David Novak 0:04 

Welcome to How leaders lead where every week you get to listen. And while I interview some of the best leaders in the world, I break down the key learning so that by the end of the episode, you'll have something simple that you can apply and develop into being a better leader. That's what this podcast is all about. Now, today's guest is will Ahmed, the founder and CEO of whoop, a wearable fitness tracker that measures a few key metrics to help top athletes and even guys like me achieve peak performance. Now, I'm a big fan of this company. And in fact, I'm wearing my whoop this very second, and you're gonna learn that will is an incredibly sharp young leader. Believe it or not, he's in his early 30s, running a company that was recently valued at $3.6 billion dollars. Now, running a company at that level requires a whole other level of discipline, when it comes to focusing in on what truly matters. If you want to keep your business healthy. No matter what size of company you lead, it's imperative that you measure it and keep your eyes on a few vital metrics at all times. Now, it's so easy to get head fake by all the data that's out there, all the ideas, all the feedback that gets thrown to you from every direction, the effective leaders I know, stay focused, they know what to measure what will have the greatest impact on the business, and they make their decisions based off of those metrics. The fact that wills already mastered this skill at such an early age is really impressive, some leaders never get it. So here we are on the first episode of 2022, and you're about to get some insights that I know will help you get this year off to a great start. So let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with my new friend and soon to be yours. Will Ahmed.

Well, thanks so much for just taking the time to be with us today.

Will Ahmed 2:08 

Thanks for having me, David.

David Novak 2:10 

You know, the last time I met you, we were at Shinnecock and you are driving the ball well over 300 yards on a urine animal.

Will Ahmed 2:16 

That was a good day.

David Novak 2:18 

I would say so. You know, I told you about my mission, which is to make the world a better place by developing better leaders tell us a little bit about whooping the mission that you're on?

Will Ahmed 2:29 

Yeah, our our mission at whoop is to unlock human performance, which is to say that we believe every individual has an inner potential that you can tap into if you can better understand their bodies. And and we've built wearable technology that measures everything around sleep and recovery and strain and gives people information that they can use to improve their health. So I got into this space. About 1012 years ago, I was I was personally I was into sports and exercise, David. So I grew up playing about a dozen different sports and ended up playing squash while I was at Harvard. And my experience of being a college athlete, you know, led me down this rabbit hole of trying to understand physiology and performance and training, I was somebody used to overtrain as a college athlete, and I got very interested in what you could measure about the body to predict overtraining, or, you know, predict under training, what why do some athletes get injured and other stone? What does it mean to peak on a given day? These were just questions that I was asking myself as a student at Harvard, and I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school and, and wrote a paper around how to continuously measure the human body, that work really became the foundation for whoop. And in the last 10 years, we've gone from working with the best athletes in the world to now working with everyday consumers.

David Novak 3:52 

Well I don't know if I'm one of the best athletes in the world, but I am an everyday consumer and I gotta tell you something that you know, I'm a big testimonial for your product and Egon Durbin who's a good friend of mine and he's the CO CEO of Silver Lake you know, I was telling him that I was really having a hard time sleeping in particularly but you know, before big golf events and he said you know, I can take care of this. So the next thing I shows up at my door, I now have my whoop, wearable okay? And he also sent me this cooler cooler pad that I put on my bed to make you know to have my bed be cooler and because you recommend you know sleeping in cool rooms for sure. I've gone from basically averaging about five hours asleep to over eight hours and be in recovery mode. And you know, I can't tell you how much it has really changed my life for the better. I just got my monthly report from whoop and you know, everything that should be doing well is doing well. So thank you very much. Well, it

Will Ahmed 4:51 

never gets old to hear stories like that. You really are a good testimonial five hours to eight hours. That's like a life changing amount of sleep.

David Novak 4:58 

Absolutely. And you know, sleep Something that we all do. So I just wanted to ask you something, you know, how should we think about sleep as a typical consumer?

Will Ahmed 5:06 

Well, I think sleep is is pretty misunderstood. You know, if you ask someone who doesn't measure their sleep, how many hours of sleep they got last night, what they'll probably do is they'll say, Okay, well, I want to bed at 11. And I woke up at six. So I got seven hours of sleep. And the problem with that math, as you know, David is it just means that person spent seven hours in bed? And the question is, within that seven hours, how much time did they spend getting quality sleep? Now, sleep staging can be periods of time when you're awake, periods of time, when you're in light sleep, periods of time in REM sleep and periods of time and slow wave sleep, awake and light, you don't really get any value for those don't do much for you. Whereas rem and slow wave, that's where really all the magic happens. REM sleep is when your mind is repairing. So that's when you go into deep dreaming state. If you're someone who never has dreams, maybe you're not getting enough REM sleep, slow wave sleep is when your body produces about 95% of its human growth hormone. So there's this idea that you get stronger in the gym, or practicing or exercising, you're actually for the most part breaking muscles down, you get stronger during slow wave sleep, when your body is actually repairing them. So let's go back to that person who spent seven hours in bed, that person could have gotten a total of 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep, or they could have gotten as much as five and a half hours of REM and slow wave sleep. And there's such an ocean between those two numbers, like the person who's only getting about 30 minutes of REM and slow wave sleep is almost definitely dealing with a variety of problems in their life. And the person who's getting hours and hours of REM and slow wave sleep is probably functioning at extremely high level. So the question for people to ask themselves is how can they go from being someone who gets less rem and slow wave sleep to more? The bottom line, of course is first you need to start measuring some of this stuff before you can start managing it.

