WHOOP: Will Ahmed

0:10 I'll never forget this investor I met. Then he had all these reasons for for why we should take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. Yeah. I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him and he said, you know what, you are gonna fail.

0:24 You're gonna fail because you don't listen. Well. And I remember For months I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true.

0:35 I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn. Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built.

0:59 I'm Guy Raz and on the show today how a college athlete changed the playing field for wearables. By launching Woop. A device that tells you things only your doctor Once new. You've heard me say this before.

1:20 The hardest thing about building a consumer products business isn't actually building the product. It's building the brand. But sometimes both of these things are equallenging. Especially when you're trying to come up with a completely new kind of technology. Today's story is about a guy who spent many years trying to build a very, very complex product.

1:44 And then many years trying to compete against some of the biggest brand names in the world. Brands like Nike and Under Armour and Amazon and Apple. The founder, Will Ahmed, started working on his idea back in college. a new kind of wearable health tracker. Now at the time, Fitbit was already out there. but Will wanted something more sophisticated.

2:09 A device that could measure things you'd normally need a doctor or a lab for. For example, how your body recovers after training, or how your heart performs over time, or how well you sleep at night. And unlike other trackers, his was designed to be worn twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Now there were plenty of moments when it looked like the whoop device wouldn't make it. But today, it's one of the leading wearables on the market, and it's become a go-to for serious athletes and fitness fanatics. As for Will, he grew up on Long Island in the 1990s and early 2000s. His dad was an immigrant from Egypt who worked in finance. His mom was a writer.

2:53 And at Harvard, where the story really begins, Will played on the squash team. So interestingly, squash is a sport that um is played around the world. But is best known for being huge in the Middle East, and actually Egyptians Um are some of the best squash players in the world. Wow. And uh and so my dad was a was a very serious squash player. He got a racket in my hands when I was little. And I learned how to play growing up on Long Island.

3:23 It it you know ended up helping me get into college. Yeah. But what I always I've loved about squash is that it's intensely cardiovascular. So it's a it's one of the hardest Minute for minute workouts that you can find. And it's a it's a fairly strategic sport as well, where you have to think carefully about where you're gonna put the ball and where your opponent's gonna put the ball. And uh and so, you know, I've I've always loved it. All right. You get to Harvard um in two thousand eight.

3:49 You're an undergraduate there. And you're also An athlete. So I I imagine that uh'cause you I mean sometimes people you know, get into these schools and then they leave the sports team and just focus on school. But you state. I mean you this must have consumed a lot of your time.

4:04 Uh as a student athlete. Yeah, I mean you spend three or four hours a day training. And I was just kinda burning it on all ends. So, you know, you work out really hard, you stay up late working or studying. And from what I understand, you're good. I mean you're a good player, but you weren't a star player. You weren't right on the team. I'm not to be I hope I'm I'd like um opening any wounds here. But you weren't right, is that fair to say? Yeah, I was in the in the varsity lineup. There's nine players who make varsity and you know, I tended to be like a bottom of the lineup guy. You were the captain and the yeah, sure. And sure enough, I was captain of the team and and that was a great leadership opportunity. I ask about about this and not again the fact that you weren't the best in the team. I is em it's important because

4:46 I imagine Wanting to get better. you were probably trying to do things that you thought would make you faster or jump higher or you know, move your fast twitch muscles. Tell me what you were doing.

5:00 Well, I I was someone who would play extra games after practice or do extra court sprints or, you know, go to the gym or do interval training and Uh and so I kept pushing more and more. And to your point, like Yeah, I wasn't one of the most talented players on the team, so I wanted to make up for it by being one of the fittest players on the team. And for the most part I was one of the fittest players on the team, but Not surprisingly, I was also someone who used to over train. And that's where you you sort of go through this period of getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then

5:30 all of a sudden you you fall off a cliff and you don't necessarily know why. What is over t so over training is sort of a weird concept, right? Because obviously uh the definition is clear. You're training too much. But I think most people hear that and think, Well, what's wrong with that? I mean, you're doing a lot of exercise, you're moving your body, you're twenty, twenty one years old, eighteen, nineteen. I mean, were you noticing that you weren't improving? You get to a state where your body's not recovering relative to the amount of uh strain that you're putting on it or the amount of stress that you're putting on it. So typically what you want in a in a training cycle is to overreach for a period of time. There's a distinction between overreaching and overtraining. Overreaching is where you're pushing your body a little too far, but in the days that follow your body can bounce back. And overtraining is where you extend your body

6:20 through such a long period of time that you actually then go through a period where you cannot recover. And you actually have a lot of the same symptoms of being sick without necessarily having a cough or a sore throat. And so what that would mean from a performance standpoint is you'd be you'd be flat in a match that you should win. You know, you wouldn't have your bounce, you wouldn't have your explosive steps, you'd feel tired in the second game when you should be tired in the fifth game. You know, and the piece that we haven't talked as much about is really the other twenty hours of the day. And that's where I was actually failing more than on the training side. What do you mean by that? Well, when I thought about what it meant to be a college athlete, I realized there was so much focus on what are we doing during the three hours that were four hours that were practice or training. But there was really not a lot of discussion around how you're treating your body the other twenty hours of the day. And I I was someone who was going to bed at inconsistent times. You know, I I would go out to a party on a weekend and drink alcohol. I would stay up late to do school work. Like I like training and and I was comfortable pushing myself

7:27 very far, but I wasn't doing what needed to be done to recover properly. Uh and so that got me into interested in this whole concept around recovery. got interested in the idea of s essentially saying, Well what if we could know Like I can measure my heart rate, right? But what if I could I could know like what my body was doing.

7:47 twenty four hours a day. Essentially. Yes. Well, the first question I asked is how would you prevent over training?'Cause that was a very personal thing. And so that got me interested in this concept of like okay, well what is overtraining? Overtraining is a mismatch between

8:02 The the strain that you put on your body And how recovered your body actually is. If your body's super recovered, you can put a lot of strain on it. You're probably not gonna overtrain. And I realized I I didn't know that much about recovery. And so I started just looking into well, how could you measure recovery? And that very simple question

8:23 Is what The next thirteen years of my life. Right. 'Cause this is a problem you have. You and w and by the way, it is it's interesting because most

8:33 Nineteen, twenty year olds can recover quickly. I mean it's just just genetically, just your body where you are in life. you can recover much better than you can in your thirty, forty, fifty, and so on. But um you're getting interested in this idea of recovery. And That sets you down a rabbit hole of like wait.

