00:05
You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? It's Ryan Alford. Welcome to the latest edition of the Radcast. It is the middle of the week here. We're on a Wednesday recording this. You'll hear this on a Tuesday, but I'm really excited to be joined today by Will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of Whoop. What's up, Will?

00:34
How we doing Ryan? Thanks for having me. Yeah, man. My pleasure. I really appreciate you getting on. I know you're a busy man and Let definitely want to get into it. I know we talked a little bit pre-episode. You're in the lovely Boston area We keeping warm there any snow on the ground No, no snow right this minute, but I'm sure it's coming. Oh, yeah

00:55
getting into it a little bit. In South Carolina we don't get to see much of the white stuff. We get we're an hour to the mountains and two hours or so to the beach but we don't get a lot of white stuff so we're I'm a little jealous because I did live in Manhattan for a little while and miss a little bit getting of at least a little bit of snow here and there so and my kids would enjoy it but nonetheless I appreciate you getting on. I definitely want you know we usually just start with kind of getting your background and talking

01:25
like that. So maybe for everyone listening, you know, just a little bit of your story and you know, what, what started whoop and all those things. So let's start there. Yeah. So I run a business today called whoop, uh, which is a really on a mission to unlock human performance. We build a wearable technology. You can see on my wrist here, uh, that's designed to measure everything about your body.

01:53
And I think what makes whoop different from other products in the market is that we've proven it can change behavior and improve health. So if you want to get fitter, if you want to lose weight, if you want to figure out how you can get more sleep, if you want to be a better executive, you name it, whoop is a product that has had a lot of success in helping you or will have a lot of success in helping you.

02:18
I got into this space personally because I was into sports and exercise. I grew up playing just a bunch of different sports and I ended up playing squash at Harvard. I was a collegiate athlete and I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing to my body while I was training. I was someone who used to overtrain, which is kind of a sin. You get fitter and fitter and fitter and then you fall off a cliff.

02:47
Yeah, yeah. And I think a lot of hard driving people, whether it's over training or burning out, don't have the right balance in their life. And so anyway, for me at a young age, I realized I didn't have the right balance in my life. And I got very interested in what I could measure about my body to better understand it. What does it mean to train optimally? What does it mean to be healthy?

03:15
Uh, these were just sort of basic questions that I was surprised, uh, that there wasn't like a whole technology business, whatnot around. And I did a lot of physiology research while I was at Harvard. I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school, which was. Frankly a lot. And, and I wrote a, I wrote a paper around how I thought, uh, how I thought you could continuously measure the human body and that

03:43
paper really became the business plan for whoop. And so I founded the company my senior year. And by summer of 2012, we were kind of off for the races and so I've been building the business for eight and a half years now. And it's been quite a journey and right now we're having a lot of success. Well yeah, it couldn't be a better time period. We'll get to that in the...

04:13
implications for COVID, which have been really interesting. You know, and I am aware myself, shameless plug there for you. I've been about, I'm only, I guess, four weeks or so is right around the hall, a little before the holidays. So it's been fascinating. I do want to ask you a couple of questions and we get into it, but I did find some interesting stuff, you know, with how you started the company. I read, you know, some of the GQ articles, a few other things and

04:40
It was really interesting to me this notion of the contrary and belief with which you started. When I think about it, I've worn every wearable and a lot of my friends and people that I run with you know like wear everything and it's always about, okay heart rates is like the same old thing. It's heart rate, what's your fitness level, how much exertion have you had? And you kind of flip the whole thing on its head looking at the other side of it which is the recovery aspect.

05:11
Is it just you're a smart guy and you thought through that on the other side or like what, what kind of took you down that path of, of, of the recovery and the sleep in and the importance of all those things? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, when I was, uh, I w when I was a college athlete and I would talk to other athletes and I would talk to coaches about training optimally, so much of the focus was on training.

05:36
And in fact, around when I knew I was going to start whoop, I went and interviewed coaches and said, if you could have technology to understand your athletes better, what would you want that technology to be able to do? And it was always so focused on practice games training. Could we get better video analysis? Could we get better weightlifting strain?

06:06
sweat analysis. And what I realized is that there was a blind spot. And the blind spot was, well, what's actually going on the other 22 hours of the day? And I also realized just personally that that's probably where I was falling over. It's that I thought if I did a great practice and really worked my ass off, it almost didn't matter what I did after that.

