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143 Investors Said No. Now His Company Is Worth $10 Billion - Video học tiếng Anh
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143 Investors Said No. Now His Company Is Worth $10 Billion
143 Investors Said No. Now His Company Is Worth $10 Billion
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0:00
I was 22 years old. I had never started a company. I had never had a full-time job. I was building
0:05
a business at the intersection of hardware and software and data science and medicine.
0:11
And I wasn't a hardware engineer or computer scientist.
0:14
So, I think there was a lot of skepticism that I was going to be able to build this technology.
0:19
Hundreds of investors said no.
0:21
And so, you know, every day I just try to pick myself up and put one
0:24
foot in front of the other and keep building.
0:26
In 2012, while studying at Harvard, Will Ahmed started building what would become WHOOP.
0:32
Built around a screenless wearable, the business is now valued at $10.1
0:38
billion and has been embraced by some of the world's top athletes,
0:43
including LeBron James, Michael Phelps, and Cristiano Ronaldo.
0:47
There was a period in 2017, 2018 where WHOOP had built, I think,
0:52
a cool brand. It was used by the world's best athletes. The technology was very
0:56
powerful. But we hadn't yet figured out how to make a real business out of it.
1:00
I mean, we were a week away from declaring bankruptcy before we got a deal done.
1:05
But none of that success was guaranteed. Just 2 years after launching WHOOP,
1:09
the pressure nearly broke its founder.
1:11
I had raised tens of millions of dollars. We had a team of 30, 40 people, and I felt
1:18
totally strung out. I was drinking too much coffee. I was drinking too much alcohol.
1:22
It all kind of climaxed around a day where I had a
1:24
panic attack and checking myself into the hospital.
1:28
There are three numbers to look out for in WHOOP's story.
1:31
143 - the number of investors who rejected Will in early years.
1:36
2.7 million - the number of WHOOP members today
1:39
And $10.1 billion - the company's valuation after a major funding round in March 2026.
1:48
This is Founder Effect.
1:56
My name is Will Ahmed and I'm the founder and CEO of WHOOP.
2:00
Will Ahmed grew up in Long Island, New York.
2:03
As a kid, he was obsessed with two things: sports and technology.
2:08
Throughout my whole life, I loved sports and exercise. I mean, I probably played ten different
2:13
sports as a kid. Squash ended up being the one I was best at, so I got to play at Harvard.
2:18
While at Harvard, Will captained the men's varsity
2:21
squash team. But there was a problem he couldn't shake.
2:23
I was someone who used to overtrain where I would go through periods of
2:28
getting fitter and fitter and fitter and then, you know, somewhat suddenly
2:31
feeling completely run down and sort of falling off a cliff and not knowing why.
2:36
It really felt like the ultimate betrayal, and it was something that was very personal to me.
2:40
And the more research I did on it, it felt like this wasn't just a problem for athletes,
2:44
this was a problem that really pertained to all of humanity.
2:47
Why do we know so much information about the weather tomorrow or our computer or our car?
2:54
But maybe the most important engine in the world, our body, we don't know anything about.
2:58
That question turned into an obsession.
3:01
I asked myself a pretty innocent question as a 20-year-old college kid,
3:05
which was, how do you measure the human body?
3:07
And what that led to was reading hundreds of medical papers and writing
3:12
my own paper called "The Feedback Tool: Measuring Intensity Recovery and Sleep."
3:17
In the fall of his senior year, he made the call.
3:19
I made the commitment to start the company, and I remember telling my parents that,
3:23
you know, I'm not going to go into finance or consulting or these other things that
3:26
all my classmates were doing, I'm going to be starting this company.
3:30
And that was, I think, one of the scariest decisions I made
3:34
in my life because I didn't know what I had just signed up for.
3:37
There was so much unknown in front of me, and I really didn't have a playbook.
3:42
You know, it wasn't just that I had never started a company before,
3:44
it was like, this was going to be my first full-time job.
