How entrepreneurship, recovery science, and wearables shaped WHOOP

Originally published on March 3, 2021

Entrepreneurship in wearable technology starts with solving a real physiological problem, and this conversation explains how that idea became WHOOP. In Episode 113 of the WHOOP Podcast, Will Ahmed joins Joe Bullmore of Gentleman’s Journal to explain why recovery became the company’s starting point, how early hardware decisions shaped the product, and what WHOOP has learned about sleep, respiratory rate, and behavior change.

Ahmed, Founder and CEO of WHOOP, also lays out a useful framework for people building companies: start with a problem that matters, expect resistance, and stay focused on signals that actually change outcomes.

To listen to episode 113 in full, head to the WHOOP Podcast on Spotify.

What problem was WHOOP built to solve?

WHOOP started with a training problem, not a gadget idea. Ahmed wanted a better way to understand whether training was helping or hurting performance, especially for athletes who were pushing hard without a clear read on recovery.

At Harvard University, he became interested in the gap between effort and adaptation. Athletes could measure output in practice, but they had a much weaker read on whether the body was ready for more load. That pushed him toward physiology research, recovery, and continuous measurement. If you want a broader primer on the metrics WHOOP tracks today, what WHOOP measures is covered in more detail here.

Ahmed told Bullmore that the company grew from equal parts research curiosity and belief that computing would move closer to the body over time.

“I read something like 500 medical papers while I was in school.”

That number matters because it shows the idea did not begin as a general interest in wearables. It began with a deep look at physiology, overtraining, injury risk, and the question of what the body is signaling before performance drops.

If you want to hear Ahmed unpack the origin story and early research, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What you should take away

• WHOOP began as an attempt to solve overtraining and readiness, not as a general fitness device.
• Ahmed’s starting point was physiology research and continuous measurement of the human body.
• The company’s earliest insight was that recovery could be more useful than output alone for guiding training.

Why did recovery become the foundation of WHOOP?

Recovery became the foundation because Ahmed believed the biggest performance problem was not a lack of effort. It was a lack of feedback on readiness. That led WHOOP toward heart rate variability, or HRV, a measure of the variation in time between heartbeats that reflects autonomic nervous system activity.

Ahmed describes HRV as one of the most useful signals he found in the literature. He noted that elite strength programs had used it to guide training, cardiologists had used it in clinical settings, and intelligence agencies had used it in stress testing. The question was whether a broader population could track it continuously without hospital equipment.

He also makes a broader product point that still applies well beyond wearables. Customers usually describe pain points clearly, but they rarely prescribe the right solution. That is one reason WHOOP focused on Recovery, Strain, and Sleep instead of simpler counts that do not map well to what is happening inside the body.

Ahmed put that distinction plainly when describing early customer conversations.

“Customers tend to be incredibly good at describing problems. They tend to be less good at describing the solutions to those problems.”

That idea also explains why WHOOP never centered daily step totals. As Ahmed tells Bullmore, step count can miss weight training, cycling, yoga, and other forms of strain, while a person with a run-down system may log plenty of steps without improving readiness. For a related look at how WHOOP frames recovery and strain, see the story of WHOOP.

If you want to hear Ahmed go deeper on recovery, HRV, and why WHOOP does not focus on steps, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What you should take away

• WHOOP centered recovery because readiness is a better guide to training load than effort alone.
• HRV became a key signal because it reflects how the body is adapting to stress and recovery.
• Ahmed argues that people describe problems well, while product teams still need to identify the right metric to solve them.

How did early product decisions shape the way WHOOP works today?

Once recovery became the thesis, the next challenge was technical. WHOOP needed to measure HRV from the wrist with enough precision to be useful, while also building a device people would actually wear for long stretches.

Ahmed says the first year was dominated by one question: could the team capture HRV from the wrist with electrocardiogram-like precision. That problem shaped the full stack, from sensor decisions to data transfer, battery tradeoffs, and how quickly scores could appear in the app. He describes early versions as bulky, slow, and sometimes frustrating, but still useful enough that serious athletes kept them on.

