Is it possible for a 22-year-old college senior to start a company, one that 14 years later is valued at $3.6 billion? Apparently, it is — and Will Ahmed did it.
Ahmed is the founder & CEO of WHOOP, a wearable fitness band built to optimize sleep, strain, and recovery. In 2012, he was a senior at Harvard and had a problem he was trying to solve — how to train correctly. Thinking about how to solve this became his obsession as he created a business plan to bring to market a product that would deeply understand athletic training, sleep, and recovery. He says now that he was naïve because he was trying to build a product at the intersection of hardware, software, design, and medicine — and didn’t have any of those skills. The only thing he had going for him at 22 was he had a clear vision of what needed to exist and that he was “willing to work his ass off” to achieve it. “If you want to build a company, it’s helpful if you don’t want anything else,” he said. At 22, that was pretty easy for him.
At an event funded by our student-led speaker series, the Raif Dinçkök Student Forum Fund, Ahmed shared his experiences in an interview with Questrom student Raza Shah. He had lots of advice and insights for students interested in starting a business: try to identify a problem in your life that you want to solve; investors don’t necessarily know more than you do; if you build a product that people want, you can screw up so many other things and still build a successful company. His take on AI stealing jobs? Ahmed feels that AI has become cover for companies to lay off employees when in fact it’s the companies that are underperforming.
Ahmed also shared some of his own personal journey. He was so stressed out by trying to build his company that he learned to meditate and, in the process, found his inner voice. Going towards that voice helped him build confidence. Early on, he developed the philosophy of trying to get a little better every single day as he learned the complexities of building a business — he emphasized that at 22, he couldn’t do what he does today. And he learned how to run a business by running a business, he learned how to raise capital by raising capital. Learning by doing is key.
