Oura vs Big Tech: The ring taking on Apple, Google & OpenAI

So, in the last 12 months, we've probably sold maybe, call it two and a half, almost 3 million. In the lifetime of the company, 5.5 million. So, if you think about it, in the last 12 months, we've sold more than half of our total lifetime sales. So, quite a few fingers with rings on out there.

So, I'm checking just to make sure. The index finger is the right place to wear it. And the reason for that is that when your heart pumps, the blood flows, you know, right down your artery right here underneath the skin. And so, this is actually the first stop for your pulse as it goes through your body that can be measured. You know, you probably know this, but when you go to the hospital, where do they put the sensor? Well, they put it on your index finger, right here on the tip of your finger. They don't put it on your wrist. They don't put it on your pinky. They don't put it on your toe. That being said, lots of people like to wear the Oura ring on different fingers. The only compromise is a little bit of accuracy. And maybe that's on the order of two or 3% per finger. So, it's not such a bad issue.

Yeah. I've got a ceramic ring just because it's the new device that we just shipped this fall. And so it's nice to see it, but it's also my beta software is running on that ceramic ring. And my personal production ring, which has my data from the past 5 years, is right here on this finger. So I wear two so I can see what's coming down the pipe in terms of new software.

Well, I guess the only answer for that is that I'm super hardcore. I've got two rings on. I'm wearing multiple wearable devices, the CGM at any given time. So I take it pretty seriously both professionally but also personally. I'm, you know, turning 57 and when you turn 57 you start thinking a lot about how you want to maintain your health and all the things that you can do to make sure you live a long healthy life which of course is the mission of Oura.

God, so many ways. I mean the reality is I came to it like many people do through sleep. I had been a championship sleeper my entire life. A set of circumstances in the fall of 2021, COVID, family stress, we'd sold a company, was being unsold, caused me to lose sleep. And so I started scouting around for a solution to help me with sleep and stumbled onto the ring. So for me my sleep behavior has been dramatically changed. But there are parts of the other kinds of behaviors that I have that contribute to sleep. So for example, I don't drink as much caffeine as I used to. I actually was cold turkey for a number of years, but now I've...

No, I know. I know. It's very scary. But actually the reality is that going cold turkey was one of the big things that improved my sleep. I was the kind of person who drank coffee just to kind of be revved up throughout the entire day and then would drink a glass of wine at the end of the day to take the edge off. Changing that habit was fundamental. It really improved a lot. I think there's a number of other habits that I've changed. I'm far more proactive in terms of the exercise and movement that I get. We believe that every movement counts. So, for me, I'm always somebody who's like given the choice between stairs and elevator, I'll take the stairs. I make sure that I get out of my seat and move around. I think that's classic kind of wearable impact on behavior. But maybe more importantly, and I think this is interesting to note about Oura, we've been focused on metabolic health over the past 12 to 24 months. And one of the things that we've been focused on is helping you understand how various behaviors you have, sleep, activity, obviously what you eat, how that affects your blood sugar. And so I'm wearing a Stelo blood sugar monitor. If you've ever seen one, you know, it comes in a purple box like this. It's attached to your arm and can measure sort of the interstitial fluid in your cells to understand like how much blood sugar you have. For me, what I learned was there were a lot of foods that I felt were really healthy, really like things that I was being virtuous by eating, but it turns out they were actually huge spikes for my blood sugar. And so, as a result, I've really changed my diet. And that's shown up in other sort of biomarkers. I mean, obviously it shows up in my health, but something like my A1C, I've managed to reverse the trend of that and bring it down to a very manageable.

