WHOOP CEO Will Ahmed：500亿小时健康数据、400万会员构筑的数据护城河，以及 FDA 之争

On 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 datasets in the world.

For a dollar a day, I think this is 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 100 people to ever wear it. You’re starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them.

Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.

1. WHOOP's $500 Hardware Problem & the Subscription Pivot

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All right, guys. Welcome back to the All-In interview program. Yeah, this is where guests we want to unpack for an hour or so. Not talk about the news like we do every Friday. We want to go deep. And health and technology is one of those areas that’s super interesting to all the besties, and I was really excited that my friend Will Ahmed from WHOOP decided he would carve out an hour for me and the All-In audience. You and I have spoken, I think, 2 or 3 times on the OG podcast, This Week in Startups, which I’ve been doing for over 15 years. I’ve been there for the journey at WHOOP.

Let’s start with the footprint of WHOOP as an organization now. I’ve known you for well over 5 years, 6 years of this journey. How many members, ballpark? How many people are using WHOOP, and how much data have you collected?

Yeah, so WHOOP, we build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I’ve been building this company for 14 years. It was founded in 2012, and I think, like a lot of overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. It took about 12 years for us to get to a million members, then another 18 months or so to 2 million, and about 6 months to 3 million. We expect to end the year around 4 million members.

4 million members. Listen, I’ll tell people right out: the service at first seems expensive because I think it’s like $40 a month, $30 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, this anxiety about losing the device. Take me through that decision.

To be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is 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 a month.

Thank you. It’s a unique business model. In 2017, we launched to consumers. It was a one-time fee: $500. At that point in the company’s history, we had really built WHOOP as a performance brand. It was known amongst the best athletes in the world, and we worked with all these sports teams. We said, “Okay, we’re going to go to consumers and target an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience.”

Over the course of the next 12 months of having that product in market, we observed 2 things. The first is that people who bought WHOOP would wear it for a long time. 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 product. But the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. We still had a sales problem.

Because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, “Is there a business model 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?” I think that immediately created all kinds of growth for WHOOP back in 2018 and 2019. We quickly became a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which, of course, is more attractive to investors.

What I underestimated was how much it changed our DNA, because when you’re a subscription business, you become really obsessed with your existing members, arguably even more so than with new members. It’s all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.

This is, I think, a critical observation for founders who might be watching. When you’re selling widgets, it’s about distribution and marketing. But once you get a subscriber, they’re your customer next month, the following month, and the following year. So you start obsessing about churn and engagement, right? The metrics kind of shift, right?

Yeah, totally. You get very focused on user engagement: how often people are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is. How are you actually driving behavior change and health improvement?

It changed our hardware cycles as well. 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 when you’re a pure hardware company, you’re not incentivized to innovate on top of the existing product, because you want to convince people to buy the next thing.

For us, we have the opposite incentives. We want to launch hardware when it’s really innovative and it’s a step-function better. Then we’re really focused on continuing to update the membership and the subscription. Someone who joined, I don’t know, 18 months ago may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring or AFib detection or Advanced Labs, which is the blood work feature that we have in the app, or Healthspan, which tells you your WHOOP age and is a whole longevity feature. Blood Pressure Insights is a new capability that allows people to look at their blood pressure every day. These are all examples of new features that we’ve brought to market with hardware that’s already in market.

2. Inside 50 Billion Hours of 24/7 Health Data

Yeah. What that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is that you’re taking on, as WHOOP, the responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade. But it’s not some high-pressure thing like your iPhone cycle, where they’re constantly pressuring you to upgrade so they can make money on the hardware.

Now, let’s talk about the innovation inside the software. I’ve used everything: Fitbit, which I guess is Google Health now, Apple Watch. I’ve had all of it, Oura, over many, many years. And I settled on WHOOP. Why did I settle on WHOOP? I thought your software, which was hard for me to get my head around at first, gave me a recovery score, a sleep score, 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 that it gave me more value once I committed to the product.

What does committing to the product mean? I think if you fill out the journal every day, or just a couple times a week, you get much more out of it. So let me have you explain what the most important metrics are: heart rate variability, the recovery score, high stress, sleep, etc. Then work me into some of the features around journaling and why that’s important.

The 3 main pillars on WHOOP are sleep, recovery, and strain. Most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night. That’ll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency. Do they go to bed and wake up at the same time? Their hours of sleep: how many of those hours were quality sleep versus the time they just spent in bed trying to sleep? How much was restorative slow-wave sleep, REM sleep? It’s a pretty deep understanding of your body’s overall circadian rhythm and how well you’re sleeping.

