Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Will Ahmed (guest, founder/CEO of Whoop)
Cold Open: How Big Is Whoop? [00:00:00]
Sam: How big is the business now? You guys have raised what, like 400 million dollars?
Will: Yeah, we’ve raised 400 million. We last raised capital at a $3.6 billion valuation. I think there’s still a lot of potential for health monitoring. If you fast forward 10 years, I think a large percentage of the world’s population will be wearing a continuous health monitor, and it’ll hook into everything you do as it relates to the healthcare system and doctors. So yeah, I’m very bullish on the opportunity in the space.
Intro and Background [00:00:30]
Sam: Do you know what you’re getting into?
Will: I’ve read the briefing, and I’m a big fan of the podcast. Ready for you.
Sam: All right. So the pod is called My First Million. It’s kind of known for — Shaan and I have both started a handful of companies and sold a few of them. People like it because we brainstorm, we dive deep on different companies, do business breakdowns, things like that. We’ll spend a little bit of time getting to know you because you’ve done a lot of amazing things. Then we’ll want to spend time diving deep on different opportunities in your industry. But first, if you want to give your 30-second spiel — who you are and the story of how you got there.
Will: Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up on the North Shore of Long Island. As a kid I was always into sports and exercise. I ended up going to Harvard and playing squash in school. I was a competitive college athlete, and I felt like I didn’t really know what I was doing to my body while I was training. That got me very interested in physiology. I did a ton of physiology research as a student — read something like 500 medical papers — and I started to conceive of this idea of how you could continuously measure the human body. The idea was initially around athletic performance, but broadly I felt like there would be ways to continuously measure the human body for all sorts of health implications.
What started as a curiosity ultimately turned into a very long research paper I wrote, and then ultimately founding a company. This would have been when I was 21, 22 years old as a senior at Harvard. For the last 10-plus years I’ve been building this business. Whoop builds wearable technology really to improve people’s health. We started with the best athletes in the world, and over time have grown to work with a large consumer population. It’s a really exciting time to be building this technology.
Sam: Okay, so you’re the CEO and founder of Whoop. If people have seen it, it’s the Whoop band. You said you started with high-end athletes — is it right that LeBron and Michael Phelps were two of the first hundred customers? Is that real, and how did that happen?
Will: That is real. This would have been around 2014, 2015. We spent about two to three years on the initial V1 of Whoop. I wanted to start with the best athletes in the world, for two reasons. The first was that we were bringing sleep and recovery technology to market for the first time, and I felt like professional athletes — who have to perform on a daily basis — really need to understand how they’re recovering. That was one of the insights to starting the business.
Second, if we could get the world’s best athletes to wear Whoop and organically like it, we could build a whole brand around performance that could ultimately scale to consumers. I grew up very inspired by brands like Nike and the Jordan Brand — how a swoosh on something could make the whole product feel completely different, independent from anything else about the product, just because of the storytelling behind it. So I was interested in how health monitoring could have a brand to it. That was really the thesis for targeting professional athletes.
In terms of getting to LeBron and Phelps — the key insight was finding people in their lives who had a big influence on them, but who a bunch of people didn’t already know. If you go to their agent or their manager, they get inundated with stuff. You have to find someone in their life who other people don’t know. It turned out back then that the personal trainer was a somewhat underrated or unknown person in a professional athlete’s life — and that also happened to be the right person to go to for technology like Whoop. In LeBron’s case, I got to know Mike Mancias. In Phelps’s case, we got to know Keenan Robinson — both personal trainers to those athletes. We got them on Whoop, and then they got their athletes on Whoop. The rest is history.
Being CEO of a Large Company [00:06:00]
Sam: Do you like being the CEO of a big company, or do you wish you were still in the early days getting in the nitty-gritty? I imagine you’re mostly just making decisions and managing people now, as opposed to getting your hands dirty on the product.
Will: I’ve still tried to stay close to the product, because I think I’ve had a relevant perspective on it even as the company has scaled — I’ve been able to see around corners in a few areas. The role of being CEO changes a lot with stage and scale. 10-person versus 100-person versus 500-person — at each of those inflections your role is definitely changing.
I think because Whoop as a technology gets increasingly interesting with scale, it’s made my role increasingly interesting as well. The overall dataset you have on a larger population makes the data much more predictive and more powerful. The coaching can get much more comprehensive as a result.