3:47
Will wasn't trying to build another step counter. He wanted a wearable that could track what was
3:52
happening inside the body continuously, including sleep, strain, and recovery.
3:57
WHOOP is a wearable device that continuously measures everything
4:01
about your body and sends all of that data to your phone and to the
4:06
cloud where we give you all sorts of insights to make you healthier.
4:09
But when the company started in 2012,
4:12
getting those kinds of insights from a wearable device still seemed far-fetched.
4:17
The wearables market was still very new. There was about five million wearables sold a year,
4:22
which is really small as a market size.
4:25
And most of the products in the market were either measuring what I would call non-invasive,
4:32
not particularly interesting metrics about the human body.
4:35
They couldn't measure what's going on physiologically inside this person's body.
4:39
Will was trying to combine the simplicity of a consumer wearable with the kind of
4:43
physiological data usually associated with clinical or elite performance settings.
4:49
Hundreds of investors said no.
4:51
And so, you know, every day I just tried to pick myself up
4:54
and put one foot in front of the other and keep building.
4:57
But WHOOP wasn't just up against skepticism from investors. He was
5:01
entering a category where giants like Nike, and soon Apple, were moving in.
5:06
Nike was coming out with the FuelBand at the time. Apple was coming out with the
5:10
Apple Watch, two of the best and biggest companies in the world.
5:13
There was certainly a pervasive narrative for at least a decade
5:16
of building this company that we shouldn't build hardware, we should just build the
5:19
software and the algorithms that sits on top of other wearable products.
5:23
But I think what that point of view missed was that there was actually no
5:27
wearable technology out there that could accurately measure the body.
5:30
But he ignored the advice and started building.
5:33
It took many years to build a product that I wasn't embarrassed by. And the
5:38
hard thing about being an entrepreneur is balancing this feeling of, gosh,
5:42
the thing has to be able to do X, Y, and Z, and it needs to look like this,
5:45
and this is what we're striving to, its perfection, its perfection, its perfection.
5:48
Once he had a product, Will made another counterintuitive bet.
5:52
Instead of chasing mass consumers first, WHOOP went after elite athletes.
5:57
We started with professional athletes because we felt professional athletes,
6:01
first of all, needed to understand sleep and recovery and strain. They
6:05
were getting paid millions of dollars ultimately, based on how they recovered,
6:08
but they couldn't measure recovery. So, it seemed obvious that that would be a good market.
6:14
But separately, and you could argue more importantly for WHOOP as a business,
6:18
professional athletes, if we could get them to really love WHOOP,
6:22
would help us create a brand around performance,
6:25
and make health monitoring aspirational, and make health monitoring, dare I say, cool.
6:31
It worked. LeBron James and Michael Phelps became early high-profile users,
6:36
and WHOOP started spreading through locker rooms by word of mouth.
6:39
But behind the scenes, building the business nearly broke Will himself.
6:43
I was 24 years old. I was about two years into building this company. I
6:48
had raised tens of millions of dollars. We had a team of 30,
6:52
40 people, and I felt totally strung out in building this business.
6:57
I really was very stressed. I didn't fully understand how to deal with
7:01
those emotions. I was drinking too much coffee. I was drinking too much alcohol.
7:05
Like, I was just still a kid, and it felt like I was thrown into
7:09
the seat of being a CEO and I didn't really know how to keep up with that.
7:13
It all kind of climaxed around a day where I had a
7:15
panic attack and checking myself into the hospital.
7:19
That moment forced a hard realization.
7:22
WHOOP could fail, not because the idea was wrong,
7:25
but because the founder was not evolving fast enough to lead it.
7:28
I also realized in that moment that WHOOP could ultimately fail in large part because of me.
7:34
Like if I didn't keep growing and evolving with the pace of this business,
7:38
it was going to be my fault the business failed, not the idea or the technology or anything else.
7:43
After the panic attack, Will started meditating, changed how he managed stress,
7:47
and became more deliberate about being the kind of CEO WHOOP needed him to be.