Then ultimately, your recovery score, which is red, yellow, or green, from 0 to 100%. By the way, I’m pretty pumped about mine today. I want you to know I’m ready for you.

Oh, man.

90%. Hold on a second. I just had to show you that.

93% is pretty good.

That’s pretty strong for me.

That’s very strong. For me, not so good. I’m on a 67.

Okay, but you got a green dial. It was—

I got green, and my sleep was 83%.

Yeah. And my strain today is incredibly low because all I’ve done is sit and do no work.

I travel. I go to Japan, Saudi Arabia, Davos, the World Economic Forum. I’m all over the globe, and I’m trying to regulate my sleep. I’m trying to figure out whether I should be on this sleep schedule or the other one. I’m trying to make sure I’m fresh when I’m doing performative stuff, like on a podcast or at speaking gigs. 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 that, under those 3 most important metrics, you also have the Health Monitor.

You have the Health Monitor. This is critical for me because twice now—maybe 2 or 3 times—I’ve had something show up under the Health Monitor, which has your respiratory rate, resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and HRV, or heart rate variability. Right now, I’m all in green. But the other week, I’m going to tell you a story. It involves me going to the emergency room with chest pain.

This is serious. Some people in the house—the kids or whatever—had a respiratory infection. I didn’t get it, but I woke up one day and my respiratory rate was 2 breaths higher than normal. Instead of 16, it was 18, or instead of 15, it was 17. My skin temperature was about 2 degrees hotter.

Just for people listening, when your respiratory rate is elevated by 2 breaths like that, it’s actually pretty meaningful, because respiratory rate is normally a very boring statistic. It normally doesn’t change at all. So it’s like, “Hey, what’s going on?” Then it does it a second day in a row. So I take a warm bath and make sure I get my electrolytes. I’m thinking maybe I’m coming down with something.

Anyway, I recover on Saturday. Sunday night, I can’t sleep. I start getting chest pains. I put the Tesla on self-driving at 1:00 a.m. and go to the emergency room because I used to work on an ambulance. I know that when you have chest pains and you’re a 55-year-old male, it could be serious, or it could be indigestion. I do every possible test. I go right to the heart center here in Austin, and they do a CT scan—I think that’s the big scan of your heart—EKGs, everything. I’m there from 1:00 a.m. until 7:00 a.m.

It turns out I had inflammation in my lungs around my chest, and my heart was being constricted. I was experiencing chest pain, but I wasn’t having a heart attack. There was something going on, and I was alerted to it 2 days in a row without having any other symptoms. Very strange, right?

It was the WHOOP those 2 days earlier, Thursday and Friday, that had me on high alert on Sunday. I was like, “Something’s going wrong with my system.” That had happened 3 years ago, too. My skin temperature was going crazy, and I think in that case it was my HRV. What’s going on? I got COVID.

I had 2 bad scores. I was in New York with one of my daughters, and I was able to take Paxlovid, which you can only take if you get to it early. So I thought, “F this.” I had 2 days of feeling hot. My wife said, “Maybe you have COVID.” I was like, “Wow, that’s so retro.” I went right to Duane Reade, took the test, and I had it. I got Paxlovid all in the same day because WHOOP told me.

So you anticipated 2 acute situations for me. What other acute things are you starting to learn now that you have 4 million people in the system? I understand that you’re becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services, and you’re starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community learns them.

Well, thanks for sharing that. That’s an amazing story, and I’m grateful you’re feeling all right. I’m grateful that WHOOP could play a small role in helping. We get these testimonials every day, every week, from members who have an experience like the one you described.

I got a message last week from a fit, healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal. Someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute was getting a heart rate of 120 or 130 while he was sleeping. He went to see the doctor, they did some tests, and sure enough, he had stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma.

Wow.

Yeah. He was able to get treated for it, and he’s recovered. There was another similar story about a member who’d been on WHOOP for close to a decade, so they had this incredible baseline. Their HRV— for people who are less familiar—

Unpack that, because you’re the one who introduced me to this whole concept, and I’ve since gone down the rabbit hole.

HRV stands for heart rate variability. It’s the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. It’s a little counterintuitive, but the more variability there is in the time between successive beats of the heart, the healthier your overall system is operating.

It’s a lens into your autonomic nervous system, which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. Sympathetic activation means heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. It’s what happens when you have a thought like, “There’s a lion in the room,” when you start to exercise, or when you’re thinking about something stressful. Conversely, parasympathetic activity is the opposite: heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It helps you fall asleep. If you exhale for a long period of time, that’s parasympathetic.

