On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. We have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data, so it's one of the largest health data sets in the world.
For a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health.
You want people to love your product authentically. LeBron James is now a global ambassador for Whoop. He was one of the first 100 people to ever wear it. You're starting to understand things before the rest of the medical community is learning them.
Through physiological signals, we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.
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All right, guys. Welcome back to the All-In interview program. Yeah, this is where guests we want to unpack for an hour or so. Not talk about the news like we do every Friday. We want to go deep. And health and technology is one of those areas. That's super interesting to all the besties, and I was really excited that my friend Will I met from Whoop decided he would carve out an hour for me and the All-In audience. You and I have spoken, I think, two or three times on the OG podcast This Week in Startups that I've been doing for over 15 years, there in the journey for Whoop. Let's start with just the footprint of Whoop as an organization now, because I've known you for, yeah, well over five years, six years of this journey. How many members, ballparkish? How many people are using the Whoop, and how much data have you collected?
Yeah, so Whoop, we build wearable technology to improve performance and health. I've been building this company now for 14 years. It was founded in 2012. And I think like a lot of maybe overnight success stories, it took a very long time to be an overnight success. You know, it took about 12 years for us to get to a million members, and then another 18 months or so to 2 million, about 6 months to 3 million, and expect to end the year around 4 million members.
4 million members. And hey, listen, I'll tell people right out. The service at first seems expensive because I think it's like 40 bucks a month, 30 bucks a month. Am I in the approximate range here? What do I spend? 300 a year on this.
Depending on what plan you're on, it's anywhere from $15 to $30 a month.
I'm on the top top plan with the top top sensor. But you took a very thoughtful approach to saying we're going to go for subscriptions and we're going to take out the cost of the device, so you don't have this cost, losing the device anxiety. So take me to that decision. And to be totally honest, for a dollar a day, I think this is like one of the best things you could spend on your health, or even less than a dollar a day. But take me through that decision as a business to go with 30 bucks a month.
Yeah, thank you. It's a unique business model. And in 2017, we had launched to consumers. It was a one-time fee, 500 bucks. At that point in the company's history, we had really built Whoop as like a performance brand. You know, it was known amongst the best athletes in the world, and we worked with all these sports teams, and we said, 'Okay, we're going to go to consumers and target, you know, an athletic and fitness enthusiast audience.' And over the course of the next 12 months of having that product in market, we really observed two things. The first is that people who bought Whoop would wear it for a long time, and that's always been a challenge in the wearables industry around drop-off rates and engagement, and fortunately for Whoop, that's been a strength of our product. But then the other thing we observed was that not that many people were buying the product. So we still had a sales problem, and because the engagement was so high, we asked ourselves, well, is there a business model here where the entry price is lower so people can get introduced to Whoop, and if they fall in love with the product, then over time it can be a good business for Whoop, too. And I think that immediately created all kinds of growth for Whoop back in 2018 and '19. And we quickly became a recurring revenue business versus a hardware business, which of course is more attractive to investors. And then, you know, what I underestimated is how much it changed our DNA, because when you're a subscription business, you become really obsessed with your existing members, arguably more so even than new members. And so, it's all about innovation cycles and continuing to rapidly improve the product and obsess over the member experience.
See, this is, I think, a critical observation for founders who might be watching. When you're selling widgets, you know, it's about distribution and, you know, marketing. But once you get a subscriber, hey, they're your customer next month and the following month and the following year. So you start obsessing about churn and engagement, right? The metrics kind of shift, right?
Yeah, totally. You get very focused on user engagement, how often people are using your product. You get focused on how effective it is. You know, how are you actually driving behavior change and health improvement. It changed our hardware cycles as well. So, when you're a hardware business, you're incentivized to ship new hardware every 12 months, whether or not it's actually innovative, because you always need that next dollar from a hardware sale. And also when you're a pure hardware company, you're not incentivized to be innovating on top of the existing product, right? Because you want to convince people to buy the next thing. And for us, we're actually the opposite incentives. We want to launch hardware when it's really innovative and it's a step function better. And then we're really focused on trying to continue to update the membership and the subscription. So, you know, someone who joined, I don't know, 18 months ago may not have known they were going to have ECG monitoring or AFib detection or advanced labs, which is now the blood work feature that we have in the app, or health span, which, you know, tells you your Whoop age and is a whole longevity feature, blood pressure insights, which is a new capability that allows people to look at their blood pressure every day. So, these are all examples of new features that we've brought to market with hardware that's in market.