06:32
You know, I could stay up late, I could party, I could, you know, whatever. And, and, uh, and the re it couldn't have been further from the truth. And in fact, I was erasing all the gains of training by not recovering properly. And it's not so obvious to see that today, but for whatever reason, 10 years ago, that was a somewhat like contrarian point of view. And I think it was also around the time where exercise had sort of.

07:01
top ticked on the pendulum. It was, can you do a two a day, could you even be doing a three a day? It was just this crazy, more is more is more. And the other thing that was interesting is that when I talked to coaches about, well what problems are you trying to solve? What are your biggest issues? It always came back to availability and injuries.

07:26
You know, this idea that coaches had athletes who would get injured or would over train or weren't actually able to play on the day of the game that they needed to play. And so this is a good insight for any entrepreneurs listening to this. I would encourage you to ask your customers what their problems are, not necessarily ask them what solutions they think you should build. It's your responsibility as an entrepreneur.

07:54
as a business leader to figure out what the solution should be to their problems. And often customers are phenomenal at describing problems and less capable at describing solutions. And so that's what I realized, you know, I realized this years later, but in that moment in time, I was just recognizing a better way to solve their problems. And that was around understanding recovery and sleep.

08:20
And we've talked about this, Ryan, from a very sports-centric point of view. Admittedly, whoops, you know, our origins are in sports. You know, we had the best athletes in the world wearing whoop from the very early days. Two of our first hundred members were people like LeBron James and Michael Phelps. So we just started at this, you know, tip of the pyramid. However, today, which really is whoop as a big business now,

08:50
We're serving virtually every type of person. And I think what holds the Whoop audience together is that it's a somewhat aspirational group of people who have something in their life they want to exceed at or improve at. And they can use Whoop to find this balance, to understand how much they're sleeping, how much they're recovering, what the strain is that they're putting on their body, how different behaviors in their life are affecting their body.

09:17
and they can use that information to perform at a higher level. So we very authentically took a formula that made the best athletes in the world effective and have now been able to deliver it to a much wider market. I love that, especially the notion of balance because when you think about motivation and the people like you mentioned eight, 10 years ago, especially on social media, whether it's a high performing person or athlete or a business person.

09:46
It was always like, well, how can I sleep three hours at night and how can I get, uh, you know, more out of my day? But the notice, but the issue with that and having gone through some of them myself is, you know, that, that seems to work for, you know, how, you know, individually, maybe a month or two. Uh, but then you burn yourself out. Maybe the highest performers and the best athletes can make that last longer. But this notion of recovery and balance in your life in general,

10:14
I think is dead on and obviously why I think you're building success because there's not been that point of view from the other fitness trackers and the other things out there until even to this day and having been in the space a little bit I started hearing about you guys and it just felt

10:31
Right. And so I think you're in, you know, as you guys get more, you're obviously mainstream. Now with the PGA tour agreement and all that, I do want to talk about that. Can you talk about, before I get into maybe some of those bullet points, like.

10:46
For those of you, we have a lot of CEO types who are aspiring entrepreneurs and things like that for the podcast. Can you talk a little bit about building the company? Some of the nuts and bolts of the realities of being an entrepreneur, a young entrepreneur, and having an idea, bringing it to life? Because I think a lot of people think that stuff happens overnight, but whoops, what, eight, nine years in the making now, and now you're seeing the fruits of this

11:16
and that's been building, but can you talk a little bit about it from that entrepreneurs and business growth standpoint? Yeah, I'll start with a positive point of view, or at least I'll frame it as positive, which is that starting a company and building a business is much harder than you think it'll end up being, but it's not nearly as hard as probably most people in your life will tell you.

11:44
which is that it's impossible. I think that the hardest thing for me in building Whoop was less so the actual business side of it, but more so me being comfortable growing into running today what is now a business valued over a billion dollars, right? Like, how do you grow into that? How are you making sure that you personally

12:13
are advancing as a leader and how do you deal with criticism along the way, self-doubt along the way? It's a very vulnerable role being an entrepreneur because it exposes you to what your weaknesses are in such an obvious, transparent way and what your strengths are too, which is why in so many ways I think people...

12:40
overstate the risks to starting a company or overstate the risks associated with being an entrepreneur because the process for becoming an entrepreneur, for starting something reveals so much about who you are as a business leader, what your strengths are, your character, where your holes are, what you need to improve. It reveals that so rapidly and so effectively that

13:07
regardless of whether the business ends up being a success, you as an individual have learned so much about yourself and what it actually takes that you will go on most likely to do incredibly great things afterwards. So I'll just say that sort of first and foremost, the process for becoming an entrepreneur and for building a business, I think is an incredibly powerful one for anyone listening. Yes.

