Speaker 1:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's exchanges and clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Just 11 days into 2023 and less than a month after we dropped episode 337 with Julia Boorstin, the creator of CNBC's Disruptor 50 list, the nomination process has kicked off for this year's compilation of the most innovative venture-backed companies that are using breakthrough technology to meet increasing economic and consumer challenges.
Our listeners who may want to enter their own nomination have only 24 hours from the time this episode airs before the window closes and the months-long process begins to narrow the 1000 plus companies to a final 50. It is, to use Julia Boorstin's own words, a very complex process, and they have all sorts of algorithms that I work on with my colleague David Spiegel, that's Julia Boorstin.
When the list is announced in May each year, anyone looking to put their finger on the pulse of the people, technologies and products that are going to shape our lives in the future and perhaps come here as the next IPO at the NYSE, they scour that list. The recognition, particularly in a time of constrained capital and a volatile economic landscape is a nice tailwind for companies that have moved up the ranking or joining it for the first time.
Our guest today, Oura Health CEO, Tom Hale, was just on the job a couple of weeks back in 2022 when his company was added to the Disruptor 50 list for the first time. The citation accompanying the list described Tom's signature product, the Oura Ring with the following. While some products have been geared towards high-end athletes or do-it-all devices like an Apple Watch, Oura has looked to develop a product that simply aims to help people better understand their health and how they can live a healthier life. Our conversation with Tom Hale on engineering the future of wearable technology, putting an entire sleep lab and training facility on a single finger, and Tom's career from PDFs to HVRs is coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Our guest today, Tom Hale, was named CEO of Oura Health in April 2022. Prior to that, he was president of Momentive, a key player in taking that company public back in 2018 and over his career, Tom has held leadership roles at HomeAway, Linden Lab, and Adobe. He sits on several companies' boards, public and private, including cars.com. That's NYSE ticker symbol, cars, C-A-R-S. Welcome, Tom, inside the ICE House and welcome back to the New York Stock Exchange.
Tom Hale:
Thank you, Josh, and thanks for having me inside the ICE House.
Josh King:
What brings you to New York this week?
Tom Hale:
Certainly not the weather because it's really cold. It actually is, outside the ICE House, out there. But I'm here because we have a presence here, we have a team, and I'm spending some quality time with the team and getting some business done along the way. Couple of conferences and meeting some investors and board members.
Josh King:
What impact does travel have on your sleep patterns as divined by that little black thing you're wearing on you there?
Tom Hale:
Travel is terrible for your sleep patterns as you probably know. And the longer you travel, the worse it is. I personally will try a nap on the plane. It's a great time to sort of catch up and pay down some of that sleep debt.
Josh King:
I want to dive deep into all the ways that customers are using the Oura Ring in the second half of our conversation. But the most frequent way that the ring is described is a sleep study on your fingers. So to introduce us to the base functions, and you just gave my colleague, Laura, one to try on, how does a four-gram ring replace the medical building of hardware?
Tom Hale:
My goodness. I don't know if anyone has had a sleep lab night, what they do. And if you don't, I'm just going to-
Josh King:
I've had a friend who's done it.
Tom Hale:
You've done it. Okay. So if you haven't done it, imagine sort of a bunch of plastic and sticky sensors applied all over your body, kind of a weighty belt and technology thing around your waist and your chest to check your breathing. Basically they're trying to track your brain waves, your pulse, your heart rate, your respiration. It's a lot. It took me about 30 minutes to get it put on one time when I did it. And then you have to spend the night in an awkward technology setup.
And so what we, I think started with was this vision of being able to capture all the same inputs or at least most of the same inputs, and then put that in a comfortable, lightweight technology that you can wear on your finger. And what's, I think maybe compelling about that is, of course, when you're doing a sleep test, you're trying to see, well, how is your normal sleep going? And putting on all this equipment actually isn't very normal. It's not very typical to fall asleep with a bunch of sensors adhesed to your face and head. So one of the things about the ring is that it's so small and so comfortable you barely notice it.
Josh King:
I mean in those first couple of nights you're wearing it, do you think anything's happening and do you feel anything on your finger?
Tom Hale:
I think it's really frictionless. You about your wedding ring, for example, if you wear one, you don't really notice it anymore after a certain point. It just sort of weaves seamlessly into your life. And I think the Oura Ring is like that. Also, too, I think that maybe this is different from most wearables. It's not constantly asking for your attention, so it just kind of rides there. I don't know how you feel about electronics in your life, but I'm always looking for a charge. I feel like, got to make sure my phone's topped up. The ring has a battery life of between five and seven days. And so you sort of put it on and don't think about it. And then if you want, you can check in on the data.
The typical pattern of an Oura Ring user and you think about sleep, everybody sleeps, but no one's particularly good at it. Some people are terrible at it. It's also not something that we teach very effectively. Have you ever really studied about how to sleep? There's some increasing awareness about sleep now, but the reality is, is that it's a great discovery. Anyway, the point is, is that people wake up in the morning and they wake up and they grab their phone and then they look and they see, did I have a good night's sleep because you don't really know how you slept.
Josh King:
And what does the telemetry tell you when you open up that app? What are you looking for? What are you hoping it shows?
Tom Hale:
Yeah. So we give you a score called your sleep score that's between zero and a hundred. And what it's made up of is a set of sub-factors. And those sub-factors include things like how long did it take you to fall asleep, how much time did you spend asleep, what kind of sleep did you have? Did you have a lot of disturbances in your sleep? We can sense the motion and we can look at the changes in the stages of your sleep over the night. Did you have a lot of REM sleep where really typically that's where memories are processed and you're doing things that are really healing your cognitive processes? Did you get a lot of deep sleep because that's really where your body rebuilds itself? And understanding that really gives you a good sense of how good was your sleep.
And so what people do is they check that sleep score and there's another score that we present called the readiness score, which is more of your physiology measures, and it gives you a sense of how's your day going to go. I talk to a lot of the customers of Oura and they'll say, "I live by that score. If I see that I've had a bad night's sleep, I really change my decision. Or if I learn maybe that my partner had a low readiness score, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go home and make sure that I'm cooking dinner that night."