For other founders I’ve met who’ve been building a business for five or even 10 years, they get to a point where they’re like, “Okay, this can run itself,” or “I’m going to bring someone new in,” or “I’ve reached the relative peak of the mountain.” I don’t feel that way. I feel like there’s still a bunch more levels to go. The insights the technology can generate, the number of people that can potentially use it — all that feels like it’s amplifying, not shrinking. So yeah, I’m very excited about being CEO.
It’s also a daily challenge. I feel like at every stage of the business I’ve had to learn how to be a CEO. And it’s not just the first company I started — it’s my first full-time job. So I’m figuring a lot of this out as I go.
Sam: Shaan always asks that question, and I’m just waiting for the one person who’s like, “I hate being CEO, I hate my job, I hate all these people in this office.”
Shaan: There are certain things that change a lot, right. The percentage of time you think of yourself as an individual contributor versus a manager has to shift very dramatically. I think probably around 50 people it has to shift. Like you have to recognize that you need to be shifting almost entirely towards manager and not being an individual contributor. That’s probably one of the most painful things — if a founder doesn’t fully appreciate it, they can screw the business up a lot.
Sam: You know what it is — we talk to a lot of interesting people here, and the CEO of a 500-person-plus company usually looks like — not always, but usually — they look tired. There are rings under their eyes. They’re usually a little chubby. They take a huge swig of coffee. But you’re the CEO of a fitness brand. You were a highly competitive athlete, so you look great. You’re kind of skewing the average here. How are you balancing being healthy with also putting your company first? Because when I was really in the thick of it I was like, dude, I don’t have time to work out. I’m just going to eat this crap.
You don’t know this, but one of your competitors was my neighbor and we used to work out together in my garage every day. Then he got promoted to CEO and just stopped having time to work out. He kept coming by while I was at it and saying, “God, I’ve got to get back in here.” And I’m like, “Dude, you’re the boss — you could just rearrange your schedule.”
Will: Right.
Sam: He’s like, “It’s crazy right now.” And for like nine months straight it was “crazy right now,” and he just stopped working out. I was like, bro, you run a health company. You gotta — if you don’t sleep or work out or make time for this stuff, what’s going on?
Anyway — what are you doing to exercise right now and how are you balancing that with work?
Will: I think it’s part of the job for me to be in good shape and healthy. I spend a lot of time around people who are super into their health and fitness — whether that’s professional athletes, scientists, or just thinking about product features designed to improve your health. As a business, just thinking every day about the product and technology we build orients me toward being healthy. Not to mention I’m using a product that’s all about health improvement. So for a variety of reasons it would feel super off-brand if I was really out of shape.
Sleep Science: What Actually Matters [00:11:00]
Shaan: What’s your sleep score? Give us your stats. And what are some of the biggest levers when it comes to health and performance for the entrepreneur listening to this?
Will: I want to be clear that building a successful company requires overcoming some level of stress that would break most people. You have to really push above and beyond what’s comfortable. I think there are a lot of techniques you can develop that allow you to run at a breakneck pace for a long time.
People always talk about this analogy: it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. But if you actually look at world-class marathoners, they’re running four-minute miles for 26 miles. It’s kind of a sprint.
Shaan: Yeah, so you want to figure out how to run that pace.
Will: Exactly. For the entrepreneur or business leader listening, you want to figure out a way to be sprinting a marathon for a long time. One of the ways I view that is taking care of yourself and being in good shape.
Let’s start with sleep, which I think is a topic that’s not talked about in the right framework. Most people, when you talk to them about their sleep, say, “Yeah, I don’t have enough time, I’m working hard.” The thing to understand about sleep is it’s all about the percentage of time you spend in bed getting high-quality sleep.
If you ask a friend who’s never worn a health monitor, “How much sleep did you get last night?” they’ll say, “Oh, I went to bed at 11, I woke up at 6, I got seven hours.” The reality is seven hours in bed. Of those seven hours, you were in periods of awake, light sleep, REM, and slow wave sleep. Awake and light are pretty much irrelevant — you’re not getting any physiological benefit from those stages. REM and slow wave — that’s where all the magic happens.