David Novak 7:01 

Yeah, absolutely. And you were talking about, you know, you're at Harvard. And you're, you're getting an active interest in the in the body and how it works and performance. And but when did you actually have that aha moment to start whoop?

Will Ahmed 7:15 

Well, I think I started whoop, before I even realized that I was I was building a company. I mean, I became an entrepreneur, before I knew what an entrepreneur was. I just became deeply obsessed with this problem. And the problem was, I don't understand what I'm doing in my body while I'm training. How do I know if I'm getting fitter? How do I know if I should train hard? How do I know if I shouldn't train at all. And the solution to that problem, I believed was actually understanding the other 20 hours of the day, there was a big overemphasis on understanding exercise, and understanding what was happening during practice and games. So I'd go out and talk to coaches. And I'd ask them, you know, what kind of technology would you want if you could have more technology. And more often than not, they kept coming back to? Well, I want more information on exercise, I want sweat analysis, I want video analysis, I want GPS information, I want to better understand the strain of workouts. But when I asked them about their problems, more often than not, they were talking about the fact that, you know, they have player availability issues, athletes are overtraining or they're getting injured. And so I thought there was a big mismatch between what the coaches were telling me the problems that they were describing, and the solutions that they were asking for. And there's an insight here for entrepreneurs to I think it's an entrepreneurs job to listen very carefully to your customers problems. But it's your job as the entrepreneur to ultimately figure out what those solutions are to those problems. And so the insight that I would say I had 10 years ago is that sleep and recovery played a much bigger and more important role in human performance than it was being given credit for.

David Novak 8:57 

That's so interesting, because you know, the the entrepreneurs that I talked to, they intuitively know how important it is to solve the most important problems that occur in a category most often. And that sounds like exactly what you've done.

Will Ahmed 9:12 

I think so I mean, I think that a lot of companies are built on, you know, something contrarian or some something maybe counterintuitive, that later turns out to be right. In the case of whoop, we believe that like sleep and recovery might be more important to performance than even training or anything else. And in 2010, that was a fairly, you know, counterintuitive point of view. It was kind of a period of more is more. And now it's I think the pendulum has come back the other way, where you see these huge pieces on sleep and recovery and how the world's best athletes are sleeping.

David Novak 9:46 

Yeah, there's no question about that. And in fact, I wear an Apple watch, and I also wear this whoop, watch and you see all the commercials for Apple now where they're talking about heart rate different majors and you know why Will I wear both a watch and whoop?

Will Ahmed 10:02 

Well, I look, I think Apple is a phenomenal company, we very intentionally didn't want to be a watch, because for one reason people don't wear two watches. And I have a lot of respect for the watchmakers out there. And I also have a lot of respect for Apple. And so, you know, we didn't view that our core function needed to be pushed notifications, or telling the time or allowing you to call an Uber or look at your email. But we did view that the core use case for whoop was to improve health and to do that in a world class way better than anyone else. That meant the most accurate product, the best coaching, the best interface. And by focusing on those areas, it led us down a much more minimalistic, I would say design for our hardware. And that's, I think, been been really good to us. At the end of the day, I think people will evaluate whether they should wear whoop or not purely through a lens of health. And today, we're proud to say that if you've been on whoop for a year, you have a lower resting heart rate, you have a higher heart rate variability, you're getting more sleep. So we're actually changing behavior and improving health. And I think that's the hardest thing to do in this space.

David Novak 11:12 

Yeah, I think that's a powerful thing to be able to bring to the marketplace. And well, I think it's just amazing that you've simplified these measures, you know, how did you go about deciding what the three big things are that you're really going to measure because you can get overloaded in this area?

Will Ahmed 11:28 

Well, I felt that the key thing you need to understand was strain and recovery in the sort of sense of balance, the the way that I felt you could tell someone what to do, or give them sort of actionable feedback. So looking forwards versus looking backwards, I thought that a lot of products did an okay job telling you what happened, but didn't necessarily tell you what to do next. And that's where part of the vision for whoop came in was to be an actionable tool. And if you look at the way that the products designed, a lot of it's trying to live a step ahead of you, the daily cycle is you wake up in the morning with a recovery score, you know, zero to 100%, red, yellow, green, that's telling you how much strain or stress you should put on your body. And then over the course of the day, you accumulate, you know, strain and whoop, will automatically measure it. And it'll tell you to keep going or to stop at some point. And then even at the end of the day, it whoop looks the strain that's accumulated on your body. And it'll tell you how much sleep you need for tonight to recover for tomorrow. And then of course, you get a new recovery score, and the whole thing restarts. So that's a daily cycle that's designed to kind of live a step ahead of you. There's also a weekly cycle that's looking at how you've your relationship between strain and recovery, how much sleep you're getting, what certain behaviors have been optimal. And then there's also a monthly cycle that's taking and looking at larger datasets. And it's saying, hey, on, on the nights where you reported taking melatonin, or sleeping in a cold room, or eating this type of food, you've performed better or worse. And so we've created effectively, three different feedback loops, you know, time based feedback loops, one's a daily cycle, one's a weekly cycle, one's a monthly cycle, there's even an annual cycle. And all of those are designed to provide different types of feedback with this lens towards how can you be healthier?

David Novak 13:20 

You know, I just got my monthly report today, you know, there you go. It works extremely well, you know, and you become this entrepreneur, tell us about the first dollar you made? What was it like when he rang you up your first sale? And how did you feel about it?

