Co-Founder and CTO John Capodilupo

Whoop is a wearable device and corresponding analytics system that aims to unlock human performance through the continuous gathering and monitoring of physiological data. Recently, Whoop has been influential in the early detection of COVID-19 and has been involved in research around neurodegenerative diseases and sleep. Pulse writer Jamie Marvil sat down with Co-Founder and CTO John Capodilupo to discuss Whoop and the growth of the company in recent years.

The Pulse: Can you please provide an overview of your background and how you came to co-found Whoop?

John Capodilupo: We started eight and a half years ago in the summer of 2012 when I was an undergrad at Harvard studying astrophysics and computer science. My dad is a professor of anatomy and physiology at Grand Valley State University, so I always had a bit of physiology knowledge from him. I come from a family of academics – my dad is an academic, my grandfather was an academic – and I was headed down that path too when I met Will, one of our other co-founders. At the time, wearable wasn’t even a word yet, and Fitbit had just come out with its first step counter. Will came across the Polar chest strap heart rate monitor and for the first time could objectively gauge how hard he was pushing his body. From there, he began to realize that monitoring your body while working out is important, but what happens the other twenty-two hours of the day? In the end, that is where the vision came from: to build a wearable system that could give you physiological metrics continuously throughout the day and then pair that with an analytics system that would help users make sense of the noisy physiological data. Will’s background is on the sports and business side, and so he looked for a technical co-founder. We met through a series of friends, and I dropped out of Harvard after my sophomore year to focus on Whoop.

The Pulse: Can you give our readers a bit of context on what Whoop is and how you aim to provide value for your customers?

JC: Our mission at Whoop is to unlock human performance, and we do that through a cutting-edge wearable that is solely focused on gathering physiological data continuously, truly 24/7. We collect heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and motion data. From there, we stream the data to a mobile application and provide an analytics suite that breaks your data into three main components.

The first is called “Strain,” which is a single number representation of the amount of cardiovascular stress you’ve placed on your body throughout the day. “Strain” is fascinating because it tracks many of the stressors on your body that you might not even be aware of – doing an interview, taking a red-eye flight, these things add up. The next component is sleep scoring. We automatically detect and score sleep much like you’d get at a sleep lab. Not only do we detect when you fall asleep and wake up, but we track the amount of REM sleep, light sleep, and micro-arousals. The third piece is a recovery score. It’s a 0-100% number that you get first thing in the morning, and it’s an indication of how physiologically ready your body is to take on strain that day. Although Whoop started with professional athletes, we have seen that these physiological metrics have applicability beyond athletics to cognitive function, general wellness, and in some cases, illness.

The Pulse: Whoop has a somewhat unique revenue model in that customers pay a monthly subscription fee and the devices themselves are free. How did you think through your revenue model and ultimately land on this payment system?

JC: It was one of the greatest changes we’ve made on the business side of Whoop. When we entered the consumer market in 2016, we offered Whoop at a premium price point of $500 upfront, with no subscription. With this high price point, we were not selling thousands of units a day, but we did build a loyal customer base. What we saw from the data was that our users were very engaged with Whoop, something other wearables companies were struggling with at the time. With this, we asked ourselves, “how do we capitalize on this value while lowering the barrier to entry but also not cheapening the brand?”

“Whoop is not a piece of hardware in isolation; it’s having the analytics system, this insights engine, that will allow you to make better behavioral choices and achieve your goals.”

The subscription model really came from the fact that Whoop is not a piece of hardware in isolation; it’s having the analytics system, this insights engine, that will allow you to make better behavioral choices and achieve your goals. As we retain customers and see them engaging with the data for long periods of time, this behavior fits more with a subscription model. Every month, we are providing value to our customers.

The Pulse: The data that Whoop gives its customers provides an impetus to make certain lifestyle changes (e.g., sleeping more, drinking less). Once a customer has really started to make those lifestyle changes and is embodying that healthier lifestyle, how do you ensure that Whoop continues to add value?

JC: There are a few ways. First, our recovery score is quite hard to predict, even for those people who have been on Whoop for years. Usually the recovery score follows how you feel, but there are times when it does not. As such, people who follow Whoop’s recommendations on activity level for the day are often surprised to see that Whoop knows them better than they know themselves. As you gain trust in the Whoop system, you recognize that Whoop is monitoring things that you can’t necessarily feel, and your body is constantly giving physiological signals.

