Thank you so much for joining from San Francisco. We really appreciate it. Hello everybody. Thank you. So, usually we finish with one fun thing, but this time we're going to start with a fun fact because I'm so excited about this fun fact. I can't wait. Backstage, I learned something I did not know. A very Washington fact. When it comes to wearables, when it comes to DC decision makers, difference makers, what do they need to know about the Oura Ring? Well, and I think you heard this actually from Amy Clobuchar earlier today. This is the only wearable that you can take inside a skiff, which is the secure enclave. The reason for that is the Navy is actually one of the places where we were really successful and the bridge of every naval ship is a skiff. And so in order to do that, we had to pass that certification. Okay, that is very Washington. All right. We have not rehearsed this. We met, we met for the first time backstage. Tom and I just met. I'm going to show you my Oura Ring readings from yesterday and narrate what you can tell about me just from these three data points. Okay? And explain each of them for our guests. Okay. So, there's three data points here. One of which is your readiness, which is at 75. And that's been pretty steady. Readiness is a measure of how much energy you have to face the day. Good job. Well done. Your sleep score...
I feel like you're patronizing.
I'm not. I'm telling you the truth. Your sleep score is a 70, which I don't know for you if that's good or bad, but the interesting thing is it's very spiky. One day you seem to have a sleep score probably in the 50. Another one you have a sleep score that's probably it looks like 70 or so. But you're pretty spiky. So 94. You have a Saturdays of course. Of course, you have a busy busy schedule and you probably travel a lot. That's what I could derive from that. Last one, which is your activity score. Wow. Pretty steady in the 90s. Crushing it. How old are you? 60. Killing it. Big big respect. Big thank.
So, you had a very personal experience with this product before you became the CEO. How many years would you say it's or has put onto your life and how?
Well, so it started in the fall of 21. COVID was still on. My kids were having a tough time. I had sold a company. We were in the process of unselling it because the shareholders were turning it down. Extremely stressful. I am a championship sleeper. And in this moment, I lost sleep for the first time in my life. And I started casting around for a solution. I found the Oura Ring and within the space of about 6 weeks, I had gotten my sleep issues under control. And not only was that good for me at that moment, but also I realized that for the past 20 years of my life, I had been sleep deprived. Anybody who has small kids will relate. I had just been in this world of like just go go go. And when I got my sleep back, it was literally as if I had walked into a 4K Technicolor movie from a 1960s sitcom in black and white. It was boom. The world had changed. That's the power of sleep.
And you were explaining to me that, and this should be your best-selling book, sleep longer, eat less, do tell.
Well, biologically when you don't sleep, your body asks you to eat. And the way it does that, it releases a couple hormones into your body and basically make you hungry. Cortisol is one of them. And this is an evolutionary thing, which is it helps you survive. If you're, you know, whatever, you know, trying to survive on the deserts of Africa, your body, if it wasn't sleeping, it needed to eat. So as a result, if you don't sleep, your appetite increases. That's why midnight snacking is a thing. Conversely, if you do sleep, two hormones are secreted, leptin and ghrelin. One of them regulates the amount of appetite you have. The other one regulates how satisfied you feel based on what you eat. So if you sleep, you will eat less.
So this stage has been full of geeks. Today speaker Ryan was telling me who has the Oura Ring on. He was saying that he knows that one of the biggest factors is consistency and when you go to sleep. But Tom, what is sadly the number one thing that would give us better sleep?
So this is in the wet blanket department. Honestly, if you talk to any Oura Ring user, you say, 'Well, what's the number one behavior change that this ring has taught you and this software has taught you?' And they will say, 'I drink less almost uniformly.' And I think the realization that we should drink less, it's actually dawning on our society. You can see that there's less alcohol being consumed each year. But what's most interesting about the way it affects your sleep is that you see it in the architecture of your sleep and you see the impact of not like we all know what 12, you know, tequilas is going to do to us the next day. But what you don't know is like what does a couple of sips of tequila do to you? What does a half glass of wine that you feel like is okay? And when you start to see that your REM sleep, which is usually what is destroyed by alcohol, basically your REM sleep is when your brain is kind of processing the memories of the day and kind of laying down tracks for learning. That's one of the things that happens during REM sleep. And if it's disrupted, you have brain fog the next day. Not just like a hangover brain fog, but actually cognitive fog. So that's a huge thing that you should all pay attention to is when you wear your ring, you will drink less.
This is the what's next summit. Lots of conversation today about AI. Tell us about Oura Advisor.
Right. So obviously one of the parts of our vision is everyone has a device like this. This is basically a supercomputer and in our world everyone will have a device like this which is persistent and consistently on your body and it's measuring you 24/7 and those things are in contact. The third part of the component is some kind of machine intelligence that is living above that stream of information. Knows your context, knows you, knows your phenotype, your genotype, knows your medical history, knows all the things that have happened to your life, knows that you're now an incredibly active man at the age of 60 and then is able with that intelligence able to give you both guidance, maybe give you some advice, maybe even say, 'Listen, this is happening and you might want to seek some medical care.' And we see this today. The sort of rudimentary part of it's called Advisor. It's essentially a part of the application that gives you advice about what's going on based on your biometrics.
So, Christa Pilot of AT&T, who's a great friend of Axios, is here and I asked her what I should ask you and she was interested in the difference between how men and women use the ring. I looked into it. You used to have an overwhelmingly male member base. How has that changed?
Well, so in the last couple of years, women have really realized that the Oura Ring is a wearable that's tuned to women. And there's a couple of different reasons for that. One is one of the key metrics that we draw here is temperature. And of course, as a woman, as your physiology changes as you go through your cycle. One of the indicators of that is temperature. Because as you go through the various hormonal releases of your cycle, your temperature changes in a really predictable way. We all know this. It's called the rhythm method, right? That you take your temperature, you try and understand where you are in your cycle. This asset which the Oura Ring has like I think better than any other wearable is tuned to the entire life of a woman from the onset of menstruation to in their 20s when they might try and be, you know, not conceiving and so they're working and trying to use non-hormonal birth control to not conceive to the point where they are trying to conceive maybe they're coming off of hormonal birth control and they want to conceive and so they're trying to conceive through pregnancy to postpartum to perimenopause to menopause across that entire health journey. Oura has solutions and benefits to women and that has been incredible. In the past couple years, it has switched our customer base from mostly men to mostly women and the growth in women has been enormous. We've grown women in the last two years 250%.
And we're a big business now as you said. So what is the split right now?
New customers coming in 70/30 women to men and your overall mix is like call it 60/40.
And what was it at your most bro-y?
Most bro-y I think we were probably 55/45 men.
So in the Axios newsroom this morning we were trading Oura stories and our publisher who all of you know Nick Johnston was saying I only wear a wedding ring no other rings. Have you considered other form factors for Oura?
We have but the reality is that this site on the human body is the most accurate place to be. You like I feel like you definitely don't want to be a watch. You definitely don't want to be a watch. Think about when you go to the hospital, where do they put the PPG sensor? They put it on the tip of your finger. The reason why they do that is because this is uniform tissue. This is arterial blood flow. Basically, you're going to get a clearer, better, cleaner signal. It's more accurate. Here on the wrist, you're dealing with hair, bones, sinew. You're also getting blood on the return trip to the heart as opposed to the trip from the heart. So, you're on the leading edge of the pulse waveform. All these things are reasons why the ring matters.
Well, I don't think we're going to be developing a wrist-based solution anytime soon.