8:50 Maybe Could we continuously measure certain metrics in our body. How did how did you go from being focused on recovery to thinking about Measurement. Well the immediate thing that I realized is that

9:04 To understand recovery, you have to understand all the time outside of training. And once you kinda opened your aperture to that idea, you realize well, maybe training is just a piece of this puzzle, you know? What is sleep?

9:18 Oh wow, well sleep is actually this hugely important component to recovery. So then I started researching sleep. And Wha what I found from all this physiology research, and I I probably read about five hundred medical papers by the time I graduated, was That

9:36 There were really three pieces of technology that provided valuable data points. Unfortunately those pieces of technology for the most part were uncomfortable and not accessible. Wh what were those pieces of technology? The first was the PSG machine, which is the gold standard for measuring sleep.

9:53 So if you are trying to figure out whether you have sleep apnea, your doctor might tell you to go get a sleep lab test. You go to a lab, they put bunch of monitors on you, they put a mask on you, or a breathing apparatus, right? Yeah, and you're gonna be uh video taped while you sleep and it'll be the worst night sleep of your life. That was a machine though that could really accurately measure Not just how much time you spent in bed and how many hours of sleep you got, but it could go deeper. It could understand

10:19 of the sleep you got, how much of it was restorative sleep. Which is to say how much was slow wave sleep versus REM sleep? And it turned out as it pertains to recovery, restorative sleep was actually that magic period of time. So I got very interested, okay, well how could you get to how could you measure restorative sleep? Uh and then the second machine was the electrocardiogram. You know, twenty thousand dollar piece of equipment. And then the third piece of equipment was a consumer product, but it was a consumer product that was invented in the eighties. And that was the heart rate monitor or the chest strap. Mm-hmm.

10:52 Right. You could run a treadmill, right? It was like a polar is a brand that does it. These these straps you put around your chest. Yes. I mean the biggest thing I was focused on was I if you could measure anything, what would you measure? Mm.

11:04 And then the second order question became Is it possible to measure these things the way I want to measure them? Which is continuously and non invasively. Right. Twenty four seven? Like Yeah. Th it's the difference of seeing a picture of someone and seeing the movie of their of their life and I started meeting with engineering labs.

11:25 in in Boston. Um and in Cambridge. And so these would be like engineering for hire firms. where you could go to them with an idea and they would prototype something for you. So wait, you started to to identify some of these these labs and you'd go in and say, Hey, I'm Will Like what was

11:42 Pretend like I'm I'm at the lab. What would you say to me? Yeah, I I I would say, Hey guy, I I've got this uh great idea. uh to continuously measure the body and here are the three pieces of technology that I want to largely replace in a small continuous form factor, likely to be some type of a wristband. And I'm curious how you would uh approach this and whether you can help me with the engineering problem.

12:08 Alright, so this is around like Two thousand Eleven ish, I guess when you start to Um and just just to put this in context. At this point in history there is a product called the Fitbit.

12:21 Which is out there. It's a fitness tracker. Um and then there's another product that's a Starting. But those products We're measuring mainly what?

12:32 Steps. Steps. Mainly movement. And my obsession was much more physiological, I w uh or even medical, you could argue, which is I wanted to deeply understand what was happening inside the body. And I had a real aversion to steps.

12:47 Um, especially then in the sense that I didn't think that steps answered anything about the strain recovery equation that we talked about before. Which is to say that how much you know stress you're actually putting on your body. Um

13:02 Is a is a different question. than how much you you've moved your arm. So All right. When you

13:11 took this idea to some engineering labs to see if they could help you with a prototype. Did any of them say, Well, that's impossible. You can't measure those things on your wrist. You it's just not possible to do that do all the things you want to do. That's why you have to go to a sleep apnea lab, for example. Yeah, I would say probably two thirds of them. were dead ends just in the sense that like

13:34 I looked like a kid with a you know a science project. Yeah. There was an important qualifying question though that they all had before before they went any deeper, which is Um, what's your budget for this project? Giving you money. Right. Yeah.'Cause they'll do it. I mean if you're like, Hey yeah, I got a couple hundred grand, uh they'll do whatever you want. Yeah, sure. And you you probably look like the dumbest guy in the room. Like, you know, here's here's a bunch of money to answer this question, no one's answered. So yeah, for the most part I was getting rejected, but but I was uh I was just looking for

14:04 For believers at that point, and I had grown pretty convinced that this was gonna exist. Uh it was obvious to me that this is where the world was going. computers over the course of my life lifetime had gone from being on your desk to on your lap. to in your pocket and inevitably it seemed to me they were gonna become on your body. Mm.

14:26 But how how did you learn what What gave you the confidence That y that there could be an invention. that could actually gather all of this data and information simply by being on a wrist. Well

14:38 When I met with some of these engineering labs, one of the techniques they suggested was using light. light reflecting off the skin. Yeah. That was very exciting and the techniques for called photo postmography. But that was very exciting because Um those sensors are actually very inexpensive. And in two thousand tw summer of twenty twelve, one of the first things that the group of us did that was sort of hacking around with this idea was we bought uh these little light sensors from the from the internet that um you could put on your fingertip.

15:10 Okay. Kind of get at your heart rate, like, you know, while you are resting. And so that was like a big uh Eureka moment where it was like, Okay, wow, this isn't this isn't Totally crazy, like this this isn't defying physics, so to speak.

15:26 There was one other thing that I think's important to the the sort of college student turned entrepreneur. Uh I took a A class at MIT's business school. Called New Enterprises. Where you go in with an idea and they essentially teach you how to write a business plan.