Second is through the Whoop community. People are always changing and new things come up in life, but through Whoop you join a group of people who have similar goals and can keep you accountable. Finally, you can do self-experimentation to test what behaviors work for your body. New fads are always coming about in the fitness industry, so you can explore how these things are affecting your body. Over time, the system becomes a repository for all past behaviors and their corresponding impact.

The Pulse: Over the last couple years, Whoop was used by Weill Cornell Medicine to understand the connection between neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, and sleep. Can you talk a bit about this study and how you see Whoop playing a role in this space in the future?

JC: The study, which was run by Cornell Medicine using Whoop straps, was quite fascinating. The study took people who had a higher likelihood of developing Alzheimer’s disease based on genetic makeup and family history and observed their sleep patterns. Along with tracking sleep, the study also used traditional lab tests and cognitive tests throughout. Overall, the study found that there was no difference in blood test results between the group with a predisposition to Alzheimer’s and the control group; however, there was an observed difference between the two groups in the composition of their sleep. Overall, it was interesting to see that there were physiological changes that weren’t picked up by traditional tests that were evident in the biometric data collected by Whoop.

Sleep is a very important factor to track as it plays a role in many health outcomes. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the hardest things to monitor in a clinical setting because sleep labs often disrupt the ways in which people sleep. As such, it’s extremely important to get quality data outside the laboratory, and I am excited for Whoop to support different research efforts. We’ve supported a variety of studies thus far and done our own investigation as well, everything from sleep apnea to COVID-19.

The Pulse: You mentioned COVID-19, and obviously early detection of the virus has become hugely important to the global population. I know Whoop has been influential in that in some cases, so would love to hear a little bit more about that.

JC: Definitely. One of the things we developed about two years ago was the ability to track people’s respiratory rate, the amount of breaths you take per minute. When COVID-19 hit, one of our members unfortunately contracted the virus and offered us the opportunity to look at his data. In examining his data, we found that his respiratory rate jumped up to 4-5 standard deviations above his baseline respiratory rate when he got COVID-19. Of interest, this spike in his respiratory rate was at a sub-clinical level, meaning it was still below the common threshold that clinicians worry about (around 20 breaths per minute). However, for this individual the spike was significant: his baseline was around 14 breaths per minute, and his rate jumped to 18 breaths per minute when he came down with COVID-19.

From this, we decided to run our own study based on self-submitted COVID-19 results from our users. We developed a machine learning algorithm using the data that ultimately predicted 20% of cases before people were showing symptoms and 80% of all cases within three days of exhibiting symptoms. This goes back to the importance of each person’s individual baseline: none of these individuals would have clinically triggered any alert based on vital signs, but the change from their baseline was still significant. By understanding medicine in this context, it shows how you can get ahead of disease before you spread it.

Another example that comes to mind here is Nick Watney, the PGA Tour player. Prior to a tournament, he got tested twice, both negative. However, on the first day of the tournament, he woke up to see a spike in his respiratory rate. Although he was asymptomatic, he knew something was wrong and asked to be tested again. Sure enough, he tested positive and was able to avoid infecting other golfers in the tournament.

The Pulse: In the healthcare industry, we have seen a significant increase in the attention paid to wearables companies in recent years. What are some of the most exciting opportunities you see for wearable devices? Are there any healthcare trends that you hope to capitalize on?

JC: Wearables have the ability to drive action through an understanding of an individual’s own physiology, what is normal for them, and when something deviates from normal. Continuous data, especially if we know how to use it, has a ton of utility. I think the real use here is understanding the deviations from baseline to detect and prevent disease. This is an area that a lot of wearables companies are interested in: the recent FDA approval of Apple Watch’s arrhythmia detection is evidence of this.

The Pulse: As we’ve talked about, it seems like there is a lot of potential in the detection and monitoring of health conditions. As Whoop’s capabilities continue to grow, how do you think about making the product affordable and accessible to a wide range of patient populations?

JC: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. The availability of Whoop across a range of people is something we are working hard on right now. In 2016, we started selling to consumers, but even then, it was really just marathoners and “weekend warriors.” Now, we’ve seen a gradual development in the general consumer space, people who wouldn’t even consider themselves athletes at all. These individuals are actually the biggest population on Whoop today. I think the interesting thing is that these physiological metrics are relevant regardless of if you are running a race or just trying to live a little bit healthier. Sleep underpins everything, and I think there has been a shift in consumer culture to understanding the importance of sleep. That’s a trend that we see in the consumer audience that Whoop is capitalizing on.