Josh King:
We just talked about sleep at some length, but another part that we're going to talk about later in our conversation is athletics. Our read on you reveals that you participated in sports at both Harvard and The Thacher School. I checked out The Thacher School's website. What drew you to Thacher and how did that experience shape your career and the Hale family generally?
Tom Hale:
The two things about Thacher that were really distinct, it had very good academics and I had kind of grown out of whatever academic opportunities I had for me in Reno, Nevada. So it was really about a chance to step up my education some. And then the second thing is that the school has a really interesting philosophy around outdoors and horseback riding. And so I learned some skills about how to be someone who can manage a horse and put together a campfire. And, no, those aren't skills that I use every day, but I think they taught some great lessons.
Josh King:
Well, being on a horse and learning how to build a campfire is one set of skills, but affinity and comfort with technology is very much another set of skills. What drew your interest in tech? And how did your early career starting at divisions inside Adobe prepare you to take on the challenges that you'd face at HomeAway, SurveyMonkey and now Oura?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, technology is so interesting. I mean, I came into technology pre internet and it was clear to me really in high school when we're being taught to do basic computer programming and start to learn about computers, that this was something I was really interested in. In those early days there wasn't a whole lot of outlets for it. It was like go to the university and play video games that are really just text-based games like Adventure on a PDP-16, which is an old computer.
It was clear to me that that was something that I was just personally going to be interested in. I've always been interested in how things work and what technology could do and could be. And it wasn't until my 20s that I realized that that was a professional calling. At the time, it was still pretty esoteric in the early '90s. And so I really made a concerted effort to find my way into a startup, joined a company called FOVE Software. I was employee number six. And six months after it, the internet happened, we sold the company for $15 million. I had 1% of the company and was like, "This is good. Let's do this again."
Josh King:
Right. Become a serial of these.
Tom Hale:
I almost went to business school at this time. It was, I guess '93, '94. And it was just clear that there was so much happening. We were at ground zero of the connecting of all humanity through technology. And I was like, this is where I should be. So I didn't go to business school. I stayed with a company that had acquired the startup I was at and stayed with that company for 10 years before we sold it to Adobe.
Josh King:
I mean talking about connecting all of humanity through technology, when you left Adobe, you worked with virtual assets at Linden Labs, which owns Second Life. And again, I sort of geeked out on various aspects of Second Life before you and I started to get together to talk. But how did working in this virtual marketplace prepare you to help HomeAway, which today operates as this very well known name, Vrbo, to create a platform to advertise and rent properties?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, I think the reality is, is that Linden Lab and Second Life, they were the metaverse before anybody knew that that was a word. You create a 3D avatar and you outfit it and all the things that you want and then you go explore this world that's made up by people. It was like Burning Man but in computers. But what it really interestingly was, was one of the first companies that had a digital marketplace where content creators, we call them creators now, but content creators could sell something that they made. They'd make 3D clothing, they'd make cars, they'd make houses, they'd make all these things that you could buy and you would pay for them with a virtual currency.
And so these two innovations, a digital currency, which today I think we know as crypto and the metaverse, which is basically a 3D space where your avatar can interact with other avatars and communicate and play and do all sorts of things, very, very seminal ideas that have now taken root in all sorts of ways. But in that, I think what I learned about was a marketplace. We controlled an economy. It was about $100 million of annual turnover. It was all conducted in this currency called Linden Dollars. It was an education in how do you price the value of money. We had to keep the price steady because people were trading in this economy. It's not unlike the New York Stock Exchange-
Josh King:
Sure.
Tom Hale:
... where you're trying to deal with the fact that there are buyers and sellers and how do you connect them and how do you make sure that there's not too much selling and not enough buying? This is a small world story, but we ended up having something that was basically the Federal Open Market Committee and every week we would determine what the money supply had to be to keep the price within some boundary, because we didn't want the price to inflate or deflate. Maybe we could work on crypto together and solve that problem for them as well.
Josh King:
This all brings us to your current role at Oura. Pete and I were putting together the episode, we realized that we really first became aware of the product back in 2020 when the suspended sports leagues were all trying to get back in the arenas during COVID. These were real people trying to do a real thing, not living in a metaverse. So let's listen to Sports Illustrated's Ben Pickman back when he was updating his listeners from his hotel room at the Orlando NBA bubble.
Ben Pickman:
NBA players and people in the bubble more broadly will have the option of wearing these rings. Now, the CEO, he told me that the league has ordered 2000 of these rings and here's what they will do. Among other metrics, they will track four things to create an illness probability score: heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, and the key one temperature. And the goal is to try to flag onset coronavirus a few days in advance and stop that silent spread. And so, one of the big things that these rings will do is not cure coronavirus by any means, and it is not even just a test, but they're really just trying to get more information to the league about potentially having to flag down and test players for coronavirus, as I said, before it spreads.
Josh King:
The ring had already become a favorite with a lot of NBA players, but how did the company and one of its users, the Finnish entrepreneur, Petri Hollmén, discover a way to detect COVID early?
Tom Hale:
Yeah. So company's always been science based, it was founded by scientists who wanted to use the power of science and technology to improve the world's health. I mean, that's always been the vision of the company. And we actually used a lot of science to understand COVID and the signals and predictors of it. And it turns out there's three really strong predictors of not just COVID, but any influenza-like illness. And these are your temperature, your respiratory rate, and something called HRV, heart rate variability. This is a metric that, I think, it's kind of where heart rate was maybe 20 or 30 years ago. People now understand resting heart rate and what it should be and what it means. HRV is still relatively poorly understood by the public at large, but it's a really important indicator of the status of your health. Whether it's stress or illness or a poor recovery from exercise, HRV is a very sensitive metric to this.
So in the case of the NBA and going within the bubble, there was really some very strong science to suggest that you could start to see the changes in your physiology from getting infected by an influenza-like illness before you started to express symptoms. And the company went and worked with UCSF in a study called the TemPredict Study. If you Google it, you'll find all the scientific papers and some of the publications and journalistic coverage of it. But this study was 30,000 people who were wearing this ring and what we were looking for, those had been diagnosed and tested and confirmed COVID, were there any signals in their data that would predict that they had COVID?