15:43 And um That business plan wa you know became this like seventy-five page document that I I I wound up being quite proud of. And it also allowed me when I met with you know, people I was trying to recruit to work with me for the summer, uh, like a you know, very talented computer scientist or an engineer. It gave me some credibility to be able to show up with a business plan and a physiology paper. And it's like here here's

16:10 What we're gonna do. And here's the data that's gonna take. Got it. Okay. And and That business plan. Was the idea that you were gonna

16:19 create something Designed for athletes? Was that Was that the original idea? The original idea was we were gonna start with athletes and then eventually we were gonna build a product for everyone and then eventually we'd go into medicine. All right, so this is twenty I think twenty eleven, which is your senior year, twenty eleven and twenty twelve. You

16:38 basically set up a an L C or some kind of a business I I think already in two thousand eleven, which is was called My Bobo, but was b becomes Bobo anal analytics. Yeah. And um and so this is the your second semester of your senior year. You've got this. business name and you've incorporated it and

16:58 You've decided that you are gonna go out and seek some money from friends and family. Why did you I mean this is kinda nuts, right? You're a senior in college, you've no track record You're not even a technology very smart guy, obviously, but you're not a technology guy. And you're gonna go ask people for money. To to help you start this thing. I mean that's pretty

17:19 Bold is is not exactly the word I want to use. It's kind of Uh yeah, and up front. In a sense what did you when you went who did you ask money f from and what did you Promise them in return. I think at the end of the day the biggest thing that anyone who backed me saw was a was a a a deep

17:36 Commitment. This was not like a side hustle. This was the hustle. And the advantage to betting on a twenty two year old is they don't have a lot else going on. No.

17:46 You went to your I'm presumably to your dad and your Yeah, I w I went to my my parents, my best friends. Um former bosses that I worked for And look, I was met with more rejection in a short period of time you know, they call it the first six months of telling the world I was gonna do this, than I had experienced in my entire life. And all these people are like, This is this is a bad idea. Like you

18:11 Are Pitching a very complicated concept. You are not uh a doctor, an engineer, a computer scientist, a designer. Uh essentially all the things that it takes to build this business you are not. And um By the way, around that time there were rumors that Nike was entering the space and Apple was entering the space. Right. I mean this is twenty twelve and you already have the Fitbit. You've got Jawbone which would become one of the b biggest

18:40 kind of eventually w it was a hu uh we raised nine hundred million dollars in time. It was a massive Silicon Valley company that had gone from like Bluetooth speakers to wearable trackers. Um, and you're like obviously smart guy, but who are you? Right? That that's a fair question to ask in twenty twelve. Very fair question. And I was asked it a lot and I was confronted with it a lot and Most days my belief system

19:09 got me through it and other days uh I was just kind of feeling like a loser. And I think that's the pain of being an entrepreneur is uh is you can feel pretty crazy sometimes. Alright, you managed to convince enough people to give you three hundred thousand dollars to start this company, and the idea was

19:31 Of course you can start to build the technology to enable this, which is really a shot in the dark,'cause there's no There's no guarantee this could work. And One of the people that you recruited was a fellow student.

19:44 Um Why did you want him to work with you? Yeah, there were there were three people that in the sort of summer of twenty twelve Really mattered. And they would go on to matter a lot to Woop.

19:57 Um John Caprilupo, Aurelian Nikolai, and Martin Oberhauser. Mm-hmm. And John Capital Lupo was nineteen years old. And taking at the time one of the hardest math classes in the country. Well.

20:10 He was really smart and he's somebody that You wanted somebody with that kind of Brain working with you. Yes, I wanted that kind of horsepower. And

20:20 His father was a professor of exercise physiology. Perfect. That's like a bonus on top. And and and then um about a a week or two into our summer Uh, and I should say that we were working out of the Harvard Innovation Lab, which is important to the story because so many people that we ended up getting to c so so many people that I cobbled together to work on this that summer were um

20:43 uh Harvard students and John was living um you know just off campus And I was saying to him, Hey, you know, it'd be great if we could uh you know, prototype some of these ideas we're having for heart rate monitoring. And he was like, Yeah, you know, it's funny, there's this really talented mechanical engineer. He's like living on my couch. He had a job somewhere, he's Romanian, something didn't work out, but he's like literally living on my couch.

21:09 And The Romanians were kind of their own uh entity at Harvard because every year there was like two or three of them that would get in, which meant they were like the smartest students out of Romania. And I said, Yeah, l hey, let's bring them on down. And so Aurelian Nikolai shows up uh at the Harvard Innovation Lab. Uh, and reveals to me all of his three D printed prototypes. Of what?

21:33 So he he had built like a whole a whole structure, like a mechanical arm that could pick things up. With um little three D printed parts. And and so I could immediately tell that this guy was a total whiz at three D printing and the exact answer that we needed to this prototyping problem. Alright, let me add some context here because there's this thing you mentioned, the Harvard Innovation Lab, and I think that was it was started. around this time, I guess it was it was designed to like help kids like you who had cool ideas. And they in this setup like it's not like they were like sure, but we need like five percent equity in your business. It was just like yeah great come and work here.

22:10 Yes. Now Th the third person I wanna give credit to is i is a guy named Martin Oberhauser. And Martin Oberhauser is a very talented designer. And there was a belief that I had From the earliest days of building this company, which was that the way that we were gonna visualize the data was actually gonna end up becoming one of the most important characteristics of the business.

22:34 And Uh I did what everyone else would do as a sort of twenty-two year old um looking for a designer. I went to Google and and Googled best information graphics designer in the world. And the The second link. In twenty twelve was this

22:51 Profile of a guy named Martin Oberhauser. And I called him. And you know, Martin in not so many words said he's already working with a few other companies. Since we're based in the States it makes it harder. Where was he based? He was based in Hamburg, Germany. Mm-hmm. And and you know, he essentially just blew me off.

23:10 And so the next day I called him back again and I said, Look If I flew to Hamburg, would you just meet with me for an hour? Wha sorry, can I just pause. That first summer that you're starting at and at this point it's just you, John, and John was gonna be the chief technology officer. Aurelian, this Romanian student, was gonna w he he was like an a a mechanical engineer type. Again, just kind of

23:35 Crazy. Like, why were you fixated on this one guy who was gonna be so expensive? I think it i i if there's something I've learned in building this business, it's that You have strong moments of intuition. And Um, if they have a good track record, you have to trust them.

23:54 When I got on that plane to Hamburg, I knew That this guy was gonna be our lead designer. All right, you but you got it's amazing. You get to Hamburg How did you convince him to join you? Well

24:07 I think it's worth saying that I got a lot of credit for getting on the plane. You know, when someone shows up to your doorstep like that with that much sort of husba, if you will, there there is a credibility m moment with it. And so I think I passed a certain test in his eyes, which was that I was pretty serious about this. And I was a little bit crazy. You know, in a good way maybe. But I was I was gonna do things. Well we come back in just a moment. How Will launches Woop and then reaches out to two of the world's best athletes to help make a name for it. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

24:56 Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the summer of twenty twelve. Will has just graduated college and he's assembled a team to build the device that will become Woop. Yeah, we start working out of the uh

25:13 Innovation Lab and the First prototype. Was a ridiculous looking product. Band thing. Yeah, it had to connect to a computer and then it had a long wire that connected to a box.