REM sleep is when your mind is repairing. It’s real cognitive repair. It’s when you have deep dreams, so if you’re someone who can’t remember your dreams, you’re definitely not getting enough REM sleep. Any high-performing exec or entrepreneur needs REM sleep.
Slow wave sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. Think about that for a second. 95% of your human growth hormone gets produced during this stage. You’re not getting stronger in the gym — you’re breaking muscles down. You get stronger during slow wave sleep.
Now take the person who spent seven hours in bed. That person could have gotten 30 minutes of REM and slow wave, or they could have gotten five and a half hours of REM and slow wave. That’s a massive, massive difference. The person with 30 minutes has all kinds of problems in their lives. The person with five and a half hours is very happy and very high-functioning.
Sam: What would be a good level of REM and slow wave in, say, an eight-hour block?
Will: If you can get over 50% of the time you’re spending in bed to be REM and slow wave sleep, you’re doing pretty well. I’m in that camp. I’m still optimizing more to be a CEO than a pure human — if I was fully focused on being a great human, I’d probably spend eight to nine hours in bed. Because I’m still optimizing for entrepreneurship, I spend more like seven, maybe seven and a half hours. But I’ve managed to make that time count — three to four hours, sometimes four and a half hours of REM and slow wave. So I’m getting the same REM and slow wave as someone spending eight or nine hours in bed, because I’ve figured out some stuff that makes me sleep better.
That’s one whole category: sleep. Anyone listening to this should try to figure that out for themselves — it’ll dramatically change the quality of your life.
I’ll give you another hack. I wear blue light blocking glasses before bed — they’ve got a red tint. Your laptop, your iPhone, all of them are emitting light that tells your eyes and brain to stay awake. If you’re using your phone or reading emails closely before bed because you’re staying on top of things, it’s going to affect the way you sleep. But if you wear these glasses, it’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card. You can look at all that stuff right up until the moment you go to bed and it won’t affect your sleep.
The Freaks of Nature: LeBron and Alex Honnold [00:20:00]
Sam: You’ve been around all these interesting athletes and now you have access to millions of data points. Who are some of the biggest freaks of nature you’ve encountered? Like is there a Judy in Iowa getting nine and a half hours of slow wave sleep who’s your hero, a picture of her on your wall?
Will: When we first started working with LeBron James — around 2015, 2016 — his sleep data I could probably pick out of a lineup. It makes a lot of sense that he’s been so good at recovering in his career because he’s taking care of that third of his life and sleeping great. I think it’s maybe the most REM and slow wave sleep of anyone I’ve talked to.
I’ll also mention Alex Honnold. Do you guys know that name?
Sam: Free Solo, yeah. The climber.
Will: Right. This is a guy who climbs mountains without a rope and does these insane feats that are extremely dangerous. The interesting thing about REM sleep is researchers were able to find that the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala response — that’s the fight-or-flight signal that tells your body to be nervous or get animated. It makes a lot of sense that the guy capable of climbing rock faces no one’s done before without a rope has this insane ability to sleep, because that’s probably in part what makes him so calm while doing it.
Shaan: I just Googled Alex’s name and “REM sleep.” I think you just gave yourself the promo of the century. The first thing that comes up is a TED Talk — not your company talking about how more REM sleep lets you take a little more risk and stay calm. That’s like a really interesting play.
Sam: Do you think it’s intentional? Are athletes like LeBron or Alex doing something to make their sleep better, or do you think they happened to be great sleepers which is what allowed them to become great performers?
Will: There are certainly genetic things that make people better or worse at sleeping. But there are also so many things the individual can do to enhance sleep. Sleeping at a very consistent time — going to bed and waking up at a similar time — will just unusually elevate the quality of your sleep. Often sleeping in a very cold room, a very dark room, a very quiet room, with high air quality. Athletes who are serious about this stuff dial all of that in.
I still think athletes aren’t sophisticated enough about sleep and recovery given how important it is to their overall performance. But those are things you can do. We talked about blue light. There are certain supplements that work — magnesium, melatonin. Interestingly, harder sleep drugs like Ambien — they knock you out, so your sleep latency is short, but the quality of the sleep is never that high. Back to that percentage of time in REM and slow wave — it’s rarely going to be good. Maybe if you’d normally be at 30%, you’re going to be at 20%.