And so the study really illustrated very clearly that about three days before you actually were confirmed COVID, before showing symptoms, before being tested with a PCR or anything else, that your temperature would elevate slightly, your HRV would plummet pretty dramatically, and that your respiration and heart rate would elevate. Those things were really strong predictors of an incoming influenza-like illness. And that was really the basis by which the NBA was like, "Now this is really compelling." You have this ring, it's a form factor that is really comfortable. You wear it 24/7, meaning that you'll start to see this pattern in your physiology changes in your baseline. You'll be able to see it really quickly because you're always wearing it. It's not like you're taking your temperature once a day, which most people don't do that. You're taking your temperature every five minutes or sometimes more frequently to really determine whether or not what your physiological state is.
And I think actually this is really the power of, call it wearables 2.0, is that continuous wear gives you an understanding not just of your health condition but emphasis on you. I'll give you an interesting example. One of our employees at Oura, his baseline temperature normalized not 98.6, which we all know to be what your temperature should be when you're healthy. His baseline temperature, 97.1. So when he goes to a doctor and someone puts a thermometer in his mouth and says, "Hey, your temperature's 98.6." You know what he's got? A fever, he's sick. And so the thing that's powerful about Oura and any continuous wearable is that it understands your baseline and deviations from your baseline, which means it understands you.
Josh King:
Let's say I've had a couple cups of coffee today or tonight I go and have a big steak and two glasses of wine. What will I begin to see on the app that is different from my baseline?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, it's a great question because the app, there's some very obvious patterns. You drink wine, next day I'm going to tell you your readiness score is going to be low. And in fact, one of the consistent stories that we hear is that people change their behaviors around consumption of alcohol simply because they see the impact on their scores. They know what readiness of 75 or 80 is like for them. They're constantly 75 or 80. The next day when they have a 60, they're like, "Wow, I had no idea that alcohol affected me that much." And then maybe further they'll see that it really disrupted their REM sleep, which is really important for cognitive processing the next day. And they're like, "I always knew that I had a little bit of a hangover, but I didn't really know exactly how much. I didn't have a number to quantify it."
And so the power of both understanding your baseline and seeing a deviation from that baseline to change your behavior is really compelling. We've all had hangovers, we all know what that feels like, but we don't have a gradation of one glass of wine, two glasses of wine, three glasses of wine, and the things you really start to realize, its impact on you. Which by the way is not standard over your life, it changes as you get older or as you have less sleep or go through menopause or whatever your changes might be. Anyway, really, really powerful to see your numbers that is the voice of your body, the voice of your physiology talking to you. And I think Oura lets you hear it better because you start to see those numbers in a way that is consistent and repetitive.
I think this is important to call out. I think one of the strengths of Oura is that because it captures your data while you're sleeping, as well as during the day, but while you're sleeping, it's a really good dataset because it's a clear signal. You're usually sleeping in the same place, you're not in motion, so you're not having your temperature elevated by moving around a whole lot. You're usually in an environment that is pretty much the same temperature. You're in really a good zone for capturing a clean signal about what your baseline is, which then allows us to see those deviations much more clearly and then present them to you. So the Apple say things like, "Josh, looks like you had something to drink last night. Is everything okay?" Think of it as like a good friend who's either an accountability buddy who says, "You really should be working out more or saying-"
Josh King:
He will say all those things.
Tom Hale:
"Are you getting enough sleep? You might want to recover a little bit today." And I think that's really interesting.
Josh King:
Can you program it to be a less than nice friend, someone who's more of a drill sergeant?
Tom Hale:
It's interesting. I think we've talked a lot about how we would personalize it because if you think about-
Josh King:
Like ways, different voices.
Tom Hale:
Yeah. Well, I think it's really about what the content would be because if you're training for a marathon, that's very different than maybe managing a chronic illness and the message that we might send you is really different. An example of this would be, we have a feature that allows you to set a range for your activity goal, every day looking at your readiness and your sleep. The app sort of says, here's an activity goal for the day in terms of the calories you want to burn or the steps you want to take. And if you're either in what we call rest mode, which means the app thinks you're sick, we sort of suggest that you might be getting ill. If you're in rest mode, we'll sort of adjust that lower. And if you have really high readiness, we'll adjust that higher.
But we also give you, Josh, the ability to set what your range is. Do you want to always be pushing it because you're training for a marathon? Or you know what, do you have, I don't know, I'm going to make it up. Do you have chronic fatigue syndrome or long COVID? And what you really want is like, I really hope I can make 4,000 steps today and then we can adjust on either side of 4,000 steps based on your readiness and your sleep to give you that target. That's the customization I think is really powerful.
Josh King:
So, Tom, this year, Oura Health celebrating its 10th anniversary of its founding, what was the problem that these three friends, the founders were hoping to solve and how did the product develop from this Kickstarter idea to now what is a Series 3 fundraise?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, it's amazing. If you think about Finland, Finland first of all was a hotbed of technological innovation for many years. I mean, I actually think about the history of the mobile phone and both the cellular network in general.
Josh King:
We had the chairman of Nokia on the show.
Tom Hale:
Exactly, and they've got a long history of innovation both around consumer design but also around electronics and firmware and software and all the things that make a great communication experience like mobile phones. So there's a lot of DNA there. There's also, I think a really almost like cultural emphasis on health and wellness. Finland is famously five years running the happiest place on the planet and part of that is because they've really maybe culturally struck a balance between taking care of yourself and taking care of your body and having a healthy outlook towards work. It's a society that really values recovery and rest.
The founding team, they always had the vision of creating a wearable that was not a fitness tracker, but was really a tool for you for managing your health. And they led with understanding sleep. And I think that was a very, very smart intuition for all the reasons we just talked about, getting a really clean signal. Turns out sleep is something that everybody does. Big market. I don't know, it's something like 10 or 15% of the population goes to the gym or say they go to the gym, whereas 100% of the population, more or less is going to go to sleep. So again, picking a large market.
