YouSaid · the spoken record

Will Ahmed

lines on the record: 122
first: 2022-10-24
most recent: 2022-10-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“By the way, we don't check accounts. I know privacy is like number one for you, but it's a joke. Thank you for being on Whoop, and I appreciate the way you do this. You do a nice job”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the process of living on that sort of dopamine wheel, I learned that you really need to 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. Not going to 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 mind. So Suppose to reans the question would be learning how to balance gratitude with drive”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keep going. You know, it's going to work out. Learn to separate Gratitude from complacency? I think I think there was a phase in building whoop 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 is a really big deal, and you're going to be really happy when you get to this milestone. And that has an important physiological effect in that it literally creates dopamine because you're anticipating this thing. 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”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, a product that you see people wearing all the time. So Everywhere I go, I now see whoop, which is pretty amazing, just given that once upon a time it was an idea on a piece of paper. And so that, you know, that 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 the potential of health monitoring is so profound that it determines a full-time, my full-time attention for now.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one thing that's potentially unique for Woop versus other businesses that I could have started 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 I've met founders who for 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. It's time to bring someone else in Stand involved as a chairman, or maybe it's the right time to sell it. For me, it's uh. 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 ways to roll with these things. And, you know, challenges ultimately are what help you find your identity.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I don't want to be critical of Amazon. I think Amazon is a pretty amazing company and I'm sure has an enormous number of amazing people. I think what's inspired, what inspired Woop in that moment is the same thing that inspired us for 10 years, which is that we see things a little differently. 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 whoop for. On the circuit boards we wrote Don't bother copying us, we will win. And it was this great call out to the engineering team. And in fact, every single engineer who worked on Whoop 4, their initials were on the circuit board.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 company and I think 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 going to fail, you know, and we're going to see to it that we succeed. So anyway, it was like almost energizing that they did it. And of course, it's nice now to see that the product, I think, hasn't quite been as successful as they would have liked. Or maybe. I don't think they're releasing a future version of it.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Potential competitor. And fast forward two years later, they came out with a product that was a direct knockoff of a whoopstrap.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I'll tell you a story. 2000 Talked a lot about competition in 2000, I want to say like 17, 18, it was around that time that Woop 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 Shared a fair amount about the company, right? And certainly information that you wouldn't want to share to”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So that would be an example of an area that we're working through and wrestling with.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. Have to ask yourself how much are you designing the product for everyone versus one of these segments? And so There's certain aspects of 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. The rate at which we're curating the whole experience to that individual experience? I think that's an aspect that I ask myself a lot about.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 closer to the secret sauce, if you will, than maybe your question intended.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's worth noting that The level of conviction that we've talked about on certain things Not a level of conviction that I feel All the time about a lot of things, you know what I mean And I think it's worth emphasizing that 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. I haven't met that person yet. I just think it's a really useful process to figure out what are the things that you feel the most strongly about. 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. Lot of magic can happen around it.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's important to develop a process for conviction and then 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 you really have to stick to it because it's ultimately what's going to make you successful.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 counterintuitive”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Solutions they were asking for and the problems they were describing. And for me, that's something I just try to think about when I'm listening to customers or when I'm thinking about products is Do I clearly understand what the problem is, or am I focused too much on what a solution could be? 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 hyper-focused on the thing, the sport, the exercise. But when I asked them, 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 overtraining, like not being optimal on the day you needed to be optimal. And so I thought there was a huge mismatch between”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to wrestle with it. And interestingly, now over the course of 10 years, disagreements 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 taking on whatever challenge you've got.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So back to some of the earlier stages of the company, 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 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 mechanism for a very short term period that would not at all have allowed me to scale a business. And I had an advisor and really mentor at the time who said to me, you know, Will, you don't have to listen to what people say, but you should just hear it.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Versus being invited to something that you're not sure about or whatever, pulling yourself into those environments is critical.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it's overrated. It's often advice too that's given to young people. I think if you 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 are half invited to, you need to go. You know what I mean?”