WHOOP Founder Will Ahmed on the future of healthcare

Welcome to Inside Blackstone, our newly launched flagship weekly podcast hosted by Blackstone's Global Head of Corporate Affairs, Christine Anderson. Each week, we take you inside our walls to share the signals we're seeing across our portfolio of 280+ companies and roughly 13,000 real estate assets, and the people shaping our future. No jargon, just a unique read on the real economy, the big trends shaping business, tech, AI, and more. 

In this episode, Christine sits down with WHOOP founder and CEO Will Ahmed who built a company out of his Harvard dorm room. After years of investors saying no, it’s now worth $10 billion. Over the conversation, he discusses the pivot that saved the company, why sleep is the closest thing we have to a magic pill, how AI-enabled healthcare may actually improve healthspan, and why continuous health monitoring is the wave of the future.

Might a fitness tracking company really be a health tech company in disguise?

Time stamps (full transcript also available here)

• 1:09 – The Monday Morning Meeting
• 3:14 – Economic Weather Report
• 5:32 – Will Ahmed Comes Inside Blackstone
• 7:28 – Building WHOOP From a Harvard Dorm Room
• 8:30 – What Is WHOOP?
• 9:58 – How did WHOOP Get Lebron James to Wear Their Tech?
• 11:10 – Falling In Love With The Problem, Not The Solution
• 11:44 – Dealing With Rejection
• 14:55 – MedTech vs FinTech
• 17:45 – The Future of AI in Healthcare and a Longer Healthspan
• 18:37 — Proprietary Data as the Real Moat in AI Healthcare
• 21:01 — Why Sleep Is the Closest Thing to a Magic Pill
• 25:13 — High Intensity, High Humility
• 27:00 – The Debrief

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