Speaker 1On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. We have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So it's one of the largest health data sets in the world. For a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health. You want people to love your product authentically. LeBron James is now a global ambassador for Whoop. He was one of the first hundred people to ever wear it.
Speaker 2You're starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them.
Speaker 1Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.
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Speaker 1Yeah, so at Whoop, we build wearable technology. We build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I've been building this company now for 14 years. It was founded in 2012. And I think like a lot of maybe overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. You know, it took about 12 years for us to get to a million members. And then another 18 months or so to 2 million, about six months to 3 million. And we expect to end the year around 4 million members.
Speaker 24 million members. And hey, listen, I'll tell people right out, the service at first seems expensive because I think it's like 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month. Am I in the approximate range here? What do I spend, 300 a year on this? Depending on what plan you're on, it's anywhere from 15 to $30 a month. I'm on the top, top plan with the top, top sensor. But you took a very thoughtful approach to saying we're going to go for subscriptions and we're going to take out the cost of the device. So you don't have this cost. Losing the device, anxiety. So take me to that decision. And to be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health or even less than a dollar a day. But take me through that decision as a business to go with 30 bucks a month.
Speaker 1Yeah, thank you. It's a unique business model. And in 2017, we had launched to consumers. It was a one-time fee, 500 bucks. At that point in the company's history, we had really built Whoop as like a performance brand. You know, it was known amongst the best athletes in the world. And we worked with all these sports teams and we said, okay, we're going to go to consumers and, and target, you know, an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience. And over the course of the next 12 months of having that product in market, we really observed two things. The first is that people who bought Whoop would wear it for a long time. And that's always been a challenge in the wearables industry around drop-off rates and engagement. And fortunately for Whoop, that's been a strength of our, of our product. But then, the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. So we still had a sales problem. And because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, well, is there a business model here where the entry price is lower so people can get introduced to Whoop? And if they fall in love with the product, then over time, it can be a good business for Whoop too. And I think that immediately created all kinds of, of growth for Whoop back in 2018 and 19. And we quickly became a, a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which of course is more attractive to investors. And then, you know, what I underestimate is how much it changed our DNA, because when you're a subscription business, you become really obsessed with your existing members, arguably more so even the new members. And so it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.
Speaker 2See, this is, I think a critical observation for founders who might be, are watching when you're selling widgets, you know, you're, it's about distribution and, you know, marketing, but once you get a subscriber, Hey, they're your customer next month and the following month and the following year. So you start obsessing about churn and engagement, right? The metrics kind of shift, right?
Speaker 1Yeah, totally. You get, you get very focused on user engagement, how often people are, are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is, you know, how are you actually driving, how are you actually managing behavior change and, and health improvement. It's, it changed our hardware cycles as well. So when you're a hardware business, you're incentivized to ship new hardware every 12 months, whether or not it's actually innovative because you always need that next dollar from a hardware sale. And also when you're a pure hardware company, you're, you're not incentivized to be innovating on top of the existing product, right? Because you want to convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually, we're the opposite. Incentives. We want to launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And, and then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, 18 months ago may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring or a fib detection or advanced labs, which is now the blood work feature that we have in the app or health span, which tells you your whoop age and as a whole longevity feature, blood pressure, insights, which is a new capability that allows people to, to look at their blood pressure every day. So these are all examples of new features that we've brought to market with hardware that's in market.
Speaker 2Yeah. And what that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is like you're taking on as whoop the responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade. But it's not, it's not like some high pressure thing like your iPhone cycle where they're constantly, you know, pressuring you to upgrade so they can make the money on the hardware. Now let's talk about the innovation inside the software and you know, I've used everything Fitbit, which is I guess Google health now Apple watch I've had all of it or over many, many years and I settled on whoop. Why did I settle on whoop? Well, I thought your software actually, which was hard for me to get my head around at first because you have this recovery score, you have the sleep score, you have stress and then there's this journal feature. It was a little complex for me compared to the other products, but ultimately what I found was it gave me more value once I committed to the product. So what does committing to the product mean? I think if you put in and you fill out the journal every day or just, you know, a couple of times a week, you get much more out of it. So let me have you explain what the, what the most important metrics are here, heart rate variability, the recovery score, high stress, sleep, et cetera. And then, and then work me into like some of the, the features around journaling and why that's important.
Speaker 1Yeah. The three main pillars on whoop are around sleep, recovery and strain. And so most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night and that'll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency, did they go to bed and wake up at the same time, your hours of sleep. So how many of those hours were quality sleep versus the time that you just spent in bed trying to sleep? How much was restorative, slow wave sleep, REM sleep, you know, a pretty deep understanding of your body's overall circadian rhythm and how well you're sleeping. And then ultimately your recovery score, which is red, yellow, green, zero to a hundred percent. By the way, I'm pretty pumped about mine today. I want you to know I'm ready for you. Oh man. I just had to show you that.
Speaker 293% is pretty good. That's really strong for me. That's very strong. Uh, for me, not so good. I'm on a 67.
Speaker 1Okay. But you got a green dial.
