专访 Whoop 创始人 Will Ahmed：从 500 亿小时生理数据到 AI 健康教练与 FDA 监管博弈

On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. We have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So, it's one of the largest health data sets in the world.

For a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health.

You want people to love your product authentically. LeBron James is now a global ambassador for Whoop. He was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it.

You're starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them.

Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.

I'm going all in.

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I'm going all [music] in.

All right, guys. Welcome back to the All-In interview program. And this is where guests we want to unpack for an hour or so, not talk about the news like we do every Friday. We want to go deep. And health and technology is one of those areas that's super interesting to all the besties, and I was really excited that my friend Will Ahmed from Whoop decided he would carve out an hour for me and the All-In audience. You and I have spoken I think two or three times on the OG podcast, This Week in Startups, that I've been doing for over 15 years there in the journey for Whoop. But let's start with just the footprint of Whoop as an organization now, because I've known you for yeah, well over 5 years, 6 years of of this journey. How many members, ballparkish, how many people are using the Whoop, and how much data have you collected?

Yeah, so Whoop, we build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I've been building this company now for 14 years. It was founded in in 2012. And uh I think like a lot of maybe overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. You know, it took about 12 years for us to get to a million members and then another 18 months or so to 2 million, about 6 months to 3 million and and expect to end the year around 4 million members.

4 million members. And hey, listen, I'll tell people right out, the service at first seems expensive because I think it's like 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month. Am I am I in the approximate range or what do I spend? 300 a year on this?

Depending on what plan you're on, it's anywhere from 15 to $30 a month.

I'm on the top top plan with the top top sensor. But you took a very [snorts] thoughtful approach to saying we're going to go for subscriptions and we're going to take out the cost of the device. So you don't have this cost uh losing the device anxiety. So take me to that decision. And to be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health or or even less than a dollar a day. But take me through that decision as a business to go with uh 30 bucks a month.

Yeah, thank you. It's a unique business model. And in 2017, we had launched to consumers. It was a one-time fee, 500 bucks. At that point in the company's history, we had really built Whoop as like a performance brand. You know, it was known amongst the best athletes in the world and and we worked with all these sports teams. And we said, "Okay, we're going to go to consumers and uh and target, you know, an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience." And over the course of the next 12 months of having that product in market, we really observed two things. The first is that people who bought Whoop uh would wear it for a long time. And that's always been a challenge in the wearables industry around drop-off rates and engagement. And fortunately for Whoop, that's been a strength of our of our product. Uh but then the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. So we still had a sales problem. And uh because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, well, is there a business model here where the entry price is lower so people can get introduced to Whoop, and if they fall in love with the product, then over time it can be a good business for Whoop, too. And I think that immediately created all kinds of of growth for Whoop back in 2018 and 19, and we quickly became a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which of course is more attractive to investors. And then, you know, what I underestimated is how much it changed our DNA, because when you're a subscription business, you become really obsessed with uh your existing members, arguably more so even the new members. And so, it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.

See, this is, I think, a critical observation for founders uh who might be watching. When you're selling widgets, you you know, you're it's and what you know, marketing. But once you get a subscriber, hey, they're your customer next month and the following month and the following year. So, you start obsessing about churn and engagement, right? The metrics kind of shift, right?

Yeah, totally. You get you get very focused on um user engagement, how often people are are using your product, you get focused on how effective it is, you know, how are you actually driving behavior change and and health improvement. It It changed our hardware cycles, as well. So, when you're a hardware business, you're incentivized to ship new hardware every 12 months, whether or not it's actually innovative, because you always need that next dollar from a hardware sale. And also, when you're a pure hardware company, you're you're not incentivized to be innovating on top of the existing product, right? Because you want to convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually with the opposite incentives. We want to launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And and then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, 18 months ago may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring or AFib detection or advanced labs, which is now the blood work uh feature that we have in the app, or health span, which, you know, tells you your Whoop age and is a whole longevity feature, blood pressure insights, which is a new capability uh that allows people to to look at their blood pressure every day. So, these are all examples of new features that we've brought to market with uh hardware that's in market.

Yeah. And what that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is like you're taking on, as Whoop, the [snorts] responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade, but it's not like some high-pressure thing like your iPhone cycle, where they're constantly, [clears throat] you know, pressuring you to upgrade so they can make the money on the hardware. Now, let's talk about the innovation inside the software. Uh and you know, I've used everything, Fitbit, which is I guess Google Health now, Apple Watch. I've had all of it Oura over many, many years. And I settled on Whoop. Why did I settle on Whoop? Well, I thought your software actually, which was hard for me to get my head around at first because you have this recovery score, you have the sleep score, you have stress, um but and then there's this journal feature. It was a little complex for me uh compared to the other products, but ultimately uh what I found was it gave me more value once I committed to the product. So, what is committing to the product mean? I think if you put in and you fill out the journal every day or just, you know, a couple times a week, you get much more out of it. So, let me have you explain what the most important metrics are here. Heart rate variability, the recovery score, high stress sleep, etc. And then and and then work me into like some of the the the features around journaling and why that's important.

Yeah, the three main pillars on Whoop are around uh sleep, recovery, and strain. And so most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night and that'll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency. Do they go to bed and wake up at the same time? Your hours of sleep, so how many of those hours were quality sleep versus the time that you just spent in bed trying to sleep. Um how much was restorative? Slow wave sleep, REM sleep, you know, a pretty deep understanding uh of your body's overall uh circadian rhythm and how well you're sleeping. And then ultimately your recovery score, which is red, yellow, green, 0 to 100%. By the way, I'm I'm pretty pumped about mine today. I want you to know I'm ready for you.

