Like I've had them where, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night, your heart beating really fast. Have you had that? Like, cause it's just so much stress. Do you feel that if you're not having them as a founder, you're probably not pushing hard enough? No, I don't

think so. Well, look, I don't think you need to be someone who wakes up in the middle of the night with your heart palpitating. You know, I do run ultimately a company that's focused on improving health. And so there's a lot of things you can do to prepare yourself to take on more stress. Do I think that in order to be a successful founder or CEO, you need to take on an enormous amount of stress? Yes. But I also think there's tools that you can develop to cope with that stress and those tools aren't explicitly just you know alcohol and caffeine like there's other tools at your toolkit and uh and look at there was a phase for me in building this company where those were kind of my only tools uh you know when I was 24, I had raised maybe $20 million at that point. I had a team of 25 people. And I was super stressed and strung out, and I was not comfortable running the company. And I had one incident where I just, I ended up in the emergency room from a panic attack. And I just bring that up to say that like, if you're not taking care of yourself, you're going to spin out of control. I wasn't at that stage in my life doing a good job managing the stress of building a company. And mind you, my responsibility today is objectively a lot greater than it was when I was 24, but I don't feel that same stress. I feel like I can cope with that, that increased responsibility. Whereas before I had less responsibility and I couldn't even cope with it. Right. And so it's all to say that if you can learn tools and techniques to manage your stress, you in turn can keep getting better at this and also keep pushing the business further and further and further. So

can you share what some

of those tools were? Yeah, absolutely. Some of these tie back to things that we have researched at Whoop as well. But for me, first and foremost, excuse me one second. For me, first and foremost, it was learning to develop a practice of meditation. I really didn't know what meditation was, but I had read online that it had helped people with stress. And so that was my entry point into learning meditation. And it was something I really fell in love with. This is now 11 years ago. And I started doing twice a day for 20 minutes. And it just helped me quiet my mind in a way that I had never experienced in my life. And it also gave me an outlet to look at my thoughts and pass through my thoughts and really just sort of sit with my challenges without providing a lot of judgment towards them. the act of doing it itself is that in other areas of my life, it felt like all of a sudden I had someone in the third person looking at me. It used to be I would get angry and next thing you know, you're yelling and all of a sudden you're kind of catching up to the moment you're in. You're like, whoa, that escalated quickly. Whereas after I started meditating, I would hear this voice in my head like, oh, Will's about to get angry before I got angry. And so it just made, it made getting angry almost like a decision. Like, okay, do I want to run in this direction or am I going to be more mellow? that in turn became very rewarding and powerful. And in a sense, it made everything feel like it was slowing down. Whereas before it felt like everything was sped up and I was trying to keep up. All of a sudden it felt like I could sit back and kind of watch what was going on and be a little bit or a lot more, I should say, intentional. So that was tool number one. Tool number two is around sleep. We could talk about sleep for as long as you'd like, but the punchline is you need to get high quality sleep. In particular, you need to get restorative sleep, which is REM and slow wave sleep. And if you don't know how much restorative sleep you're getting, I would just encourage you to measure your sleep. And once you start measuring your sleep, you're going to have a baseline for that. And then you're going to be able to tweak a few things and all of a sudden your baseline will be a lot higher. And by the way, you'll feel a lot better. The third tool is exercise. I think it's really important to stay fit and active even as you're taking on something that's ambitious. So having a regular exercise practice. And then this varies by individuals. I find for me, having a whole hot-cold practice can be really helpful with stress. So I like to do sauna and steam, and then I'll do a cold plunge, and all of a sudden I'll just feel my whole mood is improved and is better. That's something that might be more personal to me, but there's enough evidence to show that contrast therapy is something that can be beneficial. It certainly helps if your personal life is good. I mean, people don't really talk about that for some reason in a business setting, but if you're in a deeply committed relationship with your partner versus if that's kind of spinning out of control and you're fighting all the time at home and, you know, XYZ issues with your parents or in-laws or kids or, you know, none of that's going to make running a business easier or better. So having a certain level of stability in your life also is a remarkable tool for being able to drive hard as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, I agree. Definitely on the last, like, yeah, all of those, but you're right. Nobody ever talks about it. And, you know, I went through a really tough breakup and I definitely wasn't thinking straight, like and and it affected the business for sure

yeah I think that can happen often and the other thing for people to know is that your state of being does not actually correlate directly with the success of your business. When I was early at it, I kind of thought, well, if Whoop does well, I'll do well. If Whoop does poorly, I'll do poorly. If Whoop's winning, I'm winning. If Whoop's losing, I'm losing. It was sort of like we were one in the same. But I've now been doing this long enough to realize that those are actually two very different dimensions. And I've also met a lot of entrepreneurs. And by the way, I've met entrepreneurs whose business is super successful. Like objectively, the business is doing great, but they're spinning out of control. Whether it's stress or whether it's chaos in their personal life or whatever, they're not doing great, even though the business is doing well. And I've seen the opposite where you invest in a company and the entrepreneur is super grounded and trying to make it happen, and yet it's just a really hard business. And for reasons out of the entrepreneur's control, the business fails. I mean, imagining opening a hotel in April of 2020, that business is going to fail. I don't care what you do as an entrepreneur. There isn't as direct a correlation between the identity of the business and the identity of the founder. And I think that's an important distinction to make. I will say, though, in order for a business to really scale, you need to learn how you are going to grow and

change and improve. Yeah, 100%. Especially, look, as the CEO and the leader, the person that's steering the ship, I found from my personal experience, 100% what you're saying, your own personal growth is a direct correlation and reflection of the business's growth. What are you doing to constantly level up? Well,

