It's like being on a boat because if things are going great, everyone goes to one side of the boat and it's like things are going great and the boat sort of kind of tips this way and only the leader can go to the other side and kind of balance and say, 'Hey, here's some ways that it's not going great or that it could go better.'
As a leader, it can feel like you get pulled in a million different directions. So, how do you balance it all? And what does balance really look like?
Welcome to How Leaders Lead. I'm David Novak and every week I have conversations with the very best leaders in the world to help you become the best leader that you can be. My guest today is Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura.
Oura makes one of the most innovative health and wellness wearables out there, the Oura Ring. And under Tom's leadership, the company has scaled rapidly while staying focused on helping people live healthier, more balanced lives.
And that word, balance, really captures how Tom leads. He's always calibrating between vision and execution, innovation and trust, supporting his team and challenging them.
And in this conversation, you'll see what it looks like to lead from the place of balance.
Because let me tell you, the world is moving faster than ever. And the leaders who thrive in it are the ones who bring a balancing force to their people and their priorities without losing their center. So, here's my conversation with my good friend and soon to be yours, Tom Hale.
You know, before we get into Oura, I've got to ask you. I mean, how much sleep did you get last night and what was your readiness score this morning?
Let me check. Let me check. So, it would appear that I got about almost 7 hours, which is pretty good for me. And my readiness is 91, which is extremely good, I'm going to say. And that's because it's Sunday night, you know, to Monday night. I get a good night's sleep in on a Sunday night.
So, you got that good sleep and your readiness score is good. What's readiness mean?
Well, so the story of the ring is a couple pretty interesting things. One is that by tracking overnight, you get to see someone's physiology at rest. And that's really powerful because every night, overnight, you're kind of seeing the body in the same state. There's no confounding factors during the day like you're running around, your boss yells at you, something else that could make the day be a little bit noisy. At night, it's pretty level.
Your body also goes through a very typical cycle of changes as you go into deep sleep and into REM sleep and waking up based on your chronotype. So, it's actually a really great time to measure somebody. And one of the things that started very early on in the product is that we wanted to measure sleep. That's where it started. And so, as a result, you kind of have this nighttime wear pattern. People wore the ring, the first ring, they only wore it at night.
It was this enormous ring that maybe had been drawn from an alien spaceship and landed on the side of a Nordic fjord and then, you know, trolls had polished it. It was big, looked like a Super Bowl ring. But you would wear it at night and the thing is that that unlocked the ability to say, 'Well, how's your day going to go the next day?' based on your biometrics from the previous night. And that became readiness.
And basically, the way people use it is they wake up and they go, 'Ooh, how did I sleep?' and they check their little app and they say, 'Ooh, my readiness is 92 today. I'm normally a 75. I'm going to have a great day because my heart rate is low, I had a good night's sleep, my heart rate variability is high, my respiration is low.' Like all these things that would indicate, you know, biometrically that you're going to have a very good, high-performance day. That's what readiness is. It's a score from 1 to 100 that tells you how's your day going to go.
Fantastic. And you know, I love reading a lot of your customer reviews in my research and you've got phenomenal reviews on the Oura Ring. And one of the takeaways that one customer said is that it's like having my personal lab. You know, when you think about Oura, you know, and you think about the kinds of things that you'll measure and you'll give a customer, where do you see that going?
Well, I think you're right. The personal part of it is really important, meaning that like it's not some generic information that could be applied to anybody. It's applied to you and applied to your situation and your day because your physiology is not fixed. It changes over the day. It changes over the months. It changes over the years. If you're a woman, it changes every 30 days. And so, that change in your physiology is really powerful and targeting and personalizing to you is I think one of the sort of secret sauces of the Oura Ring.
It actually gets to know you over the course of onboarding, the first, you know, sort of couple of weeks, it's sort of figuring out what normal looks like for you. I'll give you a really interesting example. One of the things that we measure is temperature. And so, temperature, of course, if you have an elevated temperature, that could be a sign of you being sick or maybe you had some alcohol or some other factor that's driving your temperature high. And of course, everyone knows what normal human temperature is, right? David, what is it?
But the truth is that not everybody has a normal baseline temperature of 98.6. In fact, one of my colleagues at work, his normal baseline temperature is 98.1°. So, when he goes to the doctor and they put a thermometer in his mouth at the doctor's office and they say, 'Hey, your temperature is 98.6.' You know what he's got?
