my trainer I'll do uh steam room after that freezing cold shower I do a breakfast that's mostly like egg whites it's mostly proteins like egg whites like avocado bacon that kind of stuff two points there so the first was working out in the morning yeah is there any like dates where science around that being advantageous so back to being able to control the controllables I like to work out in the morning in large part because it means I can then stay at work later if I need to 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 that evening and then a couple things come up around 6 p.m and all of a sudden
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 out first is like okay I've checked that box and then the other thing was this the cold water cold water yeah talk to me about why you do that and how that helps so there's something I think to be said for doing things that naturally make you happy 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 huge jolt of adrenaline from it uh it also forces me to breathe properly and I think anything you can do that helps you breathe properly or forces You to Breathe properly is good for you uh and then I feel kind of happy after doing it like like this little injection of happiness and so I end a hundred percent of showers that I take cold and as cold as possible the colder the better and then the the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect depending on where I am is uh I mean there's a fair amount of research that shows if you do a steam room or a sauna a few days a week it is likely to increase longevity I would say I like the cold more than the hot but anyway all right Sam the opposite my my girlfriend is a breath practitioner oh okay Coach so obviously you understand what comes with that and 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 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 breath work do you do um I didn't even know the name of it she's got her own method she teaches classes she's doing classes in London at the moment big groups one-on-one sessions she's doing um she does sessions with lots of people that come on this podcast in fact oh cool because they end up getting getting 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 like the yeah the double inhale yeah Game Changer 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 into Shore because this word breath work showed up like 18 24 months ago over here and now it's everywhere with like Wim Hof that's a good point I mean Wim Hof yeah I think Wim Hoff pushed a lot of it especially around the cold and I look I think it's taking off for a good reason in part because again back to controlling things you can control you can literally control your breath in a second and there's an interesting whoop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering this statistic called heart rate variability and heart rate variability is essentially this lens into your autonomic nervous system it's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart so it's a little confusing but if your heart beats at 60 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 and 1.4 seconds and it turns out that variability of time between successive beats is actually a good thing because it's a sign that your body is able to regulate in its environment and your autonomic nervous system literally consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity now sympathetic is activation so that's heart rate up blood pressure up respiration up um often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising right now parasympic is all the opposite hurry down blood pressure down respiration down it's what helps you fall asleep but where this all comes back to breath work is literally inhaling that's sympathetic that's parasympathetic so just by controlling your breathing you can decide whether you want to be sympathetic dominant parasympic dominant you can increase your heart rate variability you can decrease it and that's something that's in your control and heart rate variability is one of the core statistics that we look at as a lens into how restored your body is I noticed that because my friend Logan said he went up for a night out he got drunk it was a yeah yeah and then he
screenshotted his his whoop dashboard the next day and was and put it into our chat and went [ __ ] because everything was red and and he was trying to explain to me heart rate variability and why it was important but I couldn't quite 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 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 important indicator and what are the things that we do that make it plummet so the fascinating thing about hard variability is it's been measured since like roughly the the 80s and the physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that uh Olympic power lifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift So based on whether they had a low or high heart rate 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 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 heart rate variability for lie detection tests doctors cardiologists were using heart rate variability to predict whether former heart failure patients were going to have a heart attack again 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 really that was one of the core insights in building whoop was that you need to be able to measure heart rate variability continuously and in particular it's going to play a huge role in helping us understand the status of your body's Readiness and uh how well you're sleeping so those are two ways that whoop is primarily using heart rate variability uh you know things that decrease heart rate variability uh dehydration bad diet we just talked about alcohol um heavy exercise uh you know heavy uh psychological stress often people are surprised how just
The Wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed can totally throw their sleep out of whack or their heart rate variability out of whack so it's a very powerful statistic it's a fascinating statistic and I'm mostly got like a lot more people are measuring it it seems to know us before we know ourselves to know how to describe it one of the things I would say in building whoop is uh feelings are overrated there are things happening in your body that you can't feel and I think heart rate variability is one of those one of those key indicators where for most people it'd be very hard to know what their heart rate variability was saying in any given moment but uh it has turned out to be a good embodiment of what whoop does which is that feelings are overrated I say that because I remember looking at my heart rate variability and seeing it was orange or red I can't remember and then asking myself why and I go oh yeah I 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 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 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 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 life by telling me something that maybe I wasn't listening to it changed my routine by telling me something that was clear maybe from a subjective objective standpoint but I clearly was ignoring thinking that I was invincible I think covid-19 was a big wake-up call for people in that category right of um of feelings are overrated because here you have a virus that you can get that you don't feel you're not even sick and yet you give it to someone else and they get deathly ill we had a fascinating relationship with covid-19 in being able to measure it because we detected a statistic called respiratory rate being super elevated but I can't tell you how many
screenshots and messages I've gotten over the last two years if people seeing this huge spike in their respiratory rate you know two three days before ultimately testing positive for covid and it reaffirmed in a lot of ways the founding story of the company although in a different direction it wasn't about not knowing that you should train today or rest today it was about not knowing that you were sick it speaks to the potential of Health monitoring and why it's so exciting another conversation I've been having recently with a friend is about blocking out certain types of light I heard you do that yeah so uh blue light essentially what emits from a cell phone a television set an iPad I mean blue lights frankly all around us and blue light essentially tells your brain to stay awake and so one way to offset that is to not be on devices into the evening but you know I'm still I think largely optimizing my life around being a great entrepreneur or or uh CEO so for me that doesn't 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 light blocking glasses which have a red tint to them and uh it's like a get out of jail free card for using devices into the evening and uh and then they start to make you sleepy it's probably the single biggest thing that's boosted my REM and slow wave sleep on woop is is wearing blue light blocking glasses it's worth emphasizing for a second like for your audience why that matters so if you spend like seven hours in bed you're not actually getting seven hours of sleep right and if you think about 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 wave sleep or you're in REM sleep and awake and light sleep as stages go really are kind of irrelevant like they don't do much for your body physiologically they're not restorative but REM and slow wave sleep that's like where all the magic happens so REM sleep is when your mind is repairing cognitively it's when you'll have uh
deep dreams so people who say they don't 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 that's cognitive repair slow wave sleep that's when your body produces about like 95 of its human growth hormone is that deep sleep on woop yeah yeah and so you know people think they're getting stronger going to the gym right really 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 your human growth hormone so just to zoom out if you're someone who's spending seven hours in bed it might be that you get a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep of those seven hours it could also be that you get like five and a half hours 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 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 make them way better and uh and so for me blue light blocking classes was one of those things there's a couple others but yeah this was the thing that made me fall in love with my whoop I remember getting eight hours 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 then a couple of days later or the next day getting eight hours sleep waking up and feeling like [ __ ] looking at my 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 yeah as you say like eight hours sleep but it's j when you once you see that you can't unsee it it's like this whole 29 years of my life I've been like I've misunderstood something so foundational about my entire life and the fun thing is you can optimize it like once you 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 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 be good to take care of that third too
but just the the difference I see on a 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 my mood everything is so different it's a completely different human being also there's a fascinating phenomenon too as it relates to stress so research shows that the more REM sleep you get the less heightened your amygdala response is Right amygdala is like fight or flight right and so if you get a ton of REM sleep it essentially softens your amygdala um it it makes it less active uh funny enough I did a a podcast with Alex Honnold do you know who that is so Alex honnold's the famous uh rock climber who did free solo Oh you know that documentary yeah yeah so he scales this crazy uh you know slab of of mountain without a without a rope and he also happened to wear a whoop and so I was talking to him about uh risk and fear and all these sort of different concepts stress but uh it turns out that he gets like four and a half to five hours of REM sleep a night on woop and I was thinking like how perfect is it that a guy who literally can rock climb and risk dying every single day has this like unbelievable uh outlier also ability to get REM sleep of course and could those two things be related the other time that I wasn't familiar with until I got away was this idea of strain I I'm gonna be honest I we talked a little bit before we started recording about my little fitness group yeah the 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 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 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 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 of things you have to submit your workouts every day as well and then someone verifies Etc um strain currently in that group you're rewarded for working out every day is that a good thing