Speaker 2And my sleep was 83%. Yeah. And my strain today is incredible though. Cause all I've done is sit and do no work. Uh, but you know, this is like super critical for me to have these numbers. Now I travel, I go to Japan, I go to Saudi and go to Davos, you know, world economic forum. I I'm all over the globe and I'm trying to regulate my sleep. I'm trying to figure out, should I be on this sleep schedule or, you know, the other one. And I'm just trying to make sure I'm fresh for when I'm doing performative stuff, you know, like on, on podcasts or speaking gigs. Uh, and it's essential for me now. It's just essential for me. I can't live without it. The thing that was interesting that happened for me is you also have, uh, under those three most important, uh, metrics there. - The health monitor? - You have the health monitor. this is critical for me because twice now in the past yeah i think it's two or three times now i have had um under health monitor which has your respiratory rate your resting heart rate skin temperature blood oxygen and hrv heart rate variability right now i'm all in green however the other week i'm going to tell you this story it involves me going to the emergency room with this is a serious some people in the house uh the kids or whatever had a a respiratory infection i didn't get it but i wake up one day and my respiratory rate is two breaths higher than normal instead of 16 it was like 18 or 15 it was 17 and then my skin temperature was like two degrees hotter right and um and just for people listening
Speaker 1when your respiratory rate is elevated by two breaths like that that's actually pretty meaningful because respiratory rate is normally a variable statistic it normally doesn't change at all so
Speaker 2it's like hey what's going on then it does it a second day in a row so then i you know like do the warm bath i got me sure i got my electrolytes i'm thinking maybe i'm coming down with something anyway i recover on saturday sunday sunday night i can't sleep i start getting chest pains i put the tesla at 1 a.m and self-driving and i go to the emergency room because i used to work on an ambulance i know hey you know when you have chest pains and you're 55 year old male this could be serious or it could be indigestion i go i do every possible test i go right to the heart center in austin here and they do the ct scan i think that's the the big scan of your heart ekgs everything i'm there from 1 a.m until 7 a.m turns out i had inflammation in my lungs around my chest and my heart was being constricted so i was experiencing chest pain i was not having a heart attack but there was something going on and i was alerted to it too for two days in a row without having any other symptoms very strange right and uh it was the whoop those two days earlier that thursday friday that on sunday i was on high alert i was like something's going wrong with my system it had done that and the reason is three years ago the same thing happened my skin temperature is going crazy and then in that case i think it was my hrv and what's going on i got covid yeah so i have two two bad scores i'm in uh new york with one of my friends and i'm with my daughters and uh i was able to take that paxlovid which you can only take if you get to it early so i'm like f this two days of like heat i go my wife goes maybe you got covid i'm like wow that's so retro i go right to duane reed i take the test i got it i get paxlovid all in the same day because the whoop told me so you anticipated two acute situations for me what other acute things are you starting to learn here now that you have four million people in the system i understand now you're becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services and or you know you're starting to understand things before let's say the the rest of the medical community is is learning them well
Speaker 1thanks for sharing that i mean that's an amazing story and i'm grateful you're feeling all right and grateful that whoop could uh could play a small role helping i think it's it's amazing we now get these testimonials every every day every week from uh like the one you described uh i got a message last week from uh uh you know a fit healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw he had these elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal you know someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute getting a heart rate of 120 130 while he's sleeping and uh and he goes in uh to see the doctor and um they do some tests and sure enough uh stage four and lymphoma whoa yeah and uh and he was able to get treated for it and he's recovered from it and uh and then you know another similar story where uh a member with their hrv they'd been on whoop actually for i think close to a decade so they had this incredible baseline and um an hrv for for people who are less familiar
Speaker 2unpack that because you're the one who introduced me to this whole concept and yeah i i have since gone down the rabbit hole so hrv
Speaker 1stands for heart rate variability it's the amount of um time between successive beats of the heart and uh and it's a little counterintuitive but the more variability in time between successive beats of the heart the healthier your overall system is operating and it's this lens into your autonomic nervous system which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity so sympathetics activation heart rate up blood pressure up respiration up um it's what happens you know when you have a thought like there's a lion in the room or you know when you start to exercise or you're thinking about something stressful um conversely uh parasympathetics all the opposite heart rate down blood pressure down respiration down uh it's what helps you fall asleep if you um exhale for a long period of time that's parasympathetic and what you want is for for sympathetic activity and parasympathetic activity to be coupled and so your body's kind of constantly regulating its environment and when that's the case it it means you have a higher heart rate variability that's the measurement will be higher and we're measuring heart rate variability 24 7 it was really one of the key innovations in founding the company uh i did all this medical research when i was a student at harvard and heart rate variability was the thing that like jumped off the page to me because there was really interesting research on it but it couldn't be measured 24 7 and uh and so that's where um you know part of where whoop was born out of anyway heart rate variability is something that we use for stress monitoring it's something we use for our recovery studies score and uh and we baseline everyone on whoop and then we're able to show you every day are you within your baseline are you a little higher you're a little lower and when you look at trends of this over years you start to get a sense for is someone getting healthier over time or or less healthy it's a really important longevity indicator uh typically speaking as you get older your heart rate variability will drop so you know people who are in their 20s their heart rate variability will be anywhere between 20 and 30 so it's a really important indicator and it's a really important indicator where between like 80 and 100 on average 30s you start to drop to 70 40s you start dropping to 50 you know um 50s 60s all of a sudden you're in you know 30s and below and so if you can fight that trend uh that those averages and keep your heart rate variability even just flat over years that's actually a sign of good fitness good longevity and uh anyway back to the story i was telling you the um this individual they had a very steady heart rate variability that was within a range and all of a sudden it plummeted so it was a healthy person they had a heart rate variability about 100 and uh and then it was 50 all of a sudden for for a period of time again goes in gets all these tests uh he turned out to have testicular cancer oh wow and so
Speaker 2now was that known previously that hrv would in some way be a lead indicator for testicular cancer i mean i
Speaker 1don't think so you know that that's what's so fascinating about this moment in time is we've never had this much data on the human body continuously one of the principles to founding whoop was 24 7 data and it's it's why we have a 14-day battery life now it's why we we invented a charger that you slide on to your womb i was about
Speaker 2to say these are super important and when you first told me about this on this week in startups i was like wow i need to i want to see how many steps i've done and the time it makes no sense and you were like trust me jaco you know there's a reason for this and now that i've used it you know i'm not going to be able to do it again it turns out you're absolutely right the reason i have had so many long streaks the only time i really stopped using this for the past couple years is when i lost it and i had to order a new one so i broke my streak which was a bummer but it is what it is it's just a number um because you can wear it in the shower you can wear it in the bath and you should it turns out a warm bath is when we get to journals in a minute super uh great for my recovery for whatever reason and my you never have to take it off and you can slide on the battery charger so you can have essentially the opposite experience that i had with my apple watch the apple watch was annoying because it's i'm getting alerts and i'm getting alerts for things that i app i installed two years ago and it's just constantly bothering you people think you're rude when you look at the watch and then the battery dies every you know whatever for the apple watch i think i might have gotten to 24 hours or 36 hours 48 hours a couple times but it's a terrible experience with this i i mean i i've made it 10 years ago and i've been using it for a long time days you know 14 days no problem and i carry i bought three battery chargers i just keep i keep one in my desk i keep one on the bedside one in my back my travel bag it's like these things aren't expensive um and and that's a key to it i think as well yeah is the the amount people wear these
Speaker 1on average uh a whoop member wears whoop 23.6 hours a day and as a consequence we have um just over 50 hours of continuous physiological data so it's one of the largest health data sets in the world and now with the you know the advent of ai and what you can do with large data sets it's just like a really exciting time to be working in this space do all
Speaker 2the ai companies like the frontier models want to buy this data from you in aggregate is that like uh a huge business for you guys eventually how do you think about that or building your own models yeah
Speaker 1today we're building our own models you know foundational models with in the company that are essentially training on top of this data. So one thing--
Speaker 2open source models or you're partnering with someone? We're developing our own models.
Speaker 1We've got open source models. And what's amazing is you've got this huge physiological data set, but then you also now have other data sets, right? So people are uploading their blood tests or they're doing advanced labs through Whoop. They're uploading medical records. And so as an example, we're now starting to see indications that through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself. Wow. And so then, you know, you could give someone a very targeted, hey, we think you're, you know, we think you have high cortisol. You should get this one test. And it gets, you know, and it gets super, it gets super targeted, which is exciting.
Speaker 2Which the AI would be able to figure out. The AI is going to look at all this data and say, hey, maybe there's a cortisol issue or here's the possibilities, which is super fascinating. So not, you see your business in the future. As this AI assistant and you edit an AI assistant, I think to the product less than six months ago, I'm addicted to it now. And you have these ongoing conversations. It logs the conversations. And so now it was, I'll be candid, pretty dumb at the start. It would be like, you could talk to it and be like, yes, you had this rate. Okay. Thanks for that rate. But now it's gotten a bit more sophisticated because now when I tell it, I'm in Japan, you didn't record my sleep. It's like, oh, okay. Here's what's happening. And it actually is understanding the product. And I guess you're doing some reinforcement learning. Yeah. And it's got to be that these 4 million members, including myself are now telling it where the product breaks down because when you, or where the opportunities are to add more features, however you want to look at it. But there's this constant struggle I was having with changing time zones. And was my, what was my sleep getting recorded properly? So then I could get my recovery. And then I started asking, and then it prompted me and said, Hey, by the way, when are you leaving for Japan or whatever? And I was like, here's my flight. This is when I land. And it was like, you should sleep at the first half and then not go to bed when you get to Japan, don't have caffeine at this time. So somebody in the company, I think explicitly started doing a time zone change, or did it just learn that and infer it? What did you, did you get specific about that? And how are you using the AI coach?
Speaker 1We spun up a team on travel specifically because it's such a popular use case for a lot of our members and, you know, our origins were with athletes, but now we've got this wide audience of aspiring people. You know, that's really the, if you think about who's whoop targeting, it's the aspiring. And that could be a great athlete. That could be someone who's fit, but it could also just be someone who wants to have more energy for their family and their job and their life's hobbies and wants to live longer, right? But the AI, the AI coach is a big part of that. And I think that's a really good point. And I think it's a big part of our future. And, you know, we've been working on it for years now. I'm glad to hear that you feel like it's getting good. And about 80% of our-
Speaker 2I'd say it's like a seven and a half right now. Seven and a half out of 10. I think there's so much potential for it.
Speaker 1Yeah. As long as it's good enough for you to be engaging with it, it's just going to keep getting better with time. And we're getting better at that too. And, and so, you know, one thing that's really interesting, again, back to these data sets. So physiological data, we talked about. That's from the sensor. Then you've got the advanced labs and the blood testing. You've got the medical records coming in, but actually this is, this is another very important piece of data, which is all sorts of user feedback, right? Like the journal itself. So about just over 50% of our members journal every day. This is a good point to explain what the journal is.
Speaker 2Yeah. So this is- I'm sorry that I keep explaining your features, but I'm so passionate about the product as you
Speaker 1can hear. No, you're doing great. So the, the whoop journal is essentially a hundred plus different behaviors, lifestyle decisions you know, supplements, drugs, you name it, that someone might want to log. So popular things that people log every day are like, did I drink alcohol last night? Was I hydrated? Did I travel? You know, did I meditate? Was I happy? Was I sad? You know, was I stressed? And, and all of this anecdotal information also builds on on these data sets. Where, you know, if you wanted to come up with an algorithm for predicting whether someone would be happy, you would actually need a fair amount of data from someone on you know, on their overall mood as an example. So anyway, we're excited about bringing all these different types of data sets together. And it's one thing that we feel uniquely positioned to do because not that many companies, you know, have people opening their app eight times a day and 80% of their member base interacting with the AI. Starting a business usually
Speaker 2means juggling a bunch of different services just to look legit. Not anymore. With Northwest Registered Agent, you get a complete business identity all in one place, a business address, domain, website, phone number, and more. With privacy protection built in from day one. Don't spend hundreds or thousands on services you can get from Northwest for free. Visit northwestregisteredagent.com/allinfree and start using free resources to build your business today. The journal was a major unlock for me. Here's from a user perspective, since we're doing a whole like user session here. What's really interesting about it is you get these behavioral insights. And I think you get into behavioral insight when you've used it 10 times, five yeses, five noes. As an example, if you're doing creatine, somebody's paying attention at Whoop. And I guess you got a lot of re, how many people working over there now? 1,200. 1,200. Whoa. That's, that's, that's grown significantly. Yeah, we grew. Yeah. Wow. So when you pull up your, your behavioral insights and in the morning, it will ask you and prompt you because in the mornings when everybody opens this to check their sleep score recovery, it prompts you. You can start to figure out after this five and five, what impact that behavior has on recovery. So, it turns out for a warm bath, which was never my thing. I hate baths. Not my thing. Like I'm a guy like going in a bath, hanging out in a bath. I have no interest. I'm like, I'm like a guy from Brooklyn. Like kind of feels weird to be in a bath with the candles. Any salts in the bath? Are you adding fragrance? I did add the, yes, you got me. I'm adding salts to the bath. Yes. And that's now also tracked. It helps. It helps. Warm bath, plus 7% on my recovery. Have you ever heard of something like that?
Speaker 1That's very high as a, as a response. So, you know, for folks who are trying to figure out what we're talking about, essentially when you log these things, WHOOP then will tell you what's positively or negatively affecting your recovery score. So a big wake up call for a lot of people ends up being alcohol, because it'll show you that alcohol has this like hugely negative effect. Disastrous. On your recovery.
Speaker 2It's poison. I don't drink, so I never even log it, but I'm, you have a couple of beverages now and again, Will? And then what impact does it have on your super score? I do know, I feel like I've got a,
Speaker 1I feel like I've got a good relationship with alcohol, although it's got a negative 9% for me. So I'm now looking at, I'm now looking at my behavior insights. Here's a sneaky one for everyone.
Speaker 2Wait, have you considered having that drink while you're in the warm bath?
Speaker 1Yeah, right. Maybe I should start adding more baths, but I do, I do steam room. I do cold plunge. Oh yeah? How's that working out? Those are more neutral, but I like the way they make me feel. And there's a lot of longevity research on sauna-ing and contrast therapy. So second to alcohol for being the most negative for me is a late meal. So eating, eating within three hours of bedtime, we've now seen across the entire Wu population is really detrimental to your sleep and your recovery. And it's because your body's still digesting for those first few hours that you're in bed. And as a consequence, you're not getting quality sleep.
Speaker 2So you get high stress during the sleep, I would assume. Yeah. Yeah. That whole high stress thing. Here's mine. For some reason, vitamin D minus three, I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I was putting a little vitamin D and maybe that's a false positive.
Speaker 1It could be that the days you took it were days that you were traveling or, you know, there could be something else going on.
Speaker 2Yeah. There's a correlation here that we're not seeing yet.
Speaker 1You can ask whoop that you can say, I'm seeing vitamin D minus three. Does that make sense? What could be going on? And maybe it'll, it'll look at your travel alongside that.
Speaker 2Okay. This is a modest difference, and it's a correlation, not evidence that vitamin D caused the change. Your recent recovery has ranged 27% to 87%, but you haven't logged vitamin D in this 14 day stretch. So there's no recent comparison. You were giving your duffel across bath. Okay. So I got a little more work to do on that one. Uh, but plus five strain is minus five on recovery. That makes total sense. Yeah. So when
Speaker 1you work out your body
Speaker 2needs to recover. Plus 1% of the day in high stress zone, minus 9% on recovery. So you know, through my temp, the stress score comes from what temperature heart rate, HRV. Primarily HRV, but it's also using other sensing. Got it. So, and that's kind of your, is that your special sauce there? Proprietariness in the, in that, uh, the, the stress score, the stress score
Speaker 1itself is something that we invented. Of course we based it on physiological research. And I would say that's one of the hard things about this space, which is how do you take medical research? That's credible. And then a lot of data, because you're going to be dating, getting data from consumers, and then great design, right? Because at the end of the day, you have to design something to ultimately have a score that people want to look at. And so there's a lot of science to it, but there's also art to it. And I think it's something Whoop has been very good at, you know, the recovery score and now our health span score is the most screenshotted page in the app.
Speaker 2Makes total sense. Yeah, when you share that. Consistent bedtime, plus four. Caffeine, plus four. Creatine, plus four. Morning sunlight, plus three. So now that I have this, I also do some meditation with the Calm app and with waking up or on my own. That also, I don't have enough data in there yet because I keep forgetting to log it. But it does log my skiing. So I use slopes. Yeah. And so you're a skier, Will, or no?
Speaker 1I ski, but I'm not using an app for skiing. So my senses just ski more than I do.
Speaker 2I mean, I try to get to 30, 40 days a year. Okay, there you go. But two hours a day. So it's like executive skiing, CEO skiing, if you catch my drift. Do a podcast before, a little work after. And you're doing it in Japan. I do five, 10 days in Japan is the goal. The rest are at my ski house. That's elite skiing. Yes, yes. So you can come with me and Tucker Carlson if you're into it. It's a really weird trip. Great, great. The other nice thing is it pulls in my slopes data and puts it as an activity. So you have an activity tracker. And the activity tracker is really great. You get to, you know, I do these long walks. In Japan or when I'm in New York, I love to do long walks. My age, long walks and rucking and farmer's walks are like the key to longevity, I'm told. But the great thing is now it knows that and it's making a training program for me around that. And it asked me, the AI, what's my goal? I said, my goal is to not get injured and ski better. And these are the exercises I know are going to help. It's now the AI understands my goals, kind of coaching me and setting up plans. And then, lo and behold, one of the things I think I had asked you for, maybe on DM somewhere on Twitter or something, you know, I take a GLP. So I started tracking it. I take a light GLP, lost 43 pounds on my. Wow, congrats, man. That's awesome. Well, yeah. And I mean, let me tell you, that makes a difference. When you're 213, you get to 170, skiing, sleeping, everything. I wish I had whooped during that journey.
Speaker 1Did your resting heart rate go down a lot?
Speaker 2You know, I wasn't fully on whoop for the majority of that. That would have been cool to have. That would have been so cool to have. You know what? I'll gain the 40 pounds back and then lose it. But now I'm on a maintenance dose and you just released a GLP tracker that has in it all the cohorts of things you want to make sure you're doing when you're taking GLP, including protein consumption. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how GLPs are kind of making their way into the ecosystem here.
Speaker 1Well, in general, you know, I think in line with this theme of we want to have a lot of data under the whoop umbrella so that we can actually give you the right insights. If you're taking a GLP-1, that's a pretty meaningful shift to what's going to happen for your body. And one of the challenges with GLP-1s is that typically speaking, about 50% of the weight that someone loses is fat and 50% is muscle. And, you know, so that's how sometimes people can end up getting quite frail, even though they've lost a considerable amount of weight. And so it's good for whoop to know that you're on a GLP-1. And then in turn, it's really going to push you to get some activity and hopefully a little bit of strength training, even if it's just body weight in so that you don't end up losing that muscle. And I think that's also where the appropriate diet with protein. And, you know, we've heard some anecdotal success around people taking creatine while they're on GLP-1s, I think is super important. And, you know, just to say, like, we have all this data and we take it very seriously and we want it to be secure and private. We've actually gone through the, oh, here we go.
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm just, you know, I mirrored my phone. Here's my actual whoop. You can see my resting heart rate, all that. But I added my GLP there and it said, you know, you got to get to 9,800 steps now. You got to do two strength activities a week, hydration seven days a week, protein, and then just check off that you took your GLP. And it took me through a little script to say, you know, how often do you take it, et cetera.
Speaker 1And there would have been a process here, I imagine, where the AI was asking you about some of this and you ultimately confirmed you wanted to do these things and have a plan, right?
Speaker 2Yeah, absolutely. And I'm at 300 days on my streak here. What's the other thing you added? You added, I guess, badges a little bit more, kind of like Peloton has like insane number of badges. And so you get to see where you're at. And like, I am a rucking machine on my, I'm in the top 1% of people doing rucking and farmers. So that's like a little competitive thing. Yeah, there you go. You got to maintain that now.
Speaker 1You got to keep rucking every day.
Speaker 2Okay. So let's talk about you and your relationship with the FDA. A little controversy here. It's been covered over and over again. All these devices, I guess, are not under medical devices. And maybe you could explain to us how this FDA looks at you versus other medical devices and how that's changed over time. But you have blood pressure insights, BPI. And you launch it. The FDA was a little bit like, hey, we're not happy here. And then you have the ECG heart screening stuff and all of these devices, whether it's my Apple Watch. And that's medically cleared. And when you do that, these things, you always get this disclaimer. Hey, listen, we're not in the heart attack business. So when I had those things, it's up to me to interpret that or a doctor. But talk to me about the tension. And how it's been going across the two administrations. Because now you've lived through, you know, Trump, go, go, rah, rah. President Trump is like all in on disrupting. And he put a Kennedy in there to do that. And he's a bit of a disruptor himself. And he's very pro-business. And then Biden, obviously, maybe a little more regulation, less pro-business. Definitively less pro-business. But I don't know in the medical space how that happens. So talk to me. It's not a politics show. But you are running into regulation now.