Right? So, this idea that the Oura Ring gets to know you, it's such a powerful idea behind this product is that everybody's different. Everybody's health condition, their life circumstances, their fitness level, all these things are different. And so, getting to know you is really powerful. And then if you can kind of translate that into a set of insights, words that the system is telling you about how today is going to go or how your health is doing or numbers that help you track it, you start to see really interesting insights more at the margins.
And I'll give you a pretty interesting example. Another colleague at work, his wife was going through chemotherapy and he could see her scores. And so, in seeing her scores, he actually had a sense of sort of how her day was going. And so, for example, he might see that her biometrics were somewhat depressed, her readiness was low, maybe her heart rate was elevated, temperature is elevated. And then he would change his behavior that day to better support his partner.
He might come home from work early or prepare dinner. Whatever it was, he had this really maybe insight about what was going on with his partner's physiology in a way that maybe she couldn't even say because it was on the margins. It wasn't like, you know, she was laid out and couldn't move. It was just like she didn't feel great. And instead of her having to say, 'Hey, I don't feel great. Could you pick up the kid from school and make dinner?' He knew that and he knew it in a way that was trustworthy and accurate and scientifically validated. I think that's just incredibly powerful.
So, this idea of where we're going is we want to give your body a voice. And the thing is your body does have a voice and usually if it's talking to you, you're going to listen. But sometimes it's hard to hear and it's hard to understand. And that's a lot of what Oura does.
You know, just I love that idea, the word picture of giving your body a voice. It's a great clear communication of what your vision is. How did you develop this capability to be that concise about what you're really trying to do and come up with a phrase like that?
Well, jeez, I think that's a tall order, you know, if you can come up with something that's what I like to refer to as impactfully brief, you know, and I talk a lot to my team about the importance of impactful brevity. Because it's really important to not say a lot, but say a lot. And if you can say a lot in a small amount of space, it's really powerful.
It's great. It's actually a great leadership attribute. Yeah. So, how do we do it?
Great question. You know, we worked at it for quite some time. We had a lot of people working on it who, you know, went through like a six to I think seven-week process of talking about what our vision was and all the different permutations of it, all the details. And then finally, somebody came back and said, 'Hey, we got a couple of ideas for this. This is one of them and we really like it.' And we said, 'Is that... What is it?' They said, 'Oh, it's giving your body a voice.' And so, in some sense, I think that's true of most creative processes. You want to give a really clear brief. You want to give people the opportunity to really expand their thinking as broadly as possible and then come back and narrow down to the one or two things that are really the best ideas.
Yeah. Oftentimes, you know, being in the marketing world myself, you know, it's like I used to say when it's great, there's no debate. You know, when you hear a phrase like that, giving your body a voice, you kind of go, 'Oh, that's it.' You know, you don't... not a whole lot of debate about that. There might be debate about the process of getting there and, you know, but that just pops out and really makes so much sense. You know, Tom, I want to get into how you're leading at Oura, but first, I want to learn more about your journey. And what's the story from your childhood that really shaped the kind of leader you are today?
So, I was an athlete as a kid. I used to track my workouts. I was a cyclist and so I would write down all my numbers, you know, how fast, how far, what my resting heart rate was, what my peak heart rate was. And it was pretty rudimentary what we had. So, that really like I think can't call it data orientation around fitness has always been a part of my life. I've always had wearables. I've always tried every piece of technology I might possibly use to optimize my performance.
And I think that I brought that very much with me to Oura. But the thing about Oura when I joined it was it was a relatively small company, you know, it was a few hundred folks, largely based in Finland. You know, it was maybe a challenging time if you remember 2022, the spring of '22 was right after COVID. I think the Ukraine war had just begun and stock markets were swooning. It was kind of a challenging moment.
And you know, I kind of came onto the company and had to sort of set a course for the company. And for me, the course that I wanted to set was, 'Hey, we have this big mission in the company, which is that we want to make health a daily practice. We want to change health from being intervention at the end of life to being prevention over the course of your entire life so that you live a better life longer. That's what we're all about.' And that mission, by the way, is super motivating for employees and everybody signs up for that mission.
Can we make the health care experience better? You bet you. Can we help people live better lives longer? You bet you. How do we do that? It's really the question. And the thing was is that we had also kind of lost sight of the fact that like if we weren't successful as a business, we weren't going to be able to fulfill that mission. And so the first thing that I had to do was kind of combine the mission with the reality that we had to be a better business. And those two things had to come glued together.