What you want is for sympathetic and parasympathetic activity to be coupled. Your body is constantly regulating its environment, and when that’s the case, it means you have higher heart rate variability. We measure heart rate variability 24/7. It was one of the key innovations in founding the company. I did all this medical research when I was a student at Harvard, and heart rate variability jumped off the page to me because there was really interesting research on it, but it couldn’t be measured 24/7. That’s part of where WHOOP was born.

Anyway, heart rate variability is something we use for stress monitoring and for our recovery score. We baseline everyone on WHOOP, and then we’re able to show you every day whether you’re within your baseline, a little higher, or a little lower. When you look at trends over years, you start to get a sense of whether someone is getting healthier over time or less healthy. It’s a really important longevity indicator.

Typically speaking, as you get older, your heart rate variability drops. People in their 20s will have heart rate variability anywhere between 80 and 100 on average. In their 30s, they start to drop to 70. In their 40s, they start dropping to 50. In their 50s and 60s, all of a sudden they’re in the 30s and below. If you can fight that trend and keep your heart rate variability flat over the years, that’s a sign of good fitness and good longevity.

Anyway, back to the story I was telling you: this individual had a very steady heart rate variability within a specific range. They were a healthy person and had a heart rate variability of about 100, and then it suddenly dropped to 50 for a period of time. They went in and got all these tests. He turned out to have testicular cancer.

Oh, wow.

And so—

Was it previously known that HRV would in some way be a lead indicator for testicular cancer?

I don’t think so. That’s what’s so fascinating about this moment in time: we’ve never had this much data on the human body continuously. One of the principles behind founding WHOOP was 24/7 data. It’s why we have a 14-day battery life now, and why we invented a charger that you slide onto your WHOOP.

I was about to say, these are super important. When you first told me about this on This Week in Startups, I was like, “Well, I need—I want to see how many steps I’ve done and the time. It makes no sense.” And you were like, “Trust me, JCal, there’s a reason for this.” Now that I’ve used it, it turns out you’re absolutely right.

The only time I’ve really stopped using this over the past couple of years is when I lost it and had to order a new one. I broke my streak, which was a bummer, but it is what it is. It’s just a number. You can wear it in the shower and in the bath, and you should. It turns out a warm bath is super great for my recovery and my sleep, for whatever reason. We’ll get to journals in a minute.

You never have to take it off, and you can slide on the battery charger. So you can have essentially the opposite experience I had with my Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was annoying because I’d get alerts for things I’d installed 2 years ago, and it was constantly bothering me. People think you’re rude when you look at the watch, and then the battery dies. I think I might have gotten to 24, 36, or 48 hours a couple of times, but it’s a terrible experience.

With this, I’ve made it 10 days, 14 days, no problem. I bought 3 battery chargers. I keep one in my desk, one by the bedside, and one in my travel bag. These things aren’t expensive. That’s a key to it as well, I think: the amount people wear these.

3. WHOOP's AI Coach, Journal Insights & GLP-1 Tracking

On average, a WHOOP member wears WHOOP 23.6 hours a day. As a consequence, we have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. It’s one of the largest health data sets in the world. With the advent of AI and what you can do with large data sets, it’s a really exciting time to be working in this space.

Do all the AI companies, like the frontier models, want to buy this data from you in aggregate?

Is that a huge business for you guys eventually? How do you think about that, or building your own models?

Yeah, today we’re building our own models—foundational models within the company that are essentially training on top of this data.

So, you’re using open-source models, or you’re part of—

We’re developing our own models. And what’s amazing is you’ve got this huge physiological data set, but now you’ve also got other data sets, right? People are uploading their blood tests, doing Advanced Labs through WHOOP, and uploading medical records. 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 could give someone a very targeted, “Hey, we think you have high cortisol. You should get this one test.” It gets super targeted, which is exciting.

Which 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 are the possibilities.” That’s super fascinating. So you see your business in the future as this AI assistant? You added an AI assistant to the product less than 6 months ago. I’m addicted to it now.

Yeah.

