Will Ahmed - Optimizing Human Performance – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP. 39]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. Founder's Field Guide is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all of our podcasts including edited transcripts, show notes and resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:41)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:06)
My guest today is Will Ahmed, founder of fitness wearable company, Whoop. What started as a business plan in 2011 has evolved into the 24-7 health tracking device you'll often see on athletes across professional sports. During our conversation, Will and I discussed how his own backstory ties into the founding of Whoop, the key design decisions they made in the ultra-competitive wearables market, and how the company grew slowly before inflecting in recent years.
Will shares some awesome details on health tracking and what it might look like in the future as a preventative tool rather than simply a tracking tool. I hope you enjoyed this great conversation with Will Ahmed.
So Will, maybe the right place to start here is the actual founding story of Whoop itself. This is kind of one of the classic X number of years to become an overnight success stories. I love founding stories of businesses, like why you started it, what motivated you. Maybe you could begin by telling us that founding story.

**Will Ahmed** (3:00)
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the origin for Whoop came from, I think my own passion as being an athlete, just always being into sports and exercise, generally speaking. I was someone who used to play really a dozen different sports growing up. And I ultimately went on to play squash at Harvard and the experience of being a college athlete proved to me that I knew very little about how I trained or how my body was getting fitter, whether I was prepared for a match or a game. And so that just somewhat naturally led me down a rabbit hole of physiology research. I was someone who used to over train where you get fitter and fitter and then you sort of fall off a cliff. It's the ultimate betrayal in sports along with getting injured. And so I got interested in what could I do personally to prevent over training? What could I measure about my body?
What does it mean to train optimally? How did rest and recovery play a role in performance or in training?
And I read something like 500 medical papers while I was an undergrad at Harvard. And what was interesting about that physiology research is that there were indeed metrics that you could measure that could give you a real sense for your body and the status of your body.
And there were a couple observations I made about those metrics. One, those metrics typically required obtrusive, and in my opinion, antiquated equipment to measure them.
And two, they weren't all revolved around exercise. There was a real focus, I think, this would have been around 2010, you could say while I was doing some of this research, I was maybe a 19 years old college student. And there was a real focus on just exercise and more is more. Could you do a two a day? Could you do a three a day? And yet the metrics that I found fascinating often were being taken outside of exercise or while you're sleeping or while you're even at rest. And so that I thought was quite interesting. And I was surprised that no one was really talking about it. And so from there, I took a class at, I believe it was MIT's business school that was how do you take an idea and turn it into a business plan, which was really appropriate need for me at that time. Cause I really didn't know how to start a company. I had worked a little bit in finance after my freshman year, I worked at a hedge fund. After my sophomore year, I worked at a great investment bank called Allen and Company. After my junior year, I worked at a great private equity firm called Lindsay Goldberg. And I think internships are great at showing you what you may not necessarily want to do, as much as showing you what you do want to do. And so I got the sense that finance wasn't going to be the right path for me. And separately, all I could think about was this idea for measuring the human body.