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

“Well, I had that too for what it's worth. In some respects, I still have it today, just like given the nature of The value of the business. The key, at least for me in building the business, was finding ways for myself to manage stress, to manage the difficulties that come with building a company without finding myself on that yo-yo of the company's performance, right? It can't be that if the company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship. And if the company's having a bad day, you're feeling down. And so a lot of my, I think, growth as an entrepreneur has been figuring out how to have a steady hand and how to sort of stay calm through the. Chaos”
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
“Like, as a young entrepreneur, I think a lot of your identity all of a sudden gets tied up in that thing you're creating. And for me, that meant if Woop was having a good day, I was having a good day. If Woop was having a bad day, I was having a bad day. And if Woop was failing, I was failing. And that's a very unhealthy association, but it's also not true. Like literally, you can be taking great steps to improve as a leader or as a manager or even as a recruiter. And certain things will happen that may put your business sideways. And conversely, I'm sure you and I have both met founders, entrepreneurs who have watched their company go like this. But meanwhile, they're spinning out of control. And I think the faster that I could separate those two identities, my own and whoop, the easier it actually became to build a successful company.”
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 for sure it pulls you through, like the obsession of solving a problem pulls you through. I mean, I struggled though for years with building whoop. It was really, really painful. And I think an important thing for any entrepreneur, but especially it was for me, was to disassociate my own identity from that of the companies. If you're a, and you've been a young entrepreneur, so you know this.”
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 overcoming a fear of failure is a really critical step in life and There's a lot of methods to think about for that. I think for me, it was doing a lot of work. I think it was following my passion. In some ways, the reason I feel like I became an entrepreneur before I knew what an entrepreneur was, it was that it almost became an inevitability that I was starting the company, unless so a choice. Because it was like all I was thinking about in my free time, you know. The things you do, the things you think about before bed or in a shower, you know, the quiet moments throughout life, I think those are pretty telling.”
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
“At some point, you have to ask yourself, is this a paper? Are you starting a company? Right. It sort of puts you on the spot. Like, why are you doing all this work? And I think I... I think I did a ton of work to feel as prepared as possible to like have the confidence to take the leap. And I'm so glad I did. But when I meet young people, I try to encourage them to do as much work as they can to build up that confidence. And also to understand that there's a lot of things you aren't going to know in the process of building a company. But once you make that commitment, the learnings come in fast, right? And I'm sure you've experienced that.”
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 also spent a lot of time building the confidence to start the company. Like I really didn't know what it meant to start a company. I spend two years doing physiology research. I then took another class that was around if you have an idea how do you write a business plan for it? And I remember like my senior year, I was doing like the third or fourth iteration of this business plan and I was meeting with the MIT professor, a guy named Howard Anderson who taught the class and was like a venture capitalist. And at that point, I wasn't even enrolled in the class. I was just working on this business plan. And he's like, He just sort of stopped and he said”
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
“Building I definitely saw an opportunity to continuously measure the human body, and I also saw an opportunity that computing was getting to a size and sort of sophistication where it could be smaller and smaller. But the pull that got me to building this company, and I think persevering over years was that it also was a personal obsession to really understand my own 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
“Like in that moment, I was like, okay, yeah, I'm gonna go run this. And I don't even remember what happened in that race. I don't even remember the Catholics race, which in some ways emphasizes his point. But that whole thread of just showing up is something I think about all the 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
“If you were to run that, you'd be quite tired. And that wasn't a race I ever ran. But Timmy all of a sudden was sick. And so he didn't show up for this race. And I remember Peter Zalum, who was our science teacher, he's walking around and he's yelling, hey, blue, we need someone to run this race. We need someone to run this race. And I'm kind of like avoiding even making eye contact with this teacher because I really don't want to run this race. And it was like he zeroed in on me out of a distance and just marched over. And he said, Will, you should run this race. And I said, no, no, I've got the captain's race. I got to do that. And he's like, Will, 90% of life is showing up. The other 10% is what happens when you get there.”
