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

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“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 I saw there was a lot of potential for this thing. 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 format, by the way, that you're willing to wear 24-7, which has its own challenges we can talk 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
“Well, a lot of it would be diet Potentially supplements if you're taking them, making sure you're taking the right ones. Because if you're taking the wrong supplements, that's actually a lot worse for you than taking none. I think some type of mindfulness or meditation or breath work speeds up recovery. That's my own bias. We certainly see 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.”
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
“The amount of time that your body is in an elevated heart rate zone. So we're talking about primarily cardiovascular measurement of stress that you're putting on your body for any period of time. But back to your question, 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 strain level. So if you're a 50% recovery, maybe you're doing a 10%. If you're at a 75% recovery, you're doing a 16 or 17 or 18. And a lot of this goes back to 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 get better.”
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. The way that we think about strain is to balance it alongside recovery. So The average amateur exerciser, let's call it the weekend warrior. 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 Woop, 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 peeking, like go crush it, right? Take on a 16 or a 17 or an 18. And I should also say strain is essentially looking at”
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
“You know that documentary. So he scales this crazy slab of mountain without a rope. And he also happened to wear whoop. And so I was talking to him about risk and fear and all these sort of different concepts, stress. But it turns out that he gets like four and a half to five hours of REM sleep a night on whoop. 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 unbelievable outlier also ability to get REM sleep.”
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 fascinating phenomenon, too, as it relates to stress. So research shows that the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala responses, right? Amygdala is like fight or flight. And so if you get a ton of REM sleep, it essentially softens your amyg It makes it less active. Funny enough, I did a podcast with Alex Honald. Do you know who that is? So, Alex Honold's the famous rock climber who did free solo?”
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 don't have to go. Yeah, you don't have to be that extreme. But it's, yeah, I do think it's empowering and sleeps about a third of your life. Be good to take care of that third too.”
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, you know, people think that 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 thirty minutes of REM and slow wave sleep of those seven hours. It could also be that you get like five and a half hours. Of those seven hours. And often when you talk to people about sleep, they're like, oh, 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?”
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
“An awaken 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 a 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.”
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 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 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? 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.”
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 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 I'm still, I think, largely optimizing my life for him being a great entrepreneur or 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 wear these blue light blocking glasses, which have a red tint to them. And it's like a ghetto.”
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 COVID-19 was a big wake up call for people in that category, right? Of feelings are overrated because here you have a virus that you can get that you don't feel. Not even sick, and yet you give it to someone else and they get deathly ill. We had a fascinating relationship with COVID-19 and 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 have gotten over the last two years of people seeing this huge spike in their respiratory rate 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.”
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 nice way to describe it. One of the things I would say in building Woop is Feelings are overrated. There are things happening in your body that you can't feel. And I think Harry variability is one of those key indicators where for most people it would be very hard to know what their hearty variability was saying in any given moment. But it has turned out to be a good embodiment of what Woop does, which is that feelings are overrated.”
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'm thinking to myself, this is a pretty powerful statistic that I've never heard of that feels like everyone should be measuring. And so that's really, that was one of the core insights in building Woop 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 how well you're sleeping. So those are two ways that WOP is primarily using heart rate variability. You know, things that decrease heart rate variability, dehydration, bad diet, we just talked about alcohol, heavy exercise, heavy psychological stress. Often people are surprised how just the wrong conversation with their partner the night before bed. Totally throw their sleep out of whack or their heart variability out of whack.”
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
“The fascinating thing about hard variability is it's been measured since roughly the 80s. And Physiology research that I was reading in college was showing that Olympic powerlifters were using heart rate variability to determine how much they should lift. So based on whether they had a low or a 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 was like, 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.”
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
“You can decide whether you want to be sympathetic, dominant, or parasympathetic, 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.”
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 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. Often it's what's happening when you're feeling a little bit of stress or you're exercising, right? Now parasympathetic 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. Sympathetic? Parasympathetic. So just by controlling your breat”
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 there's an interesting woop hook to all this because one of the core things that led me to starting the company was discovering the 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's able to regulate in its environment.”
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
“A good point. I mean, Wim Hoff, yeah, I think Wim Hoff pushed a lot of it, especially around the cold. Look, I think it's taking off for good reason, in part because, again, back to controlling things you can control, you can literally control your breath in a second.”
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 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 for me, being in the cold is one of those things. Like, I feel a huge jolt of adrenaline from it. 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. And then I feel kind of happy after doing it. Like this little injection of happiness. And so I end 100% of showers that I take cold. And as cold as possible, the colder the better. And then the steam room aspect or the sauna aspect, depending on where I am, is 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.”
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 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. What I hate is when I go to work without having worked out in the morning, and I'm supposed to PLA like squash that evening. And then a couple things come up around six p.m. And all of a sudden I realize I'm not going to be able to get out the door. And so then you don't exercise. So, the nice thing about working out first is like, okay, I've checked that box.”
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, 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 while she's sleeping. And then I work out for an hour with my trainer. I'll do 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.”
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 doesn't because we've got good intimacy, like we've got good bed, cuddle habits, you know. It's like, uh, Yeah, yeah. We've done a good job coexisting 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, so in a second, I want to hear what Senior and what you're trying from. So Cold Room, consistent bedtime.”
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
“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 so I'll probably go to bed between, I don't know, 1130 and midnight. And then I'll wake up at around 6.30.”
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
“Sure. So Take a given day in Boston. Day actually starts for me a little bit the night before because I'm getting into a framework for the next day. Few days a week I work out with a trainer early in the morning, so I'll actually pack everything up for that while I've got my workout clothes out. I'll have what I'm going to wear to work the next day. I'll probably have written down like two or three things that I'm going to focus on the next day. And then like sleep because, you know, building whoop, you think a lot about sleep, you know, I sleep in a really cold bedroom, really dark bedroom.”
