Will Ahmed

the other advantage that that we have over even um a doctor or trainer or coach like in your real life is like their sample size might be tens hundreds maybe even a thousand people like best case scenario whereas you know we're building data sets on millions of people right and so it's just the the number of people that look exactly like you on our platform is pretty profound

we think of the product very much as a coach and and that's a fairly deliberate that's a deliberate word because there's other ways to think about um health monitoring and i think over i think over time it will certainly be able to you know i don't want to say too much but you know it'll be able to tell you pretty deliberately um what you need to do next based on your goals or tell you things that you don't know to ask about which of course is what a great coach does

there's there's a number of categories that we're pretty excited about i think that what you're going to see um is over time this shift from being able to improve people's lives pretty dramatically with their health to um you know ultimately saving people's lives on a fairly regular basis i think it's going to be like uh almost like a chat gpt moment you know in this last you know how like all it's going to be i think it's going to be pretty binary like that where all of a sudden you realize tha

we validated the sensor from all these different locations so we we have something called whoop labs which is where we invite people um essentially off the street and we do these data collections every day and people wear body suits of sensors all over their bodies and we've identified certain locations and then we've you know built algorithms that make all those locations tell you the same thing so if you were wearing six whoop straps at the same time in all these different locations you'd get

our initial shot on goal at making whoop disappear is whoop body which is a line of clothing that allows you to put the sensor in different locations that aren't your wrist

our opinion is there's enough screens in the world so whether it's your phone whether it's the machine that you're working out on whether it's your ipad maybe one day even it's your smartwatch whoop will send the data there right and so you can you can find a way to see it uh because for most of the rest of the hours of the day having a screen is actually an inhibitor in our opinion to wearing it 24 7.

we have a principle that wearable technology should either be cool or invisible and a lot of wearable technology is kind of stuck in no man's land in the middle of those two phenomenons and it looks something like a piece of plastic on your wrist with a you know a time and a step counter or something like that and um or you know some of the smart watches on the market like they aren't super desirable things to wear and they're also very present and so we wanted to stay away from that we wanted t

what for every other hardware company a thousand percent would be a new hardware launch whoop did as a software upgrade and a firmware upgrade just over the air

historically wearables have never measured muscular load so we thought that was a pretty interesting use case

just in the last six months we released two pretty innovative features leveraged on top of our hardware

whoop built its technology off of um a psg machine which is essentially like a sleep laboratory you go to and you have nodes all over your body and the idea that you can get a similar quality of sleep staging uh from a sensor that's about the size of your thumb as you could from going to a sleep laboratory i mean that's a pretty amazing sort of moment in time for technology

we had a bit of an existential crisis where it was like hey we've built this innovative product that people love and no one's buying it like we need to take a huge reset on this business model and this is our best shot on goal at what that business model should look like and funny enough when we when we first launched it was 30 a month and even today uh it's still anchored at a 30 monthly rate if you want to pay month to month there's cheaper options if you pay on an annual membership the other

whoop was one of those businesses i mean there were so many years jason where it was very hard to raise capital you know that sort of period of like 2014 to call it 2018 or 19 was very hard to raise capital and the business almost went bankrupt in 2017 and 18 and then you fast forward a mere few years later and you know multi billion dollar company

i put out some sort of public information about why i thought the product would fail after reading things about it and it was it was a productive rallying cry internally too um so much so that we put on as we were building our next technology um we put on every uh circuit board don't bother copying us we will win and and and the inside joke being to us like if you actually were able to find that circuit board it was because you were taking the product apart to obviously figure out what's inside

the people who bought whoop had were staying on it for a long time um so we didn't have the same drop-off rates that that you would experience with say um maybe a fitbit or a jawbone

we're in a continuous cycle of improvement and they're stuck in an annual cycle of improvement and so i think it's a it's an advantage to our business

products that we're competing against in my opinion are making a mistake of holding back their innovation for 12 months from now or 24 months from now so that you buy the next hardware

we essentially launched whoop as a subscription in may of 2018 and it created this pretty amazing growth engine for the company

we started working with high performance athletes so you know i found a whoop in 2012 so i've seen a lot of ebbs and flows to what people might call the wearable space or the quantified health space and the initial vision was really to work with the world's best athletes athletes now um athletes are very diverse uh you know skin color um wrist size hairiness um sweat complicates things movement complicates things so we actually picked by far the hardest use case for measurement and that meant th

the product itself is collecting a lot of data although i think in part what people gravitate to is the accuracy of that of those readings and then the the way that the product's able to simplify the information

it's really entirely focused on your health and as a consequence i think we've become very good at health monitoring we've become very good at telling people what they need to do next and creating a product in turn that people don't take off

we collect about a hundred times as much data as a fitbit or an apple watch when it pertains to your health