But what were some of the findings that have come out of that, or do, do you know at this point?

Well, you know, some, some of the findings I think we're still, we're still uncovering and obviously working closely with Doug and, and they have a, an incredible operation there, by the way.

So if, if there are people or, or products, uh, in the room who are interested in [laughs] doing future analysis, I can plug Doug and, and his team.

Uh, you know, I...

For Whoop, like, what's really important is one, validating our product, I mean some of the things that Ru's talked about.

And then I think also on a broader level, what can we do to advance human knowledge in this category around physiology, around performance? Um, a lot of it for us is also trying to just like, you take all this data, but what's a user or a coach or an athlete gonna do with it? Like, how do you just simplify this to make it as smart and, and, you know, really as simple to use as possible? And so, you know, we've worked with some of the literally the best athletes in the world, and at the end of the day, they wanna know a color for what they should do that day, right? And so for us, it's, it's doing the hard work to crunch all this data, looking at correlations between, you know, recovery and in-game performance or minutes on the field or injuries and all these things, but then trying to d- pull that back and say, "Okay, what's like the one thing we can now tell this person based on all this data that we've collected?" And so working with the Core Performance Institute, we, you know, we're putting models together in that category.

Um, we, we conducted a study with Major League Baseball, uh, this past summer.

But, uh, what about the sort of the privacy issues when you're monitoring an athlete 24 hours a day to collect the sleep data and the recovery data that you're looking for?

Was there a turning point moment for you when all of a sudden it started to click and investors started to be more receptive?

Well, I'll say this.

I do think fundraising is a skill.

And like any skill, you have to get better at it.

And so it's easy to get, I think, kind of down on yourself over a lot of rejection.

Now, to be fair, it was probably part I wasn't that good at raising capital.

And it was also part that the business was pretty immature.

because they speak to the fact that people are catching on to the fact that this is something so much bigger.

So how does it go from an idea and a passion about physiology and about data and about just understanding the human body into a business? When did you decide that this could actually be not just a product, but a business that you could develop and later become CEO?

Well, I took a class at MIT, actually, where you go in with an idea and you come out with a business plan.

And so that was helpful.

It got me to sort of frame out what a go-to-market strategy could be and know what we'd actually need to be able to measure in order to be successful and how we might market the product what we might sell it for so i started to piece together in my head like what the business could be but you know the biggest challenge was two big challenges one was i needed to build a team and the other was i needed to build the technology And in the case of Whoop, building the technology was kind of an existential question.

It wasn't obvious that we were going to be able to build it.

It's not like I've got an idea for an app, we're just going to make the app.

It was really, oh, okay, well, can you actually measure all of these things from the wrist? We wanted to take ECG monitoring, which could do recovery.

What makes it like the place that founders and other people looking for investments should think about as they're going around the world looking for capital?

Mm-hmm.

And so however you can gather this data super accurately, have the data sets grow in nature, more sensing, more capabilities, more medical approvals, um, the better, and I think that's gonna continue to expand our TAM.

I think it's gonna continue to deliver deeper insights for our members.

So we're gonna be leaning in pretty heavily on research and development.

You're gonna see a lot of very powerful sensing coming from Whoop in, in the years to come.

Yeah.

And they're sort of generally frustrated with the tools that they've had, uh, to improve their health, and so that leads in different directions, peptides being part of it, supplements being part of it, uh, concierge doctors being part of it, uh, AI health coaching being part of it.

Uh, but broadly speaking, it's, it's, I think, good for Whoop that people wanna take more control of their health.

What I want to know is what is the next generation of Whoop look like from here? I mean, where do you go now?

In the last 12 months, I think we've done a good job building out Whoop really as a health platform.

As you know, our origins were in sports and performance.

And I started this company in 2012, so 14 years ago.

And over the last 14 years, we've really evolved from... sports and performance to you know general fitness to now a really broad-based consumer market with health very much so at the forefront and uh and we launched uh healthspan reach recently which uh of course is our internal metric for being able to tell our members how old they are uh physiologically and based on their behavior versus of course uh their chronological age and we've seen that become one of the most popular features now on Whoop.

And I think you don't have to look much further than what we've done recently to anticipate what's to come.

We're going to be leaning into more medical clearances, more sensing capabilities, more products and services broadly within health, our advanced labs capability, which is blood testing.

What do you think Aura's doing better than Whoop right now?

I mean, is there room in this space for two powerful companies or is this a winner take all scenario?

Well, thanks for having me on, Matt, and thanks for being a longtime Whoop member.

I appreciate that.

You know, if I actually just look back over the last decade, because I founded Whoop in 2012, so I've been building this company for 14 years, there's been an enormous number of players in the space over the years.

In the early days, you had big sports apparel brands, so you had the Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma crowd.

