Ahmed saw wearables bringing computers onto the body

Transcript

From the transcript Inside Blackstone publishes with the episode.

1. 9:00

   Well, I'll caveat by saying that it was helpful being young and naive. You know, I didn't know any better, so to speak. But I did have this really strong feeling that computers were moving from just in my relatively short life span at that point, from being on your desk to being on your lap to being in your pocket. And I thought eventually they would be on your body. And I thought that would coincide with meaningfully better health monitoring and meaningfully better data associated with performance.

2. 9:30

   And I was a college athlete who had overtrained. And so to me, it seemed obvious that other athletes would want this data for their bodies. And the insight that I had was it wasn't just the two hours you're exercising or the four hours you're playing a game or whatever, it was the other 20 hours of the day. And so I felt like there was this huge gap between what the market thought it wanted and what the market needed.

3. 9:55

   And there's an insight there, I think, for entrepreneurs, which is customers tend to be better at explaining problems than explaining solutions. Our observation was the problem was around understanding the body. 24/7. Tell me, you go and you meet LeBron James and you're explaining this tech to him. In order to work with pro athletes or really anyone, we felt like we needed to measure the body accurately.

4. 10:08

   And today that sounds like sort of an obvious concept. But 14 years ago, the only way really to measure the body was with medical technology, an ECG the machine, which is an electrocardiogram, and it's in the hospital and it's got all these nodes on it, and it's ugly and it's antiquated and it's expensive. And the chest strap, which was really the gold standard for a long time for measuring heart rate during exercise like that, was invented in the 80s.

5. 10:34

   The PSG, which is really the gold standard for sleep monitoring. You have to go to a sleep laboratory. You get all these things put on your body. It's a horrible night's sleep. You've got two human beings watching you sleep on videotape. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. So my naive point of view was, can we take this medical grade technology, put it in a small form factor that consumers will want to wear and measure the body 24/7.

6. 11:00

   And we're going to start with the world's best athletes, and then we're going to get consumers. And then eventually it'll be in the medical community. And we're somewhere on that on that journey, on that arc today. You have a line that I think is so great, which is like fall in love with the problem, right? Not the idea. Well, I think that's right. You want to