How Ōura doubled ring sales in two years (with CEO Tom Hale) | Masters of Scale

And my jaw dropped to the floor because I couldn't... I was like, wait, you triple the price and it goes faster? How does that work? And by the way, like the thing about Gucci that was so surprising was that like we learned that people wanted to touch the ring and they wanted to put it on, they wanted to see it against their skin, they want to see how it looked on their hand, and because it's a very physical and intimate product.

Thank you, Jeff. I'm thrilled to have you for lots of reasons, not least of which being I have my Oura ring with me.

I'm representing. It is circa 2020, Gen 2.

So the Oura ring is a very small device. It's very light, it's a couple of grams. It's kind of a miracle of modern technology. There's a ton of technology packed in here. A very small battery, much, much smaller than the battery on your Apple Watch. And what it is is you wear it on your body, on this site on your body, which turns out to be a really good place for measuring some core biometrics. If you think about, have you ever been to a hospital and they put a clamp on your finger? And that's because they're shining light into your body and then determining your pulse ox, which is your blood oxygenation. They're also determining your pulse and other things. That's why they do it there, because that's where the signal is the strongest. It has a 7-day battery life. It doesn't require a lot to charge, takes about 20 minutes to get fully charged. And it doesn't beep or bloop or talk to you. It doesn't have a screen. It's not trying to notify you about somebody talking about you on Twitter or LinkedIn. It's just very sort of silently, calmly, passively tracking your body in the background. And it's coupled with an app on your mobile phone, and the device syncs your data from your biometrics to the mobile phone. And on the mobile phone, there's a lot of computing that's going on that's making insights about your health. And every day it gives you three basic scores. It tells you about, you know, how you slept, how much activity you had, and what your readiness for the coming day is. But the whole idea is to sort of give you insights about how to make healthy choices and healthy habits without being too much of a load.

You know, I first bumped into it, I guess it was the fall of 2022. And there's a little bit of a story here, which is I had just been part of a company that we had sold to Zendesk. The company was called Momentive, but it was really SurveyMonkey was the main product. We had sold it, and we were, you know, high-fiving all around. And then it was in the process of getting unsold, basically. The shareholders of Zendesk rejected the deal. Very stressful time, not an easy moment, very difficult moment. And I think, you know, a lot of things were happening during that time frame. I had some challenges with my family, I was getting older, all these things that were going on. And for the first time in my life, I lost sleep. I don't know if you've ever had this experience where, like, I'm a championship sleeper. I mean, my entire life, I could probably fall asleep, you know, in 5 seconds and stay asleep for 12 hours.

So this was the moment when those days ended. And I was really... I was like, wow, I've never had a hard time sleeping, and this is a real... I should really pay attention to this. And what am I going to do? So researching and looking for things to do and trying to learn, you know, educate myself about sleep, and bumped into the Oura ring. And like, well, I'll give it a try. Give it a try. And I had worn wearables before. I'm kind of fitness-adjacent, so, you know, I like to try and, you know, get two or three workouts in. I like to drive by the gym. I'm, you know, and I do my best, but, you know, I'm a busy person and it's hard to fit it in. So, but I've tried all the wearables and I've, you know, I've had a trainer and I've gone to gyms, all that kind of stuff. So I kind of knew what the deal was with wearables. And I put this thing on and within the space of about three or four weeks, one, I'd learned a ton. I'd learned a lot about like what was going on for me when I did certain behaviors, when I drank alcohol, when I had too much coffee, when I didn't take a walk or work out. Like I could see all these things in my body. And then secondary, I learned a lot about sleep. I learned a lot about how sleep can really improve your life. Because within three or four weeks, I kind of had improved my sleep.

And it was like night and day.