Yeah. And what that does is you get over the issue we have with Apple products, which is like you're taking on as Whoop the responsibility for telling me when to upgrade and why I should upgrade, but it's not like some high-pressure thing like your iPhone cycle where they're constantly, you know, pressuring you to upgrade so they can make the money on the hardware. Now, let's talk about the innovation inside the software. And, you know, I've used everything. Fitbit, which is I guess Google Health now, Apple Watch. I've had all of it, Oura, over many, many years. And I settled on Whoop. Why did I settle on Whoop? Well, I thought your software actually, which was hard for me to get my head around at first because you have this recovery score, you have the sleep score, you have stress. But then there's this journal feature. It was a little complex for me compared to the other products, but ultimately what I found was it gave me more value once I committed to the product. So what does committing to the product mean? I think if you put in and you fill out the journal every day or just, you know, a couple times a week, you get much more out of it. So let me have you explain what the most important metrics are here: heart rate variability, the recovery score, high stress, sleep, etc. And then work me into like some of the features around journaling and why that's important.
Yeah, the three main pillars on Whoop are around sleep, recovery, and strain. And so most people start their day by looking at how well they slept last night. And that'll be everything from our sleep score to their sleep consistency. Do they go to bed and wake up at the same time? Your hours of sleep. So, how many of those hours were quality sleep versus the time that you just spent in bed trying to sleep? How much was restorative slow-wave sleep, REM sleep, you know, a pretty deep understanding of your body's overall circadian rhythm and how well you're sleeping. And then ultimately your recovery score, which is red, yellow, green, 0 to 100%.
By the way, I'm pretty pumped about mine today. I want you to know I'm ready for you.
90%. Hold on a second. I just had to show you that.
That's pretty strong for me.
That's very strong. For me, not so good. I'm on a 67.
Okay. But you got a green dial.
I got green and my sleep was 83%.
And my strain today is incredibly low because all I've done is sit and do no work. But you know, this is like super critical for me to have these numbers. Now I travel. I go to Japan. I go to Saudi. I go to Davos, you know, World Economic Forum. I'm all over the globe and I'm trying to regulate my sleep. I'm trying to figure out, should I be on this sleep schedule or, you know, the other one, and I'm just trying to make sure I'm fresh for when I'm doing performative stuff, you know, like on podcasts or speaking gigs. And it's essential for me now. It's just essential for me. I can't live without it. The thing that was interesting that happened for me is you also have under those three most important metrics there...
You have the health monitor. Now this is critical for me because twice now in the past, yeah, I think it's two or three times now, I have had under health monitor, which has your respiratory rate, your resting heart rate, skin temperature, blood oxygen, and HRV, heart rate variability. Right now, I'm all in green. However, the other week, I'm gonna tell you this story. It involves me going to the emergency room with chest pain.
Some people in the house, the kids or whatever, had a respiratory infection. I didn't get it, but I wake up one day and my respiratory rate is two breaths higher than normal. Instead of 16, it was like 18 or 15, it was 17. And then my skin temperature was like 2° hotter, right? And...
And just for people listening, when your respiratory rate is elevated by two breaths like that, that's actually pretty meaningful because respiratory rate is normally a very boring statistic. It normally doesn't change at all. So it's like, hey, what's going on?
Then it does it a second day in a row. So then I, you know, like do the warm bath. I make sure I got my electrolytes. I'm thinking maybe I'm coming down with something. Anyway, I recover on Saturday, Sunday. Sunday night, I can't sleep. I start getting chest pains. I put the Tesla at 1:00 a.m. in self-driving and I go to the emergency room because I used to work on an ambulance. I know, hey, you know, when you have chest pains and you're a 55-year-old male, this could be serious or it could be indigestion. I go, I do every possible test. I go right to the heart center in Austin here and they do the CT scan. I think that's the big scan of your heart, EKGs, everything. I'm there from 1:00 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. Turns out I had inflammation in my lungs around my chest and my heart was being constricted. So, I was experiencing chest pain. I was not having a heart attack, but there was something going on. And I was alerted to it for two days in a row without having any other symptoms. Very strange, right? And it was the Whoop those two days earlier, that Thursday, Friday, that on Sunday I was on high alert. I was like, 'Something's going wrong with my system.' It had done that. And the reason is three years ago, the same thing happened. My skin temperature is going crazy. And then in that case, I think it was my HRV. What's going on? I got COVID.