And maybe fundamentally I think they saw themselves as a mission-driven group of people who wanted to improve people's understanding and agency in their own health. You think about the last 20 years, who hasn't Googled trying to figure out what's wrong with them? Well, now you can do that, but also with information and data about your own self with that voice of your body talking to you. And I think it really gives people more agency and more power. That was always at the heart of their vision, always at the heart of their vision.
Josh King:
So we read that you, yourself, Tom, had stumbled upon Oura while you were dealing with some of your own kinds of stress. What was your personal journey with the ring and how did it propel you to join the team?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, it's really funny. I went through a period about a year, a little bit more than a year ago, work stress, family stress, lots of pressure, and I was not sleeping for the first time in my life. I've always been a championship sleeper. And for the first time I was lying in bed, awake at night, staring at the ceiling, mind racing, heart racing, all these things. And I said, I need to do something about this. Stumbled into the Oura Ring. The Oura Ring first gave me some numbers and I'm a numbers-driven person, so it gave me some way of understanding what's actually going on. How many times am I getting up every night? How long was I awake? Was it between 3:00 AM and 5:00 AM? So it gave me some numbers. That was one. The second thing is it gave me some suggestions. Stop watching Netflix in bed, don't look at your phone, do some breathing exercises before you go to bed, sleep in a cold room. And all these things are suggestions that the app provides you as you're educating yourself about your body, sort of weaves this into the experience.
So I made these changes and I saw my numbers change and that was compelling because I was like, oh, if I make this choice, my numbers will change, my sleep will get better. But the real difference was how I felt. I had kids in my 30s, I worked really hard in my 40s, and I entered my 50s and I was stressed out and I was drinking coffee during the week and I was drinking wine on the weekends to take the edge off. And what I didn't realize is my physiology had shifted to the point where I wasn't sleeping very effectively and when I fixed that, I'm telling you it was like going from a black and white movie into technicolor. Cognition, mood, energy, physical ability, all these things suddenly opened up to me in a way that honestly, I felt like I was 25. And so I said, I need to be a part of this company.
Josh King:
I mean, does it make you quit having wine at all? What has it done to actually change your life?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, I would say, one, it's really changed the food and drink that I consume. I drink almost no alcohol. I do have a glass of wine now and then, but mostly no alcohol. I really cut back my caffeine consumption. It used to be one or two cups of coffee in the morning and then maybe a couple during the day. And then, I think it really changed the way I think about sleep. So now when I go to bed, I've got a routine, I glide into sleep, I make sure the room is cold, I have a mask that I wear. Sometimes I'll wear headphones or EarPods or an earplug and I really think hard about sleeping. I wake up at like 5:00 AM rested and recovered when before, I think I was pushing myself to wake up at 6:00 or 7:00.
Josh King:
This is not the first podcast that you've hung out on. You described Oura to the Fitt Insider Podcast as in the sweet spot for the types of companies that you have spent your career working in. Give us a sense of the size and geography of the company currently and what draws you to companies that are at this relatively nascent stage.
Tom Hale:
Oura is about 500 employees. We're spread around the world. We're partially in Finland, partially in the US. We have in front of us, I think a really interesting growth journey. We've grown a tremendous amount. Obviously COVID was a huge boost for lots of companies like Oura. As I think about my own experience, I both find it most intellectually interesting and maybe most rewarding to go from sort of 200 employees to 2000. Above 2000 feels a little bit like you're far away from the product and the people, you're far away from the customer. It's about managing something that's pretty complex. 200, below 200, could be risky. You may or may not succeed there.
So it's really this interesting sweet spot of growth and development, not just for the company but for employees working there because employees who are at that stage, there's more opportunities, more work, more challenges than there are people to do them. And so someone's career can grow really quickly. I've spent a lot of time in that space. It usually involves going public at some point during that lifecycle. It usually involves expanding internationally during that part of a company's lifecycle, and it usually involves going from one product to multiple products. And these are all journeys that in my career I've been through multiple times and have some reasonable pattern recognition of.
Josh King:
All the fun stuff of the company's growth. Listeners and customers are going to want to know now because we've been talking about it at length and I was going to get to it later, but we should hit it now, what are the economics of becoming an Oura customer?
Tom Hale:
So the ring itself, there's multiple finishes and styles. There's two styles, Heritage and Horizon. Horizon is perfectly round. The current version is the Gen 3 Ring and has a ton of technology packed into there to give you all the sensing around your heart rate, your heart rate variability, your sleep, your motion, your activity, your respiration, all the things in Gen 3. But there are different finishes. If you think of it as an entry point of, call it 299, and maybe if you buy our Gucci ring, we had a partnership with Gucci-
Josh King:
We're going to talk about Gucci.
Tom Hale:
... about $1000. Different price points, but with the same capability. And then the monthly subscription, which in many ways is both to subsidize new features that we add all the time. We did a release this week with lots of new features that come out and that comes out on our regular cadence. But also, really to protect your data. Privacy of your data is really important and so we want to make sure that we don't have to take your data and sell it.
Josh King:
What's the subscription?
Tom Hale:
About $6 a month.
Josh King:
Okay. I know that you were one of the first investors in NoiseAware, which sells a device that acts like a smoke alarm for noise, but Oura is the first time that you've overseen basically a hardware development function. And you were talking earlier about how the battery will last you about five or six days, but did you have any idea how complex a curved battery was versus a nine volt that you throw into a smoke alarm?
Tom Hale:
It's been a huge learning curve learning about hardware and particularly I think in this domain of miniaturization and battery life, the challenges here are not insignificant. We've spent a couple of hundred million dollars as a company to build this. It's not trivial. So yeah, it's quite a learning curve. Hardware's hard. Good news is, is that we have a really, really cracked team in Finland and in the US who are really good at building hardware and making it manufacturable and scalable and reliable.