Oh man. Now now Come on, man. Hold on a second.

I I just had to show you that.

93% pretty good. Um

strong for me.

That's very strong. Uh for me, not so good. I'm on a 67.

Okay, but you got a green dial. Those are pretty good numbers.

my sleep was 83% and my strain today is incredibly low cuz all I've done is sit and do no work. Uh but you know, this is like super critical for me to have these numbers now. I travel. I go to Japan. I go to Saudi. I go to Davos, you know, World Economic Forum. I I'm all over the globe and I'm trying to regulate my sleep. I'm trying to figure out should I be on this sleep schedule or you know, the other one and I'm just trying to make sure I'm fresh for when I'm doing performative stuff, you know, like on on podcasts or speaking gigs. Uh and it's essential for me now. It's just essential for me. I can't live without it. The thing that was interesting that happened for me is you also have uh under those three most important um metrics there.

The health monitor?

You have the health monitor. Now, this is critical for me because twice now in the past Yeah, I think it's two or three times now. I have had um under health monitor, which has your respiratory rate, your resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and HRV, heart rate variability. Right now, I'm all in green. However, the other week, I'm going to tell you this story. It involves me going to the emergency room with chest pain. This is a serious Some people in the house, the kids or whatever, had a respiratory infection. I didn't get it. But I wake up one day and my respiratory rate is two breaths higher than normal. Instead of 16, it was like 18 or 15, it was 17. And then my skin temperature was like two degrees hotter, right? And um

And just for people listening, when your respiratory rate is elevated by two breaths like that, that's actually pretty meaningful cuz respiratory rate is normally a very boring statistic and normally doesn't change at all.

So, it's like, "Hey, what's going on?" Then it does it a second day in a row. So, then I, you know, like do the warm bath. I I got me sure I got my electrolytes. I'm I'm thinking maybe I'm coming down with something. Anyway, I recover on Saturday, Sunday. Sunday night, I can't sleep. I start getting chest pains. I put the Tesla at 1:00 a.m. in self-driving and I go to the emergency room cuz I used to work on an ambulance. I know, hey, you know, when you have chest pains and you're 55-year-old male, this could be serious or it could be indigestion. I go, I do every possible test. I go right to the heart center uh in Austin here and they do the CT scan. I think that's the the the big scan of your heart. EKGs, everything. I'm there from 1:00 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. Turns out I had inflammation in my lungs, around my chest, and my heart was being constricted. So, I was experiencing chest pain. I was not having a heart attack. But there was something going on and I was alerted to it two for two days in a row without having any other symptoms. Very strange, right?

Mhm.

And it was the Whoop those two days earlier, that Thursday, Friday, that on Sunday I was on high alert. I was like, "Something's going wrong with my system." It had done that. And the reason is three years ago, the same thing happened. My skin temperature's is going crazy and my and then in that case, I think it was my HRV. I'm like, "What's going on?" I got COVID. Yeah. So, I had two two bad scores. I'm in New York with one of my daughters and I was able to take that Paxlovid, which you can only take if you get to it early. So, I'm like, "F this." Two days of like heat, I go my wife goes, "Maybe you got COVID." I'm like, "Wow, that's so retro." I go right to Duane Reade, I take the test, I got it, I get Paxlovid all in the same day because the Whoop told me. So, you anticipated two acute situations for me. What other acute things are you starting to learn here now that you have 4 million people in the system? I understand now you're becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services and or, you know, you're you're starting to understand things before, let's say, the rest of the medical community is is learning them.

Well, there's your sharing that. I mean, that's an amazing story and I'm grateful you're feeling all right and and grateful that Whoop could uh could play a small role helping. I think it's it's amazing we now get these testimonials every every day, every week from uh from members who have an experience like the one you described. Uh I got a message last week from uh you know, a fit, healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw he had these elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal. You know, someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute getting a heart rate of 120, 130 while he's sleeping. And uh and he goes in uh to see the doctor and um they do some tests and sure enough, uh stage four Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Woah.

Yeah. And uh and he was able to get treated for it and he's recovered from it. And uh and then, you know, another similar story where uh a member with their HRV, they'd been on Whoop actually for I think close to a decade. So, they had this incredible baseline and um and HRV for for people who are less familiar.

that because you're the one who introduced me to this whole concept and I I have since gone down the rabbit hole.

So, HRV stands for heart rate variability. It's the amount of um time between successive beats of the heart and uh and it's a little counterintuitive, but the more variability in time between successive beats of the heart, the healthier your overall system is operating. And it's this lens into your autonomic nervous system, which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So, sympathetic's activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. Um it's what happens, you know, when you have a thought like that there's a lion in the room or you know, when you start to exercise or you're thinking about something stressful. Um conversely, uh parasympathetic's all the opposite, heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. Uh it's what helps you fall asleep. If you um exhale for a long period of time, that's parasympathetic.

Mhm.

