Will Ahmed: Founding WHOOP and the Future of Wearables

People who meditate, in general, have a much better heart rate variability. So, we do see that people who practice some form of mindfulness, some form of meditation, have, on average, higher heart rate variabilities than other people.

REM sleep is when your brain is repairing. It's when you're improving cognitive performance. And if you're an executive, if you're trying to perform at a high level mentally, you need to be getting a lot of REM sleep.

7 hours in bed does not actually translate to seven hours in sleep. Maybe you spend 7 hours in bed, and if you're pretty efficient, you're getting 6 hours and 15 minutes of quality sleep ... There are people who get 6 hours and 15 minutes of sleep, and 5 and a half hours of that is light sleep.

I really believe we will look back on professional athletes not measuring sleep and recovery as like the most insane thing ever. It'll be like baseball players smoking cigarettes in the dugout. It'll just seem that insane.

Alcohol, in general, is not good for you—most people know that. But it's actually quite interesting—a certain population of people on WHOOP, if they have one drink, it actually can be beneficial to them where they may see positive results in their recovery and their sleep the next day.

If you are going to drink alcohol, do it three hours before bed and try to have less than two drinks.

If you look at people who have been [using] WHOOP for a year, they have dramatically declining resting heart rates [and] they have an increase in heart rate variability, so they're sleeping longer and they're sleeping more consistently.

You always want to ask customers for what their problems are; you don't want to ask customers what their solutions are. Customers are very good at describing their problems; they often can maybe mislead you sometimes when they try to build that solution ... The role of a great product team is to come up with the solution.

The things that humans are good at dreaming up tend to end up being reality.

We want to live on two paradigms: We want WHOOP to either be cool, or we want it to be invisible—and nothing in between.

We don't think [step count] is relevant. It's a completely irrelevant metric in my opinion—in part because it's not even measuring steps; it's measuring how much your arm moves.