I think first of all, it's a mindset, right? Mindset is, I'm going to try to get a little better today. Mindset is, I need to surround myself with people that are going to push me further. Mindset is, if I have a challenge in front of me, it's an opportunity to grow. I mean, just those three mindsets right there, game changers. Because if you take a mindset of, oh, I've got a challenge, why is this happening to me? Which by the way, a reasonable frame that a lot of people have when things go wrong. It's just going to put you in a mode of sort of this victim mentality, excuses, these things that ultimately aren't going to help you overcome whatever you have to deal with. And the reality, as you know, is like in order to get better at your job, you have to be tested. You have to do things that you've never done before. You have to be put in uncomfortable situations. And so there's a certain like embrace you have to have for that, I think, in order to grow as a CEO. And then the last thing is, along with being around great people and having that mindset, I do think it really helps to be drawn by your mission. Because when you're of service, that's when you're going to do the best work. It's not about what I can achieve. It's about what we're providing to the world. What product are we giving you? What service are we giving you? And for Whoop, that's always been an easy one because it's a mission around improving health and unlocking performance. And so we get these amazing testimonials from people who are like, whoop saved my life or whoop changed my life or I lost all this weight or I went to see a doctor because of my data. And oh, my God, I'm now in the emergency room. And thank you. Like, those are really powerful, life changing stories. And so when you're facing a lot of adversity, knowing that's what you're for and that's what you're about and those are the people you're actually going to help, I think it makes a huge difference. Yeah.

I'm curious just around the leadership piece because you are a first-time CEO. What's been the hardest leadership lesson you've learned and how did it change your approach to building a team?

The hardest team building thing by far, I think, is when you've worked with someone who is phenomenal to get you from A to B, but they're not the right person to get you from B to C. And as a first time founder and ceo those are the decisions that you will delay you won't make fast enough and and that end up becoming very emotional and painful i think and it's just to say that it is really hard like you know you're in the trenches with someone for five years and you did all this stuff together. And now you need to go to another mountaintop and they don't have the equipment for that mountaintop. And they don't know that, but you see it and maybe other people around you see it. And so you have to make that decision. That's really hard. Definitely the hardest thing. You know, hiring great people, that's a skill that you develop. Finding people in the early days who are compatible with you, who you really like, who complimentary to you you know you're great at product find someone great at engineer you're great at sales find someone great at finance like you know find people who have skills that you don't have and committed you want to start a business early on find the missionaries not theenaries. You want people who believe in this thing. They're going to be by your side. They're in it for the equity. They're playing the long game. Those are the hiring principles. or someone who's not meeting the bar, got to fire that person. And that's also got to be an easy decision for you. But the real hard one that I described is the person who was great for a long period of time, who's no longer right for the company. That's very hard. Hard

things about hard things. Correct. Yeah. That's a great book and yeah i i know that all too well and in retrospect how do you get that person uh to perhaps have someone above them but then it's awkward like yeah i know exactly that so look we have to work towards wrapping up we're almost at time um a couple last questions or just really one for aspiring founders what's one piece of advice that you would give when it comes to navigating the complexities of hardware startups and then what are you excited about next for

hardware startups i think is the key part of that question the challenge with building hardware is that you're going to make decisions today and you're then going to see how they actually pan out 12, 18, 24 months later. And that's a really important thing to just know as you're making decisions. A lot of times it's easy to say, oh, if we had this capability, that would be very innovative. But you might be thinking that'd be very innovative today. Is that actually going to be innovative in two years when it comes out? So I think there's an element with building hardware where you have to actually be more ambitious. You have to really take on a certain level of risk when it comes to your hardware. Now, the other challenge though with hardware is you need to be maniacally focused. So take on risk here, but then don't do a ton of other things. In the case of Whoop, we said we were going to be the best at health monitoring, really accurate, but we're not going to be a watch. We're not going to be a step counter. It's not going to do phone calls. It's not going to notify you if you got an email. It's not a smartwatch. There were all these things we said no to, to just be great at this one thing. And that's a very hard process. And then you have to be comfortable with this idea that you're really trying to predict the future. And I think a lot of founders sort of dance around that idea when they're building hardware. you're not going to A-B test your hardware. You have to come up with an idea of what the future looks like, and that future needs to be right. And I think it's healthy to actually be honest about the fact that that's what you're doing. You're making a bet on what the future looks like. And to say otherwise is a little naive. So those are some of the things I would keep in mind with hardware. And then beyond that, it's probably finding investors who are sympathetic to how hard it is to build hardware. You're going to have delays. You're going to have issues with manufacturing. You're going to have quality stuff happen.