So, I have two bad scores. I'm in New York with one of my daughters and I was able to take that Paxlovid, which you can only take if you get to it early. So, I'm like, f this. Two days of like heat. I go, my wife goes, 'Maybe you got COVID.' I'm like, 'Wow, that's so retro.' I go right to Duane Reade. I take the test. I got it. I get Paxlovid all in the same day because the Whoop told me. So, you anticipated two acute situations for me. What other acute things are you starting to learn here now that you have 4 million people in the system? I understand now you're becoming a contributor to the preemptive delivery of medical services, and/or, you know, you're starting to understand things before, let's say, the rest of the medical community is learning them.
Well, thanks for sharing that. I mean, that's an amazing story and I'm grateful you're feeling all right and grateful that Whoop could play a small role helping. I think it's amazing. We now get these testimonials every day, every week from members who have an experience like the one you described. I got a message last week from, you know, a fit, healthy baseball player who all of a sudden saw he had these elevated heart rates while he was sleeping that looked very abnormal. You know, someone with a resting heart rate of 50 beats per minute getting a heart rate of 120, 130 while he's sleeping. And he goes in to see the doctor and they do some tests and sure enough, stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma.
Yeah. And he was able to get treated for it and he's recovered from it. And then, you know, another similar story where a member with their HRV, they'd been on Whoop actually for I think close to a decade. So they had this incredible baseline. And HRV for people who are less familiar...
Unpack that because you're the one who introduced me to this whole concept and I have since gone down the rabbit hole.
So HRV stands for heart rate variability. It's the amount of time between successive beats of the heart. And it's a little counterintuitive, but the more variability in time between successive beats of the heart, the healthier your overall system is operating. And it's this lens into your autonomic nervous system, which consists of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. So sympathetic activation, heart rate up, blood pressure up, respiration up. It's what happens, you know, when you have a thought like that there's a lion in the room or, you know, when you start to exercise or you're thinking about something stressful. Conversely, parasympathetic is all the opposite. Heart rate down, blood pressure down, respiration down. It's what helps you fall asleep. If you exhale for a long period of time, that's parasympathetic. And what you want is for sympathetic activity and parasympathetic activity to be coupled. And so your body's kind of constantly regulating its environment. And when that's the case, it means you have a higher heart rate variability, that the measurement will be higher. And we're measuring heart rate variability 24/7. It was really one of the key innovations in founding the company. I did all this medical research when I was a student at Harvard and heart rate variability was a thing that like jumped off the page to me because there was really interesting research on it, but it couldn't be measured 24/7, and so that's where, you know, part of where Whoop was born out of. Anyway, heart rate variability is something that we use for stress monitoring. It's something we use for our recovery score, and we baseline everyone on Whoop and then we're able to show you every day, are you within your baseline? Are you a little higher? Are you a little lower? And when you look at trends of this over years, you start to get a sense for is someone getting healthier over time or less healthy. It's a really important longevity indicator. Typically speaking, as you get older, your heart rate variability will drop. So, you know, people who are in their 20s, their heart rate variability will be anywhere between like 80 and 100 on average. 30s, you start to drop to 70. 40s, you start dropping to 50. You know, 50s, 60s, all of a sudden you're in, you know, 30s and below. And so, if you can fight that trend, those averages, and keep your heart rate variability even just flat over years, that's actually a sign of good fitness, good longevity. And anyway, back to the story I was telling you, this individual, they had a very steady heart rate variability that was within a specific range and all of a sudden it plummeted. So, it was a healthy person and they had a heart rate variability of about 100 and then it was 50 all of a sudden for a period of time. Again, goes in, gets all these tests, he turned out to have testicular cancer.
Now was that known previously that HRV would in some way be a lead indicator for testicular cancer?
I mean, I don't think so. You know, that's what's so fascinating about this moment in time is we've never had this much data on the human body continuously. One of the principles to founding Whoop was 24/7 data. And it's why we have a 14-day battery life now. It's why we invented a charger that you slide on to your Whoop.
I was about to say these are super important. And when you first told me about this on This Week in Startups, I was like, 'Well, I need to, I want to see how many steps I've done and the time. It makes no sense.' And you were like, 'Trust me, Jason, you know, there's a reason for this.' And now that I've used it, it turns out you're absolutely right. The reason I have had so many long streaks, the only time I really stopped using this for the past couple years is when I lost it and I had to order a new one. So, I broke my streak, which was a bummer, but it is what it is. It's just a number. Because you can wear it in the shower, you can wear it in the bath, and you should. It turns out a warm bath is, when we get to journals in a minute, super great for my recovery for whatever reason and my sleep. You never have to take it off and you can slide on the battery charger. So you can have essentially the opposite experience that I had with my Apple Watch. The Apple Watch was annoying because I'm getting alerts and I'm getting alerts for things that I installed 2 years ago and it's just constantly bothering you. People think you're rude when you look at the watch and then the battery dies every, you know, whatever. For the Apple Watch, I think I might have gotten to 24 hours or 36 hours, 48 hours a couple times, but it's a terrible experience. With this, I mean, I've made it 10 days, you know, 14 days, no problem. And I carry, I bought three battery chargers. I just keep one in my desk. I keep one on the bedside, one in my travel bag. It's like these things aren't expensive. And that's a key to it, I think, as well.
