Will Ahmed
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All-In · WHOOP CEO, Will Ahmed: 50B Hours of Health Data, a 4 Million…
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What Does the WHOOP AI Coach Do?
Will Ahmed says WHOOP stood up a travel team for its AI coach because travel is a common use, and the coach is a large part of the product's future after years of work. A Japan trip comes up in the conversation: sleep on the first half of the flight, and skip caffeine at a set time after landing. The audience he describes is aspiring people, a serious athlete, someone already fit, or someone who wants more energy for family, work, and a longer life.
The coach sits on more than the wrist sensor. Advanced labs, blood tests, and medical records come in beside the physiology, and the journal is the other large set. Just over 50 percent of members journal every day. The WHOOP Journal is 100 plus
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Why Did the FDA Send WHOOP a Warning Letter?
Will Ahmed says WHOOP is on good terms with the FDA now, after a long process and public disagreements. About four years before this conversation he wanted blood pressure from the wrist. A cuff was the usual tool, and no product then on the market measured blood pressure accurately from the wrist.
WHOOP asked members into a stress, sleep, and blood pressure study. 70,000 people enrolled and uploaded a reading every day for weeks, beside the data the band already collected. The team built an algorithm it wanted near medical-device accuracy and launched blood pressure insights as wellness, not as a diagnosis. The FDA, on this account, evaluates products that make a medical diagnosis. Heart-ra
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How Much Health Data Has WHOOP Collected?
Will Ahmed says the average WHOOP member wears the band 23.6 hours a day. Because it stays on almost all day, WHOOP has just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. He calls that collection one of the largest health data sets in the world.
Those hours are not a clinic visit. The band is on through the day and the night, so time on the wrist stacks across members into just over 50 billion hours. AI, and what a large data set makes possible, is why this is an exciting time to work in the field. The next question on the episode is whether frontier-model companies will want to buy that data in aggregate, or whether WHOOP should build on it itself.
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Why Did WHOOP Stop Charging $500 for the Band?
Will Ahmed says WHOOP launched to consumers in 2017 at a one-time fee of 500 bucks. It was a performance brand, known among top athletes and sports teams, and aimed at people who already trained. Over the next 12 months, buyers wore it for a long time, which is rare in wearables, where people usually stop. Not many people bought it. Strong wear and weak sales led WHOOP to lower the price of getting started, so more people could try it and the business could work if they stayed.
That shift brought growth in 2018 and 2019 and turned WHOOP from a hardware company into a recurring-revenue company, which Ahmed calls more attractive to investors. A subscription business watches the members it alr
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Why Did the Australian Open Pull Whoop Off Players?
Will Ahmed says a number of players at the Australian Open were asked to take Whoop off while they were playing, even though the International Tennis Federation had already approved Whoop to be worn in matches. He thinks the tournament acted in part because it did not know what the players were wearing. The bands were under armbands and other gear. With that approval already in place, the Australian Open was out of line.
The other tennis majors then came forward and said wearables can be worn. He describes a natural evolution of resisting the device and of safety checks. Organizers are right to want to stay restrictive about what can be worn in competition.
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Why Can Weight Loss Drugs Leave You Frail?
Will Ahmed says a GLP-1 is a meaningful shift for the body, and typically about 50% of the weight someone loses is fat and 50% is muscle. The muscle share is how people can sometimes end up quite frail even after losing a considerable amount of weight.
Knowing someone is on a GLP-1 lets Whoop push activity and a little strength training, even if it is only body weight, so the person does not end up losing weight. The right diet includes protein, and anecdotal success around creatine while on a GLP-1 is treated as super important.
Jason Calacanis added a GLP on a mirrored phone. The plan called for 9,800 steps, two strength activities a week, hydration, protein seven days a week, and a chec
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Can Whoop Flag a Biomarker Without Measuring It?
Will Ahmed says Whoop is building foundational models inside the company that train on Whoop health data, and the team is starting to see indications that physiological signals might show a biomarker is out of range without measuring the biomarker itself.
People upload blood tests, complete advanced labs through Whoop, and upload medical records next to the physiological data set. Whoop is developing its own models and also has open source models. A prompt could then tell someone the pattern looks like high cortisol and that one test is worth getting. The model would look across the combined data and raise a possible cortisol issue or list the possibilities, which makes the suggestion much
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What Is Heart Rate Variability?
Will Ahmed says heart rate variability is the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. More time variation between beats means the overall system is operating in a healthier way. It is a view into the autonomic nervous system, and the healthier pattern is sympathetic activity coupled with parasympathetic activity.
Sympathetic activation raises heart rate, blood pressure, and respiration. A thought like a lion in the room, exercise, or stress does it. Parasympathetic activity does the opposite and helps a person fall asleep. A long exhale is parasympathetic. Coupled together, the body keeps regulating its environment and heart rate variability measures higher.
He measured heart
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How Fast Did Whoop Membership Grow?
Will Ahmed says Whoop took about 12 years to reach a million members, then about 18 months to reach 2 million, about six months to reach 3 million, and expects to end the year around 4 million members.
Whoop builds wearable technology to improve performance and health. Building the company has taken 14 years. Whoop was founded in 2012. Becoming an overnight success took a very long time. About 12 years passed before membership hit a million. Another 18 months or so carried membership to 2 million. About six months later, membership reached 3 million.
The pace accelerated after the first million. The second million took about 18 months and the third million took about six months. Whoop expe