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 bad, how's everyone behaving? And so It's super important in the selection process, certainly 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it's really important that you're aligned with the investors on what the purpose of the company is. And 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interestingly, it was something that for a couple years did bias time for 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So two of our first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps. And this was in like end of 2014, early 2015. And 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. And at this point, I think the jury was out in their mind, whether me starting this company was a good idea or not. A couple of years in, like, I had raised money, but was there a business? And this amazing thing happened where a commercial came on and it was LeBron James in Ikea 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 it also made me feel good in front of my parents.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 I think in large part because we've been able to build the technology that They get value out of”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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? 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's aspirational.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They're 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 swish feels something different. The person who observes the person wearing the swish 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, I”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you go back and like looking back on it, that was a very stubborn perspective. Even a little bit arrogant to say that, no, 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 You can really deliver value around sleep or recovery or these measurements that at the time a professional athlete had never had.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a great book. Anyway, it's Phil Knight's book. But they built that brand by Storytelling and authenticity, and the authenticity being the people who wore their shoes ran faster and jumped tire. 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I found I never found myself that swayed by what the competition was doing. In fact, if there's any company I'm most critical of their strategy in the wearables space, it was Nike. Because Nike is Think one of the best brands in the world. And they built that brand. Have you read the book Shoe Dog?”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So when Woop was starting. Nike, which is a company I looked up to with great admiration, was just coming out the Nike Fuel Band. Adidas was coming out with the me coach. Under armor about a year or two later was going to spend a billion dollars, spend a billion dollars acquiring three different companies in the space. They were coming out with their own wearable. They bought a running company. Company called Endomondo, a company called MyFitness Pal. So they had a whole strategy around health dragging. Was a company called Fitbit, which was about to go public for many billions of dollars, a company called Jawbone, which had raised a billion dollars. It was rumored Apple was entering the space. It was rumored Microsoft was entering the space. So competition was always in this backdrop.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could have 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 so that's where a lot of the debates are taking place is within the lens of our already focused mission and areas of innovation, should we pursue different categories or different features. And I think I like to think it's very customer-centric because 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 subscription every month.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. But one thing that it really changed 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Woop is a subscription, right? We haven't touched too much on the business model, but”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's been certain aspects of Product development, you know, go to market strategies You know it's the right thing even But you again you're not dedicating the right level of focus to it or the team doesn't have the bandwidth for it or the timing's not quite right like Yeah. I mean, focus, I think, is probably one of the most underrated skills for any leader. And I don't mean that just for them. It's more important that they create an environment of focus.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's probably the biggest way that success 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 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. You've got the right level of focus if you're going to go into it.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Now, also kind of crazy to start a wearables company and realize you're designing boxers. But that goes back to your first principle's point, I suppose, right?”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We've looked at invisible as a more compelling landscape. So obviously you can wear it on your wrist, but you can actually 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, yeah, so we've come out with shorts, boxers, bras, underwear, 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think 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 something that pulls at me, you know? 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. 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”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So 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 into this very expansive place without being graded at anything.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We made these decisions, so like we made a decision to not be a watch 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 and moop 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? Everyone was measuring steps. We didn't think steps was physiologically relevant.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 till the time and whether or not you're going to be able to give it voice memos. And all of a sudden you're talking nothing about health monitoring. And so, if I look back over the last 10 years,”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 great at all the things that it does for all the things that it does and do. Not a smartwatch. 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 counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that whoop is not a watch.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's mostly a fun thing, but it does speak to our culture, which is using the data we have in front of us, promoting 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'd 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 needed to stay home because either you were getting sick or you were at risk of getting sick because your body was run down. So again, fun ways to use. The data in an actionable way and build it into the culture.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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% sleep performance on average throughout the month, you get a hundred dollars bonus like on your pay stock. Okay.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then creating scores or creating messaging to an end user that gets them to change behavior, gets them to improve health. That to me is the, if you think about the pyramid of challenging things, the tip of the pyramid is a product that is changing your behavior and improving your health.”
2022-10-24 · The Diary of a CEO · Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT