Jan 26, 2023 · 1h 7m · my-first-million
How I Built Whoop Into A $3.6 BILLION Company (#411)
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In this episode of My First Million, Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed joins hosts Sam Parr and Sean Puri to discuss the founding story, athletic adoption strategy, and subscription economics behind his multi-billion-dollar wearable health company. Ahmed also delves into the physiological science of sleep architecture, biometric data tracking, founder stamina, and the future of proactive continuous healthcare.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 45.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 3.7 Guest teaching 4.4 Guest disagreement 1.0 The hosts pushing back 1.0
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 53:21 Will labels Shaan's sleep tweet a profound lie
When Shaan flaunts his contrarian tweet that sleep tracking is unnecessary because good sleep is obvious, Will directly dismisses the premise as a 'profound lie' ignoring sleep's complex physiological black box.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 52:48 Shaan challenges the premise of Whoop's productShaan openly provokes the founder of a multibillion-dollar sleep tracker by arguing that sleep trackers are fundamentally unnecessary and great sleep is inherently obvious.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 14:05 Will breaks down REM and slow-wave sleep physiologyWill educates the hosts on the biological difference between time in bed and restorative sleep, revealing that 95% of human growth hormone is produced exclusively during slow-wave sleep.
The host holds their own ▶ 58:21 Sam analyzes SaaS valuation multiples on hardware subscriptionsSam displays deep business fluency by immediately connecting Whoop's business model pivot to capturing SaaS valuation multiples rather than hardware commoditization.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Founding Story of Whoop | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Sam opens the interview with a casual intro and invites Will to give his standard founder origin story. Will shares his journey from Harvard squash athlete reading 500 physiology papers to founding Whoop. | |
| Acquiring Elite Athletes: The LeBron and Phelps Strategy | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Shaan asks about the famous early adoption by LeBron James and Michael Phelps. Will details his strategy of bypassing agents to target influential personal trainers directly. | |
| Transitioning from Founder to Scaling CEO | 4 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Sam asks whether Will prefers early-stage product tinkering or managing at scale. Will reflects on the inflection point where founders must transition entirely into managers. | |
| Physical Health and Stamina for High-Stakes Leadership | 3 | 5 | 1 | 1 | The hosts joke about how most scale CEOs look exhausted, while Will maintains an athletic physique. Will argues that sustaining high startup intensity requires treating entrepreneurship like sprinting a marathon. | |
| Unlocking Sleep Architecture: REM and Slow-Wave Recovery | 2 | 8 | 1 | 0 | Will breaks down sleep architecture, explaining that time in bed is misleading compared to slow-wave and REM sleep percentages. He educates the hosts on HGH production during slow-wave sleep and cognitive repair in REM. | |
| Biometric Outliers: LeBron James and Alex Honnold | 3 | 7 | 0 | 0 | Will shares outlier biometric data, linking free solo climber Alex Honnold's high REM sleep to a suppressed amygdala fear response. Sam fact-checks and reacts with fascination. | |
| The Science and Strategy of Afternoon Naps | 3 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Shaan inquires about daytime naps, sharing his own routine. Will explains the trade-offs in nap sleep quality and suggests optimization hacks like sleep masks. | |
| Founding Team and Founder Secondary Sales | 6 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Sam and Shaan ask about founder secondaries and co-founder dynamics. Sam offers his own experience on how secondary liquidity improves long-term decision making, which Will validates. | |
| Pivoting from Finance to Entrepreneurial Obsession | 3 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Sam asks about Will's pivot away from finance internships towards starting a hardware venture. Will explains how singular obsession drove him into entrepreneurship. | |
| Brainstorming Startup Ideas: The 'Car Pipes' Pitch | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Will pitches a comedic startup idea 'Car Pipes' for vocal lessons while commuting, which Sam playfully grades an F. The conversation pivots to deep tech and Will's investment in Whisper.ai. | |
| Sponsor Message: HubSpot CRM | 4 | 2 | 0 | 0 | Following an ad read, the group riffs on synthetic likeness rights, deepfakes, and virtual AI influencers such as Lil Miquela. | |
| Archaic Habits: Predicting Future Societal Perspectives | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | Will introduces the thought experiment of societal norms today that will look absurd in 50 years, highlighting infrequent annual checkups and manual highway driving. | |
| Dietary Individuality and Performance Nutrition | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Shaan asks about extreme diets like veganism versus carnivore. Will emphasizes biological individuality, referencing LeBron's failed paleo experiment, and discusses Bryan Johnson's Blueprint protocol. | |
| Debating the Utility of Sleep Tracking Devices | 5 | 6 | 7 | 6 | Shaan directly challenges the need for sleep trackers, citing his pinned tweet that 'great sleep is obvious.' Will firmly pushes back, calling the belief a 'profound lie' because sleep is a physiological black box. | |
| The Shift to Hardware-as-a-Service Subscription Model | 6 | 4 | 0 | 0 | Sam inquires about Whoop's pivot from upfront hardware sales to a recurring membership model. Sam astutely brings up the valuation impact of commanding SaaS revenue multiples. | |
| Engineering Challenges in Wearable Battery Life | 4 | 5 | 3 | 4 | Shaan and Sam push Will on device battery life and losing charging packs. Will explains the engineering constraints of running high-frequency biometric sensors continuously. | |
| The Ethics and Appeal of Power Slap | 3 | 5 | 2 | 3 | The hosts bring up Dana White's Power Slap league. Will cites Chris Nowitzki's concussion research condemning the sport, while Shaan analyzes the cultural draw of 'painfotainment.' |
Statements from this episode (25)
Will Ahmed read roughly 500 medical papers while founding Whoop
“I read something like 500 medical papers, and I started to conceive of this idea of how you could continuously measure the human body”
Ahmed: LeBron James and Michael Phelps were among Whoop's first 100 users
“That is real, and this would have been around 2014, 2015, so, you know, we spent about two to three years, really, on the initial V-one of Whoop, and, you know, I wanted to start with the best athletes in the world”
Ahmed: Whoop raised $400M and reached a $3.6B valuation
“Yeah, we've raised four hundred million. We last raised capital at 3.6 billion dollar valuation.”
Ahmed: A large percentage of the world will wear health monitors in 10 years
“I think if you fast forward 10 years, I think a large percentage of the world's population will be wearing a continuous health monitor and it'll hook into everything that you do as it relates to the healthcare system and doctors.”
Ahmed: Whoop is my first company and first full-time job
“And it's not like this is the first, just the first company I started. It's my first full-time job.”
Founders must shift to managers by 50 employees or risk business damage
“The percent of time in which you think of yourself as an individual contributor versus a manager has to shift very dramatically. I think probably around the size of. 50 people, it has to shift like that. Like it was about 500 people, but. That's probably one o…”
Light sleep and time spent awake provide no physiological benefit
“Awake and light are pretty much irrelevant. You're not getting any physiological benefit from being in awake or light stage sleep REM and slow wave. That's where all the magic happens.”
Slow-wave sleep produces 95% of the body's human growth hormone
“Slow-wave sleep is when your body produces 95% of its human growth hormone. So just think about that for a second. 95% of your human growth hormone gets produced during this stage of sleep.”
Ahmed: More REM sleep dampens amygdala fight-or-flight response
“The interesting thing about REM sleep is researchers were able to find the more REM sleep you get, the less heightened your amygdala response.”
Ahmed: Athletes are still not sophisticated enough about sleep and recovery
“I still think athletes aren't sophisticated enough about sleep and recovery, given how important it is to their overall performance”
Ahmed: Sleeping pills reduce sleep quality despite faster sleep onset
“Interestingly, hard, harder, harder sleep drugs, like the ambience of the world they knock you out, so your sleep latency is short, but the quality of the sleep is never that high.”
Ahmed: Naps often yield lower sleep efficiency and quality
“The challenge with naps is that the percentage of time that you spend in, in trying to sleep is often lower as a quality standpoint.”
Parr: Liquid net worth safety net makes founders better company builders
“Having a safety net, particularly like a meaningful safety net of liquid net worth. I think 100% makes you better at building your company.”
Will Ahmed refused to sell Whoop secondary shares until a $1B valuation
“I don't think I ever sold shares until whoop was worth at least a billion dollars. And they were for rounds that were super oversubscribed.”
Ahmed: Late-stage founder secondaries enable long-term independent business building
“I do think for a company that's at a later stage where you're trying to, you're making this calculus of, is this a company that's going to be acquired in a short period of time, or is this a company that we're trying to build to be a standalone business? And I…”
Ahmed: Combining scans, blood work, and wearables will predict mortality indicators
“The combination of body scans, blood work, and continuous monitoring through a non-invasive wearable will ultimately be able to predict a lot of things that, that you know, are disease states or leading indicators for death.”
Ahmed: Talent agencies for deceased people will emerge with AI
“I think that there there's going to be like a talent agency of sorts that's for non-living people.”
Parr: High-speed manual driving will seem archaic in twenty years
“And it does seem, in about 20 years, it's gonna be so archaic. We're like, can you believe that we are basically one sneeze away from, like, an 80 miles an hour, like, car crash all the time? Like, you're just literally 10 feet away, five feet away sometimes. …”
Ahmed: Biometric Data Shows Diet Response Is Highly Personalized
“The data says it's highly personal. So you could put two people on identical diets and they could have literally the exact opposite effects on those people.”
Bryan Johnson offers his personal longevity protocol to the public for $2M/year
“Well, it just released that, or it was just released that you can spend, I think like A lot like a 1.5 or two million dollars a year. And you basically can, he's gonna like anyone can use his doctors and go through his system in order to what he's trying to do…”
Parr: Occasional Indulgence and Social Joy Outweigh Extreme Health Optimization
“That like, you know, that's like a life worth living is like when you have things to celebrate and like, you can build camaraderie with your friends. Like, yeah, just do it. You might live a little shorter. You might be sick for a few days, but like, you know,…”
Sean Puri argues sleep trackers are unnecessary because great sleep is obvious
“You don't need a sleep tracker. Great sleep is obvious.”
Will Ahmed predicts Whoop will IPO before 2033
“I think we'll ultimately go public. I think that it'll probably be sooner than that timeframe that you gave.”