We're seeing kind of cultural relevance here in that Oura is becoming a shorthand for how you're doing. It's like the doctor's note that isn't a doctor's note. It's in your pocket, it's on your cell phone, it's a substance of conversation between husbands and wives. You know, how was your sleep last night, honey? How's your day going to go? How's your Readiness? What did you do? It's a shorthand for caring about your health. And the thing is, whether you're Mark Zuckerberg or somebody who reads Facebook or wears a Meta headset, you can get a lot of benefit out of knowing what's going on in your body. We call it giving your body a voice. And the thing is, it's not just celebrities who are interested in that, everybody's interested in that.
Hi everyone, welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people and trends that are shaping the future of business. I'm Diane Brady.
And I'm Kristen Stoler. This week we are talking about Oura CEO Tom Hale. And what intrigued me, Chris, about this initially was every CEO I was meeting, not every, but let's say more than 50%, seemed to have this little ring on their finger and they were tracking their sleep and other metrics fastidiously, which made me wonder, is this the tool of our age for leadership and life?
So here's the thing, I was first introduced by it. I felt like the stereotype was like techy bros, and now all the women I know have it. They're swearing by it for cycle tracking. So that's how I found out about it. I feel like the stereotype is changing, right?
Well, when you have Mark Zuckerberg and Kim Kardashian, I think you've got a couple of demographics covered with that for sure. I will say I've been using it since the start of the year. I'm using the old version, so I am indeed cheap. I value the sleep. It's not cheap though, it's not that cheap. I find the sleep data is a little bit mixed and it is kind of patronizing because if I don't sleep well, as I allegedly did not last night, it immediately reduces the steps I'm supposed to take today, which I'm like, you know what, I'll decide how many steps I take today.
Okay, you know, I'm going to ask you though, what was your sleep score last night?
Well, let me just first point out that I'm calling from Miami from the FII Summit. A lot of tech people, which means a lot of parties, and I wrote a story last night, so it was okay.
How late were you partying, let's be honest?
We're going about to... my sleep score is 59, complete honesty. It says pay attention. It's below my typical range, so good to know that I'm normally better.
Okay, now I cheated because I knew I was going to ask you this and I purposefully went to bed at 10:45 last night. Total sleep 7 hours 29 minutes. I have a little crown over my head, I'm optimal.
Very nice. But is that a happy life? But I'm curious what Tom's is as a CEO. He's been CEO since 2022 of Oura. He's had quite the year. He doubled sales last year to 500 million. They had a big fundraise in December, now valued at 5 billion. I'm sure he's not getting much sleep.
Well, look, what intrigues me to your point, it's had a huge growth trajectory, including fertility. Women, that is a new growth area for them. I think about Fitbit and all of these other many, many devices that can measure things. They are disruptable and by the big tech giants like Apple. They too claim to measure our sleep, certainly lots of places measure our steps. So I think how you build community around this and how you get people to continue paying a subscription fee every month to look at their phone and see how they're doing on some of these metrics is a good question.
Yeah, it's pricey. I mean, I also think that, you know, it's Oura is small enough right now that, you know, Apple isn't super worried about them, I'd assume. But eventually, you know, it's a product that Apple could easily replicate or just acquire them. Is acquisition their end goal? I'm curious about that. And I'm curious, you know, I've been looking at my stress all week and measuring that and it tells you, you know, your stress this hour, this hour, today was 2 hours and 35 minutes. But is that good for me? Should I know my stress? What's the psychological impact of all this data? I don't know.
Well, the idea is to prompt better behavior. But I do think on a philosophical basis, the quantified life, there are times when you measure things and it's ultimately not that important. Our heart rate, for example, we don't really need to know heart rate day-to-day. Sleep, I think, is valuable. One thing I've heard is that alcohol consumption is going down. And I've heard people tell me this directly, if you drink, you tend to sleep worse and get the kinds of scores that I got this morning. And that tends to make you think twice when that bottle of wine comes out. So how it's impacting other sectors and how we live our life is interesting. And let's face it, wine is a source of joy. Sometimes you don't mind if it disrupts your sleep now and then. News outlets have called it this biometric Big Brother. Do we, is that something we want? Is that something we should have? I don't know, but I'm curious to talk to Tom about it.
Yes, lots to discuss. And we'll be right back with Tom after the break.
Generative AI has been a transformative force in the business landscape for the last 18 months. According to the latest Fortune Deloitte CEO survey, more than half of CEOs are experimenting with generative AI in their own daily activities and of course trying to spread it throughout their organizations. I'm joined by Jason Gaddus, the CEO of Deloitte US, which is the longtime sponsor of this podcast. Jason, good to see you.
Hi Diane, it's great to be with you.
How are businesses integrating AI into their organizations? Where do you see the most substantial benefits?
