Will Ahmed captained the squash team at Harvard and kept breaking himself doing it. He would train hard, get fitter, then fall off a cliff and have no idea why. That personal problem is where WHOOP starts. In his own telling, 2010 is the year he first had the idea for a product that could measure the human body, and the question that followed him around was not whether you could measure it but what exactly you should measure.

What he did next is the part worth copying. He went out to meet coaches and athletes, and he asked them two different questions. When he asked what they wanted, he heard requests for more exercise data: video analysis, speed and exertion numbers, GPS, sweat. When he asked the same people what their biggest problems were, he heard about injury and player availability. The gap between those two answers became the product. As Ahmed put it later, customers are brilliant at describing their problems, and it is up to you to identify the solution. Recovery, not exercise, was the thing to measure, which meant measuring the other twenty hours of the day and above all sleep.

He wrote the first business plan in one all night sitting, took a photograph of it in a delirious state, and told himself he would want to remember the moment. He was 22, and by his own description naive and inexperienced. He has said that all of that turned out to be useful. He started the company in January 2012 out of the Harvard Innovation Labs with two co-founders: John Capodilupo, who was taking some of the hardest math classes in the country before dropping out, and Aurelian Nicolae, who could actually build the mechanical prototypes. Ahmed was not the engineer in the room, and the list of things people told him he could not do runs long enough that he eventually published it.

A note on the timeline in this entry. The anchor for the milestone is Ahmed's own account: he dates the founding of WHOOP to January 2012, and he has written that in 2015 two of the first hundred WHOOP users were Michael Phelps and LeBron James. Counting from January 2012 to the start of 2015 gives roughly three years of building before a first hundred people were on the product. That is the conservative floor rather than a precise date, because Ahmed gives the year and not the month. A founder-bylined post on WHOOP's blog in July 2016 supports the same shape of the timeline: he wrote there that the team had spent the last four years building the WHOOP System.

The v1 strategy was deliberately narrow. WHOOP went after pro athletes, who Ahmed says were willing to put up with a first version with short battery life and flaky bluetooth connections because they so badly needed sleep and recovery data. A broad consumer base, he argues, would have rejected exactly that product. His advice to other hardware founders follows from it: target a small market for v1, accept that v1 will not make you a successful company, and understand that its only job is to earn you the right to build a v2. He also argues for a small launch on purpose, because a steady ramp is easier to manufacture against than a spike followed by a cliff.

Then came the harder problem, which was not the hardware. Up to 2018, WHOOP sold the strap as a standalone product for 500 dollars. Two things became clear fast, in Ahmed's words: it was hard to sell a device at that price as a new company without a strong brand, and the people who did buy it were far more engaged than anyone expected. So the company made a risky switch and sold WHOOP as a subscription instead of a one time purchase. Revenue in the first month dropped sharply and everything depended on members staying past their initial commitment. It worked because they rebuilt the company around it. Customers became members, software shipped constantly rather than once a year, and one of the internal values became being obsessed with the member experience.

Ahmed does not romanticise the middle years. He has written that WHOOP came close to failing, that the most rewarding chapter of building the company was also the most painful, and that he refuses the usual startup line about embracing failure. His public list of the doubts he was given reads like a decade of no: you have no experience, you have never started a company, you cannot measure heart rate non-invasively, athletes do not care about recovery, and a roll call of large companies that were each going to kill him.

The numbers on the other side of that are in his own letters to members. In October 2020 he announced 100 million dollars of new capital. In August 2021 he announced 200 million more at a valuation of 3.6 billion dollars, and mentioned in passing that the team had gone from 100 full time employees to over 500 in eighteen months. In 2026 he posted the photograph of that original business plan next to the moment WHOOP became worth 10 billion dollars, close to 14 years apart.