NEW YORK — Whoop has attracted investors ranging from Golden State Warriors star Kevin Durant to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The device has been called everything from “pro sports’ favorite wearable” to the “Tesla of health tracking and sports performance wearables.”
As the company launches a new monthly membership that seeks to expand its elite athlete base and target more everyday fitness enthusiasts, its founder and CEO, Will Ahmed, sat down with SportTechie for an extended conversation into Whoop’s past, present and future.
(Note: This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.)
SportTechie: Where did the original spark for this idea come from?
Will Ahmed: I was always into sports and exercise. I played a bunch of sports at [New Hampshire prep school] St. Paul’s and growing up, and then at Harvard I was fortunate to be captain of the squash team there. Just being surrounded by a lot of college athletes made me feel like there was a better opportunity to understand things like overtraining, under training, fitness peaks, sleep, recovery—these all just seemed like mysteries to athletes. And I was surrounded by athletes who played in all different sports, right?
So, for me, I was getting very interested in physiology, like what can I do to better understand the human body? I read probably 500 medical papers while I was in school, and I wrote a paper on how I thought you could continuously understand the human body. From that research, really, the idea for Whoop was born where there were certain metrics I felt, if you could monitor accurately 24/7, you could provide real insight to people about how to improve their lives.
I met my cofounder during my senior year at Harvard, John Capodilupo, our chief technology officer. John was studying some of the hardest math classes in the country in school, and his father, as it turns out, is a professor of exercise physiology, so the two of us had a real overlap around physiology. And John had the technical chops to do some things around a sensing standpoint that hadn’t been done before. And I had a vision for how to build a product for coaches and athletes and beyond.
SportTechie: Where do you see the wearables market going in five, 10 years? Where do you go from here?
Ahmed: I don’t actually think that much about ‘the wearable market.’ We don’t really define ourselves as a wearable. We think of ourselves as a data company. For us, it’s looking at what are the other companies that are creating data that are interesting to understand the human body. I think things that are being done around understanding genes and DNA is really interesting. I think products that can accurately understand nutrition are interesting. From a physiological data capture standpoint, I think Whoop stands alone.
We’ve been compared to, I think, every product on the market by all the sports leagues we work with and different teams we work with, and we’ve consistently won out. That suggests to me that we’re monitoring things that no one else is.
But, again it goes back to what you’re doing with that information. If we didn’t simplify the data, if we didn’t summarize it in the simple ways that we are, I think we’d fall over. I think it has less to do with the hardware and more to do with the data and analysis. I think, over time, companies that will struggle will be companies that are creating hardware that doesn’t have data that’s actionable. The companies that will succeed will be the ones that have a strong data component or, mind you, are doing something else. The Apple Watch has been pretty successful—maybe not by Apple standards, but I think they’ve sold the most watches ever. Like, of any watch brand. People seem to gravitate to the notifications. That’s their hook. It hasn’t really been as much a health and fitness product.
The reality is it’s hard to do that many things. Like we do one thing, and we try to do it really well. This doesn’t have a screen on it, you can’t call an Uber with it, you can’t make a phone call with it. It’s all about super-accurate, high-resolution data.
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SportTechie: I recently met an NFL player who joked how upset he was about forgetting to pack his Whoop charger on a trip. You’ve got high usage rates, starting with the pro athletes. In terms of building that halo effect and trickle down—when did you decide to go in that direction?
Ahmed: It’s very hard to go the other direction. Going downstream—early on, that was always the vision that if we could build this for the best athletes in the world, we would be providing data that was really powerful for understanding performance.
Everyone’s got different physiologies, right? But we all have the same biology. The things that we are measuring across physiology are all important for every single human being. On average, you spend somewhere between a quarter and a third of your life sleeping. But this tiny percentage of people measure that. There isn’t a single person who doesn’t need to recover in order to perform in their daily life.
The vision for Whoop has always been around unlocking human performance. As is natural with startups, we wanted to grow organically. I believe that startups are most successful when they really focus. We initially really focused just on the best teams in the world. Then we focused on serving high-end consumers, and now we’ve gotten to a point in scale where we’re able to adjust the business model to allow for more customers to come on board. Obviously this comes in part because we’ve raised new capital in our Series C financing, and it comes because we’ve been able to scale up our manufacturing to allow for that additional demand.