His explanation to Bullmore captures the standard the team was chasing.

“We were able to build a prototype that could really accurately measure heart rate variability within a few milliseconds of an electrocardiogram.”

That focus on measurement quality also helps explain why WHOOP has stayed tightly integrated across hardware, software, and analytics. Ahmed’s view is that a 24-hour wearable has to succeed on several fronts at once, including measurement, comfort, design, and long-term usefulness. For a related conversation about where body-based technology can go next, see Nicholas Negroponte on technology and human monitoring.

If you want to hear Ahmed unpack early prototypes, athlete adoption, and the choice to stay screen-free, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What you should take away

• WHOOP was built around accurate wrist-based HRV measurement, which drove many early product decisions.
• Early prototypes were imperfect, but they delivered enough physiological value to keep elite athletes engaged.
• Ahmed ties long-term product adoption to useful data, form factor, and daily wearability.

What habits actually improve sleep and recovery on WHOOP?

Ahmed’s answer is direct: start by measuring sleep quality, then change a few behaviors that reliably move it. He argues that many people confuse time in bed with real sleep, even though REM sleep and slow-wave sleep are the stages most tied to mental and physical restoration.

In the conversation, he explains that REM sleep supports brain repair and cognitive function, while slow-wave sleep is when the body produces most of its human growth hormone and repairs tissue stressed by training. That is why WHOOP looks beyond bedtime and wake time. A seven-hour window in bed can produce very different results depending on how much of that window becomes restorative sleep.

Ahmed also gives Bullmore several practical levers: keep the room dark, sleep in a cooler environment, avoid eating too close to bed, and be careful with alcohol. He adds one habit that stands above the rest, sleep consistency. Going to bed and waking up at nearly the same time each day is associated with better recovery, lower resting heart rate, and higher HRV.

His most specific recommendation in the episode is about meal timing.

“If you eat very close to bedtime, that can affect your sleep. So typically you want to be eating close to 3 hours before you’re actually going to sleep.”

That advice lines up with Ahmed’s larger point that WHOOP helps people identify which behaviors change their own Sleep and Recovery, instead of guessing. For another conversation that connects sleep data with behavior change, read Bryan Johnson on sleep, impulse control, and measurement.

If you want to hear Ahmed go deeper on sleep stages, sleep consistency, and alcohol’s effect on recovery, listen to the full episode on Spotify.

What you should take away

• WHOOP separates time in bed from restorative sleep by focusing on sleep stages and recovery signals.
• Ahmed highlights sleep consistency as one of the simplest ways to improve recovery, HRV, and resting heart rate.
• Eating close to bedtime, excess bedroom light, warm rooms, and alcohol can all reduce sleep quality.

How did WHOOP use respiratory rate during COVID-19?

WHOOP used respiratory rate as a leading signal because COVID-19 created a pattern the company had not seen in common illness. Ahmed says colds and flu often changed recovery-related metrics, but COVID-19 stood out for how sharply it shifted nighttime breathing rate.

According to Ahmed, WHOOP started COVID-19 research early in 2020 and quickly built a large data set from members who reported positive tests. The company then worked with Central Queensland University and Cleveland Clinic on respiratory-rate analysis. He says the resulting Central Queensland University and Cleveland Clinic respiratory-rate paper showed that elevated respiratory rate could identify about 80 percent of cases within three days.

Ahmed emphasizes that respiratory rate is usually stable at baseline, which made the COVID-19 signal easier to spot. In the Nick Watney example he shares, a long-stable respiratory rate of 14 suddenly rose to 18 alongside a 1 percent Recovery score, before Watney felt obviously sick.

Ahmed summarized the size of the pattern this way.

“We’re talking 20, 30% increases from their baseline.”