Speaker 1Well, just to say, like, it's been certainly a long process for who've been working with the FDA. And we've worked with them in a lot of different contexts, which I'll talk about here in a second. And, you know, the history of very innovative technology with, you know, somewhat dated regulatory policies is a history that has controversy from time to time. So I'm not surprised that we've had some challenges or disagreements along the way. But I'm actually really happy with our relationship with the FDA. Now, four years ago, I really wanted to be able to do blood pressure monitoring. And historically, you needed a cuff for that. And it was really a pretty difficult signal processing problem. There was no product on the market that could measure blood pressure accurately from the wrist. And so we set out to see if we could do it. And one of the ways that we collected a huge data set on it was in collaboration with our members, where we asked members if they wanted to participate. In a stress, sleep and blood pressure study. And as part of that, we actually had 70,000 people enroll. So think about, you know, the ability to generate studies at a huge scale fast. And and so people were actually uploading their blood pressure readings every single day for a number of weeks. And what that allowed us to do was to build out a pretty powerful data set on on blood pressure monitoring. And also to be able to train that alongside all of the physiological data that we were already collecting. Anyway, fast forward, we get to a period where all of a sudden we've got a very powerful algorithm for measuring blood pressure. And that's one of the things that we do, I think, very well at WHOOP is, you know, we pick a hard physiological signal and then we say we want to be able to measure it as accurately or within a similar accuracy as a medical device. And then we look to bring that to consumers. And there was controversy around blood pressure monitoring before. We launched because prior to launching it, historically, blood pressure had been under the category of physiological signals that needed to be a quote unquote medical device. And just as some, you know, background for for our listeners, the FDA is really supposed to evaluate products that have a medical diagnosis. And and then if you're not providing a medical diagnosis, then it falls under a category called wellness. And and there's like a pretty good history for this with with heart rate monitoring, for example, where if you do heart rate monitoring for exercise, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring for sleep, that's wellness. If you do heart rate monitoring for, you know, AFib detection or heart attack prediction. OK, that needs to be regulated. So the FDA in the past had a pretty clear distinction for heart rate. This is wellness. This is medical. Right. With blood pressure, they said that if you're measuring blood pressure, it has to be medical. But the problem with that is there's an avalanche of research that supports that. Not surprisingly, blood pressure affects your stress. It affects your sleep. It affects your overall well-being. And we felt like there was a pretty clear lane for us to introduce a blood pressure feature that was a wellness feature. And so we launched the feature. The FDA, you know, came back. and said that they felt like it needed to be regulated. They actually sent us a warning letter. There was a big disagreement that played out that was quite public about it. But we, you know, we stuck to our guns and I ultimately really believe in the way that we approached it. And through a long process, the FDA actually has since updated their guidelines, I think based on our case, but also based on feedback from the industry that supports that blood pressure can also have wellness applications. And so, you know, our blood pressure insights feature is still available for consumers. And just to say it, we have these conversations with the FDA across a lot of different categories. Whoop also has medical clearances from the FDA. So our ECG feature, where you can literally do an ECG from your wrist by just putting your fingers on the Whoop. Um, that's an FDA cleared product, 510K. And so, uh, in some cases we're at, we're going through a process of clinical trials to get FDA approval. In other cases, we want to bring a product to market faster. Uh, and we also believe it's a wellness application. And so, uh, that's kind of a healthy, I think, uh, process for innovative companies like Whoop to be, uh, pursuing with the
Speaker 2FDA. Why don't you guys, uh, I know you guys have some sort of integration with this Omron blood pressure. Cough. I saw, like, I was like looking it up. Why don't you guys just make your own blood pressure cough or listen, we're at a $10 billion valuation here. We got 4 million members, 250 on average a year. Let's say we've got a billion in revenue. Like let's just buy this company Omron or let's get in the blood pressure cuff business and let's get in the scale business while we're out of it. Like I trust the brand. I just want the Whoop scale. I want you to be the person who puts the features in. I want you to control it. I want it to work. I want to have to go through Apple health in the back door to get my fit bit scale uploaded. And I just want, I want a Whoop branded blood pressure cuff and a Whoop branded scale.
Speaker 1Well, I appreciate you saying that. I mean, in a lot of categories, we are debating, do we want to build this ourselves? We want to partner with someone or are we going to make an acquisition? And, uh, and often we've defaulted to either building or acquiring versus partnering in the case of, um, blood pressure cuffs. We felt like that was a fairly commoditized technology. Uh, and there is, you know, medical, uh, efficacy there. So, you know, if people want to do a calibration with a cuff to set up their Whoop, which will then measure it without the cuff. Cause at the end of the day, we kind of want to replace the cuff, uh, that, you know, that feels like a fairly healthy system. And, uh, and it's also worth saying that we, we feel like we've earned the right to, um, accumulate all this data because we have very strong data policies. So we do not sell data, you know, you are not the product, Jason, like you're the membership is the product. And, and that's a huge, I think, distinction in this space, especially when you have, you know, big technology and Apple.
