WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed: How I Built A $3.6 BILLION Company

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
How big is the business now? You guys have raised what, like $400 million?

**Will Ahmed** (0:04)
Yeah, we've raised $400 million. We last raised capital at $3.6 billion valuation. I think there's still a lot of potential for health monitoring. I think if you fast forward 10 years, I think a large percentage of the world's population will be wearing a continuous health monitor and it'll hook into everything that you do as it relates to the health care system and doctors.
And so, yeah, I'm very bullish on the opportunity and the space.

**Sam Parr** (0:43)
Do you know what you're getting into, or what?

**Will Ahmed** (0:45)
I've read the briefing, and I'm a big fan of the podcast, so ready for you.

**Sam Parr** (0:51)
All right, so the pod, it's called My First Million. It's kind of known for, Shaan and I had both started a handful of companies and sold a few of them. And people like the pod because we brainstorm and we dive deep on different companies, and we do business breakdowns, things like that.
But we'll spend a little bit of time getting to know you because you've done a lot of amazing things. Well, I know one huge amazing thing that you've done, but I bet you there's a lot more amazing things that you've done. But we'll hear a little bit more about your background and then we'll wanna spend time kind of diving deep on different opportunities in your industry. But first, do you wanna say your 30 second spiel of who you are and the story of how you got there?

**Will Ahmed** (1:33)
Yeah, absolutely.
So, Will Ahmed, I grew up on North Shore of Long Island. As a kid, I was kind of always into the sports and exercise. I ended up going to Harvard and playing squash in school and I was a competitive college athlete. And I felt like I didn't really know what I was doing to my body while I was training as an athlete. So that got me very interested in physiology. Did a ton of physiology research as a student. I read something like 500 medical papers and I started to conceive of this idea of how you could continuously measure the human body.
And the idea was initially around athletic performance, but broadly, I felt like there'd be ways to continuously measure the human body for all sorts of health implications. And what became as a sort of a curiosity ultimately turned into a very long research paper that I wrote and then ultimately founding a company. This would have been when I was 21, 22 years old as a senior at Harvard. And then for the last 10 plus years or so, I've been building this business.
The business, Whoop, builds wearable technology really to improve people's health. We started with the best athletes in the world and over time have grown to work with a large consumer population. And it's a really exciting time to be building that technology.

**Shaan Puri** (3:01)
Okay, so yeah, you're the CEO and founder of Whoop. If people have seen it, it's a Whoop band.
You have to have seen it on people's wrist. But you said something like we started with high end athletes. I think I read something like this, that is this right, that Lebron and Michael Phelps were two of the first hundred customers or users of Whoop? Is that real? And how did that happen?

**Will Ahmed** (3:24)
That is real. And this would have been around 2014, 2015 So, we spent about two to three years really on the initial V1 of Whoop.
And, you know, I wanted to start with the best athletes in the world and really for two reasons. The first was that we were bringing sleep and recovery technology to market for the first time. And I felt like professional athletes who, you know, have to perform on a daily basis should really understand how they're recovering. That was one of the insights to starting the business.
And then second of all, if we could get the world's best athletes to wear a whoop and organically like it, then we could build a whole brand around performance that ultimately could scale to consumers. And I grew up very inspired by brands like Nike and the Jordan brand and just how, oh, like a swash on something could make the whole product feel completely different independent from anything else about the product, just because of the storytelling behind it or the brand behind it. So I was interested in how health monitoring could have a brand to it. And so that was really the thesis for targeting professional athletes.