Will Ahmed 13:35 

You know, I don't think I ever felt that much pride in the first sale, because I was still so nervous about the technology. I mean, the technology that we were building, was, we had a bit of an existential problem, right? We were building technology that never been built before. And when you do that, that you have these questions to yourself of like, is it going to be able to deliver the vision? Is it going to live up to the hype of what we think we're actually creating here? So I remember in 2014, we started working with pro athletes, and two of our first 100 users were people like LeBron James, and Michael Phelps, who you could argue to the best in the world at time have to the best ever. And so it was incredibly gratifying to see these world class performers using technology that not that long ago was an idea in a dorm room. But at the same time, you know, he's hyper anxious about the fact that like, is it going to perform? Are they going to love it, or they're going to keep wearing it? And so I think that sort of balance or relentlessness, if you will, helped us continue iterating on the technology and driving forwards and of course, we went from these top individuals to leagues to, to now woop is a mainstream consumer product.

David Novak 14:49 

I want to really now kind of dig into the real purpose of this program, which is how you go about leading and it's really hard to do that without going back and examining someone's upbringing. Tell us about your upbringing.

Will Ahmed 15:00 

Yeah, I grew up on on Long Island, My father immigrated to this country when he was 22 years old from Egypt. So, you know, hard driving, charismatic, kind of street smart, you know, worked very hard, his whole career, rose the ranks and finance my mom, very different. You know, super well educated, went to Exeter and Princeton, brilliant writer, one was one of the best writers in her class, very book smart, more introverted, my father, more extroverted. And so I kind of saw through growing up with them as parents, to different filters to apply to the world. And, you know, one, which was sort of running through walls, the other, which was being deeply analytical. And I think that those sort of extremes were helpful for me and thinking about different ways to solve problems. And I was an only child as well. So I spent a lot of time around adults, which I think was helpful, too, in terms of being comfortable being around people who were older than me.

David Novak 16:05 

That's interesting, because my daughter, Ashley is the only child and I think he grew up a little faster. We knew that only child. And when you think about your childhood, when you look back at it, is there a personal story that you recall, it really helps lay out the kind of leader that you've become,

Will Ahmed 16:19 

I think, at least from my development, as a CEO, it's been really an iterative process where I've been trying to get a little bit better every day, I don't feel like you know, something happened. And that when I was 10 years old, that then became reflective of, of the CEO that I am today, I do appreciate a lot of the experiences that I had playing sports, I was captain of three teams in high school, I was captain of the Harvard squash team and college, I helped run a final club in college, you know, these experiences of leadership in different contexts, especially sports, I do think are helpful as you think about having a leadership role later in your career. And I think one of the more important things that I learned or developed in becoming a better leader was really focusing on on myself too, and focusing on how I was managing my own day to day emotions and personality.

David Novak 17:16 

Well, who believed in you before you might have actually believed in yourself?

Will Ahmed 17:20 

Well, that's a good question. I think I did operate with a fair amount of inner belief. I mean, obviously, my parents were very encouraging. In my development, I think I had, you know, great teachers along the way, I had great coaches along the way, I don't think I would have started a company at the age of 22, if I hadn't developed some sense of inner belief along the way. And, you know, I have to just be grateful for the fact that I was fortunate enough to go to good schools and have good friends. And I think, sort of an overall healthy upbringing, I will say that the sort of first year or two of building whoop, was, I would say, quite painful, and like, quite difficult, and, you know, emotionally quite draining, because I was learning what it meant to raise capital and run a business. And I also was running up against the fact that a lot of people didn't think what I was doing was going to be successful. And were telling me that. And so being told that you're going to fail from people that you admire or respect is a really painful feedback loop. I think I put up a real wall to negative feedback, you know, in my early 20s, while I was getting whoop off the ground, and it took years to sort of find how to bring negative feedback back in and actually turn it into a positive. How do you do that? Well, well, the insight I got along the way, was, you want to make sure you hear everything that people are saying you don't necessarily have to listen to it, I had gotten to a place where I felt like such a high percentage of the feedback I was getting in the early days of whoop was negative that it just felt like a better way to survive was going to be not listening to it for a while. And that can be an okay coping mechanism if you're a small company or a small team, but it's not productive if you're trying to grow into a large organization. That's a very dynamic organization. Another reason that I think I had this challenge is that my my self identity and the performance of whoop, I think were very tied up as one in the same. You know, I felt like if if whoop was having a good day, or whoop was succeeding, I was succeeding, if whoop was failing, I was failing. And that's not a healthy mindset, in part because it's also not real, like you can be operating well as a management team or as an individual. And for various circumstances or reasons the company may be working through challenges. The opposite is true to where you can be part of a business that's having explosive growth but you're personally really struggling or not keeping up and so I got to this place where I started to separate my own performance from that that accompany and that became a really healthy mechanism to also help me then bring on more forms of feedback and learning in my life. And that introspection and that sort of separation allowed me to ask myself, okay, how can I just get a little bit better every single day as a leader, as a CEO, as an entrepreneur? And, you know, the company's success and part followed from that?

David Novak 20:21 

You know, it's funny, because when I look back on the ideas I've had, I didn't have any as big as whoop, okay. But I can tell you that originally, I would, if people had gave me that negative feedback, a lot of times, I would think they just don't get it, you know? Yeah. And then I realized that the first thing you have to do is figure out whether they're right or not. Yeah, you know, so you got to really understand that barrier that they're bringing up, and then you if you can dismiss it after you've thought about it makes a lot of sense. But I made a lot of mistakes. When I had that idea, hey, these people just don't get how brilliant my ideas?