Do you mean by business, you mean a business model that makes money or?
Yeah, like we couldn't... if we were the best company in the world and didn't make money, we wouldn't be able to fulfill our potential or fulfill our mission. And if we didn't stay focused on making money and being a great business, then we weren't going to actually have as big of an impact on the world as we could. And I think that idea of kind of blending the two ideas, this idea that we were a performing company as a performance company as well as a company that had a big mission around people's health, those two ideas had to come together.
And the idea was pretty simple. It was that we make a product that allows people to look at their metrics to understand how to optimize their life or make decisions about their life or their health. And I said, 'We have our metrics in our own business and we need to look at those metrics and we need to look at those metrics and use them to drive our business because the business metrics that come out of the business is just like your biometrics coming off your body and you have to optimize it.' So I used an idea and a bit of language that made sense to everybody because that's what the product did.
And that's what we did. We built a really high performing, really successful business in that moment because everyone realized that it wasn't enough to just be great and have the best product. We had to build a great business. Now, you had asked a question. Your question was, 'What is it about your growing up that like kind of connects to that?' And I said, 'Well, look, it's really about being someone who tracked everything and analyzed it to try to understand it. But there's another element as well.'
And I think anybody in business knows this, which is that sometimes it's not about just skill or it's not just about leadership. It's not just about knowing what to do or doing it, which are important things in business. You know, sometimes it's about luck. And I think I've had plenty of that. We've all seen that. And kind of that combination of being ready at the moment when luck strikes or when the opportunity surfaces. And that is the key. Being ready.
And that goes back to like if you create a performance culture, when the market starts to sort of warm up and you see some opportunities, then you can really capitalize on that. That's what drives the outsize performance. And you know, I think that's where Oura is today. We've grown this business, you know, north of 100% a couple years in a row. We're at a scale which is, you know, very significant from a revenue standpoint. We flipped over to profitability. All these things that are great about the business.
But what they are in service of is fulfilling this mission. So you want to have both. You want to be able to see, you know, kind of the performance of the business coupled with kind of the passion, the things that move people, that move their hearts is we want to make a difference in the world. We want to wake up every morning and make people healthier and happier and live longer. And that's a great reason to make a great business.
With technology being what it is today, I mean you almost have to be a scientist to do your job.
Yeah, I mean look, I think when I got to the company, I was pretty much a software person by and large. And I, you know, I'd always been kind of science and math oriented. But what you realize here is that to make these things work, there's the interaction of physiology, physics, software algorithms, scientific validation of those software algorithms, and you know, a user experience like a software user experience. So of those five or six things, I had experience in maybe one of them.
And thank goodness that we have an incredibly capable science team at the company. You know, some 30-plus PhDs who, you know, these people are incredible. They're specialists in, you know, the physics of light. They're specialists in physiology, in biomechanics, in all these very important and very rigorous kind of areas.
And so one of the things that I think has been incredible for me is the opportunity to learn about all of the really interesting things that the ring does or is capable of doing or what it might do in the future based on its capabilities. But also the way we validated, you know, we have massive research studies to make sure that we get people of every health condition and every ethnicity and every skin color to make sure that the data that the ring is generating covers them and meets some standard of accuracy that is extremely high.
We want to be as close to a clinical grade that we can be and in some cases exceed that. We just don't happen to be regulated as a medical device. We're not a medical device. But we aspire to the level of accuracy and the level of quality that would be appropriate for a medical device. And that's such a powerful idea because that means that you have to be really good. This is not, you know, good enough is not good. It has to be great.
And so again, if you think about leading any organization, I always think you have to throw, you know, the stone twice as far to go half the distance. You have to set a huge aspiration so that you can inspire people to do the impossible. And you know, if they only make it halfway, it's still incredible because you made it. We throw that rock all, you know, twice as far. And in science and in accuracy, we make it. We make it all the way there.
And so it's just such an important lesson I think for any leader to realize that they need to push further, farther, faster than they think is possible and to push outside the boundaries of what's known. And when you're doing that, you end up making new science. And that's very inspiring for our scientists and PhDs that they get to create something that hadn't existed before.
Yeah, and as you push to go outside the boundaries, how do you stay in tune with what your customers are really looking for?
