Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - He Said No to Every Shortcut and Built a $3.6B Company | Will Ahmed - WHOOP Founder & CEO

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Lessons - He Said No to Every Shortcut and Built a $3.6B Company | Will Ahmed - WHOOP Founder & CEO · Success Story with Scott Clary

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