Speaker 2Yeah. Let's just call it what it is. You may not want to say it, but I can there they're, they make their money advertising and, uh, Apple, Apple's pretty good steward of data. I'll give them that, but, uh, you know, they make it on really expensive hardware. So you are unique in both cases, uh, in terms of business model, you're in our corner, which I love. Yeah. Apple's going to make a competitor, huh? They know their watch kind of sucks and their software sucks. Like Apple health is terrible.
Speaker 1The Apple watch is the most successful smartwatch in the world. And so I think in terms of the category that they built to own, I think they, um, I think they've been successful. I think it's an important product for them. It's a, it's a product that does a lot of things. And so if you want text messages and emails and to be able to, but they're going to
Speaker 2me, you worry to keep you. Well, I have enormous respect for Apple.
Speaker 1I think they're one of the best in the world at hardware and software. I think a lot of companies have entered our space and had challenges with, with the screenless wearable or other wearable products. You know, it's interesting 10 years ago, there were more competitive products in the market than there are today. That's true.
Speaker 2Actually. Yeah. You had a lot of people trying this.
Speaker 1People forget the whole jawbone kind of Fitbit era. There was a whole glass of Nike and Adidas and Under Armour.
Speaker 2Yeah. How dumb was it for Nike to stop pursuing that? My God. It was such an obvious, smart thing for them to do. They had a good start and then they gave the business to Fitbit, I believe. And then they just got out of it. All right, listen, it's time for lightning round. Oh, lightning round. Lightning round with Will. Yeah. You got to be honest here. Here we go. Brian Johnson or Andrew Huberman? Pick one. For podcasting, Huberman. Who's making a bigger contribution to, uh, the, the science and technology.
Speaker 1I think Huberman has a, a wider audience. I think Brian has pushed people's imagination of what they should be measuring. And I think both of those are really helpful. Cold plunge, cold shower, cold plunge, cold shower. Make a difference. I'll say cold shower because it's very accessible and it's something that people can do every day. And you do it for even 30 seconds, 60 seconds. You're just going to feel a lot better. Yeah. Wakes you up.
Speaker 2Red light therapy or just the classic hot sauna. I like the hot sauna. Old school. Yes. It gets hotter. I think the red light thing is just marketing nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, okay. Zone two cardio. This is for our age. I think you're 40 now, Will. Are you 40 yet? 37. 37. All right. So I'm going to round you up to 40. I'm going to round myself down to 50. Zone two cardio or lifting. What do you think? You've got to pick one for my age and for your age.
Speaker 1I think this depends a lot on what someone's goals are, but in general, I think that everyone should be lifting. They should be lifting more weights and probably doing, you know, if they have an hour to exercise, they should spend more time lifting and less time on an elliptical. Love it. Because people, yeah, because your, your muscle mass is such an important, uh, test for longevity.
Speaker 2The alarm in Whoop is quite sophisticated. Will, you can wake up based on recovery, sleep score. So the recovery score, the sleep score, or with a, with a hard, you know, 6am. Should you go recovery? Sleep score or with a hard alarm. So you get your sleep consistency. Which one? Pick one of the three.
Speaker 1If you're on vacation, you can go with recovery or sleep, but if you're trying to run a tech company, you better pick an exact time. Okay. All right.
Speaker 2Coffee first thing in the morning. Wait 90 minutes. Which one? Wait 90 minutes for your coffee or just drink the damn coffee and live your life. I personally drink the coffee. Yeah. Let's go. All right. Strain score. Sleep score, recovery score. Which one do you obsess over most of the, of the big three? Which one do you obsess over? You can't say they're all your children. You love them all equally.
Speaker 1Recovery. I mean, I wake up every morning waiting to see that, that color of that dial. Wow. I love it.
Speaker 2All right. Listen, there's your hour with Will from Whoop. Great product. I give it my highest endorsement. Eight sleep. I'm an investor in. I love that product too. Those are my two favorite health. Uh, products. And, uh, Hey, at the time of this recording, you have a little announcement about the King. No, not president Trump. Gotcha. That King Trump, but LeBron James, uh, now playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. A big announcement.
Speaker 1Yeah. Well, we were announcing today. So, uh, he's been on Whoop interestingly for 11 years and, uh, we never had any formal relations. With him. We love that he wore the product. Frankly, it was, it was really important in the early days that he did wear the product. Cause he was one of the first hundred people to ever wear it. And so it was incredibly validating that this incredible athlete was willing to try a technology from an unknown company called Whoop. And, uh, and it gave us a lot of hope that we were onto something, but it's been an extraordinary to see his career, uh, over two decades plus. And he's the, uh, he's really the pinnacle of performance. He's the, uh, he's the pinnacle of performance. And, and like longevity. And, uh, and so he joins a roster of ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo and, uh, Patrick Mahomes and, uh, Lewis Hamilton and, uh, Rina Sabalenka, Nelly Korda, so on. So it's a great group.
Speaker 2Now you had a philosophy though, early on, we talked about this in our previous discussions that like, Hey, you're not going to pay athletes to, uh, wear it, you know, and you're not going to beg them to wear it because they're the customers. They're the ICP, the ideal customer. Profile. So, um, is this like a, maybe a change in thinking, or is just like a unique one of one case? Hey, he's been on the product for 11 years without a formal relationship. And, you know, he's in that era. Now he's going to, you know, retire in a couple of years that, Hey man, he's probably going to go into this, uh, Kobe Shaq post playing era where, where he gets in deep into business. So what's the thinking here and how do you think about athletes writ large?