Well, I think it starts by talking to your customers a lot. And we do that through a lot of different ways. We have something called the inner circle, which is about, you know, 2,000 folks who are like, you know, on the leading edge of anything we develop and they're constantly giving us feedback as we introduce new things and we iterate over the product very quickly with them, with their feedback.
We also listen to, you know, kind of these broad-based communities, you know, whether it's Reddit or Facebook. We kind of interface there to gather information from, you know, kind of the signal, the room tone, what's actually going on out in the world. And then I make it a point and I make it a point for all of my leaders that we have conversations with members, you know, whenever we can.
I make a point of my Thursday mornings being a block of time which I set aside for conversations with customers and interactions with customers because there's no substitute for direct interaction. When someone, you know, recently someone sent me a note and said, 'Hey, you know, this is not working out the way I want it to work out and I got a problem and I need you to do something about that.' When I engage on that, I'm learning something.
I'm learning about something about our business that needs to be fixed or improved or bettered. And that means I will be a better leader. And I can push on the organization to raise the bar and I could do that credibly because I have an example. Conversely, I got a reach out from somebody who said, 'I had the best customer experience I've ever had with your company. I thought you should know.' And that kind of insight, that's gold. Because it teaches you what you're doing right and you should do more of that.
Absolutely. And your background is clear that you were in some really interesting creative companies where you got prepared to step into this role and to begin to make a difference in terms of changing the world. So, you know, you've been at a number of really great companies. I just kind of like to pull out a few of the highlights from some of the learnings that you got along the way. You know, and if for example, you know, you were at Adobe, which is a great software company. And what was the biggest lesson you learned about leadership at Adobe?
Well, it's funny. I got to Adobe on the back of an acquisition of a company called Macromedia. I'd been at Macromedia for 10 years. Some people may remember this. They made tools for people to make websites during web, you know, kind of 1.0. Had a product named Flash. Flash enabled, you know, kind of sound and audio interactions, games. So I was at this company called Macromedia.
And when Adobe acquired Macromedia, they took a lot of the leaders from Macromedia and made them leaders at Adobe. And Adobe was a much larger company, maybe 6,000 employees to our call it maybe 1,800 to 2,000 employees, something like that. And they put us, you know, and me included, in these roles. And they were very thoughtful about it because what they didn't want was a bunch of these, you know, young people who thought they were really great to come in and ruin things that were great about Adobe.
You know, it's a very successful company, very mature, very thoughtful. We were kind of like maybe more like a startup, you know, kind of entrepreneurial and willing to try anything and willing to do it, you know, at a pace that was really unreasonably fast. So, they came in and they said, 'Listen, we have some advice for you guys. Here's the first piece of advice. When you're in a group of people at Adobe and there's maybe I don't know 100 or 200 people listening to you, be really thoughtful about what you say.'
Because you might find that if you're not thoughtful, and by the way, as a group, I think at Macromedia we're more like, 'Let's think with our mouths. Let's go. Let's have the ideas. Let's get them out there. Let's go. Let's go.' You know, and like kind of getting people excited. They said, 'Be thoughtful because you might just say something that you don't really mean and then 6 months later you're going to look around and you're going to see that 250 people are off working on something just because you thought you had an interesting hairbrained idea.'
We're like, 'That's super interesting. You're saying we should use our ears more than we use our mouths. We should be listening to what's going on, not trying to generate as you do in a smaller company where like, you know, the ideas are the currency of keeping people motivated.' So, that was one of the big lessons that we learned from Macromedia and Adobe, and Adobe is an incredibly successful company because it is so thoughtful. It is so considered.
And Tom, how about Linden Lab where you were the chief product officer and there you designed the revamp of Second Life?
Well, you know, Second Life was one of the very early on virtual worlds. And now it's very typical, right? People go into 3D spaces and do stuff and play video games with each other. This was relatively early on. And you know, one of the things that it had gotten really successful early in kind of the early 2000s. It had, you know, kind of jumped up to be a I think it was about 100 million revenue a year or something like that.
And it was on the cover of Time magazine, you know, people were really interested in this idea that you could buy virtual goods like, you know, fashion or architecture or stuff like that and it didn't cost anything. It was just bits on a server. What was happening when I arrived was everything was switching to the web. All social media was just starting up, it's about 2007, 2008. So, social media was becoming a thing and all of that was like on your mobile device or, you know, on the web, you know, with Facebook and Facebook games and stuff like that.