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, we talked about meditation, which was a big one. Exercise big one. I got into hot cold Transitions Gratitude's a big one.”
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 about that all the time is like are you controlling all the controllables? And often if you are, or even just setting down in your mind or even putting on paper, hey, what are all the things I control about this situation? What are the things I don't? That can be a very calming exercise”
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
“Enormously stressful, painful. 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 CEOs or leaders or entrepreneurs carry or you're almost compartmentalizing something and you're going to have to feel it. Sure, you know what that feels like.”
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
“Totally, but I also like I was able to build a whole lifestyle and process to approach 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 pop culture likes to talk about stress, which is if you're stressed, you know, take on way less of it, right? And 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 look, that period of time was.”
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, I look back on that whole period with immense gratitude because being able to overcome that and being able to essentially pull through in a circumstance where I think almost any other business would have failed, it just 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 like poof. And so now it's like. Okay, the sales were lower this month than 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 some level of perspective that comes with all of those big challenges because I just remember being able to work through what I deem to be one of the biggest challenges.”
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 were going to go bankrupt on that Friday or file for bankruptcy on that Friday. So imagine, like two days from it all going away. And I remember writing, 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, you know, so glad I did.”
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 I just felt this enormous weight on my shoulders, man. Like it was so intense. And it also was a company size that it's one thing to say, okay, 18 months and you never have more than three months of runway. It's one thing you said when you're like a 10 person team. 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. Essentially, it got to the point where if we didn't get essentially a term sheet signed on a Wednesday.”
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
“Picture that, right? Because So much of building a business is having the runway to strategize and grow and recruit. And 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 future round or 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 compelling things happening in the business. And so we were able to stitch along a number of investments, but never enough capital.”
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
“With that depth They have the humility to recognize that they may not have all the answers. And in particular, when you're building That has a lot of different departments that intersect. And in the case of Woop, 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 boopstrap to an iPhone. And like the product person has their own perspective, the iOS engineer has his own perspective. The Bluetooth expert has their perspective. The engineer has, the mechanical engineer has their 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 I think that's a pretty good starting point, commitment, intensity, humility.”
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
“Probably some combination of commitment, intensity, and humility. The commitment piece is really important because You're going to have a lot of very difficult things happen in the first six months, little in 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 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 so commitment's critical. And then intensity and humility, that's what I just generally look for in anyone that I work for. 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 to have people who recognize that with that intensity and with that intelligence.”
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
“The technical guy and kind of do the same thing, you know. 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 hurry variability as accurately as an electrocardiogram or raise capital at a time that, you know, Nike and Apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space. If I struggled with raising capital, I wasn't going to 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. And we also knew that the other wasn't going to be better at it. So I think that there was an element of complimentary skill sets that's helpful.”
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, look, I had a great CTO. I had a great lead mechanical engineer. We built the business together for 10 years. My CTO just transitioned to a new project. But it's been an amazing ride. And I think the fact that we've been able to build this technology that has through a variety of different third parties been credited as being most accurate wearable in the market speaks to the technical chops of the founding team. And I don't take credit for that. So I think it's remarkable accomplishment. And I think it's also important when you're building a founding team to have 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”
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
“Are we going to get this thing to market soon enough? Are we going to figure out what the right way is to sell it? Are we maturing 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 in capital today, 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 nervous about that piece of it. And especially, again, as a young entrepreneur who was raising capital for the first time.”
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 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 in the right storm. You know what I mean? There were a lot of feelings of being like my back against the wall. There were a lot of feelings of doubt.”
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
“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 so there were just a lot. It was a lot.”
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 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 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. And so you're in this scenario where you're saying to investors, well, we're getting there. We're getting there. We're getting there. And so the first seven years of the company, I would say, were enormously hard from just a technology development standpoint, from a capital raising standpoint, even from a business generation.”
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 I developed doubts in managing the company. Like I always believed in the vision 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 Woop was more of a straight line than the average company where it was all kinds of zigs and zags and chaos is learning one how to be a CEO.”
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, exactly. I think it at least helped me stay more in control of my actions, my feelings, decisions I'm making. And I really recommend it to anyone. Like I think it's a game.”
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 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 gets better.”
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
“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. And it was sort of 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 and then sort of almost catching up to the emotional state that I was in and trying to reel it back. Whereas the more meditated version of me, I think has been able to recognize what I'm about to say something before I say it or feel something before I feel it. And that it feels like a superpower.”
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
“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. Think how often in your life you might have thoughts coming in and you feel like you can't really control what you're thinking about, right? You almost don't have that focus. So that's the immediate benefit 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.”
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
“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.”
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, I think the busier your mind is, the more you need to meditate. So, I learned how to meditate in 2014, and I think there's different stages of the way you understand meditation as well. 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, and I should just sort of clarify what kind of meditation I'm doing. So I spent about 22 minutes every morning doing this. And you literally are, you're breathing, but then you start repeating a mantra.”
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 checked into the hospital and they do all these analysis on me. And like, it turns out I just had a panic attack. But the fact that I ended up in the hospital from panic attack, I was like, all right, wait, wait a second. Like, I got to really reset how I'm building this company and growing. And two days later, I signed up for this meditation course Transit on meditation and I've been doing it like every single day since about eight and a half years later.”
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
“Few different things I think the first 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. I think I had raised maybe $20 million, something like that, which certainly felt like a lot of money. And I felt like I was really failing as a leader. I was super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And I remember having what I would later learn was a panic attack, 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 and you have this taste in your mouth. I actually thought I had been food poisoned because of the feeling was so unusual and outrageous. And so I drove, I actually drove myself to the hospital.”
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