Walker Webcast: Whoop Founder Will Ahmed Focuses on Physiological Recovery

Will Ahmed took a different approach to developing what is now the Whoop product line. Unlike other wearable devices and apps intended for athletic use, the Whoop Strap is intended to focus on recovery rather than performance. The product that resulted from the intensive research and development by Ahmed and his team “is great at all the things it does because of all the things it doesn’t do,” he said on Wednesday’s Walker Webcast.

This contrarian mindset came from Ahmed’s own experience as a college athlete at Harvard. As captain of the squash team, he trained too much and periodically burned out without understanding why. Scouring hundreds of studies, he made it his mission to discern where he was going wrong, in the process launching a company with a view toward addressing these issues for others.

“An entrepreneur’s role is to identify problems their customers may have,” Ahmed told Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker, himself a Whoop user.

Here, the problem Ahmed identified for athletes and their coaches was not what to do to become faster or stronger, but how to optimize performance with an awareness of biometrics that relate to how quickly and readily gains are made, or aren’t made.

While the prototype of the Strap was under development, Ahmed sounded out coaches, and found “a mismatch between the solutions they were describing and the problems they were having.” Among the problems most frequently cited were player injuries, where inadequate recovery is often a factor.

The focus on rebounding rather than the performance metrics measured by competing devices, and the years of development needed to get the hardware down to wearable size, invited a great deal of naysaying in the early days of Whoop.

“There were a lot of people telling us we were building it wrong,” Ahmed said Wednesday. He added, “We were very capital-intensive before we had the revenue to support it.”

Fast-forward to 2021, and the nine-year-old Boston-based company, which is a membership service as well as device maker and has worked with Navy SEALs as well as major-league sports, has raised more than $200 million from investors. That puts its valuation into unicorn territory at $1.2 billion.

Among the factors that helps determine recovery is heart rate variability (HRV). Although somewhat better known today, for many years HRV was something of a “cult” metric advocated primarily by elite athletes, said Ahmed.

For many years, HRV could only be measured via an electrocardiogram. Today, it’s among the functions performed by the wristwatch-sized Strap.

“It doesn’t feel like you’re wearing a medical device in the negative sense,” said Ahmed. “It feels like you’re wearing a really cool piece of technology.” Later in the conversation, he predicted, “I think within our lifetimes, every human will wear a health monitor continuously.”

On-demand replays of the May 5 webcast are available by clicking here and through Walker & Dunlop’s Driven by Insight podcast series.