Sam: Dude, I was a 400 meter runner, Division I, and I knew a bunch of basketball players who ended up going to the NBA. It’s shocking how bad — myself included — how bad most competitive athletes are when it comes to diet and recovery. I didn’t know anything. I’d eat ranch and pizza every day. A couple of friends who went on to play in the NBA were eating McDonald’s on a regular basis. It’s pretty amazing how some people are still freaks even though they don’t do any of that.
Will: Yeah, we’ve worked with a lot of athletes who used to play video games from 11 PM to 2 AM when they had a game the next day in front of a million people. It doesn’t occur to them that that’s going to affect their performance. And then you look at the data and it’s like, okay, you’ve got a red recovery even though you didn’t even drink alcohol — because you stayed up late staring at a screen. Whereas if you’d gone to bed at the same time they started playing video games, here’s the difference in your performance.
The Churchill Nap [00:27:00]
Shaan: This is a personal question — naps. What’s the word on naps? Because I am a prolific napper. One of my life goals is to be able to take a guilt-free nap every single day. And I know athletes are pretty big on naps too, but I don’t know if you can get to those deeper stages in a quick one or one-and-a-half-hour nap.
Will: Remember Winston Churchill?
Shaan: Yeah, he had a daily nap.
Will: Yeah. He’s the coolest person I can think of who really pioneered the daily nap as a hardcore practice.
Shaan: I like that. That’s a good way to put it. My nap marketing is pretty soft right now. I’m going to brand it as the Churchill Nap.
Will: I do it every day as well.
Shaan: Yeah? About two o’clock for 30 or 40 minutes every day?
Will: Yeah.
Shaan: Do you get in bed or just lie on a couch?
Will: I only go to bed for nighttime sleeping. I have a nap bedroom and a master bedroom.
Sam: Really? Interesting.
Will: And I wear a sleep mask.
Sam: I wake up two hours later and I’m a whole different human being. But can you sleep at night after two hours?
Will: Two hours is a real nap.
Sam: That’s really what you do — two hours?
Will: Not every day, but that’s my goal. Right now it’s every third day.
Shaan: Here’s my life advice, young man. You gotta get a solid 16 every day.
Sam: I’m not a big nap person personally. I almost never take them. But I think plenty of research shows that for most people getting a nap versus not is going to make them feel better and perform better. A lot of athletes take them in the afternoon — some will take them almost right up to the moment before tip-off or their event. Part of the reason is they need to peak in performance much later in the day than most people. An NBA game might start at 7:30 or 8, playing until 9 or 10, whereas most people are winding down at that time.
Will: That’s right. The challenge with naps is that the percentage of time you spend sleeping can be lower quality than a regular night. That’s why I was interested in whether you guys get in bed or take a more casual approach — because you might want to up the intensity of the setup to really maximize quality. Try a sleep mask, a couple of little things, and you might all of a sudden feel even better after your nap.
Co-Founders and Company Origins [00:33:00]
Sam: Are you a solo founder?
Will: I was fortunate in that I met two really talented engineers when I was graduating from Harvard. One is John Capilupo, who for 10 years was our chief technology officer. The other is Ara Derderian — he’s still with me and is our chief mechanical engineer. The combination of the three of us really built the company. A lot of it was algorithm development, computer science, data science, having the right prototypes. Very technical out of the gates.
Sam: Do you consider them co-founders or just meaningful contributors?
Will: I consider them co-founders. I came up with the idea for the company years before I met them, but they’ve been an amazing piece of the Whoop story.
What to Do With the Money [00:35:00]
Sam: You’re the CEO and founder of a multi-billion dollar startup. What are you going to do with all your money when you eventually do get liquid? Do you have big aspirations, or are you just a boring Vanguard index fund guy?
Will: I’ve taken some secondary along the way.
Sam: How much of a difference did that make?
Will: Well, look, it doesn’t actually change your motivation all that much in building the business. I remember someone saying that to me at various points when I had the option to sell some shares. I think it really just made the quality of my life higher. I sleep a little easier at night — literally.
Sam: You should post your sleep data before and after the secondary. “Do I sleep easier at night now? 50 million in the bank? Turns out I do.”