Well, actually, I'm 80. Yeah, but I look 57. You know, the Oura ring works so effectively. But yeah, no, it is a funny thing to think about kind of biological age because one of the ways of looking at that, and this is something that Oura does as well, is look at your what's called your arterial stiffness which is a clinical measure and the metric that is used for that is called pulse wave velocity which sounds like a metric that has to do with sort of the speed at which the blood is flowing through your circulatory system. And so understanding that and seeing that change actually is a really good indicator of kind of the age of or relative age of your arterial system and basically what you're looking for is flexibility. You know when the blood pumps you want your arteries to expand a little bit and absorb the energy of the blood flow. So we have something that we take that pulse wave velocity metric and we translate it into something called cardiovascular age. And cardiovascular age is a comparison to a normalized population to let you know if you are either aging faster, not good, or slower than your peer group. And I think that's a really interesting metric. And of course, the thing that we observed with it is that when people get a great cardiovascular age, it's like, you know, minus five, then they feel very good and very inclined to think of themselves as healthy. But when they get something that's even a little bit over, when we say, 'Oh, your cardiovascular age is two or three years over what it should be.' People's behavior changes pretty quickly. And that's because obviously age is the universal marker for mortality. And so if you think about the onset of age being faster than it actually should be based on your birth date, you're going to start to change your behavior as a result.

No. I can't say that I set out at a young age to do that, but I think there are lots of things that contributed to it. I think I've been a wearables wearer more or less since the very first wearables came out. I mean, those of you might remember the Nike Plus pod that went into your shoe or the Nike FuelBand.

Super, super. It's interesting. It's just like a red, yellow, green.

That's right. That's right. And so I think I always have had a real interest in that. I've always been somebody who's been interested in data and tracking. And I spent time at SurveyMonkey, which was of course a platform for gathering the data about all sorts of people and looking at that across webscale populations and webscale data, which is kind of analogous to this, which is that there's this huge amount of data that's streaming off of all these people wearing Oura rings and how do you make sense of that and how do you give them advice to change their behavior because changing behavior turns out to be very hard. So, it's an interesting challenge intellectually as well. So all those things kind of added up and I actually recently remembered at a young age I used to race bicycles and one of the things that I remember doing is that I would log every ride that I went in terms of like distance and time and cadence and pace and all the things just as a way of showing kind of demonstrable progress because of course if you measure something you're going to manage it, you're going to have a better sense of whether or not you're progressing or declining which is what you're trying to avoid. So I think it's always been in there for me to kind of bring me back to something like Oura. And when I bumped into Oura and the truth is during that period where I lost sleep once I put the Oura on and became much more conscious about my habits. You know, I did things like put the phone down and don't watch Netflix to get that one last episode in and really was intentional about my sleep. For me it was so transformational. My cognition, my mood, my energy, my overall just literally how I felt every morning transformed. And I realized I've been sleep deprived for most of my adult life. And so for many people, I think when they start to get their sleep habits under control and optimize for sleep, the impact can be transformational.

I think it's sleep and also stress. You know, when I talk to CEOs who wear the Oura ring, and you're right, there's quite a few of them. The CEO of Delta, CEO of Intel, lots of different people, different kind of lives, but mostly what they're trying to do is optimize for sort of almost like an athletic performance as a CEO. I mean, you think about the travel, the stress, the amounts of people who are asking things of you and demanding things of you. It's a challenging job. And so having something that helps you set your balance and help you understand the status of your body. I'll give you just a perfect example. I'm traveling. I've been on a traveling jaunt of almost 3 weeks now with a little bit of break for the Thanksgiving holiday. And during that trip I got something that's called a symptom radar alert. It's basically a little alert that says your body is pretty much under stress. And I've learned that those alerts are pretty good predictors of me getting sick. And so whenever I get one of those alerts, I immediately change my schedule. I stop drinking any alcohol with dinner. I'll have some tea. I'll take a nice nap in the afternoon if I can. I'll just try and take it a little bit easier to forestall getting sick because of course when you got a travel schedule that's as demanding as any CEO's, you want to be able to make your way through it. So we call these folks the corporate athletes and they're trying to perform at their best and Oura is a tool that helps them do it.