You then had entries from the tech market, so you had Microsoft and Google and Intel and Amazon, Meta, and so there's been a lot of players, I would say broadly, in the wearable space.

Today, there's actually maybe the fewest number of players that I've seen in the last five years, and yet the wearables market has grown enormously.

Do they stay? Do we stay? Are you retaining customers? Those that have 12-month subscriptions, are they going to 24? Are they renewing?

I mean, is there room in this space for two, um, powerful companies, or is this, you know, winner take all scenario?

Well, thanks for having me on, Matt, and thanks for being a longtime Whoop member.

I appreciate that.

You know, if I, if I actually just look back over the last decade, because I founded Whoop in 2012, so I've been building this company for 14 years, there's been an enormous number of players in the space over the years.

Um, in the early days, you had, you know, big wearable, um, or big sports apparel brands, excuse me, so you had the Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma crowd.

You then had entries from, um, the tech market, so you had Microsoft and Google and Intel and Amazon, um, Meta.

And so there's been a lot of players, I would say, broadly in the wearable space.

Do they stay? Do we stay? Are you, are you retaining customers? Those that have 12-month subscriptions, are they going to 24? Are they renewing?

Where did that idea come from to develop this technology?

Well, it was an idea that took a few years of nurturing and time to come together, and I, again, was always into sports and exercise.

I grew up playing sports.

I played squash in college, and squash is a pretty cardiovascular sport, and so I was somebody who used to train a lot, and I wasn't the most talented guy on the team, so I felt like I needed to be the fittest guy on the team, and I used to overtrain in college.

And the process of overtraining made me sort of question, what could I measure about my body to prevent this and to better understand this? And I did a lot of physiology research while I was a student.

I read hundreds of medical papers, and the process led me down this rabbit hole of looking at medical technology that was out in the world, and a lot of the medical technology was very antiquated, but it could measure interesting things.

So, for example, a, an electrocardiogram could measure heart rate variability, which was this, like, fascinating lens into your central nervous system, and, and how your body actually was recovering or resting, or how stressed your body was in any, you know, any given moment.

Talk to us a little bit about, like, what you think gives him the edge to be able to do something like that.

How long was the process of turning it from the prototype into say what ended up on LeBron's wrist?

That was probably like an 18-month process.

And the design process, looking back on it, was one of my favorite periods of Whoop or chapters of Whoop because— We were really deciding, what is it? Is it a bracelet? Is it a bracelet with a screen? Is it a watch? If it's a watch, does it do real-time heart rate and time? And well, does it do things from your phone? Does it do push notifications? Does it do other metrics? Can it tell you you're having a phone call? I mean, we were in a blank space.

We had figured out how to measure important health data.

But then we needed to ask this question of how does it live on your body? And the guiding principle that we kept coming back to was it needs to be in service of really good health data.

So like we still need to be able to collect great health data.

We don't want to make a decision that undermines that.

Was there anything in the space that gave you that hope when you felt a bit crushed by the rejection that actually it's a good idea or was this truly a world first in your eyes?

Tell me what that is.

Heart rate variability is the amount of time between successive beats of the heart.

So, if your heart is beating at 60 beats per minute, it's not beating every second.

This is counterintuitive, but your heart would be beating at, say, 1.2 seconds, and then 0.8 seconds, and then 0.7 seconds, and then 1.3 seconds.

And that time between successive beats of the heart being of different durations, the variability, is a good thing.

And the reason for that is heart rate variability is this lens into your autonomic nervous system.

So your autonomic nervous system consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity.

Tell me, what is WHOOP gonna look like in, say, five years? Is it still gonna be a black band around my wrist, or am I gonna have, like, a number of sensors around my body?

Will, what's your view that the FDA does not have authority in this moment, your wellness, not medical device?

Well, thanks for having me on.

You know, Whoop spent the last three years developing a very innovative feature called Blood Pressure Insights.

And this takes our wrist-worn wearable alongside a calibration with a cuff and is allowed to provide you with a daily estimate of your blood pressure.

And in turn, it also then gives you insights how your blood pressure may be affecting other things in your wellness.

This could be sleep, stress, nutrition, a variety of different wellness factors.

And the FDA has come forward saying that they believe that this should be regulated.

How does that impact your future product roadmap? How does more broadly the FDA acting this way affect innovation more broadly, do you think?

How'd you come up with unlocking human performance as the mission for Whoop?

Well, the original mission of Whoop, this now dates back 13 years, was to unlock human performance.

And in that context, we were particularly focused on athletic performance.

You know, we worked with the world's best athletes, people like Michael Phelps and LeBron James were two of our first hundred members.

We partnered with sports leagues and teams, worked at the Navy SEALs.

We really focused initially on the most aspirational and high-performing individuals in the world, particularly from an athletic context.

And in that sense, unlocking human performance was winning a gold medal or an NBA championship, right? It was the pinnacle of athletic performance.