Yeah, is the amount people wear these.
On average, a Whoop member wears Whoop 23.6 hours a day. And as a consequence, we have just over 50 billion hours of continuous physiological data. So it's one of the largest health data sets in the world. And now with the advent of AI and what you can do with large data sets, it's just like a really exciting time to be working in this space.
Do all the AI companies like the frontier models want to buy this data from you in aggregate? Is that like a huge business for you guys eventually? How do you think about that or building your own models?
Yeah, today we're building our own models, you know, foundational models within the company that are essentially training on top of this data. So...
So you're using open source models or you're part of...
We're developing our own models. You've got open source models, and what's amazing is you've got this huge physiological data set, but then you also now have other data sets, right? So people are uploading their blood tests or they're doing advanced labs through Whoop, they're uploading medical records. And so as an example, we're now starting to see indications that through physiological signals we might be able to predict that a biomarker is out of range without actually measuring the biomarker itself.
Wow. And so then, you know, you could give someone a very targeted, hey, we think you're, you know, we think you have high cortisol. You should get this one test. And it gets super targeted, which is exciting, which the AI would be able to figure out. The AI is going to look at all this data and say, hey, maybe there's a cortisol issue or here's the possibilities, which is super fascinating. So you see your business in the future as this AI assistant, and you added an AI assistant, I think, to the product less than 6 months ago. I'm addicted to it now.
And you have these ongoing conversations. It logs the conversations. And so now it was, I'll be candid, pretty dumb. At the start it would be like, you know, you could talk to it and be like, yes, you had this rate. Okay, thanks for that rate. Now it's gotten a bit more sophisticated because now when I tell it I'm in Japan, you didn't record my sleep, it's like, oh, okay, here's what's happening. And it actually is understanding the product. And I guess you're doing some reinforcement learning.
And it's got to be that these four million members, including myself, are now telling it where the product breaks down or where the opportunities are to add more features, however you want to look at it. But there was this constant struggle I was having with changing time zones and was my sleep getting recorded properly so then I could get my recovery. And then I started asking, and then it prompted me and said, 'Hey, by the way, when are you leaving for Japan or whatever?' And I was like, 'Here's my flight. This is when I land.' And it was like, 'You should sleep at the first half and then not go to bed when you get to Japan. Don't have caffeine at this time.' So somebody in the company, I think, explicitly started doing a time zone change, or did it just learn that and infer it? Did you get specific about that, and how are you using the AI coach?
We spun up a team on travel specifically because it's such a popular use case for a lot of our members. And, you know, our origins were with athletes, but now we've got this wide audience of aspiring people. You know, I'd say that's really, if you think about who is Whoop targeting, it's the aspiring. And that could be a great athlete, that could be someone who's fit, but it could also just be someone who wants to have more energy for their family and their job and their life hobbies.
That's right. And wants to live longer, right?
Yeah. Live longer.
But the AI coach is a big part of that and it's a big part of our future. And, you know, we've been working on it for years now. I'm glad to hear that you feel like it's getting good, at about 80%.
I'd say it's like a seven and a half right now. Seven and a half out of 10. I think there's so much potential for it.
Yeah. As long as it's good enough for you to be engaging with it, it's just going to keep getting better with time. And we're getting better at that, too. And so, you know, one thing that's really interesting, again, back to these data sets. So, physiological data, we talked about that, that's from the sensor. Then you've got the advanced labs and the blood testing. You've got the medical records coming in. But actually this is another very important piece of data, which is all sorts of user feedback, right? Like the journal itself. So about just over 50% of our members journal every day.
This is a good point to explain what the journal is.
I'm sorry that I keep explaining your features, but I'm so passionate about the product, as you can hear.
No, you're doing great. So the Whoop Journal is essentially 100-plus different behaviors, lifestyle decisions, you know, supplements, drugs, you name it, that someone might want to log. So popular things that people log every day are like, did I drink alcohol last night? Was I hydrated? Did I travel? You know, did I meditate? Was I happy? Was I sad? You know, was I stressed? And all of this anecdotal information also builds on these data sets where, you know, if you wanted to come up with an algorithm for predicting whether someone would be happy, you would actually need a fair amount of data from someone on, you know, on their overall mood as an example. So anyway, we're excited about bringing all these different types of data sets together, and it's one thing that we feel uniquely positioned to do because not that many companies, you know, have people opening their app eight times a day and 80% of their member base interacting with the AI.
