Whoop

“We helped them, you know, improve their battery performance by about 20% relative to the prior generation.”

“He got it on the wrist of Michael Phelps and LeBron James without ever paying them. In fact, LeBron James and Michael Phelps paid him to use it. They paid for a subscription, and the way he did it Was by going to their trainers.”

“We had no relationship with him. We had no relationship at the time with Michael Phelps either, and many of these athletes, I mean, they were essentially just a buyer of the product.”

“And so I wrote on every Ford auto circuit board. Don't bother copying us. We will win.”

“Well, the immediate thing that I realized is that to understand recovery, you have to understand all the time outside of training. And once you kind of opened your aperture to that idea, you realize, well, maybe training is just a piece of this puzzle.”

“Yeah, we had raised ten million dollars probably total by the end of 2014, and then we had probably raised twenty five million total by mid 2015.”

“The way that we were going to visualize the data was actually going to end up becoming one of the most important characteristics of the business.”

“If you can measure this thing and baseline it to a human, you could understand in any given moment the state of their body. Is your body at peace? Is it recovered? Is it stressed? And it also became obvious if you could measure heart rate variability during a …”

“Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, Virgil van Dyke, Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald, and for me, like, I've gotten to make friends with a lot of these, you know, global superstars, and they've offered a lot of good advice to me personally, and also to the business…”

“And the secret to getting to them, just to say it was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. It turned out in 2015, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it als…”

“I was strung out, and at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them.”

“That's where the following prototype, which came, you know, maybe six months after that, and we'd raised another 400 grand. That prototype was able to do it without all the shenanigans of a wire and you know, a computer attached to your arm and so forth.”

“They knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that one of the lead product manager from Amazon, when it came out, posted on Twitter, whoop, there it is announcing the new Amazon Halo.”

“And that 18 month stretch of like beginning of 2017 to mid 2018 whoop was on fumes. I mean, we never had more runway than three months for an 18 month period of the company.”

“The challenge to heart rate monitoring is the darker the skin, the harder it is, the hairier the skin, the harder it is, and the more non-periodic motion, the harder it is, and if you're outdoors, that's harder than indoors.”

“We didn't have a high resolution screen. In part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection.”

“And maybe most importantly, we were selling the product for 500 dollars.”

“There's a distinction between overreaching and overtraining. Overreaching is where you're pushing your body a little too far, but in the days that follow, your body can bounce back. And overtraining is where you extend your body through such a long period of t…”

“Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them, and they included their product team in the diligence, and then they ultimately did not invest in Whoop, to our surprise.”

“Well, when I thought about what it meant to be a college athlete, I realized there was so much focus on what are we doing during the three hours that were four hours that were practice or training, but there was really not a lot of discussion around how you tr…”

“The original idea was we were going to start with athletes, and then eventually we were going to build a product for everyone, and then eventually we'd go into medicine.”

“You know, remarkably in the company's history, we've never done a down round.”

“I didn't think that steps answered anything about the strain recovery equation that we talked about before, which is to say that How much, you know, stress you're actually putting on your body is a different question than how much you've moved your arm.”

“I meet hardware founders, and they talk a lot about How their first product is going to sell a 100,000 units in the first year. And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer …”

“The way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing was that Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was …”