25:27 a sketchy looking box. And then it had another wire that came out of it that eventually connected to A goofy looking wrist based sensor. And it's got a big box. It says Bobo on it and a cord coming out of it. Okay. That box Was the interface between the wristband and the computer. Uh yes. That that box did a lot of the processing and got it.

25:49 The breakthrough with that box was that It could measure Um heart rate and heart rate variability. under certain circumstances. It was still very much a prototype. Now look.

26:01 What was the point of the prototype? The point of the prototype was to prove to ourselves as much as to anyone else. That It actually It doesn't defy physics, this idea that you could measure the human body accurately from a wrist worn thing.

26:18 And so that was a big breakthrough for us in this feeling of it's possible. And at that time I had also now gotten pretty far along in the design process. of uh what this is gonna look like when all the data shows up. Why was HR V heart rate variability

26:36 so important. Why did you think that that was the measurement? And by by the way, I'm assuming the other products at least at this point out there were not doing that. So why why was that? So important. I I can go into much more detail about her variability, but the punchline is if you can measure this thing and baseline it to a human, you could understand in any given moment

26:58 The state of their body. Is your body at peace? Is it recovered? Is it stressed? And it also became obvious if you could measure heart rate variability During a control. A control being under the same circumstances every day.

27:13 you could then get a really good sense for the person's Um state of recovery. I mean, you start working on this in summer of twenty twelve, right? And you're gonna basically end up working out of this Innovation lab at Harvard. for eighteen months probably to t to the end of twenty thirteen.

27:29 When did you start when do you remember starting to see encouraging signs that actually The technology we're working on was promising. I I think it was a stage in which I had gotten

27:45 very focused on What each a successive prototype needed to be able to demonstrate to help us raise capital. I think that it was it was pretty obvious to me that this was a business that actually was much more capital intensive than I had realized. And so I was in what I would call a perpetual state of fundraising for the first twelve months of the business, which by a horrible way to raise capital. Yeah. But it it was clear to me that I needed to be able to hit proof points.

28:14 To be able to show that it was possible. And so one of the hardest things about building this company was we were building software and hardware. Like on complete islands. Just I I was with the design and with the software, I was always assuming the hardware was gonna arrive, so to speak. And so that's where the first prototype being able to measure hurry variability helped. That's where the the following prototype which came you know, maybe six months after that and we'd raised another four hundred grand. That prototype was able to do it without all the shenanigans of a wire and uh you know, a computer attached to your arm and so forth. You g you got a wireless version of this. We got a wireless version of it. Now

28:56 It had a four hour battery life. And It was totally unclear whether it could be manufactured at scale. But we believed it would be, of course, and so Onwards.

29:08 Wha one of the things that you one I think smart advantage you had was you could Take this Once you got a Bluetooth version, you could Ask athletes at Harvard. particularly the squash team.

29:20 to try it out, right? And you could kinda use them as guinea pigs. Yeah, college athletes, um, recreational athletes, but I mean like data collections, you know, where you you put a whoop on a wrist. Uh, and you put a chest strap on them and you get them to go exercise. Yeah. But um athletes have Very different body types.

29:41 Athletes are diverse. Um, and then a lot of sports happen outdoors and a lot of sports have what's called non periodic motion. So you can think of running and walking as having periodic motion, which is like your arms are moving in a certain rid rigid way. Whereas a sport like basketball or squash, your arms are kinda moving all over the place. Anyway, I bring all these things up because the challenge to heart rate monitoring is

30:05 The darker the skin, the harder it is. The hairier the skin, the harder it is. And the more non periodic motion, the harder it is. And if you're outdoors, that's harder than indoors. W sorry, t that's because of the light? Yeah, it's because of the light. I'll give you a a simple way to think about it, which is

30:24 The technique of photoplasmography is essentially shining light underneath your skin, which is reflecting off of your capillaries. And The frequency with which that returns to a photodiode. can be interpreted to be your heart rate or even estimate other physiological metrics. So essentially the light wow I mean that's interesting. So the light

30:47 Based on uh'cause it's r it's reflecting, right? And it's um but it it's affected by By skin tone? Yeah. So there were all these studies that we would sort of mock internally from other products which were like looking at, you know Thirty white men

31:02 walking on a treadmill. Indoors. And we're like, each one of those is the easiest thing. Right. Whereas if you took

31:10 People with darker skin outdoors playing basketball. You'd have a much harder data set to to reconcile. And Our advantage although

31:21 At the time it felt much harder. was that we built a an algorithm with the foundation For the hardest conditions. And and it also forced us to collect a lot more data than other products. Because we had this high bar for accuracy, and by the way, there's a lot of disadvantages to doing that.

31:39 It requires more battery life. It means you have more data to send. Uh it means there's a lot less things you can do. We didn't have a high резолюці. In part because we put all of our resources towards data collection. So basically you had to solve all these problems. You had to figure out well how is this gonna work on

31:59 you know, a a a an athlete who's darker than an athlete who's lighter. Like you had to sol these were Not insignificant. problems you have to solve given, you know, that there are uh all kinds of athletes. Totally. And and

32:13 It was a it was a f a great example of the more you learn about something the less you know. I mean just as you kept going deeper there were all these things you'd uncover. Uh, you know, people with tattoos are harder to measure, and so on and so forth. Well, Wow I mean

32:28 Again, you're doing this very patiently. Very methodically. In meantime. Fitbit is exploding even though it's doing a somewhat different thing, but b uh you know, in the minds of of most consumers, they were probably saying, Oh, if you if you met somebody, they were just assuming you were building another fitness tracker. You've got

32:46 Fit bit you've got. Job owner. You learn that like the biggest companies on earth Uh like Nike, for example. are pursuing their own

32:57 bands, their own wristbands that track Different metrics. Um Yeah, I think the Nike Nike fuel band comes out in in twenty thirteen You guys are still working on just the underlying technology here.