7:52
But changing himself wasn't enough.
7:54
WHOOP had to become a real business. And by 2017, it was nearing bankruptcy.
7:59
There was a period in 2017, 2018 where WHOOP had built, I think,
8:04
a cool brand. It was used by the world's best athletes. The technology was very powerful,
8:09
but we hadn't yet figured out how to make a real business out of it. We didn't have
8:13
mass adoption yet. So, our sales numbers still weren't where they needed to be. So,
8:18
our investors at this point were wondering, well, when is this going to be a real business?
8:22
And that was a period of time where we almost ran out of money.
8:24
I mean, we were a week away from declaring bankruptcy before we got a deal done.
8:29
Then in May 2018, Will made the move that changed WHOOP's business model completely.
8:35
He killed the one-time hardware price.
8:37
The WHOOP strap would now be free, bundled with a monthly membership.
8:41
We realized that health monitoring was a continuous journey in people's lives,
8:47
it wasn't a one-time thing.
8:49
And we needed to invest in new software features and capabilities on a relentless basis, and that
8:56
felt to us much more like actually a subscription or a membership than a one-time hardware sale.
9:02
We care as much about keeping our existing members on WHOOP, as we do finding the next new members.
9:09
And I think that in many ways aligns us with our member base and it makes us very focused
9:14
on well what do they need, what do they want? Are we giving them that every day,
9:18
every week, every month? Because that's what they're paying for.
9:21
Today, Will wants WHOOP to be more than just a fitness tracker.
9:25
The worlds of performance and health are really blurring.
9:29
Delivering this data around sleep and recovery and exercise, health alerts,
9:34
even medical capabilities is something that every human needs. Great health is performance,
9:41
and high-performing people want to be healthy.
9:45
In May 2025, WHOOP launched WHOOP 5.0 and WHOOP MG adding features like Healthspan
9:51
with WHOOP Age, Heart Screener with ECG and Blood Pressure Insights.
9:56
Two months later, the US Food and Drug Administration sent WHOOP a warning letter
10:01
saying the Blood Pressure Insights feature appeared to require medical device clearance.
10:06
WHOOP maintains the feature is a wellness tool,
10:09
but the dispute showed how the line between wellness and medicine was starting to blur.
10:15
With WHOOP Age, which tells you essentially how old you are according to WHOOP,
10:19
based on your behaviors and your physiology, and it's become the
10:22
most screenshotted page in the WHOOP app, the most popular feature in the WHOOP app.
10:26
People really want to take control of their health, and they want to feel a little younger.
10:30
Will says WHOOP now has about 2.7 million members across more than 200
10:35
countries, and the company says sales commitments more than doubled in 2025.
10:40
WHOOP's latest fundraising round, announced in March 2026, raised
10:46
$575 million - bringing in investors from the Gulf including Abu Dhabi's
10:52
2PointZero Mubadala and Qatar's QIA, as well as U.S. health names like Mayo Clinic and Abbott.
11:00
We also were able to bring in some really strategic sovereign wealth
11:03
funds which reflects all of our growth in the GCC and we were able to uh bring on
11:09
some great health strategics, and then of course, the world's best athletes.
11:14
For Will, it's no longer about survival, it's about scale.
11:18
It does give us the opportunity to accelerate a lot of initiatives around
11:22
research and development, new technology, as well as growing around the world.
11:27
And he says they're just getting started.
11:30
You shouldn't start a company because you think it's glamorous. But if you see a
11:34
problem in the world that you're obsessed with, and you can't stop thinking about,
11:39
whether it's in the shower or staring out a window or before you go to bed,
11:43
like this is the thing you're thinking about, then you should go for it.
11:47
And I think that that goes back to the lesson for any entrepreneur,
11:51
which is if your mission is that much worth fighting for, you can pull yourself through
11:55
incredibly painful periods of time and you can come out the other side.