Will: I remember when I was first getting going in my career and I heard about secondaries and I was like, that’s wrong — it was rooted a little in envy. But I was also like, you’ve got to be all in. Now that I’ve done a little bit of it, I realize having a meaningful safety net of liquid net worth, I think 100% makes you better at building your company. Taking secondaries — on a scale it can be too much — but taking secondary I think will make you a better company builder. Do you agree?
Sam: I do, especially if you’re at a growth stage company. I don’t think I ever sold shares until Whoop was worth at least a billion dollars, and they were for rounds that were super oversubscribed. But I think that’s a fair lens. I’ve read about people taking secondaries at the Series A stage and I don’t know everyone’s circumstances, so you don’t want to judge. But I do think if it’s a company you’re trying to build as a standalone business and not sell in a short period, you want your founders and key execs to not be looking at their bank account wondering when they’re going to cash out. You want them in a mode of, “I can keep going for a while.”
Will: Yeah, I agree.
Sam: What do you do with your money? Do you do boring index funds or something more risky?
Will: I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest spender of money. I’ve enjoyed investing in startups, meeting founders, backing stuff that my friends do or start.
Sam: If you go out to dinner with your friends, does the bill come and they just kind of look at you and wait?
Will: Oh yeah, they got T-Rex arms suddenly. That wingspan shortened up big time. But look, it’s great to be able to be generous and cover bills when you can. I think it just creates a peace of mind that’s important if you’re going to be doing something for the next 10 years.
How Will Became an Entrepreneur [00:40:00]
Sam: What other companies were you thinking about starting before Whoop? Because I’m looking at your background — you’re from Long Island, you went to Harvard, studied economics, worked at a bank. That’s a very typical path to just being some banker type in the city. You kind of took a left turn somewhere.
Will: I wasn’t thinking about starting companies at all, actually. I thought in the back of my mind I’d go work in finance after I graduated, because that’s what a lot of people seemed to do. I had some background in finance because my dad had worked in finance. But internships are a great thing for figuring out what you don’t want to do. I worked at a hedge fund after my freshman year, an investment bank after my sophomore year, and a private equity firm after my junior year. The question I asked myself at each of those places was: do I want to be my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss one day? And I just didn’t. I didn’t feel that gravitational pull toward it.
At the same time I was becoming obsessed with this idea. I ultimately became an entrepreneur before I really knew what an entrepreneur was. It wasn’t like I was choosing between three or four different ideas — it was just this one idea that I became obsessed with.
Sam: In the last decade, you’ve seen other opportunities. You’ve seen pain points in your business, met lots of entrepreneurs — you realize there’s a whole universe of potential businesses. A lot of people listen to this podcast to get ideas. Do you have any business ideas that came to you while running Whoop that you’re not going to do yourself?
Will: I have a lot of funny, tangent-type business ideas that are kind of silly — the ones you think of in the shower. And then I have some more serious ones.
Sam: Don’t tell us which are serious and which are silly. We’ll get them all mixed up anyway.
Will: Okay, this one is very funny. The idea is called Carb Pipes. It’s vocalist lessons while you’re commuting in the morning. You’re in your car, and someone is teaching you how to sing. You’re in a safe space, so you can belt it out.
Sam: Those are the types of ideas. I’ll give that a B.
Shaan: F.
Sam: I always wanted to sing. Look, you have so much data — both Shaan and I have invested in continuous glucose monitor companies. I want to know which of these wearables you think are going to be awesome, and which ones in the future are going to be big.
On the pod we’ve talked about this — I’ve always thought it was ridiculous that you can have cancer or something growing inside your body, and you just have no idea. I’ve had family members pass away, and the thought is always: had we just gotten the MRI or CAT scan six months earlier, you would have been fine. Whoop actually told me when I had COVID and I thought that was sick. It seems like you should be able to tell me if I have cancer too.
Will: I would put all of that in the category of obvious innovation that’s coming. The combination of body scans, blood work, and continuous monitoring through a non-invasive wearable will ultimately be able to predict a lot of disease states or leading indicators for death. I’m very optimistic about how profoundly the healthcare space — your relationship with your doctor, all of it — will change. And AI will be enormously valuable for analyzing complicated scans, looking for things inside your body that might be off, which otherwise required an expensive radiologist.