well the way that we think about strain is to balance it alongside recovery so the average amateur uh exerciser let's call it the weekend warrior uh probably has workouts that look too consistent in terms of intensity or too consistent in terms of strain so whoop has a scale from 0 to 21 on whoop that might look like a 12. or like a 13. like so every time they work out it's a 13. and the reality is when your body's run 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 permission to catch a breather but if your body's peaking like go crush it right take on a 16 or a 17 or an 18. and I should also say that you know strain is essentially looking at the amount of time that your body is in an elevated heart rate zone so we're talking about a primarily cardiovascular measurement of stress that you're putting on your body for any period of time but back to your question like you probably don't want to do a high strain every single day unless your body's freakishly recovering and there are people who do that but they're mostly like professional triathletes or whatever and you also want to try to vary the in the The Strain level so if you're at a 50 recovery maybe you're doing a 10 if you're at a 75 recovery you're doing a 16 or 17 or an 18. and a lot of this goes back to in building the product we wanted to make it actionable a lot of wearables maybe V1 wearables sort of told you what happened we were very focused on telling you what to do next and how you can uh get better on that point of recovery then how if I if I'm training a lot um how can I improve my recovery outside of sleep a lot of it would be diet and hydration uh potentially supplements if you're taking them making sure you're taking the right ones um because if you're taking the wrong supplements that's actually a lot worse for you than taking none uh
you know I think some type of mindfulness or meditation or breath work speeds up recovery that's that's my own bias uh we certainly see uh sleep consistency so that's less about what you're doing during sleep but actually more just routine so going to bed and waking up at similar times even exercising at a similar time may help you recover faster because your body's getting used to it of all the of all the metrics that attract on the whoop is heart rate variability the one you love the most well on a personal level it was the thing that jumped off the page to me you know 10 years before it became even remotely mainstream so I feel some relationship with it in the sense that like I saw there was a lot of potential for this thing on a on a whoop level the product does now measure a lot of different things very well so I don't 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 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 and then creating scores or creating messaging to an end user that that gets them to change Behavior gets them to improve health that to me is the if you think about the Pyramid of you know sort of challenging things the tip of the pyramid is a product that is changing your behavior and improving your health quick one some of you may know we've got a brand new sponsor on this podcast American Express and you've got a brand new exclusive offer for a limited time only which I can't wait to tell you about from the 18th of October to the 16th of November American Express is offering new card members a 60 000 Point membership reward as a welcome bonus when you join when you spend a minimum of eight thousand pounds across the first three months this is simply a thank you for joining American Express and for those that don't know you can use your American Express business platinum card points in exchange for various rewards such as booking travel holidays gift cards and so much more so essentially you're rewarded with huge prizes for just using their card to
spend on your usual purchases and I've had a look through at what sixty thousand points can get you so if you'd like to find out how you can get your hands on your new American Express business card then search American Express business platinum card to find out more I've had so many people tag me on Instagram even on Telegram and in my Twitter DMs in a picture of them starting their heal journey and it's one of the most amazing things in my life 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 believe is going to help every single person who starts their heel Journey change their life because this podcast the central intention of this podcast is to help people live better lives it gives me my protein it gives me my 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 there are other products there's Foods there's the hot and savory collection many other things but for me this ready 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 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 tag anyway back to the podcast your company um the business you've built I heard that your employees that would get a bonus if their sleep is considered to be good on their whoop how much truth is there to that it's a fun uh it's a fun employee perk that we came up with so everyone on woop is on a team together and you can opt into What's called the Sleep bonus and if you get 85 percent uh sleep performance on average throughout the month uh you get a hundred dollar bonus like on your pay stock and so it's it's mostly uh it's mostly a fun thing but it does speak to our culture which is using the data we have in front of us uh promoting uh sleep and good habits actually during covid we also came up with the red recovery policy which was because we had a lot of people actually coming into the office during even during the peaks of covid because we built Hardware accessories supply chain things that you kind of have to do in
person very physical things and so the red recovery policy was that if you had a red recovery you actually uh needed to stay home because either you are getting sick or you are at risk of getting sick because your body was run down so again fun fun ways to use the data in an actionable way and and you know build it into the culture when you talk about why your company has done so well and it has one you talk about there being a more Scrappy kind of nature to the team which sounds more like innovation how does one go about as your company grows keeping that Innovation that's so Central to you winning because with growth often cut becomes like I don't know things move slower you know bureaucracy before being for Jenny's come back from annual leave what are you doing from a culture standpoint I think one of the reasons whoop has been successful is we had a pretty clear perspective on what we were building and why and the consequence of that is also what you're not building right like whoop is graded all the things that it does for all the things that it doesn't do we are not a smart watch we don't allow you to download a bunch of apps we