And what you want is for for sympathetic activity and parasympathetic activity to be coupled. And so, your body's kind of constantly regulating its environment. And when that's the case, it it means you have a higher heart rate variability, that the measurement will be higher. And we're measuring heart rate variability 24/7. It was really one of the the key innovations in founding the company. Uh I did all this medical research when I was a student at Harvard and heart rate variability was the thing that like jumped off the page to me cuz there was really interesting research on it, but it couldn't be measured 24/7. And uh and so, that's where um you know, part of where WHOOP was born out of. Anyway, heart rate variability is something that we use for stress monitoring. It's something we use for our recovery score. And uh and we baseline everyone on WHOOP and then we're able to show you every day, are you within your baseline or you a little bit higher, you're a little lower? And when you look at trends of this over years, you start to get a sense for is someone getting healthier over time or or less healthy? It's a really important longevity indicator. Uh typically speaking, as you get older, your heart rate variability will drop. So, you know, people who are in their 20s, their heart rate variability will be anywhere between like 80 and 100 on average. 30s, you start to drop to 70. 40s, you start dropping to 50. You know, um 50s, 60s, all of a sudden you're in, you know, 30s and below. And so, if you can fight that trend uh that those averages and keep your heart rate variability even just flat over years, that's actually a sign of good fitness, good longevity. And uh anyway, back to the story I was telling you, the um this individual, they had a very steady heart rate variability that was within a specific range, and all of a sudden it plummeted. So, it was a healthy person that had a heart rate variability of about 100. And uh and then it was 50 all of a sudden for for a period of time. Again, goes in, gets all these tests. Uh he turned out to have testicular cancer.

Oh, wow.

And so,

Now, was that known previously that HRV would in some way be a a lead indicator for testicular cancer?

I mean, I don't think so. You know, and that's that's what's so fascinating about this moment in time is we've never had this much data on the human body continuously. One of the principles to founding WHOOP was 24/7 data. And it's it's why we have a 14-day battery life now. It's why we we invented a charger that you slide on to your WHOOP.

I was about to say, these are super important. And when you first told me about this on This Week in Startups, I was like, "What? I need to I want to see how many steps I've done and the time. It makes no sense." And you were like, "Trust me, Jake. I'll uh there's a reason [laughter] for this." And now that I've used it, it turns out you're absolutely right. The reason I have had so many long streaks, the only time I really stopped using this for past couple years is when I lost it and I had to order a new one. So, I broke my streak, which was a bummer, but it is what it is. It's just a number. Um because you can wear it in the shower, you can wear it in the bath, and you should. It turns out a warm bath is when we get your journals in a minute, super uh great for my recovery for whatever reason and my sleep. You never have to take it off and you can slide on the battery charger. So, you can have essentially the opposite experience that I had with my Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was annoying cuz it's I'm getting alerts and I'm getting alerts for things that I app I installed 2 years ago. And it's just constantly bothering you. People think you're rude when you look at the watch. And then the battery dies every, you know, whatever. For the Apple Watch, I think I might have gotten to 24 hours or 36 hours, 48 hours a couple times, but it's a terrible experience. With this, I I mean, I I've made it 10 days, you know, 14 days, no problem. And I carry I bought three battery chargers. I just keep I keep one in my desk, I keep one on the bedside, and one in my my travel bag. It's like these things aren't expensive. And that's a key to it, I think, as well. Yeah, is the the amount people wear these.

On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. And as a consequence, we have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So, it's one of the largest health data sets in the world. And now with the, you know, the advent of AI and what you can do with large data sets, it's just like a really exciting time to be working in this space.

Do all the AI companies, like the frontier models, want to buy this data from you in aggregate? Is that like a huge business for you guys eventually? How do you think about that? Or building your own models?

Yeah, today we're building our own models, you know, foundational models with in the company that are essentially training on top of this data. So, one

using open source models or you're you're partnering with

our own models, we've got open source models, and and what's amazing is you've got this huge physiological data set, but then you also now have other data sets, right? So, people are uploading their blood tests or they're doing advanced labs through Whoop, they're uploading medical records. And Um, so, as an example, we're we're now starting to see indications that through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.

Wow.

And so then, you know, you could give someone a very targeted, "Hey, we think you're you know, we think you have high cortisol. You should get this one test." And and it gets you know, and it gets super it gets super targeted, which is exciting.

Which the AI would be able to figure out. The AI is going to look at all this data and say, "Hey, maybe there's a cortisol issue here." Or here's the possibilities, which is super fascinating. So, not your you see your business in the future as this AI assistant. And you added an AI assistant, I think, to the product less than 6 months ago. I'm addicted to it now.

Yeah.

And you have these ongoing conversations. It logs the conversations. And so now it was um I'll be candid, pretty dumb at the start. It would be like [laughter] you know, you could talk to it and you'd be like, "Yes, you had this rate. Okay, thanks for that rate." But now it's gotten to be more sophisticated cuz now when I tell it, "I'm in Japan. Uh you didn't record my sleep." It's like, "Oh, okay. Here's what's happening." And it actually is understanding the product. And I I I guess you're doing some reinforcement learning.

Yeah.

And it's got to be that these 4 million members, including myself, are now telling it where the product breaks down because when you um or or where the opportunities are to add more features, however you want to look at it. But there's this constant struggle I was having with changing time zones. And was my um was my sleep getting recorded properly so then I could get my recovery. And then I started asking uh and then it prompted me and said, "Hey, by the way, w- when are you leaving for Japan?" Or whatever. And I was like, "Here's my flight. This is when I land." And it was like, "You should sleep at the first half and then not go to bed when you get to Japan. Don't have caffeine at this time." So, somebody in the company, I think, explicitly started doing a time zone change. Or did it just learn that and infer it? What Did you Did you get specific about that? And how are you using the AI coach?