Sam: Which startups at the sub-100 or sub-50 employee count, maybe sub-$300 million valuation, do you see in health and wellness that you think could have a similar trajectory as Whoop?
Will: It’s funny — I’ve spent so long thinking about health and wellness that the bar to invest in something in that category is almost too high. I’m racking my brain right now.
One company that’s health-adjacent and that I think is quite powerful is called Whisper, which I am an investor in. They’ve essentially built technology that allows you to transcribe your thoughts. It’s pretty powerful technology if you think about it — the ability to think something and have it written out.
Sam: How does it work? You’re wearing a brain scanner type of thing and you just think something and it writes it?
Will: I don’t want to butcher this, but the short of it is it looks like an old Jawbone Bluetooth set. You literally think something and it writes it. I believe it’s using your brain waves.
Shaan: What’s the URL?
Will: Whisper.ai.
Sam: I just saw it. It looks like a little hearing aid. How much money have they raised?
Will: Something in the 15 to 20 million range.
Sam: That’s pretty fascinating.
Future Trends: Deep Fakes, AI Talent, and the Virtual Economy [00:50:00]
Will: Here’s a category of work that’s a little more serious. You’ve seen everything that’s come out in terms of deep fakes — this ability to create videos of people that are almost indistinguishable from reality. I think there’s going to be a talent agency of sorts for non-living people.
Imagine you’re Tom Cruise toward the end of your career. The same way Justin Bieber sold the rights to his songs, maybe Tom Cruise sells the rights to Tom Cruise, and you can keep making movies with him for the next 100 years. Or another version: you have an AI actor like Tom Cruise who’s completely artificial.
Sam: Have you seen the Tom Cruise deep fake on TikTok?
Will: Totally. It’s incredible.
Sam: You know who did that? I thought it was Deep Voodoo, the South Park guys?
Shaan: Miles Fisher.
Sam: Oh yeah, yeah. He kind of looks like Tom Cruise. But there’s a whole technology that doesn’t even need a human involved — it would just take the fact that Tom Cruise has made 50 movies and be able to generate from there.
Will: Right, so instead of selling your back catalog, you sell your future catalog. You create an AI likeness and license it out. Obviously has some potential for misuse, but seems valuable enough that people would figure it out.
Sam: Have you guys heard of Michaela? The Instagram influencer who doesn’t exist?
Shaan: Yeah. It’s a completely made-up model.
Sam: She’s got a whole cast of characters now. She’s getting ad deals. It’s super fascinating. And I think if I had to guess, the way they’re making how she looks — they’re using AI to come up with the ideal person that both men and women are attracted to and want to follow. I follow her boyfriend and he’s super skinny, androgynous — and I’m like, damn, they don’t like yoked guys anymore. It’s kind of funny to see what they’re making as the “ideal person.” But the business is making a lot of money.
50 Years From Now: What Will Seem Archaic [00:56:00]
Sam: Here’s a theme I think about. 50 years from now, what will future generations look back at our generation and say, “Oh, that was so crazy that that was happening then”? There are easy versions — smoking on airplanes, people dying in childbirth at the rates they did, people dying from just traveling across the country. What are those things today?
Will: Health monitoring is the most obvious one. You just didn’t know how you were doing. You went to the doctor once a year, maybe, and they randomly measured your blood pressure once a year. That was your checkup. To me that is so obviously going to seem like, “Wow, you guys were really capable but you just rolled the dice with your whole health thing.”
Sam: The number of people that die from car accidents seems like it would be on that list. I was driving last night on a late-night one-lane road, and a huge truck went by me and it shook my car. We were both going 80 miles an hour, passing each other. In about 20 years it’s going to seem so archaic that we were basically one sneeze away from an 80-mile-an-hour car crash all the time. Two cars going in opposite directions, 10 feet away from each other. That’s going to be like smoking or non-smoking.
Will: That’s a really good one.
Sam: My wife is vegan, and she says the thing that’s going to be archaic 50 years from now is that you just killed animals and ate them.
Shaan: I bet Will’s got a total opposite take.
Sam: That’s what I wanted to hear.
Diet: What the Data Actually Says [01:02:00]
Will: The data says it’s highly personal. You could put two people on identical diets and they could have literally the exact opposite effects on those two people.
