Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Lessons - The Billion-Dollar Health Secret | Will Ahmed - Founder and CEO of WHOOP

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Lessons - The Billion-Dollar Health Secret | Will Ahmed - Founder and CEO of WHOOP · Success Story with Scott Clary

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