In this episode, the host welcomes Will Ahmed, co-founder and CEO of WHOOP, a health and fitness company revolutionizing human performance through wearable technology. Ahmed discusses his transition from athlete to tech entrepreneur and the origins of WHOOP, which arose from his own experiences with overtraining and a desire to understand recovery. He highlights the importance of resilience and the role early struggles played in WHOOP's success, emphasizing the value of overcoming challenges and the danger of "foie gras startups" that receive too much funding too early. Ahmed also delves into the mindset of an athlete versus an entrepreneur, the significance of hiring and empowering the right team, and the company's evolution from selling hardware to adopting a subscription model. Finally, he shares insights on personal growth, maintaining health through consistent routines, and WHOOP's vision for integrating more closely with healthcare in the future.
"To date, Will has raised over $400 million for WHOOP, with the last round valuing WHOOP at $3.6 billion and with a cap table including the likes of SoftBank, Accomplice founder, collective, foundry Group, IVP and more incredible names."
This quote highlights WHOOP's financial achievements and the high-profile investors involved in its funding.
"I was always into sports and exercise. I was playing squash while I was at Harvard, and I just generally felt like I didn't know what I was doing to my body."
This quote explains the personal motivation behind Will Ahmed's pursuit of understanding physical performance, which led to the creation of WHOOP.
"I think, generally speaking, playing sports and being an athlete prepares you for a lot of good things in life."
This quote emphasizes the belief that the skills and mindset developed through sports are beneficial for entrepreneurship and life in general.
"Those challenges, I think, helped us build a resilience as an organization."
This quote underlines the importance of overcoming initial obstacles to strengthen an organization's resolve and capability.
"I do think raising a lot of capital can be helpful."
This quote indicates that for certain types of ambitious businesses, securing significant funding is advantageous.
"Realistically, 90% of startups fail. So the 10% that are successful just in their own right have achieved something that's unrealistic."
This quote highlights the inherent unrealistic nature of startup success and the need for ambition beyond conventional expectations.## Balancing Realism and Vision
"I think a good question to ask yourself is the original vision that we set out on wrong."
This quote emphasizes the importance of revisiting the initial vision when facing challenges to determine whether the vision still holds true and if it's worth persevering through difficulties.
"Well, the one you see a lot is founder conflict."
This quote highlights founder conflict as a major reason for startup failure, underscoring the need for founders to work harmoniously.
"The first thing is I found partners that are incredibly complementary, that much overlap in the things that we're good at."
This quote illustrates the importance of selecting business partners whose strengths complement each other, leading to a more effective and harmonious working relationship.
"So we could have built technology that said, this is going to replace your trainer and this is going to replace your coach. But we were pretty mindful of the fact that if we did that, it would make it very hard to get the technology into the market and get the technology adopted because we actually needed coaches and trainers to want to use it."
This quote discusses the strategic decision to create technology that complements existing roles in the industry rather than replacing them, ensuring better market reception and adoption.
"Choose chaos over drama, choose speed over control."
This statement encourages startups to prioritize rapid growth and innovation over strict control and to manage internal conflicts efficiently to avoid derailment.
"The moment you lose trust in someone you're working directly with, it's important to have a conversation about why you've lost trust in them and can they earn it back."
The quote underlines the importance of addressing issues of trust head-on and suggests that losing trust may lead to necessary terminations for the health of the company and the individual's career.
"We tell people that in the interview process, and we tell them that when they joined. And it helped self select who's right for our organization and who's not."
This quote explains the company's approach to hiring by being upfront about their fast-paced culture, which helps in attracting the right talent who are comfortable with the company's dynamic environment.## WHOOP Culture and Decision-Making
"So if you have a company culture of control, especially top down control, where I want to know every decision that's being made today, that's going to require a ton of meetings, it's going to require a ton of committees, and it's going to slow things way down."
This quote emphasizes the negative impact of a top-down control culture on the speed of decision-making and overall company agility.
"I think in the sort of upfront stage you can be fairly deliberate and maybe to your question, this would be the slow part of it, right? Where you're ultimately focused on having everyone have alignment, but then you're in the mode of, okay, we know what we're looking for, let's go."
This quote highlights the balance between being deliberate in the initial stages of hiring to ensure alignment and then accelerating the process once the hiring criteria are clear.
"I tend to lean in on trust. I like to hire people and believe that they're going to be successful."
This quote reflects the speaker's philosophy of starting with a high level of trust for new hires, fostering a positive and empowering work environment.
"How quickly can I build a team to hire great people without me? How can I scale the mission or vision pitch as much as possible?"
The quote implies the importance of delegating and scaling the hiring process and company mission to maintain growth as the company expands.
"It used to be that if WHOOP had a bad day, I thought I had a bad day. And if WHOOP had a good day, I had a good day."
This quote illustrates the early conflation of personal and company performance and the speaker's journey to separate the two for better personal well-being and leadership.
"It's okay, I think if your identity is closely related to what you're building and your career and what you're passionate about."
The quote distinguishes between identity and performance, suggesting that while one's work can be a significant part of their identity, their sense of personal achievement should not solely depend on the company's success.
"We had this hairy moment where we were transitioning from being a hardware business to being a subscription that ended up being the right decision for the business."
This quote recounts a critical juncture in WHOOP's business model transition and the associated fundraising challenges that were overcome.
"WHOOP is a good example of? It takes, like, a really long time to be successful in what feels like overnight."
The quote encapsulates the narrative of WHOOP's journey to success, highlighting the often unseen long-term effort behind a seemingly rapid rise to prominence.## Transition to Subscription Business
This was also around the same time that Fitbit, as a publicly traded company was trading at about one times revenue, which isn't great, and peloton as a private company was trading at about 20 times revenue. And so I was asking myself, well, do we want to grow up to look like Peloton or Fitbit?
This quote explains the strategic decision-making behind WHOOP's transition to a subscription model, considering market valuation and growth potential.
What is the daily value of a life coach, or the monthly value of a life coach, or the monthly value of having an alerting system to tell you to see a doctor? It's not like that doesn't really exist.
This quote highlights WHOOP's approach to pricing based on the unique daily and monthly value it provides to users, which is innovative in the health tech space.
I like to mix it up, and then I also play golf from time to time.
This quote illustrates the variety in Ahmed's workout routine, reflecting a balanced and diverse approach to fitness.
The secret to sleep is the amount of time you spend in bed being quality sleep.
This quote emphasizes the importance of sleep quality over quantity and introduces the concept of optimizing sleep through specific habits.
High performance is exceptional output delivered consistently over time.
This quote encapsulates Ahmed's philosophy on health and fitness, highlighting the importance of consistent effort.
I think that WHOOP as a technology is going to continue to innovate and continue to make it easier and easier for people to understand their bodies and improve their health.
This quote outlines WHOOP's future direction, focusing on innovation and deeper integration with healthcare.