How I built a $10 billion fitness wearable company

For Will Ahmed, the road to building a $10.1 billion fitness startup began with what he calls “the ultimate betrayal.” The perpetrator? His own body.

Launched in 2012, the Boston-based fitness wearables company now has more than 2.7 million users across the globe. Those customers use Whoop’s screen-free wrist devices to track a wide range of biometric data around the clock, from sleep quality to how their bodies perform during exercise and recovery. The company achieved its 11-figure valuation in March, with a $575 million fundraising round from a group of investors including athletes like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo and Rory McIlroy.

“My whole life, I loved sports and exercise,” says Ahmed, 36, Whoop’s founder and CEO. He played several sports growing up and eventually captained Harvard University’s prestigious squash squad. He also obsessed over fitness to the point of chronic fatigue from “over-training,” he says: “I would go through periods of getting fitter and fitter, and then somewhat suddenly feeling completely run down … and not knowing why.”

While studying government and economics at Harvard, Ahmed pored over hundreds of medical research papers for insight, he says. He found that fatigue from over-training can affect anyone who exercises frequently, not just high-level athletes. And he became convinced of an underserved market for active, health-conscious consumers who wanted a better understanding of “what’s going on, physiologically, inside this person’s body,” he says.

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Before graduating in 2012, he published his own research paper on the subject, “The Feedback Tool: Measuring Intensity, Recovery, and Sleep,” and started working on Whoop. Working in the Harvard Innovation Labs with co-founders and fellow students John Capodilupo and Aurelian Nicolae, Ahmed wrote his first business plan and developed early prototypes with physiological sensors.

The ensuing years didn’t exactly go smoothly. Investors repeatedly expressed skepticism about the business, and Whoop nearly went bankrupt roughly six years in, says Ahmed.

“I had never started a company. I never had a full-time job,” Ahmed says. “I was building a business at the intersection of hardware and software and data science and medicine, [but] I wasn’t a hardware engineer or computer scientist, or a data scientist or doctor. So, I think there was a lot of skepticism.”

Nike had just launched its FuelBand activity and calorie tracking wearable device in January 2012. The long-rumored Apple Watch followed two years later. “[Having] two of the best and biggest companies in the world, with Nike and Apple, as…