And you have these ongoing conversations. It logs the conversations. I’ll be candid: at the start, it was pretty dumb. You could talk to it and be like, “Yes, you had this rate.” “Okay, thanks for that rate.” Now it’s gotten a bit more sophisticated, because when I tell it, “I’m in Japan; you didn’t record my sleep,” it’s like, “Oh, okay, here’s what’s happening.” It actually understands the product. 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, or where the opportunities are to add more features. I was constantly struggling with changing time zones and whether my sleep was getting recorded properly so I could get my recovery. Then I started asking, and it prompted me: “Hey, by the way, when are you leaving for Japan?” I gave it my flight and told it when I’d land. It said, “You should sleep in the first half, and then not go to bed when you get to Japan. Don’t have caffeine at this time.” Did somebody in the company explicitly start working on time-zone changes, or did it learn that and infer it? Did you get specific about that, and how are you using the AI coach?

We spun up a team on travel specifically because it’s such a popular use case for a lot of our members. Our origins were with athletes, but now we’ve got this wide audience of aspiring people. I’d say that’s really who WHOOP is targeting: the aspiring. That could be a great athlete, someone who’s fit, but it could also just be someone who wants to have more energy for their family, their job, and their life hobbies.

That’s right. And wants to live longer, right?

Yeah. Live longer.

The AI coach is a big part of that and a big part of our future. 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%

I’d say it’s like a 7.5 right now—7.5 out of 10. I think there’s so much potential for it.

As long as it’s good enough for you to be engaging with it, it’s just going to keep getting better with time. We’re getting better at that, too. One thing that’s really interesting, back to these data sets: there’s the physiological data from the sensor, then the advanced labs and blood testing, and the medical records coming in. But there’s another very important piece of data, which is all sorts of user feedback, like the journal itself. Just over 50% of our members journal every day.

This is a good point to explain what the journal is. I’m sorry that I keep explaining your features, but I’m so passionate about the product, as you can hear.

No, you’re doing great. The WHOOP Journal is essentially 100-plus different behaviors, lifestyle decisions, supplements, drugs—you name it—that someone might want to log. Popular things people log every day are: Did I drink alcohol last night? Was I hydrated? Did I travel? Did I meditate? Was I happy? Was I sad? Was I stressed? All of this anecdotal information also builds on these data sets. If you wanted to come up with an algorithm for predicting whether someone would be happy, you’d need a fair amount of data from them on their overall mood, as an example. We’re excited about bringing all these different types of data sets together. It’s one thing we feel uniquely positioned to do, because not that many companies have people opening their app 8 times a day and 80% of their member base interacting with the AI.

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The journal was a major unlock for me. Here’s the user perspective, since we’re doing a whole user session here. What’s really interesting about it is that you get these behavioral insights. I think you get into a behavioral insight when you’ve used it 10 times: 5 yeses, 5 nos. If you’re doing creatine, somebody’s paying attention at WHOOP. How many people are working over there now?

1,200.

Whoa. That’s grown significantly.

Yeah, pretty crazy.

Yeah, wow. When you pull up your behavioral insights in the morning, it prompts you, because that’s when everybody opens the app to check their sleep score and recovery. After those 5 yeses and 5 nos, you can start to figure out what impact that behavior has on recovery. It turns out a warm bath helps my recovery by 7%. A warm bath was never my thing. I hate baths. I have no interest in hanging out in a bath. I’m a guy from Brooklyn; it feels weird to be in a bath with candles.

Any salts in the bath? Are you adding fragrance?

I did add—yes, you got me. I’m adding salts to the bath. That’s now tracked, too.

It helps.

It helps. Warm bath: plus 7% on my recovery. Have you ever heard of something like that?

That’s very high as a response. For folks who are trying to figure out what we’re talking about, when you log these things, WHOOP tells you what’s positively or negatively affecting your recovery score. A big wake-up call for a lot of people ends up being alcohol, because it shows you that alcohol has a hugely negative effect—

Disastrous.

—on your recovery.

It’s poison. I don’t drink, so I never even log it. You have a couple of beverages now and again, Will. I feel like I’ve got a good relationship with alcohol, although it’s got a negative 9% for me. So I’m looking at my behavioral insights. Here’s a sneaky one for everyone—

Wait, have you considered having that drink while you’re in the warm bath?

Yeah, right. Maybe I should start adding more baths. I do steam rooms and cold plunges. Those are more neutral, but I like the way they make me feel. There’s a lot of longevity research on sauna use and contrast therapy. Second to alcohol for being the most negative for me is a late meal.

Eating within 3 hours of bedtime is really detrimental to your sleep and recovery. We’ve seen that across the entire WHOOP population. It’s because your body is still digesting during those first few hours you’re in bed.

And as a consequence, you’re not getting quality sleep. So you get high stress during sleep, I would assume.

Yeah, that whole high-stress thing.

