WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed: The Body as Data, Sleep Science & the Future of Healthcare
In a Nutshell
WHOOP founder Will Ahmed built a $10.1B company by shifting from episodic fitness tracking to continuous 24/7 body monitoring, solving his own overtraining problem with medical-grade wearable technology. The company's pivot to a membership model after 143 failed investor pitches created recurring revenue, leading to Medicare coverage for seniors who show 93% daily app engagement. Ahmed's core thesis is that AI will outperform doctors by analyzing combined biomarker data while sleep consistency represents the highest-impact health intervention available.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Christine Anderson, Global Head of Corporate Affairs at Blackstone, introduces the new weekly podcast "Inside Blackstone." The podcast provides listeners access to Blackstone's morning meetings (MMMs) and investment insights. Jon Gray, Blackstone's President and COO, participates in the discussions. The episode features Winfield Sickles' Economic Weather Report and an interview with WHOOP Founder and CEO Will Ahmed.
Jon Gray explains the importance of Monday morning meetings for investment process and culture. These meetings serve as pattern recognition exercises where investment groups share insights about emerging trends, demand shifts, and capital market changes. The meetings bring together all business groups to hear senior leadership thinking, leading to better decision making and investment returns.
Jon Gray discusses an upcoming presentation titled "Where's the Beef?" to investors representing approximately $39 trillion in capital. The presentation addresses the massive capital flowing into AI infrastructure and investor questions about returns. Blackstone has been a leader in AI infrastructure and sees compelling returns driven by productivity gains. The challenge lies in building new compute supply to meet demand.
Winfield Sickles reports that inflation, oil prices, and interest rates dominated markets ahead of the Fed meeting. Last week's CPI print was slightly above expectations, with markets pricing a 90% chance of a Fed hike. Energy pressures emerged with renewed Middle East tensions driving Brent above $100 per barrel. The 10-year US Treasury yield reached nearly 5%, its highest level since 2023.
Globally, 30-year yields hit multi-decade highs in Europe and all-time highs in Japan. The ECB raised rates 25 basis points. Despite higher costs of capital, underlying economic data shows broad-based growth. US earnings estimates have been revised higher for 21 consecutive weeks, the longest run in five years. Oracle delivered a record quarter with cloud infrastructure revenue surging over 120% year over year.
The labor market remains balanced with strong August payrolls (highest since March) and wage growth at its lowest year-over-year increase since 2021. Lower-income consumers show improved foot traffic at Blackstone Leisure and hospitality locations. US IPO volumes are up five times year over year through August. A key risk to monitor is growing legislative concern around AI potentially impacting the investment boom.
Will Ahmed provides thumbs up/down assessments on various wellness trends. Protein maxing receives neutral to slightly thumbs down. GLP-1 microdosing gets thumbs up due to obesity problems in the United States. Supplement stacking is viewed negatively. Creatine is considered hugely positive as one of the most studied supplements in history. NAD and peptides receive neutral ratings due to early data. Red light therapy, full-body MRIs, and hot cold therapy all receive positive assessments.
Ahmed notes that while he enjoys cold plunging, WHOOP data shows it should be limited to three times per week for optimal recovery benefits. Evidence indicates that cold plunging immediately after weightlifting may stunt muscle-building benefits.
Ahmed is the son of immigrants and an only child who grew up on Long Island playing sports. He became a college athlete at Harvard and developed a pattern of overtraining followed by crashing. This experience sparked his fascination with personal health data. He founded WHOOP at age 22, and the company is now valued at $10.1 billion.
WHOOP is a wearable device that continuously measures sleep, recovery, exercise, and overall health metrics. The device is designed to help users improve performance throughout life. Ahmed conceived the product based on his observation that computers moved from desks to laptops to pockets, and would eventually move to bodies with better health monitoring capabilities.
The key insight was that body monitoring should focus on the 20 hours outside of exercise rather than just the 2-4 hours of activity. This represented a gap between what the market thought it wanted and what it actually needed. The problem was understanding the body 24/7 rather than just during exercise periods.
To work with professional athletes, WHOOP needed medical-grade accuracy. The existing options were ECG machines (hospital-based, expensive, antiquated) and chest straps (invented in the 1980s). Sleep monitoring required PSG laboratory visits with multiple sensors and human observation. Ahmed's approach was to miniaturize medical-grade technology into a consumer-friendly form factor.
Ahmed emphasizes falling in love with the problem rather than the solution. Entrepreneurs should obsess over the problem rather than focusing on outcomes like making money. The focus should be on solving the problem and understanding the technology impact potential.
Ahmed conducted 143 investor meetings with no initial success. The company faced near-bankruptcy while trying to sell a screenless device competing against Nike, Apple, and Google. Multiple factors contributed to investor skepticism: Ahmed's inexperience with fundraising, the immature business, large competitors, and his young age.
After six years, WHOOP had strong engagement but low sales. The company pivoted to a membership model focused on retention and engagement rather than device sales. This created recurring revenue attractive to investors and generated a new growth spurt.
WHOOP is now available through Medicare for eligible beneficiaries at no cost. The program incentivizes innovative companies to drive health outcomes including medication adherence, blood pressure monitoring, increased sleep, and physical activity. Among WHOOP users over 65, 93% open the app daily, making them the most engaged demographic.