33:12 Didn didn't that stress you out? Considerably. And it made it much harder to raise capital and to recruit employees and essentially it made it much harder to get people to buy into the story I was saying. Right,'cause when you would go to investors they would say, Well, I mean, come on, Nike is working on this. How are you gonna compete with Nike?

33:32 Totally. And in a way they were right, and in a way they were wrong. They were right in the sense that the story I was actually telling when you really unpacked it. was we were gonna build a brand like Nike and we were gonna start with the world's best athletes And then we were gonna go to consumers using the story that we had built a performance brand. And

33:52 The idea that I was gonna literally use the playbook of the company that was launching a competitive product. is pretty hard to wrap your head around. So I could get why a lot of people struggled with that. I'll never forget this investor I met. M Spring of my

34:07 senior year because at that point it actually had been announced that the Nike fuel band was coming. And I confessed to him that Nike was kinda enter the space and he had all these reasons for for why we should Take the technology in a different direction or why we shouldn't build hardware at all. We should just try to build software.

34:24 I gave him reasons for why I disagreed with him and he said, You know what, you are gonna fail. And you're gonna fail so badly. And I'll tell you the number one reason you're gonna fail. You're gonna fail because you don't listen. Mm.

34:37 And I remember For months I would think about that before I went to bed. And it was true. I was not listening to these people. I didn't agree with them. I was so stubborn. So knowing that Nike was gonna come out with this its own band, which it had for I think it was out for five years, a fuel band.

34:56 How did you convince anybody? To give you money. So You remember how I said they were they were right in a way and they were wrong in a way. Yeah. The way the way in which they were wrong at assessing the story I was telling versus the strategy that Nike was pursuing

35:13 Was that Nike made In my opinion, a fatal mistake with their product. They made a product that all of their best athletes would never use. It was a it was a step counter. It didn't tell you anything about your physiology.

35:29 And the strategy that Nike, in my opinion, should have taken. was much more similar to Woop, which was no, we're gonna do the hard work. We're gonna measure the hard things. And then we're gonna tell this story from Tiger Woods and Michael Jordan and LeBron James on down. And that would have been

35:46 I think successful. And so I had so much relief the day I tried the Nike Fuel Band. Because It was just another step counter.

35:55 And it was a huge missed opportunity, I thought, for by the way, a brand that I Uh have admired since I was five years old. Okay. Nike Nike is the is the company that actually Taught me what a brand was.

36:09 You know, like I You wear a white cotton t shirt that's blank versus a white cotton t shirt with a s with a Nike swosh. Why do I feel different in the one with the swush? Аць показывают. And that's a brand a belief. I thought that was so cool. Yeah, I thought that was so cool. And it did influence a lot of how we built the company.

36:30 Alright, so you are You you n you're aware that um the the big sort of uh sports brands are getting into this thing, but you're really just keeping your head down and focusing on what you're gonna offer. And I think it was around twenty fourteen when you changed the name to Whoop. You go from Bobo Analytics Call it Whoop. Just br briefly what what's the how did you come up with that name?

36:51 Whoop was a word that in college uh All of my friends and I would say to express energy or excitement. you know, people would say, like, Oh, how you feeling? And you'd respond, Oh, I got whoop, I feel good And it was this like upbeat word that People would say it made them smile, and there was a certain virality to the word that was hard to explain. When other people heard it, they then wanted to say it. But I wonder before you even had um

37:16 A product, right? 'Cause it wouldn't be three years. Like like it wasn't until twenty fifteen when you actually had something that was ready for you know, ready to put out into the world. But Three years, right? And of course you're building something very complex and

37:33 But meantime all these competitors are coming out with products. Do you remember a feeling of just Just really just anxiety about wanting to get something out there. Oh, I mean it it was probably the most anxious period of my life. When I look back on it, I was I was totally upside down, uh, physiologically, which is sort of ironic, because I was trying to build a product that improves your your your sense of balance.

37:59 But I uh Yeah, I was drinking. too much coffee, I was tired all the time, I was stressed all the time, I was drinking too much alcohol. I uh I was strung out. And

38:10 At that point, you know Going to VCs and getting rejected by ninety five percent of them. Yeah. But you manage to attract Some investment. I mean it's

38:22 It's not insignificant, you know, six million dollars. in you know, June of two thousand fourteen and then a bit more by the end of that year. I mean they were clear. People who were who were believing you but still compared to your

38:34 Competitors, you're vastly Yeah. Being a vastly outspent. Yeah, we had raised ten million dollars probably total by the end of twenty fourteen and then we had probably raised twenty five million total by mid

38:47 twenty fifteen. Got it. Okay. So you have Um In twenty fifteen.

38:54 It's I think it's the end of summer, twenty fifteen. You have the first version ready. for launch. We're not gonna launch this as a mass consumer product. We're gonna launch this as a product for Athletes.

39:08 For college athletes, professional athletes, what data would an athlete have access to if they wore this.'Cause it was a initially it was gonna be expensive. It was gonna be a thousand bucks per player. We'll get into the business model in a sec, but What was the offer here. What would you get?

39:25 By wearing it. You would get strain, sleep, and recovery measurements. With a certain level of depth behind each metric. So with sleep you'd get sleep staging and time in bed and hours of sleep that you got. With recovery you'd get a score zero to hundred percent, red, yellow, green. You'd know your resting heart rate, your hurry variability, the sleep quality. And just to be clear, you would see this on your iPhone. It was the the the it was a a band that had no interface, no screen, but it was tethered by Bluetooth to your iPhone and you would see it on your phone. That was the uh initial model.

40:00 Yes, it would send data to an app via Bluetooth. And then we also built a web app. that was designed for coaches. So the coaches could see their how their players were recovering and resting, etcetera. Yeah, but my biggest focus was really trying to get the The world's best athletes. Who who did you want who was your like Barbie Dreamhouse athlete that you wanted to get this on? Uh LeBron James and Michael Phelps were the two. Okay. How are you gonna get to I mean, first of all, those guys have huge endorsement deals, millions and millions of dollars. How d how are you even gonna get to them and even if you do get to them They're gonna say

40:42 Presumably, well, I'll do it, but you gotta pay me a million dollars or five million, whatever, or you have to give me equity in the company or whatever. Like how would you do that? So those two people had a lot of infrastructure around them. And you're right, they had a lot of offers and these things. And the secret to getting to them, just to say it, was to find people in their lives that had a big influence on them that no one else knew. Turned out.