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 fair. I think it also stems from Ability to throw myself out there Back to how your childhood influences your future, there's a story, I don't know if I've ever talked about this, but fascinating story where I was in fifth or sixth grade middle school. And we're doing what's called blue and gold day. So I went to a school called Greenvale. The colors are blue and gold. And you have this fair, essentially, which is all sorts of different competitions, races, that sort of thing. And there's a captain's race at the end of the day with the four people representing their class, so to speak, to run the fast race. And I was a captain, so I was very anxious about this final race. And right before the final race was one of the longer races. I think it was three or four laps. 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
“Different internships and whatnot after my freshman year, I did an internship at a hedge fund, my sophomore year I did an internship at an investment bank, and my junior year I did an internship at a private equity firm. So I was really flirting with going into finance, but I think this is what I was supposed to do.”
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 it was like, you know, Siri, but 20 years ago, and it didn't quite work, unfortunately, but I had this real itch towards technology. And then I think somewhere between the ages of like 18 and 20, I also saw this huge convergence happening with smartphones, with the way that computers to me seemed like they were sort of seamlessly moving from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket to what I perceived to be eventually on your body or even in your body. I thought that was a natural evolution. So I definitely had this pull towards technology, but I think throughout, you know, I was overcoming this feeling of whether I should go into finance because I grew up. My dad was in finance. In fact, after my freshman year at Harvard, so most undergrads do, you know.”
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 was really thick and it had that wild wheel. A little before that, I had a palm pilot, like a palm pilot seven. It was like the original palm pilot that could get internet access. When I was around 12 or 13, I had one of the first voice recorders that you could speak into and it would type for you.”
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 don't know that I would have known, but if you looked at the things I was interested in, so I was always playing with technology, which in hindsight was quite predictive, like I had the first iPod in my sixth grade class, I remember. So we're about the same age. So you probably remember when the iPod came out and like how cool that thing 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
“The technical definition is it's a continued state of overreaching that then leads to a period where your body is essentially in a depressed state. And what that will look like physiologically is essentially your bodies run down, activities that would normally feel somewhat easy are quite difficult psychologically it makes you feel kind of lousy run down symptoms similar to being sick and depending on how overtrained you are it can last you know a week or can last months in my case it normally didn't last longer than a couple weeks but it's kind of this ultimate betrayal right because you're pushing yourself so hard to get stronger and fitter You actually get to a place where you're completely. Broken”
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, it struck me as something that. Really didn't make a lot of sense. I was spending three or four hours a day at Harvard exercising with no information about what I was doing to my body. And yet that's a school also that is totally obsessed with deeper knowledge. And so that in itself seemed like a deep irony. And then I also was a pretty competitive person and I was someone who was overtraining, right? Where you see you get fitter and fitter and fitter, you sort of fall off a cliff and you don't know why. And that bothered me. Like that bothered me that I didn't fully understand what I was doing to my body, what was the missing ingredient, so to speak. And I just sort of started pulling at that thread. And it really took me down a rabbit hole.”
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
“Ultimately, I wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body. And then over the course of my time at Harvard built up the confidence to start a company, which was a fairly crazy thing looking back on it. And for the last 10 years, I've been building this company called Woop”
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 watching how they approached life, I think, was a fascinating way to grow up because they had very different tool sets to solve problems. And I was always playing sports. I was always exercising. And that eventually led my way to Harvard. And so I was a college athlete. I got recruited to play squash at Harvard. And over the course of my time there got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body, how I could understand what it meant to train optimally, how I could prevent overtraining, which was a problem that I had, how I could really understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising. And so that took me down this rabbit hole of physiology research, which we can get into, but I've read hundreds of medical papers while I was in school.”
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 grew up on the north shore of Long Island. I was always into sports and exercise. I was super active kid. My parents are very different. My dad's an Egyptian immigrant, very street smart, charismatic, came to this country with very little, rose the ranks in finance over time. My mom, very analytical, very book smart, 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
“Super stressed out. I was drinking too much. And I remember I was driving my car. And I'm on the highway. And all of a sudden it's like your peripheral vision starts narrowing on you and you feel your fingers and they like numb. I actually drove myself to the hospital and they do all these analysis on me and like it turns out I had a”
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 emphasizing for your audience why that matters. So there was a phase-in-building whoop where it was so much about the next milestone that I was running almost exclusively on like a dopamine engine. The company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship. And if whoop was failing, I was failing.”
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, Nike and Apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space. But when it comes to health monitoring or the best game in town, that really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. One of the reasons Woop has been successful is there were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that”
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