Whoop Founder: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company & BEAT Apple! Will Ahmed | E189

So, two of our first 100 users were Lebron James and Michael Phelps. (dramatic music)

Fucking hell.

A $3.6 billion company... Wearable Health & Fitness Coach.

The founder of Whoop.

Will Ahmed. You know, Nike and Apple and a dozen other companies were entering the space, but, uh, when it comes to health monitoring, we're the best game in town. That really came from an insane level of focus in the beginning on what we were trying to solve. One of the reasons Whoop has been successful is there were a lot of counterintuitive decisions along that journey. One obvious one is that-

Interesting. I shall steal that.

It's worth emphasizing for your audience why that matters. So, there was a phase in building Whoop where it was so much about the next milestone that I was running almost exclusively on, like, a dopamine engine. If the company has a great day, you're feeling like a rocket ship, and if Whoop was failing, I was failing.

What's the personal toll on you in those moments that people don't see?

I was super stressed out, I was drinking too much, and I remember I was driving my car, and I'm on the highway, and all of a sudden, it's like your peripheral vision, like, starts narrowing on you, and you feel your fingers, and they're, like, numb. I actually drove myself to the hospital, and they do, um, you know, all these analysis on me, and, like, turns out I had a-

Before this episode begins, I just wanna say a huge thank you to all of our new subscribers. 74% of you that watch this channel didn't subscribe before, and we're now down to about 71%, so that helps us in a number of ways that are quite hard to explain, but simply, the bigger the channel gets, the bigger the guests get. So, if you haven't yet subscribed to The Diary of a CEO, if I could have any favors from you, if you've ever watched this show and enjoyed it, it's just to- to please hit the subscribe button. Without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. (upbeat music) Will, as you look back on your- your life and you connect the dots that led you to- to do what you've done now with Whoop and your professional life, um, what are those dots?

Well, I- I grew up on, uh, the North Shore of Long Island. Um, I was always into sports and exercise. I was a super active kid. Uh, my parents are very different. My dad's an Egyptian immigrant, uh, very street smart, charismatic, came to this country with very little, rose the ranks in finance over time. My mom, uh, very analytical, very book smart, and- and watching how they approached life, I think, was a fascinating way to grow up 'cause they had very different, uh, tool sets to solve problems. And, uh, I was always playing sports, I was always exercising, and that eventually led my way to- to Harvard, and, uh, and so I was a college athlete. I got, um, recruited to play squash at Harvard, and over the course of my time there, uh, got very fascinated by how I could better understand my body, how I could, uh, understand what it meant to train optimally, how I could prevent overtraining, which was a- a problem that I had, uh, how I could really, uh, understand the other 20 hours of the day when you weren't exercising. And so that took me down this rabbit hole of physiology research, which- which we can get into, but I read hundreds of medical papers while I was, uh, in school, and then ultimately wrote a paper myself around how to continuously measure the human body, and then over the course of my time, uh, at Harvard, built up the confidence to- to start a company, which was a fairly crazy thing, looking back on it. And for the last 10 years, I've been building this company called Whoop.