New technology from startup ventures is transforming the sports industry. The mission of this series will be to introduce startup companies in the sports technology space to a broader audience and allow Founders of promising new ventures to tell their story.
Company: WHOOP
CEO: Will Ahmed
Headquarters: Boston, MA
1. What is your elevator pitch?
WHOOP is the performance optimization system that helps elite athletes and teams win. WHOOP provides athletes, their coaches, and trainers with a continuous understanding of strain and recovery to balance training, reduce injuries, and predict performance. The system is currently being used by professional and collegiate athletes, Olympians, and the United States military.
2. Problem & Solution
I was playing squash at Harvard and I wanted to better understand the body. I felt that athletes, myself included, were overtraining, undertraining, misinterpreting fitness peaks, getting injured, and generally not understanding the importance of recovery or sleep. Additionally, the coaches and trainers of elite teams were trying to train each person with the same training plan. I thought there could be a better solution for understanding athletes and optimizing teams.
WHOOP is a system that optimizes performance for elite athletes by continuously measuring strain and recovery. WHOOP relies on proprietary wearable technology and personalized analytics. For a coach or trainer, it provides the ability to see every member of their team in a list and each athlete‘s respective Strain scores after a workout or game, their Recovery scores in the morning (how prepared they are for strain/exercise), and their Sleep Performance scores from last night. Based on results from our testing, this insight helps prevent overtraining/ undertraining, optimize lineups and rotations, improve training plans, and predict performance.
3. Market – your target market and the overall market
WHOOP is available exclusively for elite athletes and teams. Coaches, trainers and players across all major professional and collegiate US sports leagues are using WHOOP. There are also a number Olympic of athletes training for the 2016 games using WHOOP.
4. Business Model – how do you make money?
WHOOP is a subscription on a per athlete per year basis that includes hardware, software and analytics. We primarily work with teams.
5. Management Team – with titles
Will Ahmed, co-founder & CEO
John Capodilup, co-founder & CTO
Carlos Famadas, CFO & VP of Operations
Jeff Gatto, SVP of Engineering & Supply Chain
Jack Seitz, VP of Business Development & Creative
6. What else do you want the audience to know about your venture?
With an advisory board that includes the longtime trainers to LeBron James and Michael Phelps, UCSF cardiology chief Dr. Jeffrey Olgin and MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, WHOOP is poised to revolutionize how athletes, coaches and trainers make data-driven decisions that will affect training plans, game day line ups, practice and travel schedules and more.
Bonus Questions
If you were stuck on a desert island with any three athletes, who would they be and why?
I don’t know about a desert island but I’d want to hang with Michael Jordan. He’s the greatest athlete of all time in my mind and also a marketing genius. I think I could take him in golf though.
If you were to invite any CEO to dinner who would it be and why?
Kevin Plank, founder & CEO of Under Armor. He built a company in a crowded space (sports apparel) by identifying a sleepy category (undergarments) and targeting a specific niche (hockey and lacrosse teams). He then leveraged the success of that niche and built it into a massive brand across all apparel. I think I could learn a lot from him with my aspirations for WHOOP.