Speaker 1I think in general, if your business is pre-marketing, so to speak, like you're not in a big television advertisements and so on and so forth, you should be really careful paying anyone to use your product. You know, you want people to love your product authentically. And in our case, it just so happened that early on our target market was these professional athletes. And so we needed them to organically love the product. And by the way, because you have to wear it 24, seven, there's no amount of money. I'm going to be able to pay an athlete to wear something 24, seven, if they don't like it. Right. On the flip side, it was like, well, if it actually works and it's measuring their sleep and recovery and they play better, you know, they should want to pay for it. So that was our attitude for a long time. And, you know, we had a number of these individuals who are best in class of their sport and global people that wanted to invest in the company because they loved it so much. And from there, we also developed relationships where we could use their name, image and likeness, which has a value associated with it, that we recognize, to be able to do advertising. And so, you know, they've been amazing partnerships. And I'm very grateful that LeBron James is part of the whole process. Wait,
Speaker 2are the players allowed
Speaker 1to wear these during games? That's something the NBA is still looking at.
Speaker 2Got it. Yeah, because they're not allowed to wear jewelry. They've got to take all that off because of injuries. But they could put it, because you can wear it on your armband. They could embed it in like a wrapper. So maybe some of them have snuck it on the court.
Speaker 1Who knows? Well, you probably saw the Australian Open stuff. No, I didn't. Tell me. Well, at the Australian Open, the tennis tournament. Yeah, I don't watch tennis. A number of players were asked to take their whoop off while they were playing. And it was, I think, in part because the Australian Open didn't know what they were wearing, but they were just wearing it, you know, under their armbands and everything else. And the ITF, which is the International Tennis Federation, actually had approved whoop to be worn in matches. So. The Australian Open was kind of out of line. And then next thing you know, the other majors have come forward saying that wearables can be worn. So I think there's this sort of natural evolution of resisting it, safety checks. And by the way, they're right to want to be restrictive about what can be worn.
Speaker 2It's not. I don't think it's a safety thing if you're wrapping it around your armband or something like that. I agree. I mean, obviously, I agree. I'll tell you what's going on in the background. Your marketing department's probably getting shaken down. They're probably like, hey, you know, we'd love to have. Whoop involved. It'd be terrible if something happened to an athlete wearing 1.2 ounces. But if you were to put a logo behind them for 10 million dollars, well, we might have a different opinion. You know, all the ins and outs. It's not my first time at this rodeo.
Speaker 1I know the shakedown when I hear it. How are things for you in early stage venture? Are you are you starting to lead these billion dollar seed rounds or you're staying true to the. The accelerator model, you
Speaker 2know, it's nobody wants to do your zero work. So I have leaned into that. But then, you know, at the end, we have the syndicate and we have 4000 members of it and we would syndicate our early stage seed deals. Hey, if you want to get involved in this, you know, Jake, I was putting in 100K. You might want to put in 5K. They kept asking me, can you get me into Zipline? Can you get me into Whoop? Can you get me into SpaceX, Anthropic, whatever it is? So we started a late stage practice. That we just started this year at the syndicate. Thanks for asking. And we did we did Zipline. We did Icon Homes, 3D printed homes. These are all billion dollar companies, five billion dollar companies in vast space. So when I know the founder, the CFO gives its approval because you have to deal with this, right? People doing off the books transactions and SPVs and buying out early employees and other, you know, early investors. You have to deal with some of this SPV madness.
Speaker 1I'll say this. It's complicated when your business is failing and it's complicated when your business is winning. So it's always complicated.
Speaker 2I think just my advice to everybody with these SPVs off the books, whatever, is just build a relationship with the CFO of the company and just get their blessing for it and let them know what you're doing. And if they really don't want you to do it, then you're going to have to accept that, right? Like it's their company. I don't like this idea of going behind the back of the company.
Speaker 1And the other thing to be wary of are these secondary brokers who they claim they've got shares from someone at a price. Yes. And they go around saying that, but they're really just trying to create a market. And so. Happens to me all the time.
Speaker 2Yeah. Because I literally like I'm on the board of a company that's worth a couple billion dollars and they come to me and I say, okay, great. Who is it with? Because I got to, I'm on the board of the company. I got to talk to the CFO and, you know, I can help coordinate with you and then crickets. And I'm like, hmm, they're fishing. It's always a fishing expedition. This thing didn't really exist 10, 15 years ago. Like the only time I ever saw it was Facebook. And then Uber. When Masayoshi. John came in, he, uh, he was like, Hey guys, I need you to sell some of these or I'm going to invest in Lyft. And we were like, okay. I gave him 10% of my shares at the time. I was like, sure. I'll take a little 10% off the top just to keep Masa from investing.
Speaker 1I want to run, I want to run that business this ad, but congrats.
Speaker 2I mean, and right now like trading, uh, at an all time low PE and they're surging and they have, yeah, it's really weird to watch what's happening. Like the anti AI trade door dash Uber. Figma, you know, all the, a lot of these companies getting, uh, taken to the woodshed a bit. Um, and some of them are just like not impacted by it, but AI is going to change everything. Lots of great investment opportunities. We'll see you all next time on the all in interview program. Go get a whoop, get yourself a whoop. Perfect Christmas gift. Thank you. Appreciate you doing it. Well, love the product. I'm going all in.
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