don't receive phone calls you can't flag an Uber with your whoop right but when it comes to health monitoring we're the best game in town and that 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 there were a lot of counter-intuitive decisions along that like along that Journey um one obvious one is that whoop is not a watch uh and I can't tell you how many people 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 by putting the time on it all of a sudden you've created this enormous competitive landscape and competing with watches is hard like 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 identity the other thing about a watch and you'll notice this from every technology company is the second there's a screen there's this enormous scope creep that occurs for what the product's actually meant to do and very quickly you're in a product meeting where you're talking about email notifications and different screen colors and various ways to tell the time 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 and so if I look back and um you know over the last 10 years we made these decisions so like we made a decision to not be a watch uh and not have a screen on it we made a decision on the flip side though to invent a modular charger where you could charge your move without ever taking it off and that was super expensive and took you made the product take way longer and cost a bunch of hundred dollars but again it was back to that identity of 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 might not put it back on so that was something we did that other people didn't do right um everyone was measuring steps we didn't think steps was physiologically relevant so we we tried to stay true to our identity and I think that helped us navigate a competitive landscape where a lot of people were copying each other or where companies may have had even too much resources and those resources got them down you know into this very expansive place without being great at anything focus and first principles is what I heard throughout that that what you said there the first principles point about 24 7 monitoring yeah that's like a totally first principles thought because you said well health is a 24 7 thing so 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 signal so that approach and that conviction
towards like thinking for yourself about this problem is much easier said than done for 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 intimacy or friendships or building companies or how we construct teams thinking for yourself is what I heard there um you say it so easily but it's wise it's impossible for people to do especially when they're thinking about innovation because you know you had all those moments where why doesn't this have a 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 all like first principles that came from whoop I think what what's different about your product is also what makes it special and I think that true Innovation often comes from a level of focus or discipline that's really uncomfortable like having said everything I just said I still think about whoop as a watch on a near daily basis because it's it's something that pulls at me you know because 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 mean so there is this uh you know sort of painful level of discipline that has to occur I think to be able to continue marching forwards and we actually went a different direction where uh We've looked at invisible as a more compelling landscape so obviously you can wear it on your wrist but you can actually you know take it apart and depending on what garments you're wearing right so you take this clasp off you can now put this sensor into different places on your body so really so yeah so we've come out with shorts uh boxers bras underwear uh uh shirts that 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 areas of the body I didn't know that so I could put up my boxer shorts lining yeah oh nice dope yeah now also kind of crazy to start a wearables company and realize you're
designing boxers but that goes back to your first principal's point I suppose right yeah exactly why would you design boxers well because you need to create a way for them to wear it 24 7. something else you said which I've never had anybody say before but it's so unbelievably true is when people have bigger budgets when six like with success comes greater temptation to be and do everything and become everyone and that's often when companies lose their way is because of their success everyone 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 have you felt that temptation yeah absolutely I mean uh I think it's that's probably the biggest way that success uh is a bad teacher is the degree to which it makes you think you can go into a bunch of things and abandon the level of intensity or Focus that you took in building the original thing to be successful so but you know that doesn't stop me from dreaming of ways that the company can go in totally different directions you just you have to check yourself like you really do have to check yourself and make sure uh you've got the right level of focus if you're going to go into it that's been one of my biggest mistakes is we become successful I then come up without new ideas I then think more about the reward of the new ideas versus the actual cost the cost of like mental time for the whole team the cost of like everyone waking up and being in the shine thinking about a different problem and then we had a recent incidents where we spent I'm going to say nine months planning something big big new thing in one of my companies offered someone a job to be the CEO of this this new company and then I don't 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 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