Will Ahmed 20:57 

I think that's absolutely right. And, and, you know, now, disagreement, or negative feedbacks, almost a source of excitement for me, because it, you know, allows you to ask that question, why do I think I'm right? Or why do I feel so strongly about XY and Z?

David Novak 21:13 

You know, it's interesting as I listened to, you're obviously a self coach, and I've just written a book called take charge of you how, how self coaching can transform your life and career, and you seem to have a great sense of self awareness? What process do you use to get that kind of self awareness that allows you to self coach yourself, so that you can keep polishing the apple and get better and better?

Will Ahmed 21:37 

Well, I think one of the best things I started doing in my life was meditating. And I did this hurt started about seven years ago, which was also around the same time that I felt like I had reached a point of crisis in building the company. And I, you know, we probably raised about $10 million or so at that point, which certainly felt like a lot of money, I'd probably had a team of 15 or 20 people. But I felt like I didn't really I wasn't in control, I felt out of balance, I felt like things were coming out of my mouth. And then I was realizing, I said, you kind of feel like you're in a constant state of reactiveness. And, and so I figured maybe learning how to meditate would help. And it really did. And it's something I've done every day now, for for seven, maybe eight years. And the process of meditation is a powerful one. And that, I think, it allows you to look at yourself in the third person, not just during the meditation, but kind of in the rest of your life. And so I now find throughout the day, there'll be these points where I hear a voice in my head where it's Oh, wills about to get angry or wills frustrate, or wills gonna say something before it actually happens. And, and that sort of ability to be a step ahead of yourself, rather than a step behind yourself. For me, it was life changing. And, of course, you know, it makes you happier, it makes you calmer. It makes you I would say steadier. That's another thing that I think is really underrated in leadership is having kind of a consistent effect. You don't want to be like, you know, up here one day and down here, the next you kind of want to have a steady hand, as good things are happening or bad things are happening. So all of those things, I think came in part from me doing this sort of work on myself and really thinking about strengths and weaknesses.

David Novak 23:29 

You know, it's interesting, you know, I had a conversation with Kevin Johnson, who's the CEO of Starbucks, and he's a big believer in meditation. In fact, Ringo Starr, turned him on to somebody, you know, taught us pretty good to do is, so who taught you meditation? And you know, how much time do you spend meditating?

Will Ahmed 23:47 

Well, I took a four day transcendental meditation course. And I think that I probably spend between 20 and 40 minutes a day meditating. It's a practice that takes about 22 minutes. So I do it every single morning, and then I would say, you know, a third of a third of the days, I'll do it in the afternoon.

David Novak 24:05 

So you'll do 22 minutes in the afternoon as well. That's I think I could stomach the 22 minutes, the hour part, I think it'd be pretty hard for me to be able to do that, you know,

Will Ahmed 24:14 

I've I've done it for an hour or longer, but to me, it's sort of diminishing returns at that point, or it becomes more about the end state is meditation. For me, I'm starting to optimize a lot of my life around being a great CEO and, and running a great company. So certain things that might be slightly more optimal for me, but are less optimal for being a CEO. I tend to shy away from

David Novak 24:38 

make sense, you know, speaking to be a CEO, you had to really create a business model. Tell us about your business model and what you hope to accomplish with it.

Will Ahmed 24:47 

It's a great question. I think when you start a company, you don't necessarily know all the things you're going to innovate on. You know, for us, it was pretty clear we were going to innovate around health, monitoring and technology. I didn't think we were going to innovate around the business model itself for selling that technology. But that was one of the learnings along the way. In 2017, we entered the consumer market after working with pro athletes and teams for years, David, and we sold whoop for $500. It was a one time fee. And it was sort of equivalent to an expensive Garmin watch. And what we saw over the course of the next 12 months is that people were continuing to wear whoop who had bought it, we didn't have the same drop off rates that had plagued Fitbit or Jawbone some of these other companies, essentially, where you put it on, and you never take it off, right. And the problem was that we weren't selling a lot of them. And around that time as well, I was noticing that, you know, Fitbit, in the public markets was trading at about one times revenue, which as you know, is not great, especially for a technology company, and peloton which wasn't public yet, but in the private markets, they were trading at about 20 times revenue. And peloton of course, had a subscription Fitbit. And so I asked myself that you know, do you want to grow up to look more like peloton or you want to grow up to look more like Fitbit. And that was a fairly easy decision given those multiples. But I also thought, Well, maybe if we were a subscription, we could get more people in the door because we could have a lower upfront cost. But if people fell in love with the product over time, it could be better for both parties. And so in May of 2018, we transitioned the whole business to being a subscription, in fact, where the hardware was just included and free as part of the subscription. And now today, you can sign up for whoop for as little as $30. And we'll send you the brand new Ford auto in the mail. And you know, you can cancel over time. So it's a fairly unique business model, there isn't really a perfect analog to it, because the the hardware is free. And I would say as a company, it's made us a better company. Because we've had to be even more obsessed with customer experience and member satisfaction.

David Novak 26:57 

I wanted to ask you about that. Because you know, you obviously got this new business you're trying to gain trial. But when you think about what drives your thinking the most is it retention of your current customers or attraction?