13:37
The other thing that I'll say is that there's this thing that happens, at least it happened to me, where you start a company and you start immediately comparing yourself to the best entrepreneurs. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, whatever, right? These people wouldn't be struggling with this thing. And here I am. I've got...

14:05
you know, four people on my team and two of them are co-founders and, uh, and I'm struggling to get the fifth person, like, gosh, like they would just never would have had to deal with this. And I, I think that's a really, um, unhealthy mindset and, and one that I overcame as well, where you're trying to compare yourself to other executives, other leaders, other entrepreneurs, and really, you just have to focus on how can you become a better version of yourself in this role? And I'll

14:34
that when those heroes that we think of today as entrepreneurs were first starting a company, they didn't know that much more than you did. I mean, I really believe that. I think the key thing though that they did much faster than everyone else is how they got better themselves. And it's why if you look at what they've been able to accomplish later in their careers,

14:57
it's so powerful and it's why many of the best entrepreneurs also have these sort of like failed early startups in their careers too, or things that weren't nearly as successful as what they did later. So again, I come back to this idea that you have to keep comparing yourself to yourself on that, on that growth journey. I like that. And you know, you didn't say it, but again, I've read enough about, you know, your process and that notion of a lot of those you just named

15:26
the ambition in the idea and making sure that's grand enough so that you're kind of beating your competition ahead of the game, which I really like, because I think a lot of people box themselves into the limits of the idea because it may seem easier, but while you're at it, what you're going to all these links, be ambitious. And I think that's what you've done with Whoop, and you're so, I don't.

15:53
have every map shirts on, you guys were at competitive radar and all that, but you're already so far ahead. I think that's what some of the best entrepreneurs have done, whether that was Bezos or jobs or whatever. It was so ambitious. Can you touch on that a bit? For the listeners that may not have read every article I already have.

16:18
Yeah, you know, look, I think that again, back to this moment, like early stage of the company, one of the things that I constantly was told was that the vision for whoop was too ambitious, that you why are you trying to build hardware and software and analytics and design it all from scratch and manufacture it all from scratch. And I believe, well, the key is that you need to have this vertically integrated system so that you controlled every element of it so you at the end

16:49
People would say to me, well, why don't you just build software on top of the Fitbit, or software on top of the Apple Watch, or whatever, right? Yeah. And I thought that was such a flawed way to think about the market, and it totally missed the actual problem that you were trying to solve, and the end user experience for the customer, which at the end of the day is the most important thing. And so this was a recurring piece of criticism.

17:18
And in fact, I'll just say broadly, I think that the more ambitious your idea is, the more potential it is, that's obvious, but it has all these lists, it has all these other benefits that you sort of don't fully appreciate in the moment. The first is, for example, that you end up being able to recruit insanely good talent, like the best talent by far.

17:45
You know today whoop has a 96% job offer acceptance rate Which in like the world of engineering is kind of unheard of and the reason we have such a high job Acceptance rate is that what we're doing is so hard that it attracts these like insanely competent people Because they want to work on the hardest problems, you know, it's why SpaceX and Tesla for example also have I'm sure amazing

18:13
engineers because they're doing stuff that's on the cutting edge. So if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge, I think you inherently have these advantages of being able to attract really great talent. You also have the opportunity to work with other very cool brands because those brands want to associate themselves with the next thing, like the cool cutting edge thing. I mean, look, it has limitations or challenges. First of all, you have to be able to raise a lot of capital.

18:42
This was something I got better at over time. Whoop has raised like $200 million. I mean, at this point, over $200 million of capital in order to pursue this vision. And you said it yourself, like, you know, we've been building the business for eight, nine years, but six or seven years into it, the whole thing almost blew up or, you know, went bankrupt. You know, so are you willing to really...

19:10
put that much time into something to see your vision through. I think you also need to know that if you're going to take something on that's super ambitious. How's, uh, you know, on the raising capital side, and I, I know we could go down this, this road for more time than we have, but, uh, what was that like for you? You know, being, you know, a young entrepreneur, you've got a great idea. You're building it. Were you, did you know that that was the path? I mean, were you just insightful enough or did you have in?