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 all knew we all knew we'd got carried away with thinking more about the reward of this 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 far down a path with a new idea and then range yourself back in because you realize the cost of focus yeah I think there's there's been certain aspects of product development you know go to market strategies where you know it's the right thing even but you you're again you're not dedicating the right level of focus to it or the team doesn't have the bandwidth for it or uh the timing's not quite right like yeah I mean Focus I think is probably one of the most underrated uh skills for any leader and not and I don't mean that just for them it's more important that they create an environment of focus how does one do that if I if I join whoop how am I going to learn on the day before I join the day I joined and thereafter every day why I'm here this this Vision the focus how are you how are you teaching me that well a lot of it comes back to the core mission of the company right which is to unlock Human Performance to improve health a lot of it comes back to being really deliberate about the hardware that we build and why the accessories we build and why a lot of it comes back to the fact that whoop is a subscription right we haven't touched too much on the business model but transitioning the whole company and the whole business model to being a subscription versus a one-time Hardware sale changed a lot for the company uh but one thing that it it really changed uh for the better is the DNA around launching new features launching new Analytics you're no longer trying to get a 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 widget you're trying to keep your customers every day right because every day they have a choice to cancel and
what in turn that does is it makes you very focused on releasing new features that are adding value now you could have a like a conversation that's two or three depths deeper than this which is around well should we go down the path of releasing these features or those features do those features feel less focused than these features right but all of a sudden at 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 place is within the lens of our already focused Mission and and areas of innovation should we pursue different categories or different features and I do I think like to think it's it's very customer-centric because uh because we have this deep relationship with our members where they're wearing the product 24 7. and I think rightfully so we have to earn their their subscription every month competition you've got some big competitors I mean I saw the I saw Apple's recent announcement that sleep is now going to 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 what role is that that played in motivating you terrifying you all of these things yeah so when whoop was starting uh Nike which is a company I looked up to with great admiration I was just coming out with the Nike fuel band uh Adidas was coming out with the me coach uh Under Armor about a year or two later was going to spend a billion dollars spends a billion dollars acquiring three different companies in the space they were coming out their own wearable they bought a a Running Company um a company called Endomondo a company called MyFitnessPal so they had a whole strategy around Health tracking there was a company called uh Fitbit which was about to go public for you know many billions of dollars a company called Jawbone which had raised a billion dollars uh it was rumored Apple was entering the space it was rumored
um Microsoft was entering the space so competition was always in this backdrop but I I found I never found myself that um swayed by what the competition was doing in fact if there's any company I'm most critical of their strategy in the wearable space it was Nike because Nike is 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 haven't it's a great book anyway it's Phil Knight's book but they built that brand by uh storytelling and authenticity and the authenticity being the people who wore their shoes ran faster and jumped higher and so that was the company I was the most nervous about because I was afraid if they could build a wearable that their world's best athletes actually wore they could then tell that story to the masses and be successful but they took a huge shortcut and that shortcut was they just built a product they thought the mass Market 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 all the best athletes in the world and so the clue to me that that product was going to fail was that 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 wearing it and on the flip side the opportunity I saw was if we could get the world's best athletes to wear whoop we could in turn build our own brand around performance and around an aspirational product and if you go back and like looking back on it that was a that was a very stubborn perspective again and um you know even a little bit arrogant to say uh that 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 I also though think it was a fairly rational perspective because if you build a product that
someone needs to wear 24 7 and they don't love it there's no amount 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 that with the fuel band on the flip side if if you can really deliver value around sleep or recovery or you know these measurements that at the time a professional athlete had never had uh they're very very likely to pay for it because that's a huge value add in their overall performance so that was our very early go to market strategy and it was also part of the way that we differentiated ourselves from other products the last thing I'll say about this is and again inspired by Nike the idea that you could build a brand or a product that says something about your identity like the difference between a cotton shirt that's plain versus a cotton shirt with a swish on it like the person who's wearing the switch feels something different the person who observes the person wearing the swoosh thinks something different that was a phenomenon that resonated for me at a very young age but when I looked at the health monitoring landscape uh to me it felt like Health monitoring was actually definitively not cool and wearing a health monitor there was almost a stigma associated with it unfortunately so how can you build a technology that people wear 24 7. that has a positive identity associated with it 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 story about how health monitoring is aspirational it's interesting because I sat here with Scott Galloway earlier on and Scott talked to me about how once upon a time maybe 30 years ago um because of the way we learned about products and the lack of trip advisors and review sites and Amazon reviews the big the big companies could could sell a fairly mediocre product based on just pumping advertising at like traditional advertising like TV and stuff so you'd go out and buy the
