The Ledger
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Ahmed: Amazon copied WHOOP with Halo, tweeting 'whoop, there it is'
“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.”
Ahmed: Nike made a fatal mistake designing FuelBand as a step counter
“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 …”
Ahmed: Tracking step count does not measure actual physiological stress
“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.”
Ahmed: LeBron James and Michael Phelps were initially paying WHOOP customers
“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.”
Ahmed: Selling 100,000 units of a first hardware product is a mistake
“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 …”
Ahmed: Amazon's Alexa Fund passed on investing after extensive product diligence
“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.”
Ahmed: Overtraining prevents bodily recovery and mimics symptoms of sickness
“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…”
Ahmed: College athletic programs focus on practice while ignoring daily recovery
“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…”
Ahmed: Computing inevitably evolves from desktops to laptops, pockets, and on-body wearables
“Computers over the course of my lifetime had gone from being on your desk to on your lap to in your pocket, and inevitably it seemed to me they were going to become on your body.”
WHOOP's Ahmed: Data visualization is critical to wearable health businesses
“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.”
Ahmed: The wearables market is plagued by poor long-term user retention
“The wearables industry, just to say it, is a market that's been plagued by engagement, which is to say someone buys a Fitbit, and then three weeks or three months later, it's in a drawer.”
Ahmed: WHOOP printed 'Don't bother copying us' on its 4.0 circuit boards
“And so I wrote on every Ford auto circuit board. Don't bother copying us. We will win.”
Ahmed: Understanding recovery requires monitoring time outside training
“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.”
Ahmed: WHOOP's founding plan spanned athletes, consumers, then medicine
“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.”
Ahmed: The advantage of backing 22-year-old founders is a lack of distractions
“And the advantage to betting on a twenty-two-year-old is they don't have a lot else going on.”
Ahmed: Baselining daily HRV reveals human recovery and stress states
“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 …”
Ahmed: Optical heart rate monitoring struggles with darker skin and body hair
“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.”
Ahmed: WHOOP skipped a screen to prioritize sensor data collection
“We didn't have a high resolution screen. In part because we put all of our resourcing towards data collection.”
Ahmed: WHOOP was rejected by 95% of VCs during early fundraising
“I was strung out, and at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them.”
Ahmed: WHOOP reached LeBron James by seeding devices with personal trainers
“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…”
Ahmed: WHOOP initially priced its consumer wearable at $500
“And maybe most importantly, we were selling the product for 500 dollars.”
Ahmed: WHOOP survived on under three months of runway for 18 months
“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.”
Ahmed: WHOOP has never done a down round in its history
“You know, remarkably in the company's history, we've never done a down round.”
Ahmed: Rory McIlroy, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Eli Manning Invested in WHOOP
“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…”
Ahmed: WHOOP raised $400K to build its wireless second prototype
“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.”