Here’s mine. For some reason, vitamin D is minus 3%. I don’t know if that’s accurate or not, but I was taking some vitamin D. Maybe that’s a false positive. There’s some correlation here that we’re not seeing yet.

It could be that the days you took it were days you were traveling, or there could be something else going on.

That’s a great idea. I’m seeing vitamin D minus 3%. Does that make sense? What could be going on?

You can ask WHOOP that.

Okay, this is a modest difference and it’s a correlation, not evidence, that vitamin D caused the change. Your recent recovery has ranged from 27% to 87%, but you haven’t logged vitamin D in this 14-day stretch, so there’s no recent comparison. Okay, so I’ve got a little more work to do on that one.

But plus 5 strain is minus 5 on recovery. That makes total sense.

Yeah. When you work out, your body needs to recover.

Plus 1% of the day in the high-stress zone, minus 9% on recovery. So, looking at my temperature, what does the stress score come from? Temperature, heart rate, HRV?

Primarily HRV, but it’s also using other sensing.

Got it. Is that your special sauce there—the proprietary nature of the stress score?

The stress score itself is something that we invented. Of course, we based it on physiological research. I would say one of the hard things about this space is figuring out how to take credible medical research, a lot of data, and great design. At the end of the day, you have to design something that people want to look at.

There’s a lot of science to it, but there’s also art to it. I think it’s something WHOOP has been very good at. The recovery score, and now our healthspan score, are the most screenshotted pages in the app.

Makes total sense. When you share that, it shows consistent bedtime plus 4, caffeine plus 4, creatine plus 4, morning sunlight plus 3. Now that I have this, I also do some meditation with the Calm app, with Waking Up, or on my own. I don’t have enough data in there yet because I keep forgetting to log it.

But it does log my skiing. I use Slopes.

Yeah.

So, you’re a skier, Will, or no?

I ski, but it sounds like you’re using an app for skiing, so my sense is you ski more than I do.

I mean, I try to get to 30 or 40 days a year, but for 2 hours a day. It’s executive skiing, CEO skiing, if you catch my drift. I do a podcast before, then ski a little more.

You’re doing it in Japan.

I do 5 to 10 days in Japan, ideally. The rest are at my ski house.

That’s elite skiing.

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 in as an activity. The activity tracker is really great. I do these long walks in Japan or, when I’m in New York, I love to go on long walks. At my age, long walks, rucking, and farmer’s walks are like the key to longevity, I’m told.

The great thing is now it knows that and it’s making a training program for me around it. I told the AI my goal is not to get injured and to ski better, and these are the exercises I know are going to help. The AI now understands my goals, kind of coaches me, and sets up plans.

Lo and behold, one of the things I think I had asked you for, maybe in a DM somewhere on Twitter or something: I take a GLP-1, so I started tracking it. I take a light GLP-1. I lost 43 pounds on it.

Look at that, man. That’s awesome.

Well, yeah. That makes a difference. When you go from 213 to 170, skiing, sleeping, everything. I wish I’d had WHOOP during that journey. Did your resting heart rate go down a lot?

I wasn’t fully on WHOOP for the majority of that, so it 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. You just released a GLP-1 tracker that has all the things you want to make sure you’re doing when you’re taking a GLP-1, including protein consumption. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that and how GLP-1s are making their way into the ecosystem here.

In general, in line with this theme of wanting to have a lot of data under the WHOOP umbrella so we can give you the right insights, if you’re taking a GLP-1, that’s a pretty meaningful shift in what’s going to happen for your body. One of the challenges with GLP-1s is that typically about 50% of the weight someone loses is fat and 50% is muscle. Sometimes people can end up quite frail, even though they’ve lost a considerable amount of weight.

It’s good for WHOOP to know that you’re on a GLP-1. 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 bodyweight, so you don’t end up losing that muscle. The appropriate diet, with protein, is also important. We’ve heard some anecdotal success around people taking creatine while they’re on GLP-1s.

We have all this data, and we take it very seriously. We want it to be secure and private. We’ve actually gone through the—

Yeah, I’m just mirroring my phone. Here’s my actual Whoop. You can see my resting heart rate and all that. I added my GLP-1 there, and it said, “You’ve got to get to 9,800 steps now. You’ve got to do 2 strength activities a week, hydration 7 days a week, protein,” and then just check off that you took your GLP-1. It took me through a little script to ask how often I take it, et cetera.

And 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?

Yeah, absolutely. I’m at 300 days on my streak here. The other thing you added is badges, a little more like Peloton, which has an insane number of badges. You get to see where you’re at. I’m a rucking machine. I’m in the top 1% of people doing rucking and farmer’s walks, so that’s a little competitive thing.