Procter and Gamble soap or whatever just because you'd been overwhelmed with advertising from it in the modern era when we're all we have social media accounts and we have you know ways to 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 become more about the product and actually being great then the advertising dollars spent so he 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 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 Ash a year ago raving about it like you'd paid him I think you paid him the way he was going on about it was like you had paid him personally that's great and then obviously you know and 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 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 right I think there's a certain authenticity that consumers gravitate to whether they're intentionally recognizing it or not and yeah for us that's been core to our identity we've had very unusual relationships with athletes and uh I think in large part because we've been able to build the technology that they get value out of LeBron James is one of them that's often cited as being a whoop wearer that must have been pretty surreal to see him wearing it so two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps [ __ ] you know and this was in like end of 2014 early 2015 and uh it was also a very difficult time for the business as we talked about earlier but I remember I was sitting at home with my parents uh 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 couple years in like I had raised money but you know uh was there a business and this amazing thing happened where a commercial came on and it was LeBron James in a Kia commercial wearing a whoop strap
and I thought isn't that the coolest thing like you wouldn't even take it off for a Kia commercial and uh and it also 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 yet but interestingly it was uh it was something that for a couple years did buy us time for for like building a real business was the fact that we could get all these really high profile athletes to wear the product without endorsing them it demonstrated I think to investors or others that okay there's something real about this technology that's different on that point of investors you've raised 400 million in capital roughly yeah 100 million dollars in capital how important is it when it comes to picking your investors to pick the right ones because I've seen this kind of make and break companies I think it's really important that you're aligned with the investors on what the purpose of the company is and you know as a consequence also what the purpose of the capital is we certainly had investors along the way who wanted to put money into the business but wanted it to go in a different direction than what I thought was the right direction and so I'm grateful that I never took that capital I think it gets more complicated when you've got a Believer and that believer invests in you and your business and then whatever you're building takes longer or the revenue hasn't quite come in yet and all of a sudden the believer starts to become a non-believer that's where you start to learn who your investors really are you know I think that's when you start to learn how a functional a board of directors is like when things are when things are bad how's everyone behaving and so it's super important in the selection process certainly with with investors and I think reference checks are really important and I think alignment on what you're trying to do with the capital what your identity is as a company but I think equally important is learning how to manage your board and your group of investors when stuff isn't going well we have something in common which is you don't like networking it's
my idea how that's good research that's how I know you're good at this I [ __ ] hate networking and then when I read you didn't like networking I thought ah that makes two of us yeah I think it's overrated it's often advice too that's given to young people I I think if you uh find a particular problem industry like fill in the blank something you want to solve a passion of yours it pulls you into meeting the right people and that's where showing up is really important that's where going to the thing that you're half invited to you need to go you know what I mean versus being invited to something that you're not sure about or whatever pulling yourself into those environments is critical another piece of advice you gave to CEOs was this which I found fascinating which is there's a difference between hearing and listening what did you mean by that so back to some of the earlier stages of the company um I mentioned it was hard to raise capital for the business and you know I heard no a lot like I was rejected a lot in building this company and the coping mechanism for that especially when I was I would say I was a slightly more immature leader the coping mechanism for that was to kind of put up a wall to negativity to the point where 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 was an effective coping magic mechanism for a very short term period that would not at all have allowed me to scale a business and I had a uh an advisor and and really Mentor at 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 and that was a helpful and very simple way for me to just reframe the way that I thought about negative feedback like okay this person disagrees with me I'm going to absorb that I'm going to sit with it I'm gonna wrestle with it and interestingly now over the course of
10 years you know disagreement's almost a source of excitement for me because it allows me to ask myself this question of how do I know what I know why do I feel so strongly about something and it really makes you again wrestle with it and hopefully debate it with someone who's smarter than you is going to prove you wrong I mean that I think is what's so exciting about building a dynamic team and you know taking on whatever challenge you've got that speaks to the importance of humidity again doesn't it and why that's such an integral thing when you're hiring or picking co-founders you know I've also heard you 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 I think that's important I think it's a very helpful framework I mean back to starting the company I went out and met with all these coaches and athletes and asked them okay if you could have any technology improve your performance what would it be and they were all super focused on exercise type equipment could be measuring stress could be GPS analysis could be video analysis form analysis it was it was hyper focused on the thing the sport the exercise but when I asked them what like what are your biggest problems managing a team or being an athlete it almost always came back to some form of availability so injury or over training like not being optimal on the day you needed to be optimal and so I thought there was a huge mismatch between the solutions they were asking for and the problems they were describing and for me that's that's something I just try to think about when I'm listening to customers or when I'm thinking about products is am I do I clearly understand what the problem is or am I focused too much on what a solution could be 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 something pretty different interesting you hear the problem and then you can kind of first principles up to solve the problems accepting probably conventional