I think it's true as you say that every organization wants to capitalize on the benefits of AI, particularly generative AI. The benefits have been largely around efficiencies to date and looking for ways to automate routine tasks. The promise is there for more insight-driven use cases and innovation use cases. That's the next stage. We're seeing organizations looking to move from proofs of concept and pilots to see these technologies and models put in place in true operational uses at scale.
When you think about how much change there's been the last 18 months, really curious, how do you think it's going to evolve in the next 18 months, 36 months?
I think we're actually needing to change our timing horizon. By all indications, we're more in six-month intervals. And I think that's exciting but also a challenge. Enterprises aren't accustomed to working in that type of cadence and with that type of pace. And so the winners, if you will, will be those that can assimilate this technology that quickly, which I think is putting real strain on organization's ability to adapt that quickly. This is a perfect instance where leadership has to be in sync to assimilate technology that quickly. I think as a CEO, it's important that we lead by example. So I've been through all the training, I've been through all the productivity tools that we have available within our organization. But then more broadly, we've embarked upon a significant investment to deploy this across all we do. I'm feeling the urgency.
Jason, thanks for joining us.
Well, Tom, good to see you. I'm coming to you on a day when I have the worst Oura scores I've had since I bought this ring that you convinced me would be so useful in my life. So I'm embarrassed to say I did not get enough sleep last night, merely fair.
I'm sorry for you. I'm sorry for Tom.
I'm going to brag and say that I did, only because I knew I was talking to you and I didn't want to disappoint you. So I got a crown today.
Good for you, good for you. Please, what's yours? I want to hear your, what's your sleep score today?
My sleep score was 93 and my Readiness is 87, which is pretty good. I'm usually kind of a low 80s kind of person.
How many days per week do you get a perfect score or a score in the 90s?
Not enough is the answer. But you know, I strive to be in the high 80s, low 90s when I can. And I think frankly, my dogs are in the kennel, my wife's out of town, so I got some bonus time.
Oh yeah, there's crowns all around for that. Well, listen, I thank you for joining us first of all. And I'm intrigued by how Oura has really permeated pop culture as well. You know, you've got Mark Zuckerberg, Kim Kardashian. Before you came on, you mentioned that one of the big basketball coaches even gave you a shout-out during a press conference. We're seeing kind of cultural relevance here in that Oura is becoming a shorthand for how you're doing. It's like the doctor's note that isn't the doctor's note. It's in your pocket, it's on your cell phone, it's a substance of conversation between husbands and wives. You know, how is your sleep last night, honey? How's your day going to go? How's your Readiness? What did you do? You know, we see this kind of cultural relevance. It's a shorthand for caring about your health. And the thing is, whether you're Mark Zuckerberg or somebody who reads Facebook or wears a Meta headset, you can get a lot of benefit out of knowing what's going on in your body. We call it giving your body a voice. And the thing is, it's not just celebrities who are interested in that, everybody's interested in that. And if it teaches you how to use your body more effectively, no one gives you a manual for how to use your body. If it teaches you something you don't know, that's valuable.
And I like that you brought up wives there too instead of just husbands. Because Tom, I feel like for the longest time, Oura was for me something I saw on male CEOs, attracted like this male tech bro vibe. But the cycle tracking has been so helpful. I have mine on too and I think you're pushed toward fertility tracking and all that. Talk to me about your strategy and the demographics you're seeing using your product now.
We started life in sleep. And the great thing about sleep is that everybody does it at least once a night. You know, that's a pretty large market. It's a good T. But we always had the ambition, and maybe this is really the foresight of the people who founded the company, to expand beyond sleep. But to use sleep as kind of this incredible way that you gain access to insight to someone's body in a really controlled setting. And so you can make evaluations about what's going on in someone's health with like a really clean signal. There's a lot of noise, you know, during the day. If you're stressed out or whatever, you're going to get some noisy data. So we've always had the ambition to expand beyond sleep. And one of the first places that we went to was sort of activity. But Women's Health has been a place where we expanded in the last couple years and it's been phenomenal. It's been an incredible success for the company. The kinds of things that we can do, looking not just at your temperature but a whole set of biomarkers to make predictions about like when is your cycle going to arrive, when's a good time to get, you know, if you were trying to conceive, like when's a good time to try and conceive, when's a time when if you don't want to conceive when you probably shouldn't. What can we teach you about the way your body moves and changes through your cycle? How does illness or exercise interact with your cycle? These were all needs that weren't really met. And I think by meeting them, I think we've had an incredible response from women. And in the last two years, our audience has shifted from majority men to majority women.
That's interesting. You know, I have to ask you, I used to go to the Consumer Electronics Show and you couldn't trip without hitting yet another sleep measuring device or something that measures your step or fitness. How did you crack the code? What is it you think you did differently or Oura did differently that resonated?