Josh King:
So as we head into the break, Tom, your debut as CEO coincided with the sale of the one millionth Oura Ring and a fundraising round that valued you at about 2.5 billion. How's the company been able to establish itself in the tech wearable space among these giants like Google and Apple as well as the purely pure play companies like Fitbit?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, I would say that the emphasis on sleep really gives us a differentiator. We are, I think, arguably the best at sleep in the world. And so for anybody who cares about sleep, we're the best choice. I think the reason for that actually is a little bit about the product and a lot about the site on the human body. If you think about measurement of your heart rate or your blood oxygen, where do they do that? Oh, they do that on your fingertip. That's where medical devices measure it. And that's partially because the technology that does that is really sensitive to the flesh that they're looking into with light and understanding the diffraction that comes back. That's easier done on the finger than it is on the wrist.
In the wrist you have tendons and bones and you can shift around and where you are changes the sensing. Whereas the fingers, there's a nice lump of flesh that keeps the sensors in place and there's a nice, very consistent ability to read that data back. So the finger's actually a much more accurate site than the wrist. On top of that, if you think about your heart, your heart pulses and blood shoots down your arm, part of the leading edge of the sort of wave form of your blood moving through your body, and it goes right into what's called the palmer artery, which goes under your finger, which is why the sensors are all located there or if you're-
Josh King:
And you are pointing to your index finger, so is index the key spot?
Tom Hale:
Index is the most accurate and for a couple of reasons. One is it gets that leading edge signal, as I said, it's just a little bit ahead. Secondly, you also have a really good chance that your knuckle is going to be a little bit smaller than your flesh there. And so the contact between the sensor and your body is actually a little bit better there. By contrast, the wrist is on the trailing edge, the blood is flowing back to the heart, it is going through... There's not a major artery there. There's a lot of bone and sinew, so you get some noise coming back from the signal that you're sending into your body and how you're reading it back. So there's actually a really, really good case that this is just the most accurate site that you could use for measuring this kind of signal coming off your body.
Josh King:
Is there a chance for it to act as a watch on a phone as well?
Tom Hale:
Well, it's interesting. I think we made a, and maybe I didn't make this, but I think the team made a really conscious decision that particularly if you're a rest and recovery and sleep-oriented wearable, we should not be asking for your attention all the time and we should probably not have a big screen or a bunch of vibrations and stuff to interrupt you. You think about something like this, you want it to be low-key and people have actually called that out. That's like a real distinction. Interestingly enough, a lot of people wear us because they have a watch, whether it's a watch like yours, which is a beautiful piece of jewelry, not a piece of technology-
Josh King:
Just an analog.
Tom Hale:
Just an analog watch. And they to want to track their health, but they don't want to have to give up that space on their body. And then I think alternately we also see a lot of people who wear Apple Watch. I'm wearing an Apple Watch right now and a ring, and the reason is because they like the ring for night and it's comfortable and relaxed. They don't have to worry about putting their watch up to their cheek as they roll around with their hands underneath their head, but also because the battery, what's happening to the Apple Watch at night? Well, it's charging. It's on your bedside table, making sure it's ready for the day when you're going to be whatever, looking at LinkedIn notifications or texts or whatever. It's a notification device.
Josh King:
Do you have long-term projections for wearable adoption across the country or the world?
Tom Hale:
Well, pretty much everybody on the planet has a mobile phone. And I think it seems logical to me that as the costs come down, as the technology advances, that really, it would be really great if everybody on the planet had a device that could relay data to their computing cloud, whether it's on a mobile phone or some other device about their health status. And that would allow the power of computers and algorithms to make predictions about their health and maybe even provide some insights and advice. I think it's a pretty large market. It's call it the attach rate of wearables to mobile phones. Today, that's measured in single-digit percentage points. I think it could be very high.
And I think, again, the value, it's very high. How important is your health to you? Really important. I think COVID taught us all a lesson that we took our health a little bit for granted and now we do not. And the reality is, is whether it's telling you if you're going to have an influenza-based illness coming on and that changes your behavior or whether you know something about your partner or someone in your family. My father-in-law, he's in an old age home and understanding his state, not because I need to have 911 go and check on him, but because he had a bad night, maybe I should call him and connect with him. I think there's a lot of really interesting power in listening to that voice inside your body, and I think it's just going to become something pretty universal. I believe that in my heart. Maybe some people wear rings and some people wear watches and some people wear bands. I think it's just, it is a accelerating understanding of the human body and yourself. I think that's a change in medicine.
Josh King:
Late last year, we noticed that you made the announcements of hiring Doug Sweeny as your CMO, Lina Alcala as your first ever chief people officer and promoted Holly Shelton as the chief product officer. As you expand Oura's team across all levels, we're looking at layoffs from Microsoft all over the tech sector, every place else, do you see this as an opportunity to get more talent in the door that you need or are you facing some of those same challenges?
Tom Hale:
It's funny, right around the CNBC Disruptor 50, people were asking a lot because they were like, "Oh my god, the markets, everything's gone crazy." And I think we were able to say, "You know what's interesting, it's actually kind of good for business." When there's disruption and upset in the world, a wearable that advises you to rest, recover and take it easy is pretty welcome. When sleep is disturbed, sales go up. And so honestly, we've been on a great growth year. This year has been a fantastic year, best ever for the company. Accelerating as we make partnerships around the world, introduce ourselves into new channels and new markets. I think the market is primed. We're at the early stages of the market and we're in great shape. So as a result, we definitely see hiring opportunity. We're hiring this year pretty dramatically, whereas many tech companies are laying off. So yeah, it's maybe not exactly counter cyclical, but definitely a strong business in a down market.
Josh King:
After the break, Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura Health and I are going to take score of Oura's capabilities and its abilities and look into the future of wearable tech. And that's all coming up right after this.
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Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, I was talking to Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura Health, about his career and the genesis of Oura. We spoke earlier, Tom, about your athletic pass, but Oura has just announced a partnership with Real Madrid. How's the team going to use your rings to improve their on-field performance?