4. WHOOP vs. the FDA & Competitor Wearables

Yeah, there you go. You’ve got to maintain that now. You’ve got to keep rucking every day.

Okay, let’s talk about you and your relationship with the FDA. There’s been a little controversy here, and it’s been covered over and over again. These devices, I guess, aren’t medical devices. Maybe you could explain how the FDA looks at you versus other medical devices and how that’s changed over time.

You have Blood Pressure Insights, BPI, and you launched it. The FDA was a little bit like, “Hey, we’re not happy here.” Then you have the ECG heart screening stuff, and all of these devices, whether it’s my Apple Watch—

Medically cleared.

—and that’s medically cleared. When you do these things, you always get this disclaimer: “Listen, we’re not in the heart attack business.” When I had those things, it was up to me or a doctor to interpret them.

Talk to me about the tension and how it’s been going across the 2 administrations, because now you’ve lived through Trump. President Trump is all in on disrupting, and he put a Kennedy in there to do that. He’s a bit of a disruptor himself, and he’s very pro-business. Biden was maybe a little more regulation, less pro-business—definitively less pro-business—but I don’t know how that happened in the medical space. So, talk to me. It’s not a politics show, but you’re all running into regulation now.

Just to say, it’s been a long process for Whoop in working with the FDA. We’ve worked with them in a lot of different contexts, which I’ll talk about in a second. The history of very innovative technology with somewhat dated regulatory policies is one that has controversy from time to time. So, I’m not surprised we’ve had some challenges or disagreements along the way, but I’m actually really happy with our relationship with the FDA today.

Four years ago, I really wanted to be able to do blood pressure monitoring. Historically, you needed a cuff for that, and it was a pretty difficult signal-processing problem. There was no product on the market that could accurately measure blood pressure from the wrist, so we set out to see if we could do it.

One way we collected a huge dataset was through a collaboration with our members. We asked members if they wanted to participate in a stress, sleep, and blood pressure study, and 70,000 people enrolled. Think about the ability to generate studies at huge scale, fast. People were uploading their blood pressure readings every single day for a number of weeks. That allowed us to build a pretty powerful dataset on blood pressure monitoring and train it alongside all the physiological data we were already collecting.

Fast-forward, and we get to a period where all of a sudden we’ve got a very powerful algorithm for measuring blood pressure. That’s one of the things we do very well at Whoop: we pick a hard physiological signal, then say we want to be able to measure it as accurately—or within similar accuracy—as a medical device. Then we look to bring that to consumers.

There was controversy around blood pressure monitoring before we launched because, historically, blood pressure had been under the category of physiological signals that needed to be a quote-unquote medical device. For some background, the FDA is really supposed to evaluate products that have a medical diagnosis. If you’re not providing a medical diagnosis, then it falls under a category called wellness. There’s a pretty good history for this with heart-rate monitoring, for example: 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 AFib detection or heart attack prediction, that needs to be regulated. In the past, the FDA had a pretty clear distinction for heart rate: this is wellness, this is medical. With blood pressure, they said that if you’re measuring blood pressure, it has to be medical.

The problem with that is there’s an avalanche of research supporting that, not surprisingly, blood pressure affects your stress, your sleep, and your overall well-being. We felt like there was a pretty clear lane for us to introduce a blood pressure feature as a wellness feature, so we launched it. The FDA came back and said they felt it needed to be regulated. They actually sent us a warning letter, and there was a big, quite public disagreement about it.

But we stuck to our guns, and I ultimately really believe in the way we approached it. Through a long process, the FDA has since updated its guidelines—I think based on our case, but also on feedback from the industry—to support the idea that blood pressure can have wellness applications. Our blood pressure insights feature is still available for consumers.

We have these conversations with the FDA across a lot of different categories. WHOOP also has FDA medical clearances. Our ECG feature, where you can do an ECG from your wrist by putting your fingers on the WHOOP, is an FDA-cleared 510(k) product. In some cases, we go through clinical trials to get FDA approval. In other cases, we want to bring a product to market faster and believe it’s a wellness application. That’s a healthy process for innovative companies like WHOOP to pursue with the FDA.

Why don’t you guys— I know you have some sort of integration with this Omron blood pressure cuff. I was looking it up. Why don’t you make your own blood pressure cuff? We’re at a $10 billion valuation here. We’ve got 4 million members, $250 on average a year, let’s say, or a billion in revenue. Let’s just buy Omron or get into the blood pressure cuff business and the scale business while we’re at it.