It was for me, it was like I was living in a black and white movie basically since the time I'd had my kids. My kids, you know, I had them in my 30s, and I'd been sleep-deprived more or less up until that moment. And then made a few key behavior changes, and it was like walking into like a 4K technicolor movie. I was like, whoa, this is what life could be like. Where has it been? So, I mean, one of the great things about Oura is you get all this insight from the data, but that doesn't make it necessarily actionable, right? So how does Oura help the customer close the loop and actually act on the data to improve their health? There's three ways. The first way is the daily insights that we give you contain kernels of things that you might behave that might be healthy for you. So for example, your heart rate lowered late last night, did you eat a late meal? And that's a sort of reinforcing and education of, hey, you should eat, you know, three hours before you go to bed because if you go to bed and your body's still digesting, your deep sleep will be reduced and less effective. And deep sleep is how your body repairs and grows. And so if you want to be, you know, giving as much value to each minute of sleep you get, don't eat too early. So insights that sort of come up, and they come up sort of a couple times a day, or, you know, they come up within the experience in a really sort of very subtle way. Insights is the first way. Second way is this idea of the advisor. And the advisor is an AI chat kind of coach that knows all about you and makes recommendations and does education and gives you visibility to trends and helps you understand and maybe place a context around that and then makes suggestions. And those suggestions are things that would be better for your health. And then the third way, and this is probably the earliest but maybe could be compelling, I think, is something called experiments. And an experiment is basically a protocol, like try doing this for two weeks and then see what the impact on your metrics are. And then we'll show you actually how you compare it to everybody else, and we'll also show you, you know, what the impact was on you. And the classic one is we have this stop drinking coffee experiment. And so stop drinking coffee for two weeks and let's show you what happens.

And those three things are really potent because what's measured is managed, but you also need some context and you need some instruction.

Yeah. So, the leadership position at Oura came open.

And you did not get a call out of the blue from a recruiter.

Actually, I think when I learned that there was a search going on, I might have said something like, hey, this seems really interesting. And they're like, yeah, no, you know, it's a little out of your range.

Like, I am probably what you would call kind of a software person by training. I've come up the ranks in various software companies and have worked, you know, almost exclusively in software. I have a couple investments in hardware, but mostly in software. And I think the board had this view that what they were looking for was a CPG, you know, consumer product goods person, maybe with a sports background, you know, really like, you know, somebody who had a real name profile. And there were certainly candidates in the mix. And so I didn't fit the profile, and they kind of told me that. And I said, well, I don't know if I agree, but let's have some meetings and let's talk about it. And I basically, you know, kind of did something that's very uncharacteristic for me, which is I ended up saying like, you guys really, you really need to hire me. Like, this is... I love this product. This product has changed my life. I can see the impact that it can have on other people's lives. I am aligned with this mission. And by the way, I think I know what we need to do, you know, to take it to the next level.

Somebody advised me to write a letter and, you know, put your thoughts down, make the case for why you think it's a good fit and what you should do. And that's very uncharacteristic of me. I tend to be someone who, you know, like, I'm happier being pursued than pursuing. So, but I really just went out there and I wrote this letter that said, listen, I think you guys, this is a software problem and a data problem, and it's data at scale, which is something that I know because of my days at SurveyMonkey and Momentive. And it's a user experience problem, and it's about transforming people's lives and behavior. And I've spent my entire life thinking about kind of how much the product experience matters for people. And like, here's the case, you should have a software person leading this company. Every company is a covered dish. You think you know what it is, come in, you lift the top off, and it's something different.

I think for me, the foundational belief was wearables are going to be a thing. Everyone's going to have one. And a wearable that's tracking your health and continuously monitoring your health, which is what the Oura ring kind of does, is going to be a thing that everyone's going to have. And the thing that was different about the Oura ring, and I knew this because I'd worn a bunch of other wearables, was, you know, a 7-day battery life, unobtrusive. It's not another digital mouth to feed that's asking you to pay attention. It's just on your body producing this stream of data. And then making sense of it is something that software and data analytics and machine learning is going to have to do. And by the way, the whole point of this is that it's not like on the averages, it's personalized to you. And so the sort of vision of an AI intelligence that was tuned to your needs and understands everything about you and understands all your context and then can make recommendations about your health, whether it's an intervention or a prevention, that's an incredibly powerful idea. And I think at the heart of it, that's a software and data problem. And that's what got me convinced. And that's what convinced the board, you know, I think so.

That's right.