We spun up a team on travel specifically because it's such a popular use case for a lot of our members and you know, our origins were with athletes, but now we've got this wide audience of aspiring people. You know, I'd say that's really the If you think about who's Whoop targeting, it's the aspiring. And that could be a great athlete, that could be someone who's fit, but it could also just be someone who wants to have more energy for their family and their job and their lives.

Yes. That's right.

And wants to live longer, right?

Yeah, live longer.

But the AI uh the AI coach is a big part of that and it's a big part of our future and you know, we've been working on it for years now. I'm glad to to hear that you feel like it's getting good. About 80% of our

it's like a seven and a half right now. Seven and a half out of 10. I think there's so much potential for it, yeah.

As long as it's good enough for you to be engaging with it, it's just going to keep getting better with time and we're getting better at that, too. And and so you know, one thing that's really interesting, again back to these data sets, some physiological data we talked about, that's from the sensor. Then you've got the advanced labs and the blood testing, you've got the medical records coming in. But actually this is this is another very important piece of data, which is all sorts of user feedback, right? Like the journal itself. So about just over 50% of our members journal every day.

This is a good point to explain what the journal is.

Yeah.

I'm sorry that I keep explaining your features, but I'm so passionate about the product as you can hear.

No, you're doing great. [laughter] So the the Whoop journal is essentially a hundred plus different behaviors, lifestyle decisions, you know, supplements, drugs, you name it, that someone might want to log. So popular things that people log every day are like, did I drink alcohol last night? Was I hydrated? Did I travel? Uh you know, did I meditate? Was I happy? Was I sad? You know, was I stressed? Uh and and all of this anecdotal information also builds on uh on these data sets where you know, if you wanted to come up with an algorithm for predicting whether someone would be happy, you would actually need a fair amount of data from someone on uh you know, on their overall mood as an example. Uh so, anyway, we're excited about bringing all these different types of data sets together and it's one thing that we feel uniquely positioned to do because not that many companies um you know, have people opening their app eight times a day and 80% of their member base interacting with the AI.

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The journal was a major unlock for me. Here's from a user perspective since we're doing a whole like user uh session here. What's really interesting about it is you get these behavioral insights and I think you get into a behavioral insight when you've used it 10 times, five yeses, five nos.

Right.

As an example, if you're doing creatine, somebody's paying attention at Whoop and uh I guess you got a lot of How many people working there now?

1,200.

1,200. Whoa. That's That's growing significantly.

Yeah, we grew.

Yeah. Wow. So, when you pull up your your behavioral insights and in the morning it will ask you and prompt you cuz in the morning's when everybody opens this to check their sleep score, recovery, it prompts you. You can start to figure out after this five and five what impact that behavior has on recovery. So, it turns out for a warm bath uh which was never my thing. I hate baths. Not my thing. Like I'm a guy like going in a bath, hanging out in a bath. I have no interest. I'm like I'm like a guy from Brooklyn like kind of feels weird to be in a bath with the candles.

Any salts in the bath? Are you adding fragrance?

add the Yes, you got me. I'm adding salts to the bath. Yes, and that's now also tracked.

It helps.

It helps. Warm bath plus 7%

Wow.

on my recovery. Have you ever heard of something like that?

That's very high as a as a response. So, you know, for folks who are who are trying to figure out what we're talking about, essentially when you log these things, Whoop will then will tell you what's positively or negatively affecting your recovery score. So, a big wake-up call for a lot of people ends up being alcohol because it'll show you that alcohol has this like hugely negative effect

disastrous

on your recovery.

It's poison. I don't drink, so I never even log it, but I'm You have a couple of beverages now and again, Will? And then what impact does it have on your super score?

with alcohol. Although it's got a -9% for me. So, I'm now looking at I'm now looking at my behavior insights. Here's a sneaky one for everyone.

Have Have Wait, have you considered having that drink while you're in the warm bath?

Yeah, right.

Maybe you have a drink.

Maybe I should start adding more baths, but I do I do steam room, I do cold plunge.

Oh, yeah. How's that working out?

Those are more neutral, but I like the way they make me feel. And there's a lot of longevity research on saunaing and contrast therapy. So, second to alcohol for being the most negative for me is a late meal. So,

Yes.

eating within 3 hours of bedtime, we've now seen across the entire Whoop population is really detrimental to your sleep and your recovery. And it's because your body's still digesting for those first few hours that you're in bed. And as a consequence, you're not getting quality sleep.

So, you get high stress during the sleep, I would assume, yeah? The high that whole high stress thing. Here's mine. For some reason, vitamin D, -3. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I was putting a little vitamin D in, maybe that's a false positive.

It could be that the days you took it were days that you were traveling or you know there could be something else going on. There's some yeah there's a correlation here that we're not seeing yet.

By the way you can ask you can ask Whoop that. You can say that's a great idea. I'm seeing vitamin D minus three does that make sense? What could be going on? And maybe it'll it'll look at your travel alongside that. Okay this is a modest difference. And it's a correlation not evidence that vitamin D caused the change. Your recent recovery has ranged 27% to 87% but you haven't logged vitamin D in the 14 day stretch so there's no recent comp sorry you're given your thoughtful cross path you know okay. So I got a little more work to do on that one. But plus five strain is minus five on recovery that makes total sense.