Will Ahmed 27:10 

Well, it's funny, we defined the whole business through growth and retention, which we've we've nicknamed grow tain for grow and retain. So you'll see people walking around with growth chain shirts on from time to time, you know, those are the two levers on our business. And I would say that, I probably personally spend more time thinking about retention, I would say the rest of the management team probably spends a lot of time thinking about growth. But you can't have one without the other. And for us ensuring that people are really enjoying the product for months and years, and hopefully for the rest of their lives is core to our value proposition. I mean, we don't think of improving health as a one time thing. It's something that's going to evolve at different stages in your life. I mean, just picture a woman who goes from being someone who's training for a marathon to all of a sudden, someone who's pregnant all of a sudden, who's got a newborn, I mean, those are three very different stages of life for the same person. And and each one of those stages has a very different goal attached to it. And so as a product and a technology and a service, we want to make sure that we're evolving with those different needs.

David Novak 28:21 

You know, it's interesting, I was thinking about your job, and you've got to be an expert, or at least damn good at technology damn good at medicine damn good at research, how do you manage the intersection of those three things? Does? Does one take more time than the other? And how do you lead in each of those areas?

Will Ahmed 28:38 

Well, first and foremost, it's about being around great people. You know, I I've built this business in large part by getting to work with really brilliant people and people, by the way, who are much more brilliant at their category of work than I am. I mean, you're absolutely right, in order to be successful. At wearable technology. You have to be great, not good at hardware, software analytics, design, you probably need some notion of community, you have to be able to lean on research and science. And there's a reason that many of the best companies in the world have failed in this space. I mean, Nike exited the space Adidas exited the space Under Armour spent a billion dollars and then exited the space. Intel pulled out of the space Microsoft launched something pulled it back, Google launched something pulled it back, jawbone and a 10 other startups that have raised in total over a billion dollars have failed. It's uh, you know, it's been a really, really hard market. And so the only way you can be successful is being excellent at like six or seven different things and in order to be excellent at six or seven things as you know, David, you need to have really, really good people. There's not one generalist who's all those things and I'm certainly an I'm not one generalist, I've gotten to a place where I can identify, I think, great talent, and I can empower that talent to take on the world. You know,

David Novak 30:09 

I want to talk to you about talent in a minute, but I have to pay a compliment. Your marketing is fantastic. I don't know if you view yourself as a marketer, but your brand marketing is incredible. First question I have to ask is, How in the world do you get a LeBron James or Michael Phelps to be wearing the whoop, watch to begin with?

Will Ahmed 30:26 

Well, this the key to getting to a world class athlete back then was going to their personal trainer, that's still a pretty good person to go to today. But in 2014, you know, it wasn't quite as sexy of a role. And those personal trainers spent more time with these athletes than, you know, almost anyone else. So that was the way we got to LeBron was through Mike Minh CEUs, his personal trainer for over, I think, 15 years now. And Keenan Robinson, who at the time was was Michael Phelps, his trainer, and then you know, the the product has to live up to the pressures of, of those athletes. And fortunately, it did. I think, in terms of brand and marketing, the thing that I'll add is that we never paid these athletes to wear whoop, it was critical to our success, that they had to buy the product and use it. And I bring that up, because I thought with wearable technology was so disruptive to your life, you're how many things in your life do you wear 24/7? Not a lot, right? So it's such a disruptive thing that if it didn't live up to expectations, there was no amount of money or equity, we could give someone to wear it, who didn't like it. But if it actually could tell them how well they were sleeping and recovering, and it was gonna give them even just 1% Chance better winning, they would pay for it. And so we bet on the technology. And it forced us also to actually figure out if the technology was good. And so it was a you know, it was a painful battle but but one that we look back on fondly.

David Novak 32:06 

I love your marketing that you have now on national television, you know where you'll watch a Rory McIlroy, or Justin Thomas before he swings the golf club and you'll see what his heart rate is food fly. Yeah, whoop live. I mean, fantastic. Now, are you getting these guys to wear the product for free or now that you're bigger, you actually cut them in on the action?

Will Ahmed 32:27 

Well, woop live is an interesting marketing initiative because it touches so many different constituencies. So woop live is our ability to bring live heartrate and other whoop data to broadcast. So David, you're talking about during the Ryder Cup or during the PGA Tour, we were showing live heart rate of players hitting shots, loved it. And we're gonna do this across a lot of different sports. We've started doing it in CrossFit. We've been doing it in NASCAR and SRX. There's there's a lot more to come on that front. You know, you have to have approval from the leagues, you have to have buy in from the broadcaster's you have to buy in from the various athletes. So that is a marketing initiative certainly requires various forms of sponsorship. But I think the cool thing is that it brings a better experience to the fans too. It's not just sticking a banner in front of you and telling you to buy whoop, it's like, Hey, this is pretty cool. This is the actual heart rate of this person under a lot of stress.

David Novak 33:26 

I love it. It is super cool to watch, especially when you're wearing the product. And you've got a good sense of it. And yeah, so I absolutely love it. And I think your marketing has a tremendous Luck of the leader to you know, I think that's always so important that you look like you've established the category you are it. And you look that way, how involved you get in that

Will Ahmed 33:46 

very involved, I can tell you it was an orientation again, going back to 2011 2012, when I was starting the companies that I believed that the company that would ultimately own health monitoring, would grow up to look a lot more like Nike than IBM. You know, I thought that health monitoring needed to be cool to be a mass market adopted thing. And, you know, health monitors historically have kind of had a stigma associated with them, where if you see someone wearing a health monitor, it's almost like there's something wrong with them. And I wanted to develop a health monitor that was aspirational. You know, the same way, putting on a pair of Air Jordans is aspirational, and says something positive about you. That's how we wanted people to feel when they were whoop. So although whoop the product today is really something that's helping anyone understand their bodies will always have this anchoring in sports and athletics and performance because it creates that aspirational feeling. Just love

David Novak 34:47 

what you're doing. And you mentioned the importance of talent, which I couldn't agree more. I mean, you know, building people capabilities job number one of any CEO. So you go from having 10 people let's say now you're you have over 1000 I don't know how Many people do you have now? Well,

Will Ahmed 35:01 

we're right around 650.