orientated solution I thought the best way to solve problems around Athlete Performance was measuring the other 20 hours of the day and at the time that was super counter-intuitive but that again that word counter-intuitive seems to be come up over and over again when I read your story about being a contrarian and being 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 convention that seems to be a really consistent thread throughout your whole journey not easy to do not easy to do especially when things get tough and everyone goes see convention was right will important to develop a process for conviction and then to to really sit with something that you're convinced about and pressure test it and bat it around and even let other people pressure test it but if you have a track record of that conviction working out then it you really have to you have to stick to it because it's ultimately what's going to make you successful sometimes I worry about that that you know you can you can be you can win so many times in a row that you might stop listening and you might you know oh it's worth noting that the level of conviction that we've talked about on certain things yeah is not a level of conviction that I feel like all the time about a lot of things you know what I mean and 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 so it's important not to look at any entrepreneur and think that person has all the answers like I haven't met that person yet I I just think it's it's a really useful process to figure out what are the things that you feel the most strongly about in the product or service that you're building because when you figure those specific
things out and then you dig your heels in on them a lot of magic can happen around that 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 might be something fun fundamental to whoop that you might have been wrong about in terms of your hypothesis well I think a lot of the answers to that are also things that we're actively working on and building so it's a little bit sort of a little bit closer to the secret sauce if you will then then maybe your your question intended I'm more than happy for Secret Sauce there's a natural tension that occurs when you grow as fast as woop has over the last call it three years four years and where your Market goes from being a certain level of elite athletes to Fitness enthusiasts to everyone where you have to ask yourself how much are you designing the product for everyone versus one of these segments and so there's there's certain aspects of the the rate at which we would help someone who's trying to lose weight versus someone who's trying to improve sleep versus someone who's trying to run a marathon versus someone who's training for the World Cup like the rate at which were curating the whole experience to that individual experience I think is it that's an aspect that I asked myself a lot about how are you thinking about that at the moment I believe it should get much more personalized and even the degree to which certain statistics that you see or don't see May evolve depending on your core goal um so that would be an example of you know an area that we're working through and wrestling with I have no doubt that people have approached you to buy whoop no comment so I'll tell you a story in 2000 and we talked a lot about competition in 2000 and I want to say like 1718 it was around that time that up had clearly
built great technology but we hadn't quite figured out the distribution side of the business or even the business model we were approached by Amazon and Amazon was interested in first investing in the company but then they also got interested in potentially acquiring the company and we weren't interested in selling the business at the time but in the process of evaluating an investment we shared a fair amount about the company right and certainly information that you wouldn't want to share to Amazon a potential competitor Amazon and fast forward two years later they came out with a product that was a direct knockoff of a whoop strap that's not like Amazon yeah well you know you feel it differently when it happens to you that's for sure but look it goes back to some of the resolve of the of the company and the I think that the culture at whoop where we do feel kind of David versus Goliath we are comfortable with people coming after us and we're not threatened by competition because the day they announced that it was almost like a running joke within the office it wasn't okay we're screwed it was 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 energizing that uh that they did it and of course it's nice now to to see that the product I think hasn't quite been as successful as they would have liked or maybe um 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 conviction what is it about what you see in your walls and knowing about what's 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 is a pretty amazing company and I'm sure has an enormous number of amazing people I think what what's inspired what inspired whoop in that moment is the same thing that inspired us for 10 years which is that we see things a little differently if if someone is going to try to copy everything that we've done before
they're still not going to have the special sauce for what we're going to do next and even when we created our uh whoop4 on the circuit boards we wrote um don't bother copying us we will win and it was this great it was this great like call out to the engineering team and in fact every single engineer who worked on who before their initials are on the circuit board oh really so real sense of ownership and the funny thing of course about putting a line like that on a circuit board is the only person 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 there's ways to roll with these things and um you know challenges ultimately are what help you find your identity what is 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 start thinking about taking money off the table about selling about you know going and working on some other 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 and but where are you at what can you tell me I think one thing that's potentially unique for whoop versus other businesses that that I could have started or or an entrepreneur might start is that it's actually gotten exponentially exciting as it's grown like I'm as energized today running the company as I've ever been running the company and and I've met Founders who for you 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 and they kind of feel like they've hit their peak of the mountain and it's time to bring someone else in and they'll stay involved as a chairman or maybe it's the right time to sell it for me it's uh 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 well it creates I think more and more momentum for it it's also a product that you see people wearing all the time so