That section of the conversation also helps explain why WHOOP added tools for illness tracking and why respiratory rate remains a useful context metric inside Health Monitor. For more on those early workplace and return-to-play use cases, see how WHOOP used 24-hour monitoring during COVID-19.

What you should take away

• Ahmed says COVID-19 produced larger respiratory-rate changes than the colds and flu patterns WHOOP had already observed.
• WHOOP worked with Central Queensland University and Cleveland Clinic to study respiratory rate in members who reported positive tests.
• A stable baseline makes respiratory rate useful because sudden increases can stand out before symptoms feel obvious.

What does this episode show about entrepreneurship and leadership?

The leadership lesson in this conversation is that endurance matters as much as vision. Ahmed describes startup building as a long output problem, where founders need to keep learning, keep their identity separate from daily company swings, and protect relationships with co-founders.

Toward the end of the episode, he explains that negative feedback became easier to absorb once he stopped treating every company outcome as a referendum on himself. He also credits meditation, exercise, sleep, and stable relationships for helping him stay even across good and bad stretches. That personal side of the conversation pairs well with Matt Mullenweg on stress, routine, and performance at work.

Ahmed is also unusually direct about one risk he sees all the time in early companies.

“About 65% of startups fail because the co-founders get in a fight.”

His advice is practical: resolve conflict early, keep perspective, and remember that pressure can make smaller issues feel larger than they are. In Ahmed’s framing, the goal is sustained high output over a long period, which is the same balance WHOOP tries to help people manage in training.

What you should take away

• Ahmed treats entrepreneurship as a long-duration performance challenge that depends on recovery, perspective, and consistency.
• He separates personal growth from daily business swings, which helps him use setbacks without overidentifying with them.
• Ahmed sees co-founder conflict as a major failure point and argues for dealing with it directly and early.

The bottom line

• WHOOP was built around a specific performance question, how to measure readiness and recovery before training quality drops.
• Ahmed made recovery central because HRV, resting heart rate, and sleep quality can reveal adaptation better than output metrics alone.
• WHOOP avoided step counting as a primary metric because steps do not capture many forms of strain and do not reflect readiness.
• Early WHOOP development focused on measuring wrist-based HRV with electrocardiogram-like precision.
• Ahmed links better sleep to sleep consistency, cooler and darker sleep environments, and avoiding food too close to bedtime.
• WHOOP found respiratory rate especially useful during COVID-19 because that metric is usually stable and can show clear deviations from baseline.
• Ahmed’s leadership framework treats startup building like long-duration performance, where sustained output depends on recovery and stable habits.

Frequently asked questions about things discussed in this episode

How does WHOOP measure recovery?

WHOOP measures Recovery by combining signals such as HRV, resting heart rate, sleep performance, and other markers of physiological strain into a daily readiness score.

What does WHOOP do for sleep tracking beyond time in bed?

WHOOP tracks Sleep by estimating how much time you spend asleep, how much of that time is restorative, and how behaviors such as alcohol, meal timing, and sleep consistency affect next-day recovery.

Why does WHOOP focus less on steps?

WHOOP focuses on Strain and Recovery because steps can miss weight training, cycling, yoga, and other activities that still place real load on the body.

How does WHOOP use respiratory rate?

WHOOP uses respiratory rate as a context signal inside Health Monitor because your nighttime breathing rate is usually stable and sudden increases can stand out against your normal baseline.

What does WHOOP show about sleep consistency?

WHOOP shows that consistent bed and wake times are associated with better recovery, lower resting heart rate, and higher HRV over time.

What does WHOOP offer people with demanding jobs, not just athletes?

WHOOP offers people in demanding jobs a daily read on readiness, sleep quality, and strain so decisions about training, work, and recovery are based on physiology instead of guesswork.

For people balancing training, sleep, and high-pressure work, WHOOP gives Ahmed’s central idea a daily form: measure the signals that show when your body is ready to push and when it needs more recovery.