19:40
where people were telling you like to get this where you gotta go, you're gonna have to take on investors. And then once you take on investors, did you feel more pressure of suddenly, not that you aren't the owner, you're still the CEO, the founder, you still have a lot of skin in the game, but what was that like?

20:00
You know, I think it's like a lot of things that we've discussed where again, you have to keep getting better at it. I think, you know, for example, raising the first 700 grand as a 22 year old founding woob was harder than the last round of financing, in which we raised $100 million. So don't you know, don't ever look at the headline big number.

20:25
All of these things are relative to the stage that you're at, the proof points that you're at, and also how much time you spent raising money. I mean, now I've spent nine years learning how to raise capital. So I think I've started to understand the ins and outs and what investors are looking for and what they're not looking for. So anyway, I bring up those two numbers though, just for your audience to appreciate.

20:49
just because you're having a hard time raising that first 250 grand or that first million dollars or whatever it is, it doesn't mean you can't go on to raise an enormous amount of capital. It's learning the fundraising process. The other thing I'll say that I feel fortunate about is I've raised capital from investors that I've built great relationships with over time. And I will say that when you take

21:19
capital from someone it's like a marriage except that you can't get divorced. I mean, there's a real bond that happens there. You're now both on the cap table. And so, you know, you need to just be pretty thoughtful about that. And I would also say that you don't want to take any capital. You want to make sure that there's some real alignment around what the vision is

21:48
That's been another thing that I think has boded well for Whoop in being very ambitious. You know, it self-selected out investors who were maybe at the early stage scared of losing their money. They knew that there were some real technology risks and so they said like, let's take it on. Whereas now at a later stage, you know, it's more of a business model story. You have to think about these things relative to the stage as well.

22:18
You know, transitioning a bit, we are a marketing podcast. I mean, what were, you know, maybe some of the, the successful, you know, marketing tactics or, you know, in the early days versus now, I mean, obviously, with the PGA agreement, it certainly helps when you have a killer product and you get some organic.

22:37
things already happening, you know, and anybody would love to have, you know, LeBron or, or Justin Thomas or whoever, you know, throw your, uh, throw your, uh, band on. And I mean, I know some of those are starting to probably become paid engagements, but, uh, you know, maybe talk about some of the early marketing tactics versus where we're at now. Well, one strong point of view I had around the product.

23:04
was that it needed to be able to be good enough such that a famous person, a professional athlete, someone who wanted to improve would wear whoop and we weren't going to pay them. Like essentially, we didn't need to sponsor everyone who wore the product. And I said that if the product delivered on its value proposition was, which was that it could measure recovery, it could tell you how hard to work out, it should tell you when to go to bed, it could make you a better

23:34
athlete person, you name it, then people should pay us for that. And by the way, if, if it didn't deliver on those things, there was no amount of money we could pay someone to wear something 24 seven that they weren't getting value out of. I mean, ask yourself how many things in your life do you wear 24 seven? And so, you know, and we saw what's that? Very few. Yeah.

23:58
So we saw this with like the Nike Fuel Band, for example, which was a, you know, sort of a Fitbit like wearable in 2013 or 14. And they had athletes like LeBron James and Tiger Woods and Serena Williams. And meanwhile, none of those athletes were wearing the Nike Fuel Band, even though they were paying these guys like hundreds of millions of dollars. So it was obvious to me that we were never going to sort of pay our way into the sports world. We needed to authentically build the best product.

24:28
And that we held that to such a high bar that it became actually a marketing strategy in that athletes paid for whoop. We didn't sponsor them. And that was a that was a really strong point of view. And what it did is then when you saw these athletes wearing the product, it had a real authenticity around it. And so we were able to authentically build a brand.

24:54
which was also a marketing strategy. We said early on we wanted to be a brand. Not every company needs to be a brand to be successful, but we believed that health monitoring as a broad landscape would consolidate around brands, that it would make all the sense in the world that a company that owned human performance would be a brand. And so while the product, I've always wanted to build a product that

25:22
added value for really a wide, I'd say a wide audience of people added value for a wide audience of people. The brand I always liked the idea of it being anchored around high end performance. You know, I think that so much of what we learn in health and fitness has come from professional athletes. And, and I think it's often taken for granted, you know, the fact, for example, that

25:51
Weightlifting really started with pro athletes in the 90s. It wasn't that long ago. So let's call that 25, maybe 30 years tops where most professional athletes lifted weights. I mean, now you can't go to a hotel in America that doesn't have a gym. And that story, I think, just permeated directly through sports into society. And so I've believed for a while that the next version of that story will be around sleep and recovery.