Tom Hale:
Yeah, it's funny. I go back to this idea that the ring is different uses based on your needs states or your health status. High-performing athletes, one of the most important thing you can do as a high-performing athlete is rest and recover. If you overtrain or, you see this in actually endurance sports a lot, if you peak too early or peak too late, you're not going to perform at your absolute best. And so monitoring the signals of your recovery, which in many case are how well did you sleep or what is your HRV? HRV, that's heart rate variability, it turns out to be a really good predictor of your recovery. And optimizing your training and the timing of your training based on your own physiology so that when you hit the game or you hit the race, you are at your peak, I think that's a real edge.
Actually, it's well reported that the US women's soccer team, they did a lot to coordinate not just their training, but also to understand the cycles of the players and so they could sync the cycles with their training and understand the cycles of hormones and changes that were happening as part of a normal cycle to optimize training. And the US women's national soccer team is the best in the world for many years. And I think that's the kind of edge. I think Real Madrid sees the same opportunity to really optimize training and performance. And we have lots of athletic customers, college teams, professional teams across multiple sports, but Real Madrid, I mean that's like we should all be excited now. To be clear, we're at the beginning of that and we're working with those teams to help optimize rest and recovery. But for them too, the fact is, is that it's the form factor and the accuracy.
Josh King:
Well, it's one thing to analyze what's going on in the pitch. It's another thing to think about what's going on up in the stands. And looking through Oura's website, we came across another article about soccer, this time off the field. Your data revealed the stress on the part of the Argentinian and French fans during their respective teams' matchup in the World Cup Final. You talked about monitoring your own dad and how is he feeling, but what did you find about these fans and when calculating scores, how much of the data is generated using the user's unique statistics versus aggregated numbers from across the universe?
Tom Hale:
We were talking about trust a little bit earlier. It's so important that we keep anonymity and privacy at our forefront. There's all sorts of reasons for that, not the least of which is that your health data is sovereign to you. You should be the sovereign over your health data. And that absolutely, I think is a critical element of trust. That being said, it is sometimes compelling and interesting when we have anonymized that data and aggregate it. So it's not personally identifiable. We're not talking about any individual, we're talking about Argentinians generally, of which there were many tens of thousands who were watching the game and many French folks who were watching the game and to see what happened to their heart rate over the course of the World Cup game. Well, I mean it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to understand, but that was, first of all, one of the greatest World Cup games in recent history.
We could see in the heart rate data each goal what the response was, whether the Argentinian or French side was responding positively or negatively with stress. And, of course, when you look at the trace of all Argentinian and all French heartbeats, you could see the game play by play, the five penalty kicks at the end. Unbelievable. It's really worth a read because what it tells you is that there's an interesting, I think, set of data, which is like how are people doing in the aggregate? I'll give you just another illustration. We can see in an aggregated and in an anonymous way what the sleep patterns are of different nationalities at different times of the year. So what do you think the lowest time of the year for readiness, meaning your HRV, your heart rate, whether it's elevated, for the world is?
Josh King:
January 1st.
Tom Hale:
January 1st, like a lock, right? Because everybody is out the night before, they're drinking alcohol. Absolutely, 100%. Which nation do you think is the least slept in the world?
Josh King:
United States.
Tom Hale:
No, United States is middle of the pack. We're okay. We're not the best. It turns out the Nordic countries are the best, but Japan is absolutely the worst and it's like 10 solid percentage points worse than the rest of the country. And by the way, this is both a well-known and well-considered fact that the Japanese government thinks about, they're like, "Oh my god, our people, they're falling asleep on the subway, they're getting three hours of sleep." There's a cultural emphasis on this. And they're really going through kind of a reckoning about how do we improve sleep, which is actually one of the reasons why Japan's one of our targets. It's a market that we just entered in the fall through a partner.
Josh King:
Yeah. And we had the prime minister of Japan, Prime Minister Kishida here just a couple of months ago, basically talking about his whole economic plan, but also the need to make families happier and bigger and healthier. So that's certainly very much on the mind, all the way up to the top of the cabinet.
Tom Hale:
Absolutely. It's a matter of public concern, I'd say.
Josh King:
We're talking about the game between Argentina and France and I want to talk about another kind of game because in a recent press release on Oura's partnership with Therabody, you use the term gamify. Can you explain what that means in this context and how tapping into people's competitive natures can help users stick to wellness goals and their healthy habits?
Tom Hale:
Well, we see this a lot. People will compare their sleep or readiness or activity scores. I'm sure you've probably seen that. You've probably seen that yourself with whatever wearable you wear.
Josh King:
Certainly on Peloton and Strava, and we're going to talk about Strava in a second.
Tom Hale:
For sure. I think competition is one aspect of it, and I think if you can turn that gamification or competition into something that's healthy and positive, I think that's really good. We tend to not try and create gamification for gamification's sake. We're trying to find the right level. We also want people to be able to customize the amount that they want the app to nudge them or tell them, maybe try and reinforce positive behaviors. So, gamification as it relates to their body. There's two ways that we think about it. Therabody, if you don't know, they make a bunch of mechanical or electrical devices that are for wellness. The classic one is the Theragun. It's a handheld massager. Turns out if you do massage, you actually sleep better. That was really interesting. They did a whole study of people-
Josh King:
Basically, a jigsaw with a ball at the end.
Tom Hale:
Exactly. And if you do that sort of consistently before you go to bed actually, there's a lot of scientific evidence that it improves your sleep, which makes sense. You've relaxed, your muscles are relaxed, you don't have pain or tension or whatever. So for us, the mechanism in the app is when you do an intervention like that and you inform us that you do that by tagging, you tag the Theragun tag 9:00 PM on Tuesday, then that helps us create an established correlation or causation between the nights when you did that Theragun and you tagged it and the results of that night's sleep or that next day's readiness. And so what that does is it provides you that kind of connection between a context that the ring can't know about. It's hard for us to know if you did a Theragun, you have to tell us that, and an outcome in terms of your physiology the next day. And so seeing those patterns between tags and metrics is really reinforcing for those behaviors.
Josh King:
If my wife were to tag the fact that she's now going to spend a lot of time walking the dog or petting the dog and be communing with animals, can we see data that talks about the effect of companionship like that?
