Lessons - The Billion-Dollar Health Secret | Will Ahmed - Founder and CEO of WHOOP

In this lessons episode, you'll gain insights into the value of embracing technology risks, to drive innovation and how strategic thinking can shape the future of a business. Learn how handling negative feedback and stress management are key to entrepreneurial growth and success. I want to talk about some of your thoughts on innovation. So from the get go, you focused on counterintuitive approach. I mean, you mentioned you don't have a screen. You're tracking very meaningful health data that makes the the the wearer more self-aware. How do you look at innovation? When you think of, you know, the next the next piece that you want to roll out, what do you look for in terms of I think the market will appreciate this. I think this will resonate with the market or is this you have a whole bunch of R&D. I guess when you're looking at something that's never been done before, how does your brain work? How do you approach problem solving like that particular thing? It's such a great question and it's interesting that I don't feel I don't think entrepreneurs talk as much about it. You know, they talk around it, but they're not explicitly addressing what risks are we taking as a company. And when people hear about technology risk, for some reason it's very easy for them to say, oh, that's risky. Oh, it's risky. Can you build that? Will that be able to be accomplished in a certain time frame? I don't know how we're going to build that. Like those are those are things that will come up when you propose technology risk. However, when an entrepreneur is presenting a plan that seems achievable and you're launching a product that you know can already be made or exist, it surprises me that that doesn't also introduce alarm bells for risk. Hey, there's a strategic risk there that you're not innovating. Right? And so it's just worth acknowledging that technology risks and strategic risks are two different types of risks. And I personally gravitate towards taking technology risks that in a fact decrease your strategic risk, decrease your market risk, right? Let's take an extreme example, curing cancer. Okay, very high technology risks, very low market risks, right? So as I think about building an innovative company, to me, it's a huge risk strategically, not to take very big technology risks. Like we need to take technology risks. We need to be pushing the envelope on what is possible to unlock human performance, which is our mission at Woop and has been for 11 years. And so to me, innovation is being pulled towards the risk of technology and the unknown versus shying away from it. I absolutely love that thought process and that mental model because I find it a lot of entrepreneurs, they actually, to your point, they default to the strategic risk or the market saturation risk or however you want to describe it. But they don't actually understand that that's a larger risk than innovating because I think the innovating thing is hard to grasp. The market, it's there. I can navigate it. I can see it. I can touch it. I can play within it. But the strategic, the innovation, it's almost like an esoteric concept. It seems scary. It seems like there's a billion variables as opposed to just a thousand to draw a parallel. But I understand exactly what you're saying. So what is the strategy even though you have the innovation risk and pursuing the innovation risk decreases the strategic risk, what is the strategy in innovating that still even more so can decrease innovation risk in terms of creating something that consumers want to adopt? Well, a good framing to think about especially with hardware is if you're brainstorming a new hardware today and you think it's going to launch in 18 months. Well, in 18 months, the world's going to have changed. And then on top of that, that product you just came up with might be in market for another two years after you've launched it. So you need to put your head in a place that is three, four years from now. And I think a lot of times people aren't comfortable going to that place because that place tells you that what you're building right now is actually not that ambitious. It's not that innovative. You know, like I meet with a lot of entrepreneurs who are earlier in that journey and maybe they're building their first product. And so I think the thing sometimes I'll say is if that product that you're going to build for the next 12 months existed today, it would very likely be innovative. Are you worried at all though about what it looks like in 12 months and how the world's changed and how the market's changed? And by the way, your competitors didn't stop working for 18 months, they're going to put stuff out. So all of these things I think just speak towards like cranking up that ambitious, you know, ambitiousness with with your products and your technology. And look, there's a positive to this too, which is that you then I think a track talent that wants to work on hard problems. There's a lot of companies out there that whether explicitly or implicitly have just decided they're not that going to be that innovative. And so those are companies where you can build something on a very predictable timeline that you know can be built. But that's just a different company and culture than what we're trying to do at whoop. Speak to me about, you know, you as an entrepreneur founder from from day zero to to where you're at right now. The this this the span of different problems that you've had to deal with is huge. Obviously at different stages of the company as an individual, how have you grown? How have you matured? What are some lessons that you've learned as an entrepreneur now dealing with 500 plus people, you know, raising 400 million dollars that obviously were not so apparent when you first started out. I think I think I've gotten a lot better at embracing negative feedback and debate and pulling in a lot of different perspectives. I think in the early years of building whoop, I had built sort of a self defense mechanism if you will towards negative feedback of any kind. And it was in large part because I was getting so much negative feedback. I you know, I wasn't really that used to rejection. And at age 22, you know, I had like kind of a nice young person resume. I went to good schools and captain sports teams got good grades, ta-da-da, you know, went to Harvard, whatever. And then all of a sudden I graduated and I started this company and I feel like on a daily basis I'm getting punched in the face and getting rejected. And so by the way, that's everyone doing anything in life. So this is not personal to me. But I'm just saying that I you know, I didn't know how to grapple with that. And it was very negative. It wasn't a lot there was really a very small number of people I would meet in a week that would say this is exciting or you're on the right path. And look, I think they had good reason for it. I was super young. I was not an engineer or a doctor or designer or filling the blank of all the things you might want a founder of a company like this to be. And so my defense mechanism was to not hear it at all like walls were up. And the problem with that is it carried over into how I was managing the company too. And so if members of my team were disagreeing with me, I just had like a tunnel vision kind of stubbornness. And look, there's an aspect to building company where you have to have strong points of view on the world. And those points of view probably are contrarian and need to turn out to be right. But the nitty gritty of managing a company is a million details. And those details require iteration and disagreement and all sorts of collaboration. And so as a young person running whoop, I was bad at that. I really was. And I was probably much harder to work with as a consequence. It's worth noting I was also like stress out of my mind. I didn't know how to handle the pressure that I had put myself in, which was raising tens of millions of dollars and having 25 employees or 30 employees. I get all that felt really like the weight of the world. And so it took years for me to build also a process by which I was comfortable in that hot seat. And I was managing stress appropriately. And I was hearing feedback. You know, you can hear feedback. You don't necessarily have to listen to it. I think that's a powerful frame for anyone in a leadership position. You want people to feel heard and you want to embrace those, you know, differing points of view. And at the end of the day, if you're the CEO or you're running the thing, you get to make the call. So it's worth really embracing some of that different, those different perspectives. And anyway, that's a little bit of of a background on that evolution. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.