Yeah so when you work out your body needs to recover.

Plus 1% of the day in high stress zone minus 9% on recovery. So you know through my temp the stress score comes from what? Temperature heart rate HRV?

Primarily HRV but it's also using other sensing.

Got it. So and that's kind of your is that your special sauce there proprietaryness in the in that the stress score?

The stress score itself is something that we invented. Of course we based it on physiological research. And I would say that's one of the hard things about this space which is how do you take medical research that's credible and then a lot of data because you're going to be dating getting data from consumers and then great design right? Because at the end of the day you have to design something to ultimately have a score that people want to look at.

Mhm.

And and so there's a lot of science to it but there's also art to it. And I think it's I think it's something Whoop has been very good at. You know the recovery score and our now our health span score is is the most screenshotted page in the app.

Makes total sense yeah when you share that. Consistent bedtime plus four caffeine plus four creatine plus four morning sunlight plus three. So now that I have this I I also do some meditation with the Calm app and with Waking Up or on my own, that also I don't have enough data in there yet cuz I keep forgetting to log it, but you it does log my skiing. So, I use slopes.

Yeah.

And so, slope you're a skier, Will, or no?

I ski, but not it sounds I'm not using an app for skiing. So, my sense is you ski more than I do.

I mean, I try to get to 30, 40 days a year. But, 2 hours a day. So, it's like executive skiing, CEO skiing, if you catch my drift. Do a podcast before

And you're doing it in Japan.

I do 5, 10 days in Japan is the goal. The rest are at my ski house in

That's elite skiing.

Yes, yes. So, you can come with me and Tucker Carlson if you're into it. It's a really weird trip.

Great. Great.

The other nice thing is it pulls in my slopes data and puts it as an activity. So, you have an activity tracker. And the activity tracker is really great. You get to, you know, I do these long walks in Japan or when I'm in New York, I love to do long walks. My age, long walks and rocking and farmers walks are like the key to longevity, I'm told. And the great thing is now it knows that and it's making a training program for me around that and it asked me the AI, "What's my goal?" I said, "My goal is to not get injured and ski better." And these are the exercises I know are going to help. It's now the AI understands my goals, kind of coaching me and setting up plans, and then lo and behold, one of the things I I think I had asked you for maybe on DM somewhere on Twitter or something. You know, I take a GLP. So, I started tracking it. I take a light GLP, lost 43 lbs on my Whoop.

That's awesome.

Oh, well, yeah. And I mean, let me tell you, that makes a difference. When you're 213, you get to 170, skiing, sleeping, everything. I wish I had Whooped during that journey.

Did your resting heart rate go down a lot?

Yeah, I wasn't fully on Whoop for the majority of that. So, that would have been so cool to have. You know what? I'll gain the 40 lbs back and then lose it. But, now I'm on a maintenance dose and you just released a GLP tracker that has in it all the cohorts of things you want to make sure you're doing when you're taking GLP, including protein consumption. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how GLPs are kind of making their way into the uh the ecosystem here.

Well, in general, you know, I think in line with this theme of we want to have a lot of data under the WHOOP umbrella so that we can actually give you the right insights. If you're taking a GLP-1, that's a pretty meaningful, you know, shift to what's going to happen for your body. And one of the challenges with GLP-1s is that typically speaking about 50% of the weight that someone loses is fat and 50% is muscle. And, [clears throat] you know, so that's how sometimes people can end up getting quite frail even though they've lost a considerable amount of weight. And and so it's good for WHOOP to know that you're on a GLP-1 and then in turn, it's really going to push you to to get some activity and hopefully a little bit of strength training even if it's just body weight in so that you don't end up losing that muscle. And I think that's also where the the appropriate diet with protein and, you know, we've heard some anecdotal success around people taking creatine while they're on GLP-1s. Uh I think is is super important. And, you know, just to say like we have all this data and and uh and we take it very seriously and we want it to be secure and private. We've actually gone through the uh oh, here we go.

Yeah, I'm just I you know, I mirrored my phone. Here's my actual WHOOP. You can see my resting heart rate and all that, but I added my GLP there. Um and it said, you know, you got to get to 9,800 steps now. You got to do two strength activities a week, hydration 7 days a week, protein. And then uh just check off that you took your GLP and it took me through a little script to say um you know, how often do you take it, etc.

And there would have been a process here, I imagine, where the AI was asking you about some of this and you ultimately confirmed you wanted to do these things and have a plan, right?

Yeah, absolutely. Um and I'm at 300 days on my streak here. But see, the other thing you added, um you added uh I guess badges a little bit more kind of like Peloton has like insane number of badges and so you get to see where you're at and like I am a rocking machine on my I'm in the top 1% of people doing rock rocking and farmer so that's like a little competitive thing.

Yeah, there you go. You got to maintain that now. You got to keep rocking every day.

Okay, so let's let's talk about you and your relationship with the FDA little controversy here. It's been covered over and over again. All these devices I guess are not under medical devices and maybe you could explain to us how this FDA looks at you versus other device medical devices and how that's changed over time but you have blood pressure insights BPI and you launch it the FDA was a little bit like hey we're not happy here and then you have the ECG heart screening stuff and all of these devices whether it's my Apple Watch

cleared.