Tom Hale:
Well, we don't have a petting your dog tag, but you can actually enter, "I pet my dog," and therefore you would see that note. It is really something where those behaviors, I think become both reinforced, they become visible to you, maybe more importantly. Maybe us knowing that or the app knowing that and being able to tell you is important, but really what you say is you notice that. You tag alcohol and you notice the next day your readiness is low, you're probably going to change that behavior. You tag breath work and you notice that your heart rate is lower. You're going to continue that behavior. It's that reinforcing cycle. That's one.
The other side of it was Therabody did some very interesting work around content and they gave us this TheraMind content, which was there to help people focus and sleep and all those kinds of things. And what we saw was a lot of engagement with that content because it turns out consuming content is an input to your physiology and, depending on what kind of content you consume, it affects you differently. So really pleased with that partnership. Great to see how interventions can start to show up in your physiology and how that reinforces behavior.
Josh King:
Oura Rings have a lot of functional uses as you and I have been talking about, but I don't want our listeners to get the mistaken impression that the product design is purely functional. You're wearing a black one, you just gave a, what do you call that, the one that you gave to Laura?
Tom Hale:
Silver Horizon.
Josh King:
Silver Horizon. It looks great, but you also mentioned maybe some of the more premium models. Let's listen to US ski team champion Lindsey Vonn talk on the Gucci Podcast.
Lindsey Vonn:
Yeah, I've been with Oura for a long time because I really feel it's important to have a balance in life. I tend to be an overachiever. I like to work hard, and I tend to burn the candle at both ends, so I have a hard time relaxing and de-stressing myself. And so I like being able to check my readiness score and my HRV score and seeing how well I'm recovering and knowing when, okay, I need to pull back a bit. I need to maybe not travel as much, I need to not work out as much or I need to do the opposite. I need to work out more because I am really stressed. It's getting that information so I can find a way to live a more balanced, healthier life.
Josh King:
Now Lindsey's been a regular here at the NYSE for the times when we have members of the Olympic Team ringing the bell as well as working with many of her sponsors. How did she connect with Oura and how do partnerships with fashion companies like Gucci help ensure that users keep their rings on regardless of the setting?
Tom Hale:
I think we've been very blessed and lucky to have Lindsey and many people that she knows part of that universe. They've been really interested in the ring and have really come to us in many ways. They surfaced saying, "I love this product and I-"
Josh King:
You can have multiple models and switch them out easily or-
Tom Hale:
Well, you can, and I think most people think about the ring really almost as jewelry. I mean, sure, it has all this utility and we're talking about sleep tracking and health tracking and detecting whether or not you're sick. All those things are really powerful and that experience is really powerful. But at the end of the day, it's something that you wear on your finger all the time. And interestingly enough, I think fashion is a part of this. I never saw myself as a purveyor of fine women's rings or men's rings, but now here I am. It's really compelling.
I think the thing about Gucci that I was really surprised by was how much people thought about it as a statement and as a marker of who they were. They were Gucci people. And so when Oura and Gucci got together to do a collaboration, of course they were going to get that. And for some people it was an alternate. They could wear the Gucci Ring when they were going out for the night because, boy, this thing doesn't look... It's fancy. It's gold and black and has the double interlocking. Jeez, it's a beautiful piece of fashion, but it's also very functional.
And yet you know what, if you're going to go do some gardening, you're probably going to put on your stealth black ring because you're not really interested in getting dirt in your wonderful gold that's called a torsion, which is this woven gold braid that goes around the edge of the ring. I love that. I know the word torsion, by the way. And so what that really showed us is that if you're going to be 24/7, you actually want something that fits into your life and what you're doing. And for Lindsey, I think wearing a Gucci Ring, she's high fashion, impeccably dressed when she's not burning down a grand slalom, of course. But I think that was a big learning for us.
Josh King:
So while Gucci might not be the most obvious partnership for a company like Oura, the genesis of getting you inside the ICE House actually was a meeting between our team, you and the CEO of Strava. I have that app on my phone. How are you working with Strava and other tracking applications to provide the clean, accurate information to help people achieve their peak health?
Tom Hale:
Well, I think the reality is that there isn't one technology, ever, that does everything. In fact, if it is, it probably doesn't work very well. It probably does a mediocre job at a lot of different things. We're really great at sleep. We are oriented around tracking people's movement with less effort. Strava is an incredible fitness app around tracking your performance and comparing your performance as part of a social network. It's got a really, really rich feature set for that. It has a really rich understanding. And we wanted to make sure that they could have access to our data so that someone who was a Strava user would be able to see their rest, their recovery, see a workout that maybe Oura had captured and pass it over to Strava or vice versa. They're tracking workout in Strava, let's make sure that makes its way into Oura because they're tracking all their health and wellness metrics in Oura.
So that partnership was really an excellent opportunity for us to illustrate a partnership strategy that says, let's find the best partners, the best products in each one of these spaces, and make sure that we're giving them what we are arguably the best at, which is sleep and accurate low-friction metrics and make that available where the user wants it.
Josh King:
In a related note, on an article on the biggest challenges to wearables in the next five years, it quoted you as saying that Oura offers a solution to the need for more data analysis. The article said, "Decentralized data storage, access and encryption, part of Web3 is going to enable easier sharing of health insights, status and data with doctors and payers, melding individuals both at the point of aggregation and also in control of their own data." Where do you see this sort of either reflecting on your data or anyone else as they relate to all their healthcare professionals?
Tom Hale:
Those are a lot of really big concepts there. I mean, Web3, privacy, your health data, sharing that with organizations. And I guess, I think we're not quite there yet as an industry, certainly not on the healthcare side and certainly not on the wearable side. But the future that I can imagine is, and we see this with some of our earliest customers who have five years of data, maybe 10 years of data, and they know what their patterns are and so again, they go back to their baseline. How is that baseline changing? What does that mean for their health? Well, turns out sleep heavily implicated in cognitive decline around Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. And so can we start to see that happening and maybe warn you that maybe you need to have some intervention well before you've gotten into advanced Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and really what you're trying to do is manage a condition that you can do nothing about? Well, that's really interesting.