like everywhere I go I now see whoop which is pretty like pretty amazing just given that uh once upon a time it was an idea on a piece of paper and and so that you know that's still I still find that energizing I've got an amazing team and the future for health monitoring I think is really to be able to predict something about your health that you otherwise couldn't feel that is either going to improve your life or it's going to save your life like I think Health the potential of Health monitoring is so profound that uh you know it determines a full-time my full-time attention for now we have a um tradition here where the previous guest asks a question for the next guest 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 left for you is this is kind of funny um they maybe didn't realize your age when they wrote this but they said what would you tell your 25 year old self I'm going to change this to what would you tell your 22 year old self keep going you know it's going to work out I think learn to separate gratitude from complacency I think I think there was a phase in building Loop where it was so much or even just growing as an entrepreneur where it was so much about the next Milestone and getting to that next Milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine right and you tell yourself okay getting to this milestone's really big deal and you're going to be really happy when you get to this milestone and that has a that has a an important physiological effect in that it literally creates dopamine because you're anticipating this thing um but then when you get to that thing if it's not the thing that you thought it was going to be there's this huge letdown
and so in the process of living on that sort of dopamine wheel I learned that you really need to um introduce gratitude and be appreciative of all the steps and people and products that are happening along the way and I think there's a misperception for entrepreneurs at least I think there was slightly a misperception for me which is like okay if I stop too much to appreciate where I am or this moment or what's happened I'm not gonna have the drive to get to the next thing that's actually not true at all like you can be very appreciative of where you are today and still entirely driven to get to the next milestone in your in your mind so as opposed to to re-answer the question it'd be learning how to uh to balance gratitude with Drive and that makes the whole journey sustainable totally yeah that's how you can go for like multi-decades and still and not get burnt out or that's how you sprint the marathon well thank you thank you for your time thank you for making a product which is just exceptional and you know it 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 by the way we don't check accounts I know previously is like number one for you guys 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 and um it was such amazing timing that we we got to have this conversation shortly after I became obsessed with my week 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 job of it and I think now I know I finished this conversation understanding why and it's about that that focus on the vision it's about having really um clear principles that are driven from a real real sense of like authentic curiosity obviously hard work and all of these things and great people are huge
factors resilience grit and all those 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 principles because the whip is very different and so that that for me is clear like a like a book like Harry Potter it means it's come from a very singular vision of the world it couldn't have been this is not the byproduct of huge amounts of um 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 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 is going to continue to go from strength to strength so thank you for being here thank you Stephen quick one I have some exciting news this episode is brought to you by Mercedes-Benz who recently got in touch to support the Diary of a CEO thank you I've been quite the fan of their cars for some time now so I jumped at the chance to work with them as one of the most well-known luxury Brands out there and through getting to know their brand on a much deeper level I came to learn about our shared values on Innovation striving to create a better tomorrow some of you may know if you follow me on Instagram that this year we invested in a Mercedes-Benz of our own and honestly it's transformed my life but not only that we also use Mercedes-Benz to pick up all of our guests on this podcast this way the dire Visio experience really starts from the moment they're collected and we can be in total control of how that introduction looks and feels over the coming weeks I want to talk to you about Mercedes EQ which is their all-electric car range and how they're Innovative Next Generation technology sustainable benefits are changing the game in terms of their electric driving for businesses but in the meantime if you'd like to stay up to date with the full range and find out more about how Mercedes-Benz can work for you and your business search Mercedes-Benz Fleet and let me know how you get on quick one as you might know crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are a jewelry brand and they make really
meaningful pieces of jewelry and this piece by crafted when I put it on for me it represents courage it represents ambition it represents being calm and loving and respectful and nurturing while also being the antithesis of that seemingly the antithesis of that which is um sometimes a little bit aggressive with my goals and determined and courageous and brave the really wonderful thing about crafty jewelry is it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]