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The journal was a major unlock for me. Here's from a user perspective, since we're doing a whole user session here. What's really interesting about it is you get these behavioral insights. And I think you get into behavioral insight when you've used it 10 times. Five yeses, five nos. As an example, if you're doing creatine, somebody's paying attention at Whoop. And I guess you got a lot of... How many people working over there now?
Whoa. That's grown significantly.
Yeah. Wow. So when you pull up your behavioral insights, and in the morning it will ask you and prompt you, because in the mornings when everybody opens this to check their sleep score, recovery, it prompts you. You can start to figure out after this five and five what impact that behavior has on recovery. So it turns out for a warm bath, which was never my thing. I hate baths. Not my thing. Like I'm a guy like going in a bath, hanging out in a bath. I have no interest. I'm like a guy from Brooklyn. Like kind of feels weird to be in a bath with the candles.
Any salts in the bath? Are you adding fragrance?
I did add the... Yes, you got me. I'm adding salts to the bath. Yes. And that's now also tracked.
It helps. Warm bath plus 7%.
On my recovery. Have you ever heard of something like that?
That's very high as a response. So, you know, for folks who are trying to figure out what we're talking about, essentially, when you log these things, Whoop then will tell you what's positively or negatively affecting your recovery score. So, a big wakeup call for a lot of people ends up being alcohol because it'll show you that alcohol has this like hugely negative effect.
It's poison. I don't drink so I never even log it, but you have a couple of beverages now and again, Will. And then what impact has...
I feel like I've got a good relationship with alcohol, although it's got a negative 9% for me. So I'm now looking at my behavior insights. Here's a sneaky one for every...
Wait, have you considered having that drink while you're in the warm bath?
Yeah, right. Maybe I should start adding more baths. But I do steam room. I do cold plunge. Those are...
Yeah. How's that working out?
Those are more neutral, but I like the way they make me feel. And there's a lot of longevity research on sauna-ing and contrast therapy. So second to alcohol for being the most negative for me is a...
Late meal. So eating within 3 hours of bedtime, we've now seen across the entire Whoop population, is really detrimental to your sleep and your recovery. And it's because your body is still digesting for those first few hours that you're in bed.
And as a consequence, you're not getting quality sleep. So you get high stress during the sleep, I would assume. Yeah, that whole high stress thing. Here's mine.
For some reason, vitamin D minus three. I don't know if that's accurate or not, but I was putting a little vitamin D in. Maybe that's a false positive.
It could be that the days you took it were days that you were traveling or, you know, there could be something else going on.
There's some, yeah, there's a correlation here that we're not seeing yet.
You can ask Whoop that. You can...
I'm seeing vitamin D minus three. Does that make sense? What could be going on? And maybe it'll look at your travel alongside that.
Okay, this is a modest difference and it's a correlation, not evidence, that vitamin D caused the change. Your recent recovery has ranged 27% to 87%, but you haven't logged vitamin D in this 14-day stretch. So there's no recent compliance.
Okay, so I got a little more work to do on that one. Uh, but plus five strain is minus five on recovery. That makes total sense.
Yeah. So when you work out, your body needs to recover.
Plus 1% of the day in high stress zone, minus 9% on recovery. So you know, through my temp, what the stress score comes from — what temperature, heart rate, HRV?
Primarily HRV, but it's also using other sensing.
Got it. So, and that's kind of your, is that your special sauce there, proprietary-ness in that, the stress score?
The stress score itself is something that we invented. Of course, we based it on physiological research. And I would say that's one of the hard things about this space, which is how do you take medical research that's credible and then a lot of data, because you're going to be getting data from consumers, and then great design, right? Because at the end of the day, you have to design something to ultimately have a score that people want to look at. And so there's a lot of science to it, but there's also art to it. And I think it's something Whoop has been very good at. You know, the recovery score and now our health span score is the most screenshotted page in the app.
Makes total sense. Yeah. When you share that, um, consistent bedtime plus four, caffeine plus four, creatine plus four, uh, morning sunlight plus three. So now that I have this, I also do some meditation with the Calm app and with Waking Up or on my own. That also, uh, I don't have enough data in there yet because I keep forgetting to log it. But it does log my skiing. So I use Slopes.