And that's medically cleared so and when you do that these things you always get this disclaimer hey listen we're not in the heart attack business so when I had those things it's up to me to interpret that or a doctor but talk to me about the tension and [snorts] how it's been going across the two administrations cuz now you've lived through you know Trump go go rah rah President Trump is like all in on disrupting and he and he put a Kennedy in there to do that and and he's a bit of a disruptor himself and he's very pro business and then Biden obviously maybe a little more regulation less pro business definitively less pro business but I don't know in the medical space how that happened so talk to me it's not a politics show but you you're all running into regulation now.

Well just to say like it's been a certainly a long process for Whoop and working with the FDA and we've worked with them in a lot of different contexts which I'll talk about here in a second and you know the history of very innovative technology with, you know, somewhat dated regulatory policies is a history that has controversy from time to time. So, I'm not surprised that we've had some challenges or disagreements along the way, but I'm actually really happy with with our relationship with the FDA today. Now, 4 years ago I really wanted to be able to do blood pressure monitoring. And historically, you needed a cuff for that, and it was really a pretty difficult signal processing problem. There was no product on the market that could measure blood pressure accurately from the wrist. And so, we set out to see if we could do it. And one of the ways that we collected a huge data set on it was in collaboration with our members, where we asked members if they wanted to participate in a stress, sleep, and blood pressure study. And as part of that, we actually had 70,000 people enroll. So, think about, you know, the ability to generate studies at at a huge scale fast. And and so, people were actually uploading their blood pressure readings every single day for a number of weeks. And what that allowed us to do was to build out a pretty powerful data set on on blood pressure monitoring, and also to be able to train that alongside all of the physiological data that we were already collecting. Anyway, fast forward, we get to a period where all of a sudden we've got a very powerful algorithm for measuring blood pressure, and that's one of the things that we do, I think, very well at Whoop is, you know, we pick a hard physiological signal, and then we say we want to be able to measure it as accurately or within a similar accuracy as a medical device, and then we look to bring that to consumers. And there was controversy around blood pressure monitoring before we launched, because prior to launching it historically, blood pressure had been under the category of physiological signals that needed to be a {quote} medical device. And just as some, you know, background for for our listeners, the FDA is really supposed to evaluate uh products that have a medical diagnosis. And and then if you're not providing a medical diagnosis, then it falls under a category called wellness. And and there's like a pretty good, you know, history for this with with heart monitoring, for example, where if you do heart rate monitoring for exercise, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring for sleep, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring for you know, AFib detection or heart attack prediction, okay, that needs to be regulated. So the FDA in the past had a pretty clear distinction for heart rate. This is wellness, this is medical, right? With blood pressure, they said that if you're measuring blood pressure, it has to be medical. But the problem with that is there's an avalanche of research that supports that, not surprisingly, blood pressure affects your stress, it affects your sleep, it affects your overall well-being. And we felt like there was a pretty clear lane for us to introduce a blood pressure feature that was a wellness feature. And so we launched the feature, the FDA you know, came back and said that they felt like it needed to be regulated.

[snorts]

They actually sent us a warning letter. There was a big disagreement that played out that was quite public about it. But we you know, we stuck to our guns and and I ultimately really believe in in the way that we approached it. And through a long process, the FDA actually has since updated their guidelines. I think based on our case, but also based on feedback from the industry. That supports that blood pressure can also have wellness applications. And and so you know, our blood pressure insights feature is still available for consumers. And just to say it, we have we have these conversations with the FDA across a lot of different categories. We also has medical clearances from the FDA. So our ECG feature where you can literally do an ECG from your wrist by just putting your fingers on the Whoop, um that's an FDA-cleared product, 510k. And so, uh in some cases we're at we're going through a process of clinical trials to get FDA approval. In other cases, we want to bring a product to market faster, uh and we also believe it's a wellness application. And so, uh that's kind of a healthy, I think, uh process for innovative companies like Whoop to be uh pursuing with the FDA.

Why don't you guys uh I know you guys have some sort of integration with this Omron blood pressure cuff? I I saw like I was like looking it up. Why don't you guys just make your own blood pressure cuff? Or what you know, let's say we're at a $10 billion valuation here. We got 4 million members, 250 on average a year, let's say, or got a billion in revenue. Like, let's just buy this company Omron, or let's get in the blood pressure cuff business, and let's get in the scale business while we're at it. Like, I trust the brand. I just want the Whoop scale. I want you to be the person who puts the features in. I want you to control it. I want it to work. I don't want to have to go through Apple Health in the back door to get my Fitbit scale uploaded. And I I just want I want a Whoop-branded blood pressure cuff and a Whoop-branded scale.

Well, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, in a lot of categories we are debating, do we want to build this ourselves, do we want to partner with someone, or are we going to make an acquisition? And uh and often we've defaulted to either building or acquiring versus partnering. In the case of um blood pressure cuffs, we felt like that was a fairly commoditized technology, uh and there is, you know, medical uh efficacy there. So, you know, if people want to do a calibration with a cuff to set up their Whoop, which will then measure it without the cuff, cuz at the end of the day we kind of want to replace the cuff, uh that, you know, that feels like a a fairly healthy system. And uh and it's also worth saying that we we feel like we've earned the right to um accumulate all this data cuz we have very strong data policies. So, we do not sell data. You know, you are not the product, Jason. Like, you're the membership is the product. And

And that's a huge, I think, distinction in this space, especially when you have, you know, big technology company.

yeah, let's just call it what it is. You may not want to say it, but I can. They're They're They make their money advertising and uh Apple Apple's pretty good steward of data. I'll give them that, but uh you know, they make it on really expensive hardware. So, you are unique in both cases uh in terms of business model. You're in our corner, which I love. Yeah. Apple's going to make a competitor, huh? They know their watch kind of sucks and their software sucks. Like, Apple Health is terrible.