And so, as a leadership team, we realized we really needed to transform the company to take advantage of this new opportunity. And that we needed to go and figure out, you know, how we were going to address this changing world where people were spending all this time, you know, on websites clicking on likes and thumbs up and that kind of stuff instead of these really rich immersive experiences where you're inside of a virtual world in 3D.
And we tried and we failed. And so, the lesson is that like if you really want to try and do something different, sometimes you can't do it with just the same people. You know, you might need to find the new people with the new outlook and the new skills and the new capabilities to address a new opportunity.
And I've always thought about that because it's just such a tempting thing to say, 'We were great at this. And so, then we're also going to be great at this other thing.' You know, we were great at 3D virtual worlds, so we're going to be great at social media. Well, turns out that's not always true.
And then you were the chief product officer and you became the chief operating officer at HomeAway. You know, what's something you picked up there that really shaped your leadership?
Well, you know, HomeAway was very early on in what is now known as vacation rentals by HomeAway or Vrbo or many people know it as Airbnb. The thing that I took away there, and I think this goes to how do you think about leadership inside of a company? In a tech company, your tech leadership needs to be empowered.
And when I got to the company, you know, HomeAway was an amazing company. It had acquired some 25 different websites and kind of pulled them all together. And, you know, in many ways like the SEO benefits of all those websites were driving the business. If you were looking for a rental in the South of France, you were going to end up on a HomeAway site. That was where you were going to end up.
And what we had to do was re-platform all of those sites onto one platform so we could run it efficiently and then add e-commerce to it so you could book those sites, you know, you had to be able to book them. And so, the change that was really required was we had to go to our technical leadership and say, 'Hey, you guys actually have a really, really important vote in what we do.'
You're not there just to take orders from anybody else. And if someone tries to tell you to take their order, you know, like, 'I need this. Get this done. I need it done by Tuesday.' You need to be able to tell them that that's not the right thing because we're doing something here. We're going to bring these 25 sites together onto a common platform and that's our mission. And you need to be strong in that mission. You need to be the leaders of that mission.
And I think in many ways it was a change in our technical culture, you know, the engineers and programmers who write the code, to think of themselves not as people who were receiving people's instructions, but as the people who were giving them. And that transformation, it took a couple years and it took a lot of coaxing and kind of getting people out of their comfort zone to kind of say, 'Hey, you know,' and we used to call it, we had this phrase for it.
We called it developer spine. You know, they had to learn that no one could push them around and that in fact when it came down to the most important things, they had to be the drivers of that change.
Yeah, developing your spine makes you know, that's something we all have to learn. And then at SurveyMonkey, which is the world's most popular survey platform, you were, as I understand it, celebrating this big acquisition with Zendesk and then it fell apart. What did it teach you about the role of a leader when plans suddenly change? When you go from exaltation to oh?
Well, yeah, and that was certainly actually a big one, too. I think I kind of knew it actually the day that Zendesk, the acquiring company, announced it. I kind of had this feeling in my gut that it was not going to go well.
I think that leaders have a particularly CEO. I was not the CEO at the time, but this is true of CEOs, maybe most true of it. That in some sense, when things are going great, right? The CEO has to be the one who says, 'Hey guys, things are going great, but like, you know, bad news could be right around the corner and we got to be careful that we don't rest on our laurels or get overconfident. We've got to be thinking about, you know, where we're going next. We got to aim higher for the future. We got to watch out for these threats.'
And I think liken it to like being on a boat because if things are going great, everyone goes to one side of the boat and it's like, 'Things are going great.' and the boat sort of kind of tips this way and only the leader can go to the other side and kind of balance it and say, 'Hey, here's some ways that it's not going great or that it could go better.'
And conversely, and this is the example with SurveyMonkey and Zendesk, when people are all, you know, they're down in the mouth because they feel like everything's going poorly, they all go to that side of the boat and they're like, 'Oh my god, woe is me. We're doomed.' The leader has to be the one who says, 'No, actually, there's light in this darkness and if you follow me, we're going to make it. We're going to get to the other side.'
And I think that kind of the power and need and responsibility of a leader is to kind of be that counterbalance. Now, I believe in something called servant leadership where the leader actually is in service of everybody, you know, everybody who works at the company. It's not 'I'm going to tell you what to do and you need to do it this way and I'm the expert and I'm the smartest one.' It's not like, 'How do I get the best out of you? How do I make you do your best work?'