41:06 In two thousand and fifteen, the personal trainer was a relatively unknown person in a professional athlete's life. And it also turned out that the personal trainers of the very best athletes essentially lived with them. And spent more time with them than any other human on the planet. And so in the case of LeBron, like Mike Mencius was his longtime personal trainer, still is today.

41:26 And he started wearing woop. And he liked it enough to ask for another one to put on the bronze So that's how you started. You got him on the wrists of the personal trainers just just so they could try it out. Yeah. I mean, Michael Phelps and LeBron James were among your first hundred users. I mean We're not talking about

41:44 really good athletes. We're talking about the greatest athletes in their sport. I mean first of all, let's just talk about LeBron Jay LeBron for a sec. I mean he's a Nike athlete. They had a product that arguably was a competing product. Like I guess it's LeBron James and he can do whatever he wants, but h wasn't that

42:01 Complicated? Didn't that create friction? Well the way that it didn't was that we had no relationship with him. We had no relationship at the time with Michael Phelps either, and many of these athletes I mean they were essentially just Um buyer of the product.

42:15 You charge them for this or you gave it to them? I'm assuming you would give it to them. Well, in the case of the trainers we would give it to him as a seed, but then we would actually charge for it. Again, because we believed that the product was valuable. And At the end of the day, it's kinda obvious whether someone likes Woop.

42:33 Because wearing something twenty four seven is like It's a it's really hard. It's just really hard to do. It's just hard to build a product that people wear twenty four seven. And so if they're actually still wearing it twenty four seven. Uh they like it.

42:48 And so the our Our engagement metrics became the lifeblood of our story. Mm. And I remember

42:56 There was a year where Lebron And his whole team were wearing it and it came out that they were wearing it in games. And that wasn't yet allowed in the NBA. It wasn't allowed by the NBA. Yeah, it wasn't allowed by the NBA. And so that created this whole scandal. around whoop. And ironically Um

43:13 Created more interest from other sports leagues. And so shortly thereafter we did this very cool partnership with Major League Baseball and We we grew um in the NFL and Uh And so there was

43:25 It it did turn out to be true. that if you start with literally the very best athletes in the world There is a massive trickle down effect. And And was there

43:35 Even then at that point, You know, once uh let's just say a year in you know, when when the Apple watch is becoming more and more popular I mean you've got a screen of screen free device here. I mean it's measuring different things and and more things, but there's no screen, right? And the screen is like a shiny This sort of the shiny object sort of sh screaming out there.

43:59 I am have to imagine even at this point you had investors saying, Okay, when are you guys gonna do a screen a screen now? Yeah, a lot of it goes back to the origin of wanting to create a product that you wear twenty four seven. And wanting to create a product that has super accurate data. And it turned out As we really unpacked it that having a screen was not gonna help either of those. In fact it might hurt it.

44:21 So what do I mean? Well first of all this idea that you wear it all the time. If you put a screen on the product, then it's a watch. And if it's a watch, then you can't wear another watch, right? And and if you're If you're having to decide which watch to wear You're gonna take whoop off sometimes.

44:39 And furthermore, as we start to unpack the the watch capabilities. You kind of quickly start saying yes to a lot of functionality. First it starts saying, Well maybe you should You know, w know when your phone's ringing or you know, push notifications or emails. And next thing you know you're building a smartwatch, right?

44:57 And One of the ways that we uh built a product that people use is by just discarding the notion of having the most features. We were not gonna have the most features. In fact, we were gonna have very few features. We were gonna be singularly focused on Fitness and health monitoring.

45:14 Got it. Okay. So You have this product it's it's doing well with athletes and they like it and you're ready to put out a version for consumers. This is in 2016. Um And again, for people who aren't familiar with Hoop, I think a lot of people l listening are, it's it's basically a strap. I mean, it looks like

45:33 I mean it's it looks like a you know a for consumers, right? Um It didn't quite take off initially. Uh as and maybe you had expected it to, or maybe you didn't, I don't know. But

45:50 Um Yeah. It was sort of slow to get Mass adoption.

45:58 I was surprised, but it was a great example of really not knowing what I was doing. I mean uh There are moments in the history of Whoop where looking back on it, I'm reminded that this is my first full time job, let alone the first company I've started. So Um I think launching to consumers was one of those wake up calls.

46:21 The the bet at the time was Hey, we've built this. Brand with Professional athletes, the world's best. And

46:30 a bunch of fitness enthusiasts are gonna want the product that's used by the pros. Yeah. But one of the challenges Was that we weren't paying athletes. So we didn't technically have the rights.

46:41 To Um likeness and image. Right. But you couldn't do advertising with them. But we weren't doing advertising with them. And by the way, we also didn't really know how to do marketing yet. And Maybe most importantly.

46:55 We were selling the product for five hundred dollars. So Compared to like a Fitbit, which is like a hundred or hundred fifty, that was a lot. Yeah, it was a lot. More than an Apple Watch at the time. Well more than an Apple Watch, yeah. Yeah. In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have expected to sell a lot.

47:10 But look, we we observe two things. The first was that people who wore Whoop Which is to say they bought it and then they put it on. Would wear it for a long time. And this

47:22 User engagement. Was uh Unique. I mean it it was a market the wearables industry, just to say it, is a market that's been plagued by engagement. Which is to say someone buys a Fitbit and then three weeks or three months later it's in a drawer. They were just really cheap and that was it. People would buy'em and use them and then stop using'em.

47:42 Yeah. And and so we didn't have that engagement problem, but we had a a big problem which was that people weren't buying it. Yeah. It's a big problem. Now you start to look at the incorporation year of Whoop and you start to look at how much money we've raised and Yeah, you start to squint a little bit, like what uh

48:00 Why hasn't this business figure out? How to generate revenue at a material level. And you're five years in now. Oh yeah. I imagine you n you had enough faith in the product that you thought this is gonna be fine. But still, like I'm sure there were people

48:16 maybe not so subtly asking you that question. Okay, you're five years in here. Uh you're not your sales aren't great. What's going on? So there was a period of time in twenty seventeen where we were asking ourselves the same question. Like what is wrong?

48:30 Like why why aren't a lot of people buying this? when we come back in just a moment. Whoop changes its business model. And another massive company enters the wearables market. Amazon.