26:19
And you're starting to actually see this happen, right? You read a 5,000 word ESPN report on like LeBron James spending a million dollars a year on his body to recover, right? Like there's just, it's the new angle that people are talking about, sleep and recovery. And so I think a lot of that story is being told by the best athletes in the world. And so I always wanted WUPE to be anchored in sports. And so as a result, that's also where we've looked for

26:48
for big marketing partnerships. Whoop just became the official recovery wearable of the PGA Tour. So that's a situation where every member of the PGA Tour is gonna be wearing Whoop and we're gonna be creating a lot of cool visualizations around data for those players. Although again, the reason that deal came to be, Ryan, was that all those golfers were actually wearing Whoop organically.

27:17
And that's where we realized, oh, this is going to be a great partnership because these guys organically like the product. So hopefully that puts a bow on some of what I'm saying here where you want to find people who authentically organically use your product and then help tell stories with that. Yeah, I love it. So I'm sure like you just mentioned the organic with PGA tour. I mean, is there anything you can talk about? I mean, I'm not asking you for like numbers of but.

27:46
I'm assuming this is a paid agreement between WUPE and PGA on some level. But you're also giving them data. There's a fairly equal, not equal, but there's a mutual exchange happening there for both them and you. Not to mention, so maybe start there, but the COVID aspect, which was just fascinating with Nick Watney this past summer, and the notion of the advanced data that you guys are getting with these things.

28:16
are now leading to potential, if not early, real time signals that someone might have COVID. I know that was kind of a dual question there, but anything more specific you can say around the PGA agreement as far as how that will work and things like that? Well, our PGA tour relationship probably goes back a couple of years now where we discovered that about

28:43
50% of the PGA tour was organically wearing the products. Good grief. And the way that I would discover that is just by watching golf on the weekend, and I would see it on all their wrists. And so I got to know a bunch of the players in that process, and then COVID hits, and golf says it wants to be one of the first sports that comes back. And Nick Watney, who was one of the professional golfers who had worn WUPE for a long time,

29:13
tests negative for COVID-19 on a Tuesday, the tournament's on a Thursday. He plays in the tournament on Thursday, wakes up on Friday and looks at his whoop data, right? So he looks in the whoop app and he sees that his recovery is incredibly low. Recovery is like this metric we give from zero to 100%, red, yellow, green. He's got a red recovery, which means his body's really run down.

29:43
And he also had something on Whoop which is called an elevated respiratory rate. So what is that? Respiratory rate is a measurement of breaths per minute. So you know, most people have on average about 10 to 20 breaths per minute while they're sleeping. And it's a very static statistic. It really doesn't change. So Nick Watney, if you looked at his data for 10 months, every single day, he had a

30:11
he would wake up with a respiratory rate of 14. It's a very boring statistic, doesn't change. However, this morning he wakes up with this red recovery and a respiratory rate of 18 and a half breaths per minute. So for 10 months, no change, and then all of a sudden it's 18 and a half breaths per minute. And we had just published all this research showing that an elevated respiratory rate could be a predictor of COVID-19.

30:40
Now that's quite a statement. Why would we say that? Well, we had thousands of whoop members get tested for COVID-19. And we saw that the ones who tested positive all had this elevated respiratory rate. And in fact, an elevated respiratory rate caught about 80% of the cases who have these whoop members who got COVID-19. Now this is published research, it's been peer reviewed. I encourage listeners to look it up. So we have this peer reviewed.

31:08
research that shows an elevated respiratory rate can be a predictor of COVID-19. And Nick Watney sees that he has this super elevated respiratory rate. Now just to be clear, why does it matter that you have an elevated respiratory rate? COVID-19 is a lower respiratory tract infection. So it makes all the sense in the world that if you have a lower respiratory tract infection, your respiratory rate would go way up.

31:36
Anyway, Nick goes to see the doctors on this morning, instead of playing in the tournament, he says, look, I think I should be tested again. They say, you're cleared to play. He says, no, I've got an elevated respiratory rate on whoop. They say, what is whoop? Okay, you can figure it. And so anyway, they test him again. What is this whoop we're talking about? Who were you out with last night? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, so they test him again, and sure enough, he tests positive, and he's able to drop out of the tournament.