The Apple Watch is the most successful smart watch in the world. And so, I think in terms of the category that they built to own, I think they um I think they've been successful. I think it's an important product for them. It's a It's a product that does a lot of things. And so, if you want text messages and emails and to be able to call

But, they're going to make Are you worried to keep you up at night that they're going to make a Whoop competitor?

Well, I have enormous respect for Apple. I think they're one of the the best in the world at hardware and software. I think a lot of companies have entered our space and had challenges with with the screenless wearable or other wearable products. You know, it's interesting, 10 years ago, there were more competitive products in the market than there are today.

That's true, actually. Yeah, you had a lot of people trying this.

People forget the whole Jawbone kind of Fitbit era. There was a whole class of Nike and Adidas and Under Armour

Oh my god, yes.

Yeah, what And how dumb was it for Nike to stop pursuing that? My god, that was such an obvious smart thing for them to do. They had a good start, and then they gave the business to Fitbit, I believe, and then they just got out of it. All right, listen. It's time for lightning round.

Oh, wow.

round. Lightning round with Will.

Yeah.

You got to be honest here. Here we go. Bryan Johnson or Andrew Huberman? Pick one.

For podcasting, Huberman.

Who's making a bigger contribution to uh the the science and technology?

I think Huberman has a a wider audience. I think Brian has pushed people's imagination of what they should be measuring, and I think both of those are really helpful.

Cold plunge, cold shower. Cold plunge, cold shower. Make a difference?

I'll say cold shower because it's very accessible.

Okay.

And it's something that people can do every day. And you do it for even 30 seconds, 60 seconds, you're just going to feel a lot better.

Yeah, wakes you up. Red light therapy or just the classic hot sauna?

I like the hot sauna.

Old school.

Yes. It gets hotter. I think the red light thing is just marketing nonsense.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh okay. Zone two cardio. This is for our age. I think you're 40 now, Will. Are you 40 yet?

37, all right. So, I'll round you up to 40. I'm I'll round myself down to 50. Zone two cardio or lifting? What What do you think? If you have If you got to pick one for my age and for your age.

I think this depends a lot on what someone's goals are, but in general, I think that everyone should be lifting more weights and probably doing, you know, if they have an hour to exercise, they should spend more time lifting and less time on an elliptical.

Love it.

Because people Yeah, because your your muscle mass is such an important uh test for longevity.

The alarm in Whoop is quite sophisticated, Will. You can wake up based on recovery, sleep score. So, the recovery score, the sleep score, or with a with a hard, you know, 6:00 a.m. Should you go recovery, sleep score, or with a hard alarm so you get your sleep consistency? Which one? Pick one of the three.

If you're on vacation, you can go with recovery or sleep, but if you're trying to run a tech company, you better pick an exact time.

Okay. All right. Coffee first thing in the morning, wait 90 minutes. Which one? Wait 90 minutes for your coffee or just drink the damn coffee and live your life?

I personally drink the coffee.

Yeah, let's go. All right. Strain score, sleep score, recovery score. Which one do you obsess over most? Of the Of the big three, which one do you obsess over? You can't say you're you're they're all your children, you love them all equally.

Recovery. I mean, I wake up every morning waiting to see that that color of that dial.

Wow, I love it. All right, listen. There's your hour with Will from Whoop. Great product. I give it my highest endorsement. Eight Sleep, I'm an investor in. I love that product, too. Those are my two favorite health uh products. And uh hey, at the time of uh this recording, you have a little announcement about the king. No, not President Trump. [laughter] I got you. Not King Trump, but LeBron James uh now playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. Uh big announcement, yeah?

Well, we're we're announcing today LeBron James is uh now a global ambassador for Whoop. So, uh he's been on Whoop, interestingly, for 11 years.

Wow.

And uh we never had any formal relationship with him. We loved that he wore the product. Frankly, it was it was really important in the early days that he did wear the product cuz he was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it. And so, it was incredibly validating that this incredible athlete was willing to try a technology from an unknown company called Whoop. And uh and it gave us a lot of hope that we were onto something, but it's been an extraordinary to see his career uh over two decades plus, and he's the uh he's really the the pinnacle of performance and and like longevity. And uh and so, he joins a roster of ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo and uh Patrick Mahomes and uh Lewis Hamilton and Aryna Sabalenka and Nelly Korda and so on. So, it's a great group.

Now, you had a philosophy though early on. We talked about this in our previous discussions that like, hey, you're not going to pay uh athletes to uh wear it, you know, and you're not going to beg them to wear it cuz they're the customers. They're They're the ICP, the ideal customer profile. um is this like a maybe a change in thinking or is this like a unique one-of-one case? Hey, he's been on the product for 11 years without a formal relationship and you know, he's in that era now. He's going to, you know, retire in a couple of years that hey man, he's probably going to go into this Kobe, Shaq post playing era where where he gets in deep into business. So, what what what's the thinking here? And how do you think about athletes writ large?