48:44 Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Woop has had some pretty big wins. Michael Phelps and LeBron James are using the device, which is huge. The problem is That's not translating into sales.

49:15 But eventually Will starts to figure out What's wrong? It took us some time to realize that we had the wrong business model. Perhaps we were totally wrong to be selling this as a one time fee. And so then we started playing with this idea of okay, well what if the hardware cost X and the subscription cost Y?

49:34 And you start unpacking that and And the more time that I tinkered with the idea, the more I got obsessed with the idea of what if it was just completely a subscription. The whole thing was a subscription, the hardware was just included. And you're signing up for the data and the platform and the insights, the coaching. But the band is free. The whoopstrap is free. And I fell in love with that idea and I became convinced that that was gonna save the company. And the engagement data would suggest that I was right.

50:01 But It was still pretty unproven. It was a company that wasn't yet good at marketing. And To your point, we're five years into building it. Didn't have a big revenue stream.

50:12 Um wasn't like competition was gone, by the way. We still had all these companies in the space At this point now they were more tech companies actually than fitness companies. So you know, twenty twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen were kinda defined by Nike, Under Armour, Adidas, Puma entering the space. Now

50:32 Apple was heating up. They'd seen success with their first watch or two. Samsung was entering the space. Microsoft was entering the space. And at the same time My conviction level. that we were on to it. We were just one turn away.

50:48 My conviction level was at an all time high. A very painful eighteen months. In in some ways you were actually really lucky that you were under the radar, right? Because no one I mean when people talked about fitness trackers, Whoop wasn't in the conversation in twenty sixteen, twenty seventeen. They were talking about uh these other companies you mentioned, the Apples and Samsung's Fitbits and so on.

51:12 And of course th that would change eventually, but in some ways you were kind of lucky that you were under the radar and perceived maybe by those com those other companies as like, oh well, this is really more of a medical device for professional athletes because they weren't working on I guess they weren't really focused on on offering the same Data. I I think that's right, but I do think that By having the first launch kind of be such a

51:39 A a a snooze fest. It gave us a chance to Launch again for the first time. You know, I I meet hardware founders and they talk a lot about how their first product's gonna sell hundred thousand units in the first year. And I tell them that's actually the wrong goal. You really want your first product or your second product that goes to the consumer market.

52:00 Two Just teach you this what's the state of play. and and buy you some time to get to that second or third iteration. The worst thing that could have happened to Woop. and would have killed the company ironically.

52:13 was selling a hundred thousand units. In Two thousand fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. Even seventeen, probably. Hm.

52:22 We weren't ready for that big a number of people to come on. and for all the challenges that would come with it. And there's a sort of like gradual infrastructure that you need to build as a hardware company. You need to get in lockstep with your manufacturing line. You wanna have the infrastructure to support customer support and membership services and these sorts of things. And so

52:46 Yeah, we probably weren't ready for that in two thousand and sixteen. But we got ready for it. Alright. Let's Let's talk about

52:54 twenty eighteen, right? Because This is an important year. You get um I mean you're still kind of under the radar, right? I mean you're raising money and you're showing promise. You know, that year you attract money from the NFL Players League Association, um But one one interesting thing happens that year, which is you're approached by Amazon, they have a fund called the Alexa Fund.

53:17 And they they come in to talk to you about maybe investing in you, which is Must be really exciting because it's Amazon. I mean if Amazon is gonna be an investor, well, you know, it's like the n next up, you know, the moon, right? I mean So when they came to you

53:33 You must have been pretty excited. Totally. And look, we had a distribution problem. And so You know, who's bigger than Amazon when it comes to distribution. What did they say? They said we're interested in in making an investment.

53:46 Yes. Yep. Yeah, and they did a lot of diligence on Woop, and uh it started with their deal team. They came in to really go into your they went into your data room really kind of looking at your numbers and technology and Yeah.

54:01 Were they talking about a a possible like Dollar figure of what they might invest? I don't remember the exact dollar figures, but I can tell you That in two thousand seventeen and eighteen I was trying to raise probably ten or twenty million dollars. And so they would have probably been a candidate to take all of that or lead that.

54:20 Yeah, we spent a lot of time with them. And They included their product team in the diligence. And then they ultimately did not invest in Woop. To our surprise. Why? What was the reason?

54:33 Th this is maybe a disappointing answer, but I've had so many investors pass on Woop. No asked Yeah. Thirteen years.

54:41 That That all the answers kind of blur together. Yeah. And so I I don't remember what their reason was for not investing and it could have been

54:50 A dozen things, frankly. Do you do you do you remember caring that much about it or just being like okay, whatever? At that point I had gotten pretty numb to people passing on Whoop or As it often felt to me rejecting me. Because I spent so much time as the sort of front man for these pitches.

55:08 Uh and that eighteen month stretch of like beginning of twenty seventeen to mid twenty eighteen. Whoop was on fumes. I mean we never had more runway than three months for an eighteenth

55:22 month period of the company. Which is just it's hard in hindsight to figure out how that ended up being possible. But we were we just were continually on life sport. We would continually find a little more capital or a couple good things would happen and people get a little more excited. And I was perpetually fundraising and getting told no and a lot. Well, during that time I g this is it's just so fascinating and especially now.

55:46 Now that we know what the product is today, which we're gonna get to. And how Just how it's triumphed. At that time, I mean, you were raising like th there's a there's this kind of conventional wisdom about raising money now. You'll hear founders say Raise money when you don't need it,'cause that's when you have the most leverage.

56:04 But here you were raising it'cause you really needed it. Totally. And I imagine That that you know, you had to Except. Terms sometimes that were hard to swallow. You know, remarkably in the company's history we've never done a down round.

56:19 And It's hard to actually explain how that's possible when I think back on it. But the We had people who were using the product who were quite euphoric about it. But The irony was that the unlock for the business was gonna be moving to a subscription.

56:35 And what's the problem with the subscription? You get no mo you get far less money up front. And so it was a The only way out of this problem was to have more capital on the balance sheet. Right,'cause instead of charging five hundred bu bucks for it

56:50 you were now saying okay that it's gonna be free but you're gonna get Uh you're gonna it's gonna be like thirty bucks a month or whatever it was gonna be. Which is m much more affordable for somebody to c to sort of try it out. Totally. I wanna turn back to the Amazon story because they They were sort of

57:08 toying with the idea of investing and they decided not to, and that goes away. And you know, you keep Working on New iterations, new versions of your product and uh the the the to two point oh and then three point oh comes out. Um And then

57:26 Amazon announces They're Making a A monitor strap, a wearable band. That

57:33 Um You feel Looks quite Shockingly similar. To to the whoop.