David Novak 35:03 

So you're growing exponentially every year in terms of people that yeah, you know, I talked to Neil butchery of Workday. And the first 500 people that he hired, he and his co founder hired, they interviewed themselves, how involved you get in the interview process now? And what do you look for in your people?

Will Ahmed 35:22 

Well, I interviewed probably everyone up until 100 150 people and I became more concerned, I think, with establishing the right culture than being the person who's saying, go or no go on every person who walks in the door. I mean, in a way, it's a nice idea that the CEO interviews everyone, but it's also wildly inefficient. And it also sort of implies to the rest of your team that you don't trust them to find great people. So how do you create a culture, which is finding great people. And the thing that I think really helped crystallize This is that whoop, looks for people who are at this intersection of high intensity and high humility. And we've we've written about this internally, we're very key about this. And high intensity is effectively looking for people who are hard driving, who have a deep expertise in a particular area. And high humility is effectively looking for people who, despite that sort of hard drive, recognize they don't have all the answers in the process. And interestingly, those two things also ourselves, you know, are a little harder to find, because they tend to be inversely correlated. People who are high intensity tend to be a little more arrogant, sometimes people are high humility can be a little more meek. And so just looking for people who are hard driving and humble is helpful lens. And in practice, what that does is, it creates a culture where people are comfortable, really debating and challenging each other. You know, we talked before about having to be great at six or seven different things in a pretty small company. Sometimes companies can be successful, because they're great at one or two things. When you've got that many different things that need to be awesome, you often have these meetings that are very cross functional. You know, how do you send data from a whoop strap to an iPhone? Okay, well, that's gonna require an iOS engineer, a marketer, a designer, a hardware engineer, all in the same room, figuring that one question out, and what's gonna happen is, they're gonna all come in with their own point of view, and there's gonna be a collision, collision. And what you want is not for people to be concerned with getting it their way, but for coming up with the best idea for the company. And when you have people who are high intensity, high humility, I find that you're more likely to get to that and, and in turn, it also helps create this feeling of an idea meritocracy, where the best idea really can come from anywhere in the organization.

David Novak 37:52 

You know, that's a great phrase idea. meritocracy. I've heard of meritocracy. But that's that's a great way to think about getting everybody to contribute and collaborate. Because today, I mean, the one thing humans can do that a computer can't do is you can collaborate and you know, getting your organization fired up to do that it has to drive, drive a lot of success. You know, I'm sure all your people were whoop, you know, I guarantee when I worked at Pepsi, everybody drank Pepsi, and I'm sure everybody where everyone was promising. Yeah. How's it affect how you run your company? How do you take advantage of that factor? Do you?

Will Ahmed 38:24 

Well, we certainly do a lot of company initiatives around our own products and our data. For example, we have a sleep leaderboard. And we have actually a competition in the company where if you get over 85% of your sleep need for the month, you get a bonus as part of your your, you know, pay stub, so we actually pay people to sleep at whoop, which I think's kind of a cool company initiative. Yeah,

David Novak 38:53 

I'd be winning that basis, my numbers, I'd be up, I'd be off the GA, you'd

Will Ahmed 38:57 

be doing just fine. I think you'd get the sleep bonus. We've got, we've got a red recovery policy, which we kicked off kind of at the early start of COVID. Because we also had people coming into the office, which is to say that if you had a red recovery, we recommend that you stay home. You know, the thinking being if you ever read recovery, you're either rundown because you're you're getting sick, or you're you may be more susceptible to getting sick, so it's in your interest in others to stay home. And then of course, we've got lots of different fitness classes and data collections that we do as a team. So overall, I would say that, that health and wellness is pretty core to our culture.

David Novak 39:33 

You've evolved as this entrepreneur, and now you're talking about how you want to be the best possible CEO. You can be. How much have you really enjoyed growing into that CEO role? We are what 31 Now or 31? Yeah, that's fantastic. You got a lot of responsibility and you know, it is a 24/7 responsibility. People are watching every step of the way. How much do you like that spotlight itself?

Will Ahmed 39:59 

I've come to really Enjoy it. I also remember what it was like to feel like out of sorts in the job. So this feeling of growing into it also is rewarding. And, you know, I feel more comfortable now running a 650 person company that's raised over $400 million than I did, running 15 person company that raised 10 million, you know, and, and what I think that really says is just that being a CEO, like anything else is something that you have to work at, and, and learn from and be very introspective about, you know, I've really tried to think about strengths and weaknesses and listen to other members of my management team and board members and, you know, try to create a sort of a learning culture for myself around how to get better,

David Novak 40:45 

you're 31. So you're obviously working with a lot of older board members, older people, even in your own company, has that ever created any kind of anxiety for you just having to give direction to older people? And if so, what advice could you give to other people who are rapid climbers, taken on more and more responsibility and have older people working for him?

Will Ahmed 41:08 

You know, I view at the end of the day, it's it's kind of a performance culture, right? And, and it doesn't matter really what your age is, or what your skin color is, or your gender or your background? Or, you know, are you delivering on the expectations that you've set out for yourself and your teammates. And I think if you look at it through that lens, it's a blank canvas, and anyone can be graded at any role,

David Novak 41:35 

you know, you've had so much success. And I know you've had some struggles along the way. And as you look back, will, you know, what would be one day at work that you'd like to live over?