And so, you have to have both of those. You have to have this ability to balance the boat by saying things that, you know, people don't either see or agree or understand and leading them to a new place, but you also need to be able to say, 'Hey, you know, as a leader, I'm here to make you successful and that's my goal.'
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What do you think if you could pick one thing, what do you think is the most important thing a leader has to do with people to make them recognize that they can rise and they can achieve and be even more than what they are today?
Well, you know, it's a great question and I think you're sort of in this business today a little bit, you know, you're trying to find out what it is that motivates somebody. And if you can figure out what it is that motivates them, maybe conversely what it is that demotivates them, you can help them understand what's possible and you can ask them to do things that they didn't think they could do.
I'll go back to the developer spine example. You know, a lot of times like there wasn't any problem with the developers being leaders. They were perfectly capable being leaders, but they just sort of had come to believe that in this company they didn't have a vote, you know, they didn't have a seat at the table. And so I had to say to them, 'Listen, you guys, not only do you have a vote, but it's an important one.'
And you guys need to rise and like you need to see that glass of water at the center of the table and say, 'Hey, I want to take a sip of that. That glass is the glass of leadership. I'm going to grab it. I'm going to drink it and then, you know, I'm going to be a leader, too.' And that idea of inspiring people to do something that they don't think they can do or maybe don't feel capable of doing.
We have a way of talking about it at Oura, and I'll call it... This is a quote that I'll make from my colleague Michael Chapp. He's the one who told me about it and I love it. He says, 'Listen, you got to get outside your comfort zone. Because when you get outside your comfort zone, that's where the magic happens. And that's what the leadership has to do is to help you get outside your comfort zone.'
You know, when you stepped into the role of CEO of Oura, how comfortable were you? I mean, you know, what brought you to Oura and why are you
sitting at desk today?
Well, let me just say this. It was a big step and maybe I was pretty far outside of my comfort zone. Maybe that's why that comment really resonates with me. You know, it was a complicated business. It was a new space. I was climbing a learning curve that was as steep as any I've ever climbed.
And I had a great reserve of passion and energy and love for the product. And the reason for that was because after the Zendesk SurveyMonkey situation, you know, I'd lost sleep for the first time in my life. And I got this product and it changed my life. And so I was very personally motivated and very personally passionate about the potential for Oura. And that kind of came through even though it was outside of my comfort zone. That passion carried me through the discomfort. And I think people saw that. I think they, you know, every employee if you asked them today if they were there when I got there, they would say, "Hey, it was obvious that Tom loved this product and believed that it was going to be incredible and that this company was going to be a once-in-a-generation company?" And they would say, "Absolutely. Came right through. You know, shone through his eyes like some light."
How did you develop the know-how on the brand and the category that, you know, gave people a sense that you really did know what needed to be done and that they would follow you because, you know, before people will follow you, they got to feel like you actually know what you're talking about.
I mean, it's so true. If they don't trust you, they don't follow you. In fact, an old boss of mine used to say, "How can you tell the leaders in the room, Tom?" And I'd be like, "I don't know. The one with the leadership qualities." And he said, "No, no, no. The followers. That's how you know who the leaders are." And his point was that, you know, leaders aren't always at the top of the org chart, right? They're the ones that people follow.
So how did I do it? Honestly, I think a couple of things. One is it's luck. You know, I'd been somebody who'd been using wearables since the early 2000s. So I kind of, you know, I had some skills and some understanding. But I had also had a really recent experience where I had lost sleep because of the stresses of COVID and because of the unraveling of the SurveyMonkey acquisition and then had recovered sleep and knew exactly how powerful that could be for somebody. How transformative. I liken it to, you know, walking out of a black and white television set onto a 4K, you know, Technicolor movie where like all of a sudden, you know, you realize what experience could be like. And that was transformative. And so people could see that.
I think another dimension of it was I approached it with a tremendous amount of respect. One of the first things that I did was actually to travel to Finland where the majority of the technical staff was located at the time. And I wanted to go within the first week because I wanted to show them that they had my respect and that I understood that they were the people who created the value in the company, the algorithms, the hardware, the software, the experience that Oura delivers. And I got COVID that week. And I was like, "I'm still coming. I'm going to come." And they were like, "Yeah, no. Please don't come. You've got COVID. Please don't come." So I came, you know, whatever it was, like 10 days after. And I came and expressed my respect. And I think that made a huge impact on them because, you know, to know that the person who's been anointed as the leader of the company both understands them and wants to learn more about them and wants to respect them, I think it just went an incredibly long way.