Four years ago, WHOOP launched Blood Pressure Insights as a wellness feature. The FDA initially raised concerns, arguing that blood pressure measurement required medical device classification. After extensive back-and-forth including a warning letter, WHOOP prevailed. The FDA subsequently changed its guidelines to reflect evolving technology. WHOOP maintains both wellness features (heart rate for exercise) and medically cleared features (ECG monitoring for AFib detection).
Ahmed predicts that previously siloed data sets will converge to reveal population-level patterns. AI will outperform human doctors in identifying correlations across biomarkers, heart rate signals, and medical records. This will create an avalanche of profound health insights.
In AI-enabled healthcare, data ownership is critical because AI capabilities will largely handle themselves. Large language models can explain information, while companies like WHOOP develop frontier AI trained on proprietary data. The magic happens when different data sources are combined.
WHOOP aims to avoid forcing consumers to choose between privacy and health outcomes. The company has achieved HIPAA compliance for data privacy and security standards.
Ahmed highlights systemic healthcare problems: 50% of Americans are hypertensive, 25% are pre-hypertensive, and 1 in 3 will become diabetic. US healthcare costs total $4.9 trillion. A member of Congress described the United States as "a healthcare company with a military," emphasizing the need for systemic change.
WHOOP data reveals interesting trends including latest bedtimes occurring in Middle Eastern cities (Dubai, Riyadh, Doha). Padel has become one of the fastest-growing activities in the United States after international popularity, following pickleball's trajectory.
WHOOP pays employees $100 bonuses for achieving over 85% sleep performance averages monthly. Slightly over half of employees achieve this target, reflecting the company culture around sleep importance.
Ahmed identifies sleep, particularly sleep consistency, as the closest equivalent to a magic pill. Going to bed and waking at consistent times provides physiological benefits even with shorter total sleep duration. Sleep is associated with muscle repair during slow-wave sleep and nearly every positive bodily signal.
Ahmed advises that starting a company is extremely difficult but possible. The key is obsession with solving a problem with the right motives. The United States provides the best environment for entrepreneurship. When facing difficulties, focus on making one good decision at a time and stacking positive choices.
The most challenging periods occur when things are going well rather than when struggling. During struggles, focus becomes intense, but success requires turning down optimism and maintaining paranoia.
Ahmed believes WHOOP should be valued as healthcare technology rather than fitness tracking. The market opportunity involves reshaping the healthcare industry through continuous health monitoring and data collection, representing a much larger opportunity than device sales volume.
The founder gets to dive deep into the organization and be disruptive at times. This allows breaking all the rules to make something happen with a "hell or high water" mentality to figure things out. WHOOP is an environment where people feel their hair is blown back a little bit, sometimes from the founder's doing and sometimes from the company's culture.
A wonderful quote describes the founder as having "high intensity, high humility." In the early days of WHOOP, the team tried to figure out what attributes worked well versus what led people to not last at the company. They realized successful people tended to have characteristics of high intensity and high humility.
High intensity is the drive within your job to accomplish things, to push, to try to figure out how you can be better at your craft. High humility is recognizing in that process that you're not going to have all the answers and need to work well with a team.
Interestingly, high intensity can often correlate with arrogance, and high humility can sometimes lead to people who are a little bit meek or not as driven. The combination of high intensity and high humility naturally narrows down the field when recruiting talent.
In the near future, an enormously high percentage of the population will be continuously wearing a health device. It will either coach people to be a healthier version of themselves, or it will be able to predict certain events including illness states, disease states, and heart attacks, providing notifications and processes for those predictions.
Most of WHOOP's value was created on the other side of something difficult. The hardest moments, when coming out of a problem or crisis, are when opportunities are identified and when it's recognized that something is being done wrong with a product or service that could be done better. This leads to the new thing.
The advice is to stay calm, stay positive, never give up. When starting a business, you may think it's going to be one thing, but it ends up something very different.
What AI is going to do is radically accelerate the drug discovery process. It will accelerate trials, and even earlier, determine what combination of drugs on a person with specific DNA is likely to have high success. The trial process still needs to be run through in the physical world, but the pace of innovation is going to accelerate. The best thing about AI is what it's going to do to healthcare.
Transformational gifts have been made to Brock Cancer Research. Much of genetic cancer research is about data - looking at somebody's DNA and their risks. Human beings can only compute so much, but AI is incredibly powerful and has unbelievable visualization techniques. AI will be able to identify things like ovarian cancer, which has always been very hard to detect, and thus save tons of lives.
An unexpected category of financial fitness influencer has emerged. Being able to reach people where they are in an authentic way is powerful. People can relate to running and traveling, and there's humanity about it. It's working for now, though at some point it may need to evolve to a new approach.
A sleep score of 81% was recorded. There's been resistance to sleep tracking because when traveling globally and getting bad sleep, it looks bad on the metrics. The preference is to be high achieving in everything. Sleep tracking will help maintain discipline, and sleep insight is super important.
Trying to do weight training as getting older, along with basic things: eat well, stay hydrated. Everyone's looking for some super drug, but it's these very basic things that will lead to higher scores.
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