Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed | E189

Will Ahmed recounts how his own struggle with overtraining as a Harvard athlete and an obsession with measuring the human body led him to found Whoop. He describes the brutal early years, including an 18-month stretch where the company never had more than three months of cash, and a panic attack that pushed him into daily Transcendental Meditation. He explains Whoop's first-principles bets: no watch, no screen, 24/7 wear, and a subscription model, plus its athlete-first go-to-market strategy. He digs into the science of heart rate variability, REM and slow wave sleep, strain and recovery, and shares his personal routines around sleep, cold exposure, and blue-light blocking glasses.

• Ahmed had a panic attack while driving, drove himself to the hospital, and two days later began daily Transcendental Meditation.
  00:18:53
• Whoop went roughly 18 months never holding more than three months of cash, once coming within two days of filing bankruptcy before a term sheet was signed.
  00:31:53
• After seven years the company flipped its entire business model from one-time hardware sales to a subscription, a bet-the-company moment.
  00:26:08
• Two of Whoop's first hundred users were LeBron James and Michael Phelps, and LeBron later wore a Whoop strap in a Kia commercial.
  01:24:22
• Amazon explored investing in and acquiring Whoop, then two years later released what Ahmed calls a direct knockoff product.
  01:35:53
• Ahmed deliberately refused to make Whoop a watch or add a screen to avoid scope creep and competing with watchmakers.
  01:06:46
• Whoop expanded into garments (shorts, boxers, bras, shirts) so the sensor can be worn off-wrist to keep monitoring 24/7.
  01:11:26

• The paper Ahmed wrote in 2011, titled measuring intensity, recovery and sleep, maps almost exactly onto Whoop's three core metrics today.
  00:24:35
• Heart rate variability measures the time between successive heartbeats; higher variability signals a body better able to regulate itself.
  00:46:29
• HRV has been measured since the 1980s and was used by Olympic lifters, cyclists, the CIA for lie detection, and cardiologists.
  00:48:04
• Slow wave sleep is when the body produces about 95% of its human growth hormone; you get stronger sleeping, not at the gym.
  00:54:16
• Whoop detected elevated respiratory rate in users two to three days before they tested positive for COVID-19.
  00:51:40
• Whoop employees can opt into a Sleep Bonus, earning $100 for averaging 85% sleep performance over a month.
  01:04:37
• During COVID, Whoop ran a red recovery policy requiring employees with a red recovery score to stay home.
  01:05:09
• On the Whoop 4.0 circuit board the engineers wrote a message daring competitors not to copy them, plus every engineer's initials.
  01:38:39
• Free-solo climber Alex Honnold gets only about four and a half to five hours of REM sleep a night, an outlier ability.
  00:56:52
• Under Armour spent roughly a billion dollars acquiring three companies (including Endomondo and MyFitnessPal) for a health-tracking strategy.
  01:18:11

Books, products and media the guest or host genuinely endorsed here — with the buy link.

Affiliate link — we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.