I think in general, if your business is pre-marketing, so to speak, like you're not in a stage where you're doing big television advertisements and so on and so forth, you should be really careful paying anyone to use your product. You know, you want people to love your product authentically. And in our case, it just so happened that early on, our target market was these professional athletes. And so, we needed them to organically love the product. And by the way, because you have to wear it 24/7, there's no amount of money I'm going to be able to pay an athlete to wear something 24/7 if they don't like it.

Right.

So, on the flip side, it was like, well, if if it actually works and it's measuring their sleep and recovery and they play better, you know, they should want to pay for it. So, that was our attitude for a long time. And you know, we had a number of these individuals who were best in class of their sport um and global people uh that uh wanted to invest in the company because they loved it so much.

Amazing.

And from there, we also developed relationships where we could use their name, image, and likeness, which has a value associated with it. Heck, yes. That we recognize uh to be able to do advertising. And so, you know, they've been amazing partnerships and uh I'm very grateful that LeBron James is is part of uh the Whoop roster.

Wait, uh are the players allowed to wear these during games? They're not, right?

That's something the NBA is still looking at.

Got it. Yeah, cuz they're not allowed to wear jewelry. They've got to take all that off cuz of injuries, so but they could put it cuz you can wear it on your uh armband. They could embed it in like a wrap, or so maybe some of them have snuck it on the court. Who knows?

Well, you you probably saw the Australian Open stuff.

No, I didn't. Tell me.

Well, in at Australian Open, the tennis tournament a number of players were asked to take their Whoop off while they were playing. And uh it was I think in part because the Australian Open uh didn't know what they were wearing, but they were just wearing it, you know, under their armbands and everything else. And the ITF, which is the International Tennis Federation, actually had approved Whoop to be worn in matches. So, the Australian Open was kind of out of line. And then next thing you know, um the other majors have come forward saying that wearables can be worn. So, I think there's this sort of natural evolution of resisting it, safety checks. And by the way, they're they're right to want to be restrictive about what can be worn.

It's not a I don't I don't think it's a safety thing if you're wrapping it around your your armband or something like that. I'd say it's

I mean, obviously I agree.

I'll tell you what's going on in the background. Your your marketing department's probably getting shaken down. They're probably like, "Hey, you know, we'd love to have Whoop involved. It'd be terrible if something happened to an athlete wearing 1.2 oz, but if you were to put a logo behind them for $10 million, well, we might have a different opinion."

You know all the ins and outs.

I I it's not my first time at this rodeo. [laughter] I know the shakedown when I hear it.

How how are How are things for you in in early stage venture? Are you Are you starting to lead these billion-dollar seed rounds or you're you're staying true to the the accelerator model?

Uh you know, it's um nobody wants to do year zero work. So, I have leaned into that.

Right.

But then, you know, at the end um we we have the syndicate and we have 4,000 members of it and we would syndicate our early-stage seed deals. Hey, if you want to get involved in this, you know, Jake House putting in 100K, you might want to put in 5K. They kept asking me, "Can you get me into Zipline? Can you get me into Whoop? Can you get me into SpaceX, Anthropic, whatever it is?" So, we started a late-stage practice that we just started this year at the syndicate. Thanks for asking. And um We did We did Zipline. We did Icon Homes, the 3D-printed homes. These are all billion-dollar companies, five billion-dollar companies in vast space. So, when I know the founder, the CFO gives its approval, cuz you have to deal with this, right? People doing off-the-books transactions in SPVs and buying out early employees and other, you know, early investors. You have to deal with some of this SPV madness.

I'll say this, it's complicated when your business is failing and it's complicated when your business is winning. So, it's always complicated.

I think just uh my advice to everybody with these SPVs, off-the-books, whatever, is just build a relationship with the CFO of the company and just get their blessing for it and let them know what you're doing. And if they really don't want you to do it, then you're going to have to accept that, right? Like it's their company. Uh I I don't like this idea of going behind the back of the company and

The other thing to be wary of are these secondary brokers who they claim they've got shares from someone at a price.

Yes.

And they go around saying that, but they're really just trying to create a market. And so

Happens to me all the time.

Yeah.

Uh cuz I literally like I'm on the board of a company that's worth a couple billion dollars and they come to me and I say, "Okay, great. Um who who is it with?" Because I got to I'm on the board of the company. I got to talk to the CFO and, you know, I can help coordinate with you. And then crickets. And I'm like, "Hmm." They're fishing. It's always a fishing expedition. This thing didn't really exist 10, 15 years ago. Like the only time I ever saw it was Facebook. Uh and then Uber. When Masayoshi Son came in, he uh he was like, "Hey guys, I need you to sell some of these or I'm going to invest in Lyft." And we were like, "Okay." I gave him 10% of my shares at the time. I was like, "Sure. I'll take a little 10% off the top just to keep Masayoshi from investing

What a run What a run that business has had, but congrats.

Yeah, and I mean and right now, like trading uh at a an all-time low PE and they're surging and they have Yeah, it's really weird to watch what's happening. Like the anti-AI trade, DoorDash, Uber, Figma, [snorts] you know, all the a lot of these companies getting uh taken to the woodshed a bit. Um and some of them are just like not impacted by it, but hmm AI's going to change everything. Lots of great investment opportunities. We'll see you all next time on the All-In interview program. Go get a Whoop. Get yourself a Whoop. Perfect Christmas gift.

Thank you, Jason.

Appreciate you doing it, Will. Love the product.

I'm going all in.

[music]

I'm going [music] all in.