57:40 Well the first thing I I actually found out because s so many investors had hit my email up with it when the announcement came out. So it was like that mor you know, you wake up in the morning and you're looking at your phone. And all of a sudden I've got like six emails from shareholders being like Will, have you seen this?

57:59 And It was really a bit of a condolences message, too. Because Everyone believed Amazon, which had unlimited distribution. And unlimited resources if they entered the space was gonna be quite problematic for Woop. You could do an image search for this.

58:19 It looks pretty much like a whoop. They they knocked the product off. There's no question. And by the way, it was so egregious that th one of the lead the lead product manager from Amazon When it came out. Posted on Twitter. Whoop, there it is, announcing the new Amazon Halo.

58:39 Wow. Which just was like a sickening level of of like we're above the law, so to speak. And look, you know, it's sad to say this, but they were above the law. Like we weren't gonna go after them legally. We were gonna sue them. They're g they have endless resources to fight that lawsuit. We were gonna win in uh the court of public opinion and with consumers. But you would lose so much money trying to fight that case. Yeah, we didn't touch it. Yeah. But it became a rallying cry internally.

59:05 I had already Seeing how Nike and Adidas and Under Armour and Puma and Microsoft and Apple were supposed to be the death of Woop. And this was another Company that At least

59:19 In my opinion, at that moment in time. Was not going to beat us. It was also around this the time that we were designing the circuit board of our next generation product. And so I wrote on every

59:32 four. Don't bother copying us, we will win. Wait in tiny letters on the circuit board? On the circuit board, yes. Along with every engineer's initials. And the joke.

59:45 The joke was if if anyone actually found this message. They probably had nefarious reasons because they were opening our hardware. to look at our circuit board and they were gonna see this message. And that made us so happy. It's it's interesting because of course Amazon is You know, one of the greatest

1:00:03 brands in modern history. It's it's an incredible company and and has sort of changed the way we live. But they have, you know, they've from time to time they tried a uh a a smartphone didn't work. They tried this in for anyone who doesn't know it doesn't exist the product was discontinued, the Halo eventually, but It's interesting because on the one hand

1:00:21 you could have gone down the path of saying, All right, we're just gonna go after them and try and sue them. But that that probably could have destroyed your company because you would have spent years in litigation Tens of millions of dollars trying to fight this. And and for Amazon's arounding air, I mean they can fight you and and certainly make the case that this is not a copy.

1:00:39 Or you can decide to lean further into your brand and just say, you know what? Forget about them. We're just gonna focus on building And doubling down on brand. and really making sure that people see that what we're offering

1:00:55 is we believe A better product. Yeah, I I think my my sort of personal philosophy is you can only Control what you can control. And if you're stressing about things that you're not in control of, you've lost the plot a little bit.

1:01:09 And I think it's a pretty good company strategy too, which is to say like if you spend too much time looking at what the competition is doing or letting the competition dictate your strategy. You've probably also lost the plot. Yeah, I'm curious about again, going back to the athletes, I mean initially it was like, Hey, we're offering this really cool thing that will give you a competitive advantage, but now, you know, now you've got um I mean Michael Phelps I think does does endorsements for you and Ronaldo. And so I imagine um that s some of these athletes, if not many of them, are investors in the company now. Yeah, we have a we have an amazing

1:01:49 Roster of professional athletes that have invested in the company. Patrick Mahomes is in there and Eli Manning. Uh Rory McElroy, Cristiano Ronaldo. Virg Van Dijk, Eli Manning, Larry Fitzgerald. And for me, like I've gotten to to make friends with a lot of these you know, global superstars and and they've offered a lot of good advice to me personally and and also to the business.

1:02:15 You know, um Yeah, I don't always say this uh show, but uh'cause I'm yeah, I want to be neutral, but You have a great product. Thank you. And it offers great information, but it's one product. Right. It's it's the it's the band. It's it's the wearable.

1:02:30 And Is there A future where You know You've got

1:02:36 seven different products or you know, or other Other than things that you're selling just to kind of diversify. I mean, is that a concern, is that a necessity for you guys or maybe not? I think we'll we'll

1:02:52 Add products to our portfolio to the extent that they contribute to that core mission. Which is to unlock human performance and health span. You know, a challenge with the definition of life span is it just means how long do you live, but what we like about health span is it really reflects the quality of how long you live.

1:03:11 I mean I get you know, I get messages every single day from people who talk about how whoops improved their life or Increasingly. You know, probably at least once a week now, whoop saved my life. And It's just hard to find a mission that

1:03:27 That feels that valuable. Well, when you think about You know. the journey you've taken where y you are now'cause I mean there there have been a lot of close calls where you guys could have gone under and and here you are, a really established super well respected brand.

1:03:41 How much of of where you got to now do you attribute to that hard work and how much do you think had has to do with getting lucky? I think there's certainly a a a resilience that the company's had or or I've had over the last thirteen years. I think there's been a lot of near death experiences. I think there's been a lot of moments where

1:04:03 Uh quitting may have seemed responsible. I think I benefited from being young and naive for a lot of it. And I do think at its core. The idea was right. And in some ways I'm still trying to fulfill the vision.

1:04:20 That I had as a twenty one year old. I mean that's that's That's pretty cool. That's Will Ahmed, founder of Woop. By the way, while Woop is probably best known for helping you track the strain and recovery from doing sports.

1:04:36 It also tracks your response to other things like Acupuncture, circus arts, commuting, cuddling with a child. Cooking And even. Public speaking.

1:04:49 Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from some of the world's greatest entrepreneurs, please sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on Substack. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Seifer, with music composed by Rantine Are Lui. It was edited by Neva Grant. Our audio engineer was Patrick Murray. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Andrea Bruce, Carla Estevez, Casey Herman, Carrie Thompson, Chris Massini, JC Howard, Sam Paul. Olson and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening. how I built this.

1:05:33

What you see above is a preview of the first minutes. One unlock costs 10 credits and covers this episode forever: full segment and word-level timestamps on this page, plus .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like.