The Exchanges

Q You go to a lab, they put a bunch of monitors on you, they put a mask on you, or a breathing apparatus, right?

A Yeah. And you're going to be videotaped while you sleep and it'll be the worst night's sleep of your life. That was a machine though, that could really accurately measure not just how much time you spent in bed and how many hours of sleep you got, but it could go deeper. It could understand of the sleep you got, how much of it was restorative sleep, which is to say how much was slow wave sleep versus REM sleep. And it turned out as it pertains to recovery, Restorative sleep was actually that magic period of time. So I got very interested in, okay, well, how could you get to, how could you measure restorative sleep? Uh, and then the second machine was the electrocardiogram, you know, 20,000 dollar piece of equipment. And then the third piece of equipment was a consumer product, but it was a consumer product that was invented in the eighties. And that was the heart rate monitor or the chest strap.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. And you're going to be videotaped while you sleep”

Q of all, those guys have Huge endorsement deals. Millions and millions of dollars. Like, how are you going to get to them, and even if you do get to them, they're going to say, presumably, well, I'll do it, but you've got to pay me a million dollars or five million, whatever, or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like, how would you do that?

A So those two people had a lot of Infrastructure around them. And you're right. They had a lot of offers and these things. 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 also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them and spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron, like Mike Mencius was his longtime personal trainer, still is today, and he started wearing whoop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on LeBron.

AI assessment note: “the secret to getting to them, just to say it was to find people”

Q What is over, so overtraining is sort of a weird concept, right? Because obviously the definition is clear. You're training too much, but I think most people hear that and think, well, what's wrong with that? I mean, you're doing a lot of exercise. You're moving your body. You're 20, 21 years old, eight, 19. I mean, were you noticing that you weren't improving?

A You get to a state where your body's not recovering relative to the amount of, uh, Strain that you're putting on it or the amount of stress that you're putting on it. So typically what you want in a, in a training cycle is to overreach for a period of time. 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 time that you actually then go through a period where you cannot recover. And you actually have a lot of the same symptoms of being sick without necessarily having a cough or a sore throat. And so what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be, you'd be flat in a match that you should win. You know, you wouldn't have your bouts. You wouldn't have your explosive steps. You'd feel tired in the second game when you should be tired in the fifth game, you know, and the piece that we haven't talked as much about is really the other 20 hours of the day. And that's where I was actually failing more than on the training side.

AI assessment note: “what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be, you'd be flat”

Q When it was ready, For consumers, right, um, it didn't quite take off initially, as maybe you had expected it to, or maybe you didn't, I don't know, but, um, were you surprised that it, it, it was sort of slow to get mass adoption?

A I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I was doing. I mean, uh, There are moments in the history of whoop where looking back on it, I'm reminded that this is my first full-time job, let alone the first company I've started. So, um, I think launching to consumers was one of those wake up calls. The, the bet at the time was, Hey, we've built this brand with professional athletes, the world's best, and a bunch of fitness enthusiasts are going to want the product that's used by the pros. Yeah. But one of the challenges was that we weren't paying athletes. So we didn't technically have the rights to, um, likeness and image, right?

AI assessment note: “I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I”

Q And it's got a big box, it says Bobo on it, and a cord coming out of it. Okay, that box was the interface between the wristband and the computer?

A Uh, yes, that, that box did a lot of the processing and the breakthrough with that box was that it could measure, um, heart rate and heart rate variability under certain circumstances. It was still very much a prototype. Now look, what was the point of the prototype? The point of the prototype was to prove to ourselves as much as to anyone else that It actually doesn't defy physics. This idea that you could measure the human body accurately from a wrist worn thing. And so that was a big breakthrough for us in this feeling of it's possible. And at that time, I had also now gotten pretty far along in the design process of, uh, what this is going to look like when all the data shows up.

AI assessment note: “Uh, yes, that, that box did a lot of the processing”

Q Right, because when you would go to investors, they would say, well, I mean, come on, Nike is working on this. How are you going to compete with Nike?

A Totally, and in a way, they were right, and in a way, they were wrong. They were right in the sense that the story I was actually telling, when you really unpacked it, Was we were going to build a brand like Nike and we were going to start with the world's best athletes. And then we were going to go to consumers using the story that we had built a performance brand. And the idea that I was going to literally use the playbook of the company that was launching a competitive product is pretty hard to wrap your head around. So I could get why a lot of people struggled with that. I'll never forget this investor. I met my spring of my Senior year, because at that point it actually had been announced that the Nike fuel band was coming. And I confessed to him that Nike was going to enter the space. And he had all these reasons for, for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. We should just try to build software. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him. And he said, you know what, you are going to fail and you're going to fail so badly. And I'll tell you the number one reason you're going to fail. You're going to fail because you don't listen. And I remember for months, I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn.

AI assessment note: “we were going to build a brand like Nike and we were going to start”

Q So essentially the light, wow, I mean, that's interesting. So the light based on, because it's, it's reflecting, right? And it's, um, but it's affected by, by skin tone?

A Yeah. So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally from other products, which were like looking at, you know, 30 white men walking on a treadmill indoors. And we're like, each one of those is the easiest thing, right? Whereas if you took people with darker skin outdoors playing basketball, you'd have a much harder data set to, to reconcile. And our advantage, although At the time it felt much harder was that we built a, an algorithm with the foundation for the hardest conditions. And, and it also forced us to collect a lot more data than other products because we, we had this high bar for accuracy. And by the way, there's a lot of disadvantages to doing that. It requires more battery life. It means you have more data to send. Uh, it means there's a lot less things you can do. We didn't have a high resolution screen. In part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection.

AI assessment note: “Yeah. So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally”

Q You charged them for this, or you gave it to them? I'm assuming you would give it to them.

A Well, in the case of the trainers, we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it. And again, because we believed that the product was valuable. And at the end of the day, it's kind of obvious whether someone likes whoop because wearing something, 24, seven is like, it's a, it's really hard. It's just really hard to do. It's just hard to build a product that people wear 24, seven. And so if they're actually still wearing it 24, seven, uh, they like it. And so our, Our engagement metrics became the lifeblood of our story. And I remember there was a year where LeBron and his whole team were wearing it, and it came out that they were wearing it in games, and that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA.

AI assessment note: “we would give it to them as a seed, but then we would actually charge”

Q So knowing that Nike was going to come out with its own band, which it had for, I think it was out for five years, a fuel band. How did you convince anybody to give you money?

A So you remember how I said they were, they were right in a way and they were wrong in a way. The way, 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 a, it was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology. And the strategy that Nike, in my opinion, should have taken was much more similar to whoop, which was no, we're going to do the hard work. We're going to measure the hard things. And then we're going to tell this story from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and LeBron James on down. And that would have been, I think, successful. And so I had so much relief the day I tried the Nike Fuel Band, because it was just another step counter, and it was a huge missed opportunity, I thought, for, by the way, a brand that I have admired since I was five years old. Nike is the, is the company that actually taught me what a brand was. You know, like I, you wear a white cotton t-shirt that's blank versus a white cotton t-shirt with a, with a Nike swoosh. Why do I feel different in the one with the swoosh? And it's because the swoosh stood for something. And that's a brand.

AI assessment note: “Nike made, in my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product.”