32:06
And within 24 hours of the PGA Tour, learning of this story from Nick and the background, they procured a thousand whoop straps, not just for every player on the tour, but also for every caddy, every media member, everyone in the bubble. Because again, if you're creating a bubble, you wanna have everyone as safe as possible. So that was this summer.

32:36
And then over the course of the past six months, we started talking about what would be a partnership that could one, benefit player health, but two, also help elevate the Whoop brand and do some things around fan engagement that may be unique. And that's where we came up with this idea of Whoop Live. And Whoop Live is essentially our brand name for putting physiological data on videos.

33:05
You can do this in the whoop app even if you go to the camera. You can put your heart rate, you can put your calories, you can put your strain in real time on top of a video. And so we got thinking about, well, what if you were watching golf in real time and you could see Rory McIlroy's heart rate as he's putting on 18 or you could see what was happening inside his body during a high pressure.

33:33
And so that's where we came up with this idea of whoop live and we're going to have a lot more to come with it. Uh, hopefully, uh, the marketers listening to this can appreciate how, how fun of an idea it is. And yeah. And so it's a, it's a five year deal. And a lot of it comes down to improving, uh, player health and performance and creating whoop live, which we think is going to, you know, improve the broadcast experience and improve the fan experience. Yeah, that's awesome. And uh,

34:03
Yeah, we'll see. It'll probably be a whole, I can, you can just think of the applications of who's got the lowest heart rate over the most, uh, critical putts, you know? I bet you it's, uh, you know, Branson that occurs. One of the, one of the really good putters, they probably just have like a flat line heart rate or something. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I don't know either, but it's, it's intriguing. It's very intriguing. One of the interesting things about COVID was.

34:31
you know, they started showing all these replays of old sporting events. And you know, you're watching the masters in 1997 or the Superbowl in the early two thousands or whatever. And I remember thinking to myself like, gosh, this is over 20 years ago. And how can I tell that it's over 20 years ago versus the broadcast today? And really the only difference, I mean, the only meaningful difference is the resolution of.

35:01
the camera. Right. And if you think about how much our world has changed in the last 20 years, you know, doesn't that seem kind of underwhelming? Very. And, and I think professional sports broadly has gone through this, this sort of crazy bull run. You know, you bought a sports team, it went up. You're a player, what point guard all star in 2010 versus 2020. You're now making more money, right? It's like,

35:29
everything's just been up and to the right. And so when you're winning, innovation comes more slowly. Right. And I think what's about to happen, and we're starting to see this with some serious rating declineings for certain sports leagues. What we're starting to see is the evidence that there is a younger generation coming up that is glued to their phones. I mean, a lot of generations are glued to their phones. But pro sports today are competing with TikTok,

35:59
Netflix, sleep, you know, like they're competing with things that 20 years ago, maybe they weren't competing with the same way. And I mean, those things barely existed 20 years ago, you know, in the case of at least TikTok and some of these other social platforms. So I just think that you're gonna need to see pro sports adapt and innovate in a way that they haven't.

36:28
And I think, you know, the leagues that do are going to continue to thrive. And I think that, you know, in the next 10 years, we may see a major sports league disappear, you know, if they don't innovate, uh, you know, I think, I think there could be real trouble ahead. Yeah. Baseball might be on that list. I mean, it's talk about just the speed of the game and, you know, golf's playing with that too. And I think that's why it's brilliant to be integrating things like this that make it more interesting. The data points, the live aspect.

36:56
because you know golf's biggest complaint for non-players, watchers, is just the speed of the game as well. So they're doing things like this that make a ton of sense for making that a more engaging experience because look, there's only so much you can do to speed up the game. So you've got to add interesting things that make the engagement, you know, more to the attention spans of today. And let's face it, when in the TikTok world we live in for a younger audience, that spans, I think exactly 8.7 seconds, maybe less.

37:25
Yeah, yeah, so anyway, that's you know, I hope whoop can play a role in that innovation, but I'm also a sportsman. So I hope that I hope that all the leagues are thinking right now like what can we do differently and and taking that very seriously. Was we close out will and I appreciate your time on this but where are we going? I mean, you know, obviously you were way ahead of the game. It's landing perfect for you with being in the position you are with.

37:54
Not that anyone's witching for a pandemic by any means, I know that. But you're positioned well because there's just more overall awareness of health and recovery and all these things. And is it obviously the benefits that whoop has with identifying maybe some of those markers. So, again, being an innovative company, though, what what's the end game for you? Maybe with both the business and for yourself personally. And I know that's a loaded statement, maybe not in game, but, you know, where do we want to see things go?