So when you took over in 2022, Oura had sold about a million rings. Now you've more than doubled that to 2 and a half million. You know, what's the single biggest strategic decision that you made that really unlocked that growth?
Yeah, I don't know that I could say there was any single decision. You know, there's never a silver bullet, which I think is a good leadership lesson. You know, any successful business is built through a lot of, you know, some big ideas, but a lot of small important ideas that are executed well. But if I had to sort of pin it down to three, I think one would be the focus on women. One of the things that the Oura ring can do quite well is measure your temperature and that is a key to unlocking where you are in your cycle. We kind of realized this early on and it unlocked a bunch of applications for women. You know, one being the ability to predict the day that your period is going to arrive. Another is understanding when you're ovulating and therefore your fertility is at its peak. Or maybe better yet, and we do this with a partner called Natural Cycles, when you can have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. Understanding how your body changes as you go through your cycle. These were all things that were just not in the marketplace. And so we really nailed it for women. And that was a huge unlock for the business.
Most people think of wearables as sort of a fitness tool, you know, how do I get fit? And at the time no one was really solving for even the fitness needs of women specifically. You know, they had like, you know, a pink bracelet or something like that, you know, a pink Fitbit, but it wasn't really specifically tuned to a woman's physiology. So that was one. The second was retail. We, you know, you look at this device here, you know, you kind of see it. You know, it has the properties of jewelry, right? You know, it has a particular finish. It looks a certain way on your hand. You know, it has to sort of fit into your life as a piece of kit that you would wear on your body 24/7. And what we realized was that people wanted to see it. You know, we had been up until that point just a purely D2C business where you could go to the website and you could see it or maybe you could see it on a friend. And a lot of our sales came from referrals, but if you wanted to see it, try it on, look how it looks against your skin, you needed a way to do that. And retail really unlocked that. So we went big into retail.
And this was a controversial decision at the time because we had been D2C up until that point, but we went deep with Target, Best Buy, Amazon to really unlock retail. And that was a big second factor. And then the third factor, and this is really interesting, and maybe most people may not even know this, but you can use what's called your health savings account or your flexible spending account, HSA or FSA, funds to purchase an Oura ring. And at the time buying a wearable, you know, the kinds of wearables you could get were the sorts of things that you would get for a purely, you know, kind of medical context. You know, they were not more broadly written as a health wearable. They were like things that you would get very specific to a particular health context. So when we got the HSA FSA kind of unlocked, we turned that on and all of a sudden we helped people realize that they could have access to this product. And they could use these funds, which are effectively pre-tax funds, and apply them to something that was going to help their preventative health. And that was a huge unlock. That was remarkable. So those three things were big strategic elements that drove the business.
We'll be back with the rest of my conversation with Tom Hale in just a moment. I'm sure you can see Tom is a deeply empathetic leader. And you know, people sometimes try to make empathy seem like something soft and fluffy. But Johnny Taylor at the Society of Human Resource Management has a different take, and I love it. He encourages leaders to treat empathy like a business imperative because it is one.
People hear empathy and conflate it with sympathy. That's the number one problem. And sympathy is softer by definition, right? It's you someone loses a parent or sibling or whatever and you sympathize with them. Versus empathizing. This whole concept of every day trying to experience life, not just through your eyes, but through the eyes of the person on the other side of the conversation. It's built into why I think we've had this real diversity problem in our organizations. It's because we can achieve diversity. We go hire people who are different. By definition, you get diversity. But then we're not looking at them through their diverse experiences and trying to do it through the lens of empathy. As a result, you're bringing them in and they're leaving very quickly. So it is now a business imperative in a knowledge-based economy. David, you don't have the luxury of having people just come and leave. Bringing people into an environment that's not particularly empathetic when they can go get other jobs means you're going to lose them and thus lose the game. We did some research just recently at SHRM, 93% of employees said they would leave a job that they like, okay, a job we're in perfectly fine, to go work for a more empathetic organization. So, if that doesn't make the case that this empathy is a business imperative and not just a feel-good moral imperative, I don't know what does. Nine out of 10 of your employees are saying, "Listen, I'll go to the guy across the street if we're in a place where I think people are more empathetic in their approach." Again, not to be confused with sympathy. It's empathy.