Will Ahmed 41:47 

One day, tomorrow, you know, I have to say, I wake up fired up to go to work every day, I feel like I've kind of created my dream job, I get to work with, you know, the smartest people, we are serving everyone from the best athletes in the world to everyday consumers who are improving their health. It's, it's an invigorating, invigorating job.

David Novak 42:07 

This is pretty heady stuff, you know, that you have to really deal with, you're a founder of a really fast growing company that's really talked about in so many different circles, Bezos, Musk, all these different founders, you know, how do you stay grounded, and not not even get comparative to other people? Because you're obviously a very competitive guy. No question about that.

Will Ahmed 42:29 

Yeah, I think that it's not particularly productive to compare yourself to other entrepreneurs, or CEOs, I especially did that again, going back to that younger version of myself that was trying to find his footing, you know, I'd say to myself, Oh, I bet fill in the blank, famous CEO never had to deal with this. But I don't think it's that productive. Because I think in part, when they started, they were wrestling through the same challenges you are. And I think part of what's made those entrepreneurs so successful as they just kept getting better. And so that's just the lens that I try to apply back to myself as How can I keep getting a little better every day. And then sure, we'll wake up and see one day where that leaves me, but you have to be very present, as well. You want to be in the meeting that you're at, we're in this conversation that we're in. And I find when you start doing those sort of comparison points and whatnot, it sort of removes you from being present, and takes you to this unproductive mindspace,

David Novak 43:28 

I've listened to your own podcast will enjoy it very much. Thank you. Last one I listened to was one with Justin Thomas, which was a lot of fun. Why did you start your own podcast? And what have you learned from doing it with such top athletes?

Will Ahmed 43:42 

Well, you know, to to your point earlier, one of the things that makes woop unique is that we have these really fascinating people who wear our product and get performance gains out of it. We also, you know, like being able to tie whoop to performance and that aspirational plays, I realized, you know, I was having these conversations with these fascinating people, just one on one and listening to things that we're doing with our technology. And I was saying, Wow, it'd be so interesting if, if other people heard these conversations. And so that was really the starting point for it. And I said, Let's do 10 of these and see how it goes. And so now of course we're on like 140, and a lot of them I've hosted, I would say one thing I've really loved about doing them is and I wonder how this is for you. But I've found it's made me just a better listener. You know, you have to really listen to your guests when you're doing a podcast in order to make it interesting, right? And depth over breadth I think is what makes something memorable so that that's probably the thing I've personally taken the most away from it. I would also say that just listening to these world class performers talk about performance, I can't help but rub off on you. You're just sort of like left thinking about ways that you can perform better. So those are things that I've done I would say I've taken from it and you know, then I'm very grateful that I get to spend time with these people. I mean, I'm sure for you, it's awesome to just get to do these conversations.

David Novak 45:09 

Absolutely. You know, I've always been a big time learner. And so I love listening to people. And you know, it's always been a fantastic way for me to increase my IQ points by having best practice chats like I'm having with you here, I'd always pick up a couple of things and want to go back and really make it happen. And the other thing that I feel is gives me a lot of joy, to bring our listeners people like yourself, because people don't have the access to people that I have access to. And so this is one of the things I'm doing in this chapter of my life is really trying to give people access to leaders that they otherwise would never have basically level the playing field, you know, so that you can talk to a will on that. Or you can talk to a Jamie Dimon or you can talk to Tom Brady. And you know, it's been fascinating for me, you know, this has been so much fun. I always do a lightning round well, and I'd love to do one with you. Okay. What three words best describe you?

Will Ahmed 46:02 

Well, I tried to be calm. I think most people would say I'm ambitious, persistent. Try to be humble. Those are at least the first few words that came to mind.

David Novak 46:14 

I figured you'd be humbled and intense for sure. If you could be one person for a day, who would it be beside yourself? And why?

Will Ahmed 46:26 

Would a fun question I would want to be I would want to be the President of the United States, I think it'd be fascinating to see what that's like, in a 24 hour cycle?

David Novak 46:40 

Well, you got plenty of time to get some experience so that we can all vote for you.

Will Ahmed 46:44 

I appreciate that. What

David Novak 46:45 

What's your biggest pet peeve?

Will Ahmed 46:47 

biggest pet peeve I think is is lack of follow up or, you know, circumstances where you're you're engaging with with someone who you perceive is not hard working. You know, it's one thing to go after a problem and do it wrong half a dozen different ways, because it's a hard problem. But if you feel like you're working with people aren't sort of driving at it, and driving towards the solution. That, to me is really frustrating. And frankly, I don't really encounter it because I get to be surrounded by hard driving people that

David Novak 47:22 

tell us something about you that few people would know.

Will Ahmed 47:25 

Something about me that few people would know. Well, let's see, whoop is my first full time job. Some people are always like, it's the first company so it's actually my first full time job. One other fun one is I play hours of speed chess on my phone. So I'll play these little three minute games on my phone. I just I

David Novak 47:47 

gotta hook you up with my buddy. Larry Fitzgerald. You guys could really go after it. He loves that stuff. Larry is

Will Ahmed 47:52 

a chess guy. Oh, he loves I've already told him I'm gonna beat him in golf. And I gotta try to beat him in chess.

David Novak 47:59 

So what what's your biggest fear?