38:25
Yeah, I do think that who has the opportunity to be like a massive standalone business, much bigger even than we are today. And I think a lot of our responsibility is going to be helping individuals understand and improve their health. And it's, it's no easy thing to change behavior. It really isn't. And it's, and it's certainly no easy thing to improve health. But

38:55
you know, we as society are realizing from a global pandemic that feelings are kind of overrated. You know, you can have this virus and be asymptomatic and give it to a loved one and it gets that person incredibly sick and God forbid they die, right? And so I think, you know, I think everyone's sort of waking up to this realization that feelings are overrated. And in fact, there may be things that you can measure about your body.

39:23
that can help you understand the status of your body. You think about the healthcare system today, it costs a fortune and it's so inefficient. For example, should I go see a doctor on a random day of the year? Or should I go see a doctor 30 minutes before something's about to happen? I mean, to me, everything around medicine and healthcare,

39:52
improves when it's preventative versus curative. All the cost reductions are optimized around preventative care. And so I think wearable technology can play a huge role in preventing, on the preventative side of this and creating awareness. And then when something does happen, providing that alert.

40:18
So you'll see over time whoop will play a much bigger role in health broadly. And there's a lot of horrible things that have come from this global pandemic. But one positive I would take from it is that I think society at large is now taking a very close look at the healthcare system, at broad health awareness, and is saying, yeah, this is something we really need to get right over the next decade. I love it.

40:47
So what about you personally? I mean, you know, like, do you see, are you in, is this the brand or is this, you know, you never could really see Steve Jobs disconnected from Apple, I mean, is Will Ahmed and Whoop, and you know, do you see this being the forever ride or do you have like, are you, you see yourself being a serial entrepreneur? Ha.

41:10
Well, I'm someone who's all in until I'm not. So, you know, right now it's all in on Whoop. It's making Whoop the biggest success it can be. It's certainly a mission I'm incredibly passionate about. It's working with a group of people I'm incredibly passionate about who I think are exceptionally brilliant. And look, I gotta keep growing too. You know, 12 months ago, Whoop had 100 employees. Today we've got

41:39
375, right? Uh, the, the role of a CEO for a hundred people versus 375 is different. And I know we're going to blink and you know, probably be at 700 or a thousand. So, you know, I have to make sure I can keep growing. And, um, and so that's exciting too. I love it. And, you know, I think you're blending.

42:03
what you're searching for, which is this humility combined with an intensity that I feel, and I think you're gonna get where you plan to go. And I really appreciate you coming on, Will. Ahmed, founder and CEO. Tell everyone, Will, if they wanna keep up with you and the brand, obviously, all those locations, where they can find you. Yeah, you can learn more about Whoop just at whoop.com. That's W-H-O-O-P.com.

42:30
You can find me on social media at Will Ahmed and then at Whoop as well. And I also host a podcast where I interview interesting athletes, entrepreneurs, CEOs, you name it. And that's the Whoop podcast. You can find that as well on everywhere podcasts are hosted. Man, really appreciate it and really appreciate the time.

42:59
I'm going to keep tracking my HRV and hopefully getting that up. Uh, it seems to fluctuate a bit, but, uh, it all seems to come back to my five and a half hours of sleep, which needs to get up as well. Keep that HRV high, keep the respiratory rate flat, keep the sleep, the servants is low, you got it all gone. I know I'm going to keep doing it. Well, let's, I, Hey man, I want to follow up with you in the next day. You went from 100 to 375.

43:28
And let's follow up in the next 8 to 12 months and see where we're at then. Okay. That sounds good. Ryan, I appreciate your time. Thank you for having me on. Thanks Will. All right guys. We really appreciate Will coming on today. You know where to find everything. The Radcast. That's theradcast.com at the.rad.cast on Instagram. And you know where to find me on Instagram at Ryan Alford. And we really appreciate you listening in and we'll see you next time. Yo guys, what's up? Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. But do us a favor.

43:57
If you've been enjoying the Radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else. We'd really appreciate it. And go leave us a review at Apple or Spotify. Do us a solid. Tell more people, leave us some reviews. And hey, here's the best news of all. If you want to work with me directly, if you want to get your business kicking ass and you want radical or myself involved, you can text me directly at 864-729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going.

44:27
864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.