But as you say, I think sleep was having a moment when people, I think the, you know, maybe the social conversation around sleep, which was like, I don't need sleep, you know, I'll sleep when I'm dead, I'm going to party all night, look at me, look how strong, it's kind of macho version of like, I don't need sleep. The understanding of sleep has really come around where people realize that like, if you want to perform at the highest level, you want to be as cognitively able as you can possibly be, you want to improve your mood, you want to live long, sleep is one of the foundational elements of your health regime. And that awareness, I think, has been rising and people's understanding of it. You know, much like in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, people understood exercise was something you ought to do and you better be intentional about it and think about it. Sleep is kind of having that sort of moment. You add to that things like the changing mores around health, like people are really thinking like, hey, I need to be in charge of my health. I'm not going to, you know, just trust the doctor in the white coat to take care of me. I got to take care of this myself. I got to have some agency in this. You think about what happened, COVID is a boomer thing, that's they're used to the doctors telling them what to do. Young folks are thinking about it. Longevity, to your point, Diane, I think is something that as our population or any population ages, we all start to think about longevity a little bit with a little bit more focus. You know, like maybe I'm not going to have that second glass of wine or whatever because I want to live longer or feel better. The other thing I would point out is that COVID, I think, actually was interesting from the perspective of it gave everybody on the planet a sudden glimpse into how fragile their health actually is. And in fact, it elevated people's understanding of health in a way, like what kind of information should I trust or not trust. You know, should I inject myself with Clorox? You know, there's all these things that were suddenly changing for people.
Yeah, the answer is no, in case you're listening, listeners, do not do that.
But the point is, people started reading studies, so they became more literate about health. People started doing research, or you know, we've all consulted Dr. Google since the early 2000s. But like now it's a little bit deeper. Like people are feeding, you know, scientific papers to ChatGPT and saying, please explain this to me in terms that I can understand because I want to live better, I want to be better, I want to live longer, I want to be around for my kids. This is just a different world that we're in. Performance, this is where it started. You know, you had athletes who are like, how do I shave that tenth of a second off of my time? How do I win? How do I compete? And it turns out sleep, they've known this for a while, is a real edge in performance. We've seen things where like people who are, you know, traders, where they've done studies with traders on Wall Street and one group has slept well and one group has slept poorly. And you know what, who does better in the long run? That's the ones who slept well. They did a study with the NBA. You know, how many free throws, what's your three-pointer percentage, how many fouls do you get, how many playing minutes do you get. They looked at this study on people who slept less. You know what, not surprisingly, anybody who has kids already knows this, underslept, more fouls, less playing time. Right? And well slept, no surprises there. I mean, I think I've known this for a long time, but there's the evidence. You know, but if you're well slept, you know, you get more three-pointers, you get more free throw percentage, like all these things sort of come through in the data and the science. So what we steered into was sleep with a couple of really important kind of areas of focus. One is accuracy. And accuracy really matters because, you know, if you're going to trust something that's going to give you guidance, you know, you want to believe that it's actually correct, right? You know, you want to know. So accuracy turns out to be not just something like, oh, it's nice, I want the most accurate. It's like, no, do I trust this thing? Do I believe it? And I think the thing about Oura is it gets it right so much more often than it gets it wrong that people trust it. People tell me this all the time. They're like, oh my God, it really gets me, it really understands me. I woke up six times last night and it says eight, and I only am aware of six, but it's at eight, so I'm going to believe eight because maybe I wasn't aware, maybe I wasn't conscious, but I was definitely moving. Okay, so that's accuracy. Another one that we got, I think, really right was this idea that a ring is something that you don't take off your body. You know, I mean, I wear my wedding ring. Honey, I love you. I wear it all the time. I never take it off. And the thing is, a ring is sort of thing like when you go to bed, you're taking stuff off your body. You know, take your glasses off, you take your clothes off, you change clothes, you get into your bed, the ring stays with you. And so as a result, you get this kind of continuity of data. You get data night after night after night, coupled with a long battery life. It's a seven to eight day battery life depending on how you use it. You don't have to worry about it. It's not another digital mouth to feed. You know, I mean, I know what happens to my, I used to wear an Apple Watch. I know where the Apple Watch is at the end of the day because I've been using it all day to respond to texts and look at LinkedIn and see what someone's calling me and all that kind of stuff. I'm charging it. You know, and not every night, maybe I'm charging it every two nights, but like some nights it's done and I'm like, oh my god, I've got 15 minutes before I go to bed, I'm not going to be able to charge this thing. Ring stays with you. It's on your body. And that continuous data, by the way, huge unlock. Because continuous data allows us to notice small changes and then say, hey, Kristen, your temperature is elevated by like half a degree and your heart rate variability has plummeted and you've been stressed. And what that does is it lets us tell Kristen that you're getting sick. And you're like, no, I'm not getting sick, I'm fine, I'm going to do fine. And then two days later when you're on the couch surrounded by Kleenex, right, you're like, damn, that thing really does know me. And it knows something about me that I don't know myself. And that power, let me tell you, that power, people, this is what blows people's mind about Oura, is they suddenly realize the thing can tell them something they don't know.