Is there anything that you can do to make it all a little bit more palatable, if you will?

Mm-hmm.

... and so that would need to be regulated by the FDA.

Now just to say it, we also spent the last two and a half years getting regulated with the FDA, doing clinical trials, and so now we have a medically cleared product by the FDA to do ECG monitoring from the wrist, and also to do AFib detection.

So that's just one example of the difference between wellness and medical.

You know, with sleep, you can say hours of sleep, you can do staging.

That's wellness.

If you want to tell someone they have sleep apnea, that's medical.

Mm-hmm.

That's like a bonus on top.

Right.

And, and, and then, um, about a, a week or two into our summer, uh, and I should say that we were working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is important to the story because so many people that we ended up getting to, so, so many people that I cobbled together to work on this, that summer, were, um, uh, Harvard students.

And John was living, um, you know, just off campus, and I was saying to him, "Hey, you know, it'd be great if we could, uh, you know, prototype some of these ideas we're having for heart rate monitoring." And he was like, "Yeah, you know, it's funny.

There's this really talented mechanical engineer who's, like, living on my couch.

He had a job somewhere.

He's Romanian.

Wh- who- how are you going to compete with Nike?"

Will first came up with the idea during his time as captain of Harvard's squash team.

Woot builds wearable technology that's really designed to improve performance and health.

The company was founded out of the Harvard Innovation Lab 12 years ago.

We started with the world's best athletes, where we were really designing high performance technology to replace what at the time was a lot of medical technology.

an electrocardiogram, a PSG machine, the gold standard for sleep, a chest strap which measures heart rate during exercise.

This is the original prototype that we built in 2012.

Now it looks ridiculous in a million ways, but it could measure this thing called heart rate variability from the wrist, which was a breakthrough.

How do you compare? What's your market niche?

It's better than I ever imagined, or like here's, here's the ways in which, you know, I still feel like I'm myself.

Well, I do think the process of building a company and creating a product that people use to improve their healths and their performance has made me more who I am, so to speak, which is like I've had to do a lot of work on myself to get in this position to lead this company to, uh, create a product that is intentionally of service, so to speak, to, to the world's population.

And, and so that I'm, I'm very grateful for.

You know, put aside the success, just the fact that this incredibly hard, beautiful, chaotic thing that I've built with really smart people has molded me, and so I lo- I love that.

I love that being on that hard path and figuring out how to climb this mountain, so to speak, uh, has shaped me in certain ways, and in certain ways I'm still trying to, you know, mold myself and, and keep growing, so to speak.

I think that the, the biggest surprise, so to speak, is that I don't feel like a deep, deep sense of I've arrived, I've made it.

I mean, even the notion of being, quote-unquote, "successful," that's not a word I spend a lot of time anchoring to.

Um, and I wanna end this just by giving you the opportunity to share, like, what, what you, what you think is the main or, or biggest thing that you wanna, that you want people to understand, uh, about this mission that you're on and what you've learned about human health and potential that they could take away and think about and perhaps use in their lives.

Yeah, from a blue chip investor, from an LP of yours.

Well, it's interesting, like the first eight years of the company's history, I think were actually quite challenging from a capital standpoint.

And everyone looks today at Whoop as this really successful company that, you know, went from zero to multi-billion dollar valuations and higher.

But the truth is along the way, like there were a lot of very hard fundraisers.

And I think they were hard for a few reasons.

One was that we were building hardware, which was capital intensive.

Two was that I was still learning how to be a great CEO.

What has happened in the business to affect that sort of change and what role have you played in that and how does it affect your business?

How do you come to split-brain yourself into actually being a functional human?

Well, your first reaction is, uh, to try to go numb, because that is a coping mechanism.

If you don't feel the pain, you can kind of still get through the day.

And... you have to process the emotion.

You have to feel it.

And so, I think in the first 10 days of it, I was sort of white-knuckling through it, and especially kind of day-to-day in running the company.

Now, fortunately, the company's also at a stage where I've got, you know, an executive team that's- that's pretty functional, and, um, and they knew what I was going through.

But you're also training yourself to be the sort of person who reflects on their experiences.

Um, but how di- how do you guys kind of work w- what, what does that product actually look like in practice, and what was, what was important to get right there?

Yeah.

It's a feature we've worked on for a few years now, and, uh, it's called Healthspan with Whoop age, and it really has two key numbers.

The first is your Whoop age, which is essentially what we define as your, your real biological age, which is obviously different than your, your chronological age.

And then, it's got your pace of aging, which ranges from -1X to 3X, and, um, and the lower, the better for that.

And those two numbers kind of play off one another.

The, the age itself is based on six months of data, and the pace of aging is looking at your last 30 days.

But, um, talk about that and, and maybe how you're kind of, um, planning around, around the tariffs.