Will Ahmed 48:03 

I don't know if it's a fear, but it's something that drives me which is like living up to potential. You know, I think I'm really excited by the stage that I'm at in life and the people I get to work with and and so I'm kind of at this phase of of saying to myself, you know, don't make unforced errors keep keep driving, you know, and and see where that takes you.

David Novak 48:26 

Will you have any hidden talents? hidden talents?

Will Ahmed 48:29 

Well, you know, I feel decent about my golf game actually, given the given the time commitment of starting a company, low single digit handicapper, which is pretty good.

David Novak 48:42 

Absolutely. You mentioned earlier, whoop, being a wearable monitor, they can help you stay one step ahead. When you think about that, what's your favorite oops story? You know, I gave you my little testimonial. But when you think back, you know, what's your favorite whoop story you like to tell about the impact of your product?

Will Ahmed 49:03 

You know, I'm grateful. I've gotten to hear so many amazing stories like this one more recently. You know, as a man who was looking at his whoop data, his heart rate was way out of whack. He was in the red. And he was having chest pain, and whoop, you know, sort of alerted him that something was up. And he wanted to go to the doctor and it turned out he was having a heart attack. And you know, his words on my whoop saved his life. That was pretty powerful. hearing that story. We've now had, you know, probably dozens of stories like on the same the life spectrum, which is pretty remarkable. We've helped a lot of folks in military tactical space, work through PTSD and like not being able to sleep and real emotional trauma. Those have been incredibly powerful stories. Obviously helping have, you know brave men and women who have served our country to so that's pretty awesome. During COVID, we would put out research on elevated respiratory rate being a predictor of COVID-19, one golfer Nick Watney was able to use that to predict that he had COVID-19. And he effectively didn't play in a golf tournament as a consequence. And next thing we know, every player on the PGA Tour was wearing whoop because of that. And then we did all these partnerships with sports teams around it. And And now, we've probably had 10s of 1000s of people on whoop, report that they got an early indicator that they had COVID from their whoop data. And and you know, as a result, I've gotten the message like, Oh, I didn't go to my Thanksgiving dinner, because we've told me, something might be up. And sure enough, I tested positive for COVID. So those are pretty powerful stories.

David Novak 50:52 

That's great. And we'll as I understand it, you're recently married? How have you integrated that into your jam packed life?

Will Ahmed 51:01 

Well, my wife, Leila is also an entrepreneur. So that helps. So she's building a fashion line. And she's, I think, as a consequence, fairly patient with the fact that some, you know, some moments I might be thinking about business or not as president as I should be. I think also just having someone in your life who's a rock and very stable and loving, you know, is critical to being able to be successful in business or anything else. So, you know, I think I've got a very healthy marriage, very happy marriage, and we don't have any kids yet. I'm sure that'll that'll shake things up for us. When we do.

David Novak 51:39 

Yeah, well, you know, I've been married to my wife, 47 years, Wendy. Wow. Great to have a rock. Yeah, I want to wrap this up with the last question here. Because I know you're a busy guy. What three bits of advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs leaders?

Will Ahmed 51:55 

Well, I think the I think the first is to really focus on solving a problem. I know, we talked about that earlier, I sometimes meet young entrepreneurs who are just very enthusiastic to start a company, but maybe less so focused on on why they want to start that company, you know, it's more about the financial upside, I think, than the actual problem. So I think being hyper focused on solving a problem, I think, surrounding yourself with people who are complementary to you, you know, offering different skills, different perspectives than than your own, and therefore complementing what you're trying to build. And then you know, the last thing is just keep going, there's going to be good days, there's going to be really bad days, and you got to just keep going. And if your business doesn't run out of money, and you don't quit, at some point, you're going to be successful.

David Novak 52:46 

Well, well, there's no doubt that you're definitely on your your way. You're not only keep going, but it's obviously you're gonna keep growing, because you've got that mindset that you're gonna make yourself, be the best leader you can possibly be. And it's been a real thrill and honor to have this conversation with you. And thank you for your time.

Will Ahmed 53:05 

Well, thanks, David, very appreciative for having me on. And I really enjoyed it.

David Novak 53:18 

Well, that was just an absolute great conversation with will, you know, his measurement of the vital few makes so much sense. When I was running yum brands, we were focused on operations at the store level, what were the key measures? Well, we had this acronym was kind of fun, but it's easy to remember. It's called chance, cleanliness, hospitality, accuracy, maintenance, product quality, and speed. And we measured those relentlessly in our restaurants. And everybody knew it was important because it led to great customer satisfaction. That's the restaurant business. And we just heard, we'll talk about whoop, they made the decision for their business to focus on a few key things strain recovery and sleep. If they would try to give data for much more than that'd be overwhelming. And their customers wouldn't know how to act on the information. But by keeping it simple, they're retaining their customers and adding new ones like crazy. So what's it for you as you kick off the new year? What are the vital things you're going to track? Perhaps it's a few key pieces of data, you need to make important decisions. Perhaps it's some personal objectives you have that you're really going to get committed to this year and make it happen. Well, let me tell you something. If you measure it, you'll make it happen because you'll know exactly where you stand. And if you're motivated, you'll do the things that you've got to do to make it happen. So do you want to know how leaders lead? What we learned today is that the great leaders have learned to measure the vital few. Thanks again for tuning in to another episode of how leaders lead where every Thursday you get to listen and while I interview some of the best leaders in the world, I make it a point to give you some think simple on each episode that you can apply to your business so that you will become the best leader you can be. See you next week.