I trust the brand. I just want the WHOOP scale. I want you to be the one who puts the features in. I want you to control it and make it work. I don’t want to have to go through Apple Health and the back door to get my Fitbit scale uploaded. I just want a WHOOP-branded blood pressure cuff and a WHOOP-branded scale.

I appreciate you saying that. In a lot of categories, we debate whether we want to build something ourselves, partner with someone, or make an acquisition. We’ve often defaulted to either building or acquiring versus partnering.

In the case of blood pressure cuffs, we felt like that was fairly commoditized technology, and there’s medical efficacy there. If people want to calibrate their WHOOP with a cuff to set it up, WHOOP can then measure blood pressure without the cuff. At the end of the day, we kind of want to replace the cuff, so that feels like a fairly healthy system.

It’s also worth saying that we feel like we’ve earned the right to accumulate all this data because we have very strong data policies. We do not sell data. You are not the product, Jason. The membership is the product.

And that’s a huge distinction in this space, especially when you have big technology companies. Apple, let’s just call it what it is. You may not want to say it, but I can: they make their money advertising. Apple’s a pretty good steward of data, I’ll give them that, but they make it on really expensive hardware. So you’re unique in both cases in terms of your business model. You’re in our corner, which I love.

Apple’s going to make a competitor, huh? They know their watch kind of sucks and their software sucks. Apple Health is terrible.

The Apple Watch is the most successful smartwatch in the world. In terms of the category they built to own, I think they’ve been successful. I think it’s an important product for them. It’s a product that does a lot of things. If you want text messages and emails and to be able to call—

Too much. But they’re going to make you worry, keep you up at night, that they’re going to make a WHOOP competitor.

I have enormous respect for Apple. I think they’re one of the best in the world at hardware and software. A lot of companies have entered our space and had challenges with the screenless wearable or other wearable products. It’s interesting: 10 years ago, there were more competitive products in the market than there are today.

That’s true, actually. Yeah, you had a lot of people trying this.

People forget the whole Jawbone and Fitbit era. There was a whole class of products from Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour.

5. Lightning Round & LeBron James becomes a WHOOP Ambassador

Yeah. I mean, 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.

Lightning round. Lightning round with Will.

Yeah.

You’ve 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 the science and technology?

I think Huberman has 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 or cold shower? Do they make a difference?

I’ll say cold shower because it’s very accessible and it’s something people can do every day. Even if you do it for 30 or 60 seconds, you’re going to feel a lot better.

Yeah, wakes you up. Red 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. Okay, Zone 2 cardio. This is for our age. I think you’re 40 now, Will. Are you 40 yet?

37.

37. All right, I’ll round you up to 40. I’ll round myself down to 50. Zone 2 cardio or lifting? What do you think? You’ve got to pick one for my age and for your age.

I think this depends a lot on what someone’s goals are. But in general, I think everyone should be lifting more weights. If they have an hour to exercise, they should spend more time lifting and less time on an elliptical.

Love it. Because your muscle mass is such an important test for longevity. The alarm in WHOOP is quite sophisticated, Will. You can wake up based on your recovery or sleep score. So, the recovery score, the sleep score, or a hard 6:00 a.m. alarm to get your sleep consistency—which one? Pick one of the three.

If 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. Coffee first thing in the morning or wait 90 minutes? 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: strength score, sleep score, recovery score. Which one of the big three do you obsess over most? You can’t say they’re all your children and you love them all equally.

Recovery. I wake up every morning waiting to see the color of that dial.

I love it. All 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 that, too. I love that product. Those are my two favorite health products. At the time of this recording, you have a little announcement about the king. No, not President Trump. Gotcha—not King Trump, but LeBron James, now playing for the Philadelphia 76ers. Big announcement.

We’re announcing today that LeBron James is now a global ambassador for WHOOP. He’s been on WHOOP, interestingly, for 11 years, and we never had any formal relationship with him. We loved that he wore the product. Frankly, it was really important in the early days that he wore it, because he was one of the first 100 people ever to wear it. It was incredibly validating that this incredible athlete was willing to try a technology from an unknown company called WHOOP, and it gave us a lot of hope that we were on to something.

It’s been extraordinary to see his career over two decades-plus. He’s really the pinnacle of performance and longevity. He joins a roster of ambassadors like Cristiano Ronaldo, Patrick Mahomes, Lewis Hamilton, Aryna Sabalenka, and Nelly Korda. It’s a great group.