SportTechie: When did you see yourself as an entrepreneur and not just someone with an idea?
Ahmed: Every entrepreneur in those very early stages is kind of figuring out whether or not they’re just obsessed with something or if they’re starting something. I like to say that, in some ways it didn’t feel like at the end of the road I even had a choice about starting Whoop, that was all I was thinking about. If you’re thinking about something in the shower, that might be a good thing to pursue. I like to tell other founders that.
For me, it just became this very natural evolution where every phase it felt I was getting additional validation to pursue starting the company. That led from one thing to another. It was an idea in class. Then you get the physiology research validated. Then you have a business plan written. Next thing you know, I was working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab. Then I had a smart co-founder, and some angel investors give you money. Then some venture capitalists give you money. One day you wake up and you have 50 employees, and you live in Boston and you serve three markets and you’re off to the races.
SportTechie: At some point you can no longer call yourselves a startup. Have you started thinking longer term about other products, other avenues of exploration?
Ahmed: At the end of the day, it’s our mission to own human performance. If you think about the equation to understanding human performance, there’s the performance itself—what was the outcome? It’s pretty tangible, that’s why we like working in high-end athletes. In pro sports, you’ve got wins, losses, batting average, field-goal percentage, you name it.
Then there’s everything leading up to the performance. That’s where a lot of the Whoop data comes in: That’s physiology. We’re measuring things like recovery, which seem to be predictive of performance.
Now the missing ingredient in this equation is stuff leading up to recovery or affecting recovery. So what other bits of information affect recovery? That could be nutrition, that could be dehydration, that could be all sorts of things that you’re doing in your daily life. That could be your calendar at work, right? So, for us, we like to ingest as much data as we can across what I call those three categories.
Within recovery, we’re measuring things like exercise and sleep that’s affecting it directly, so there’s a lot of things we’re already measuring that are part of that equation. Where I think you’ll see Whoop invest over time is really to understand that overall equation, that value chain. How can we do everything in our power to tell someone how to perform at a higher level?
Travel is another big one. We do a lot around jet lag, East Coast/West Coast. That’s something that affects pro athletes, sure, but affects everyone who works and has to travel.
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SportTechie: How do you win over a group of athletes reluctant to use the device over fear about data privacy?
Ahmed: I think it’s the responsibility of the unions and the leagues to understand what data is being collected and to have informed conversations about who has access to that data, what it can be used for, what it can’t be used for because it’s only to get more intelligent over time.
We like to be very transparent with everyone who uses Whoop or is interested in Whoop about what we do because we view that’s the best opportunity for long-term success. Nothing good will come of an athlete wearing Whoop and having that data end up somewhere that he or she wasn’t expecting and then being uncomfortable with the product. Whenever we work with a team or an athlete, we have what I would say is a very methodical onboarding process. In that process, the athlete and the team understand what information is being collected. And that information, it’s very clear what’s being shared from an athlete to, say, a coach or a trainer or a team dashboard. Those are conversations that, for the most part, will occur between the athlete and the team. Depending on the status of the league and the union, there may already be parameters in place.
At Whoop, I don’t view that it’s necessarily our role to determine things related to, say, data ownership or privacy between a team and a player, however I do feel it’s our role as a technology company to be very transparent about how that information is being shared.
SportTechie: There is resistance from some athletes who worry that the data collected from a wearable might identify some pattern of physiology that suggests a breakdown and could lead to a reduced contract. On the other hand, some athletes might prove to more durable with that data. The use of such data may well be zero-sum and not strictly management versus players. What do you say to the players who espouse that point of view?
Ahmed: I think that argument misses the point, which is just that this is really important information that can improve your career long-term. It’s sort of like saying you don’t want to get checked out for an injury and recover for that injury because you don’t want anyone to know you’re injured. But the problem is now you’re injured, and you can’t get better.
You can only manage what you measure, and the idea that you wouldn’t be measuring how you sleep and recover because you’re afraid of where that data may end up going, I think is an odd sort of paranoia. Especially when there’s a number of privacy settings in place and transparency in place to make sure that data isn’t being shared anymore. And, furthermore, by measuring sleep, by measuring recovery, you can start to determine what really are the things that can help you improve those metrics.