Take professional athletes — remember when LeBron got really skinny around the Olympics? Ray Allen got him on the paleo diet because Ray Allen was obsessed with it. It was amazing for Ray, terrible for LeBron.
For me personally, I eat three meals a day, I try not to eat crap, I eat carbs. I’d say I have a Mediterranean-type diet — a lot of meats, fish, and vegetables. I don’t drink many calories — mostly water and coffee. I also think diet is easier if you like the right things and you can eat as much as fills you up, versus having to count calories. In part because a lot of the calories you’re trying to avoid are really bad calories.
Sam: Have you seen Brian Johnson? You know who that is?
Will: Yeah, he’s creating a really cool company that measures brain waves.
Sam: He’s like a human Whoop band. Have you seen Blueprint?
Will: He wears Whoop, and that’s how I know him. He’s been on a podcast before.
Sam: Is he in the top one percent of your data? Because if not, he’s doing a hell of a lot of stuff with his lifestyle for nothing.
Will: I don’t have access to every single person on Whoop’s data, but I think some of the stuff we went over on the podcast — he was telling me some pretty good stats, and it sounds like he’s dialed it in even more since.
Sam: So Brian came on our pod and he looks like a freak — chiseled, looks awesome. And he just released that you can now spend something like one and a half or two million dollars a year and go through his exact system with his doctors. What he’s doing is basically this thought exercise he’s taking seriously: he’s trying to reverse his biological age faster than his chronological age goes up. In theory, if you do that, you live forever. Obviously that won’t happen, but it’s an interesting thought exercise.
Shaan: Are you going to do it, Sam? It’s like two million dollars a year.
Sam: No. Also, I have a thing with all the fitness people. I called Brian out for this and he actually answered it well — I was like, do you ever experience joy? I don’t drink alcohol, and a lot of people say they want to do that. I’m like, well, do you have a problem? And they go, no, I just thought it’d be better. And I’m like, then what? Sounds dope, just get drunk every once in a while. You know? Get things to celebrate, build camaraderie with your friends, experience joy.
With Brian I was like, do you ever have birthday cake for your kid’s birthday? And he said he’s only cheated once in two years. I was like, well, are you happy? And he said, “I’m happy.” So my opinion is: okay, great, you’re winning. But for most people — experience joy a little bit. Be healthy and also get a little loose every once in a while.
Great Sleep Is Obvious: The Tweet Debate [01:10:00]
Shaan: I have a similar thing that you’ll hate. On my Twitter I have this tweet pinned that says, “Here are some semi-controversial things I believe,” and one of them is: you don’t need a sleep tracker — great sleep is obvious. You would probably disagree because it’s kind of the premise of your life right now.
Will: I mean, that might be true in extremely binary terms — oh, I had to wake up for a 4 AM flight, or the alarm kept going off last night. Sure, those are bad nights of sleep. But I think it’s a profound lie if you’re actually trying to understand your nightly sleep and routine. A third of your life is a complete black box. You have no idea what’s happening during that third. And science has proven that third dramatically affects the other two-thirds. If you’re good at sleeping, it decreases every form of potential disease. It is the magic pill. So I don’t agree with your tweet, but I respect it.
Sam: Tons of retweets. We do it for the retweets around here.
Shaan: I do think Sam’s points are good as they apply to a tweet. Which is: if you make all these things seem like discipline in spite of joy, or sort of soulless, then of course there’s a rebellion against it. I’ve heard people talk about sleep tracking in a way that makes it seem profoundly not cool. But I think the reality is you can measure things about your body passively that give you great insight into your life and make your life better.
Will: Right.
The Future of Whoop: IPO, Health Prediction, and Coaching [01:16:00]
Sam: So what do you think happens in 10 years? Going public? Sell this for $10 billion?
Will: I think we’ll ultimately go public. I think it’ll probably be sooner than that time frame. And I think we’re going to build technology that’s able to predict a lot of massive life events as they pertain to your health, and along the way provide a 24/7 coach that helps people meet their goals — well beyond health. Psychological goals, professional goals — just because of the value that understanding your body can provide.
Sam: Dude, you stuck it in the face of all the finance bros. You said, “I didn’t have to go that route and I still crushed it.” I’ve got so many Long Island friends who just do the same thing over and over. We’re big fans of Whoop. I’ve never tried the Oura Ring, so I’ve been loyal. I’ve been calling it “whoop” — my apologies.