You had a philosophy early on—we talked about this in our previous discussions—that you weren’t going to pay athletes to wear it or beg them to wear it, because they’re the customers. They’re the ICP, the ideal customer profile. Is this a change in thinking, or is it a unique, one-of-one case? He’s been on the product for 11 years without a formal relationship, and he’s in that era now where he’s going to retire in a couple of years. He’s probably going to go into this Kobe-Shaq post-playing era where he gets deep into business.

So, what’s the thinking here? How do you think about athletes at large?

In general, if your business is pre-marketing, so to speak—if you’re not at a stage where you’re doing big television advertisements and so on and so forth—you should be really careful paying anyone to use your product. You want people to love your product authentically. In our case, it just so happened that early on, our target market was professional athletes, so we needed them to love the product organically.

And by the way, because you have to wear it 24/7, there’s no amount of money I’m going to be able to pay an athlete to wear something 24/7 if they don’t like it.

Right?

So, on the flip side, it was like, well, if it actually works and it’s measuring their sleep and recovery, and they play better, they should want to pay for it. That was our attitude for a long time. We had a number of these individuals who are best-in-class in their sport and global people who wanted to invest in the company because they loved it so much.

Amazing.

And from there, we also developed relationships where we could use their name, image, and likeness, which has a value associated with it.

Heck yes.

We recognize that value and use it for advertising. They’ve been amazing partnerships, and I’m very grateful that LeBron James is part of the WHOOP roster.

Wait, are the players allowed to wear these during games?

That’s something the NBA is still looking at.

Got it. Yeah, because they’re not allowed to wear jewelry. They have to take all that off because of injuries. But they could put it on an armband. They could embed it in a wrap. Maybe some of them have snuck it onto the court. Who 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.

I think it was in part because the Australian Open didn’t know what they were wearing, but they were wearing it under their armbands and everything else. The ITF, the International Tennis Federation, had actually approved WHOOP to be worn in matches. The Australian Open was kind of out of line, and then the other majors came forward saying that wearables can be worn. 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. I don’t think it’s a safety thing if you’re wrapping it around your armband or something like that.

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, we’d love to have WHOOP involved. It’d be terrible if something happened to an athlete wearing one. But if you were to put a logo behind them for $10 million, we might have a different opinion.”

You know all the ins and outs. It’s not my first time at this rodeo. I know a shakedown when I hear it.

How are things for you in early-stage venture? Are you starting to lead these billion-dollar seed rounds, or are you staying true to the accelerator model?

Nobody wants to do year-zero work, so I’m leaning into that.

Great. But then, at the end, we have this syndicate, and we have 4,000 members in it. We would syndicate our early-stage seed deals: “Hey, if you want to get involved in this, Jake House is 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 at the syndicate this year. Thanks for asking.

Great.

We did Zipline. We did ICON Homes, 3D-printed homes. These are all billion-dollar companies, $5 billion companies in fast-growing spaces. When I know the founder, the CFO gives their approval, because you have to deal with this, right? People doing off-the-books transactions and SPVs and buying out early employees and other early investors. You have to deal with some of this SPV madness.

I’ll say this: it’s complicated when your business is failing, and it’s complicated when your business is winning. It’s always complicated. My advice to everybody with these SPVs, off-the-books transactions, whatever, is just to build a relationship with the CFO of the company and get their blessing. Let them know what you’re doing. If they really don’t want you to do it, you’re going to have to accept that, right? It’s their company. I don’t like this idea of going behind the company’s back.

The other thing to be wary of is these secondary brokers who—

They claim they’ve got shares from someone at a price.

Yes. They go around saying that, but they’re really just trying to create a market. And so—

Happens to me all the time.

Yeah.

Because I’m on the board of a company that’s worth a couple billion dollars, and they come to me. I say, “Okay, great. Who’s it with?” I’m on the board of the company, so I’ve got to talk to the CFO, and I can help coordinate with you. Then crickets, and I’m like, “Hmm, they’re fishing.” It’s always a fishing expedition.

This thing didn’t really exist 10 or 15 years ago. The only time I ever saw it was Facebook, and then Uber, when Masayoshi Son came in. He was like, “Hey, guys, I need you to sell some of these, or I’m going to invest in Lyft.” 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.”

What a run that business has had. But congrats.

Yeah. Right now, it’s trading at an all-time low P/E, and they’re surging. It’s really weird to watch what’s happening—the anti-AI trade. DoorDash, Uber, Figma, a lot of these companies are getting taken to the woodshed a bit, and some of them are just 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, Will. Love the product.

I’m going all in.