Will: What is the right way to pronounce it?
Sam: Whoop? Like Whoop!
Shaan: If you wear it inside out it’s “whup.”
Sam: I never knew how you pronounced it. But my wife and I are paid subscribers — I think we pay you $300 a year?
Will: If you reach out to membership services they’ll send you a band. No problem — if you’re a subscriber, the hardware’s included.
Sam: That was one of the more — obvious now in hindsight but — profound model pivots. How huge was that change?
Will: Totally. We used to sell the product for $500 as a one-time fee, everything included. Then we went to: you can sign up for as little as thirty dollars a month. Just picture all the cash implications, gross margin implications, everything that happens almost overnight when you do that.
And it was also about the business moment. The company was founded in 2012. If you’re changing your business model that profoundly six or seven years in, you’re also admitting you hadn’t figured out the right business model six or seven years into building a company. So yeah, that was all quite painful and concerning. But we created a really cool business model that’s now been amazing.
Sam: Now you’re going to get SaaS multiples.
Will: There’s a fair case for that, yeah.
Battery Life, Kids Stealing the Band, and Closing [01:24:00]
Sam: What’s the plan on battery life? Is a 30-day charge going to happen anytime soon?
Will: The modular battery pack was a good innovation at least, so you don’t have to take it off. Originally I was hoping we’d do it like watches, where movement keeps it alive. The reality is because we collect so much health data, we’re driving the battery pretty hard. In some ways it’s great that we’ve gotten to four or five days, but customer feedback heard — we’ll work on the two-year model for both of you.
Sam: That’s been my same thing. That’s why I don’t wear an Apple Watch — I think it’s so stupid that you have to charge those things all the time.
Shaan: I lost my wedding ring on my honeymoon because I lose everything. I got mine tattooed on my hand I lost it so much.
Sam: I’m not smart enough to get away with the absentminded professor thing — “oh, he’s so messy but he’s brilliant.” That doesn’t have the same excuse power for me.
Will: Little kids are another reason I lose it. My little kids see it and think, “Oh, bracelet — toy.” They just steal it when it’s charging on the counter.
Sam: Well, dude, thanks for doing this. Your PR guy John — my good buddy John — hooked us up through Ariel Helwani. You like UFC?
Will: I observe it from a distance. I think the athletes are some of the more impressive physical specimens in the world.
Sam: Besides the whole brain thing.
Will: That’s what I — yes. That’s what I glossed over there.
Sam: Dude, the slap league. What is that? I watched three minutes of the preview and I was like — that’s the dumbest thing ever.
Shaan: Are you really a fan of that?
Sam: No one’s saying it’s smart. I think it’s adorable. For those listening who don’t know — it’s basically they have weight classes, and the big guys just stand in front of each other and they smack each other. Five slaps each, but they almost always get knocked out. And the slap is not really a slap — it’s like a thud, basically a punch. Their faces are so swollen after.
Shaan: They wear earplugs because it will rupture your eardrum.
Sam: Did you see the trailer they released to hype up the league? They’re like, “These people come from everywhere, from nothing, this has given them this opportunity” — and then one guy goes, “I just want to change the world.” Change the world one slap at a time, brother.
Shaan: We’re democratizing slap.
Sam: Chris Nowitzki — who’s done all the concussion research at Boston University — he was like it’s just half a step from having people stab each other on live TV and then saying who made it. Give it ratings.
Shaan: There’s this idea of pain-tainment. We love entertainment of people suffering. Whether it’s Survivor or Naked and Afraid, or Dr. Phil, Jerry Springer, Maury telling you you are not the father — there’s this long history of people enjoying watching suffering as entertainment. I’m not saying it’s good or bad, but I do think it’s going to work for that reason.
Sam: There’s some darkness there. Well, thanks for making this happen, dude. We appreciate it.
Will: This was fun. Thanks for having me, guys.
Sam: Yeah, we’ll be in touch because I’m going to be emailing you all my complaints about my Whoop band. And maybe I’ll be one of your investors when you IPO. This is awesome — we appreciate it.
Will: You can give a shout out. What’s your social media handle?
Sam: At Will Ahmed — thanks for making this happen. We’ll talk soon.
Will: We will. Thank you.