And so looking at that long span of data, using the power of computing, using the power of looking at those metrics over diverse populations over long periods of time and seeing the patterns to make those predictions, that's incredibly powerful. That's a little bit, I think what we're scratching at here. Now, if you assume that's possible across a bunch of different things, maybe it's type two diabetes, maybe it's the American Heart Association, just made it clear this last year that sleep is one of the eight factors in cardiovascular health. If you have poor sleep, you are going to be at a higher risk for a heart attack or atherosclerosis or a myocardial infarction.
All of these things are behavioral illnesses. You can change your behavior and it can affect the outcome. So if you can look at this data over the long term, what does that mean? Well, it means you can probably make preventative choices. That's really powerful. You can improve your health outcome 20, 30 years from now by making choices today. Guess what? That's also really hard. So why would you do that? Well, because you've got this knowledge of your body and this app that's telling you what to do. Great. Okay. Preventative health. Super.
It's also really interesting to providers because if they have that information, then they can provide care regimes or care protocols for you that might either screen you into maybe you have sleep apnea, maybe they'll be like, "We should really look at you. Your sleep is bad and here's why you have sleep apnea. Let's do something about that, give you an intervention." It's also interesting for insurance companies because they want to understand the cost of care and then if they can make preventative choices and reduce the cost of care, not only is it a better medical outcome, it's a better business outcome. That's I think some of the big vision, we think about this as going from sick care where what you're really doing is intervening after the fact, someone's already sick and you're just trying to manage it, to making preventative choices that improve long-term health outcomes. Really good for the world, really good for people, also, lots of people are really interested in it.
Now, who should be in charge of the data for you? And our belief fundamentally is that is yours. You are the sovereign over your data. And if we are the organization that is collecting that data and storing and analyzing that data, we have a very, very solemn promise to you, which is that that data, it will only go where you want it to go and it will be encrypted and secure and no one gets to tell anybody who gets that data other than you. We call that data sovereignty over your data. And one of the most powerful ways you might imagine data sovereignty working is something that works today, which is called the blockchain. The blockchain basically stores data in a way, decentralized around the world on computers everywhere, in a way that can be accessed, shared, copied, but only if someone has permission, if there's a smart contract there that allows someone to access that data. And I think that's a really interesting and compelling vision.
Imagine the case where you want to share your data with your care provider and you can share that data, they access it, their system can access it, they can see that five years of history, that 10 years of history, see those biomarkers and how they're changing and understand that. Maybe even look at what the software is telling them about that. Great. Change doctors, revoke that permission. Change insurance providers, give them that permission, revoke that permission. I think that's a really powerful vision. And there's lots of talk about health records and the problem with health records is that they're stored in dozens or hundreds of systems that don't talk to each other. And so creating a comprehensive health record for you, guess what? Impossible. It's impossible. And I think one of the things that Oura imagines is that we're not going to be all your health records, but we could be a really, really important part of that because we're going to have this longitudinal data about you and how it's changed.
Josh King:
So elevating the conversation a bit, Tom, from data that is stored in the cloud to data that is well above the clouds. You tweeted in December, and I'm going to quote your tweet here, "A dream come true. Oura Rings on astronauts only 20 grams added to a payload for five astronauts." So, Tom, how's NASA using Oura's tech and have you partnered with other government agencies and organizations as well? Certainly, I can imagine a lot of military applications.
Tom Hale:
For sure. This fall we introduced something called Oura for Business, and that's really our effort to sort of, if you will, provide organizations with tools to understand the readiness, rest, recovery, fatigue of what we might describe as either mission-critical workforces or maybe sometimes just their regular workforce.
Josh King:
UPS drivers all over the place.
Tom Hale:
Absolutely. You think about the costs being measured, not just in someone's wellness and how they feel, but in their ability to fly an airplane, their ability to make a really good decision in life or death circumstances. I think it's pretty, I think, valuable to think about that as an organizational focus.
NASA obviously wants their astronauts to be in tiptop shape. They're making all sorts of mission-critical decisions with the support of many people, but also in mission-critical environments. I think it's compelling for us to think about how first responders, soldiers, pilots, truck drivers, people who are sometimes maybe pushed past or are at the limit of their endurance and the kinds of things that might happen if they do so, and to do that in a way that allows people to manage it. Now we're at the beginning of that journey, to be clear, but I think there's a really interesting opportunity there and NASA's a good illustration that there's lots of opportunities for that. And I think some of it is just, again, it's a great accurate form factor that's really seamless and it doesn't weigh a lot, so it's easy to get into space.
Josh King:
Talking about what NASA's probably going to do with that telemetry, you've got to be working, and I know you're working with a lot of universities, how has integration with academia sort of-
Tom Hale:
It's critical. I mean partnerships with research institutions, again, for a science-based organization as we are, our partners like UCSF or the National University of Singapore or the University of Tokyo, University of Michigan, all these great institutions who are by their very function trying to do core science and understand physiology. HRV as a metric came out of a lot of academic research and people understanding its implications. There's still so much core research to be done. And what's interesting, again, you go back to that idea of data being collected over a long period of time, I don't think we've had data like this nor have we always had the mechanism, computing power cheaply available, large sets of data over very diverse populations to do that. And academic research in many ways is where some of this pure science is being done.
Josh King:
As we wrap up, Tom, we've covered a lot of ways that the Oura Ring is being used. As you investigate the data around the customer journey, do you find that typically they get a new ring purchased for a specific use or just the base case of improving sleep and then over time a customer is going to diversify how they use it? Or do they really stay true to their original profile?
Tom Hale:
It really depends on where they're coming from. And our premise is that we meet users where they are. If you have long COVID, you have a chronic illness that you're managing, you're recovering from surgery or heart condition or heart attack, your orientation is very much around generalized health and maybe keeping yourself healthy. You're having sleep apnea, you're insomniac, sleep is why you come to us. You want to optimize your performance like Lindsey Vonn or a marathon runner. You want to understand your physiology in terms of rest and recovery.
So the use cases are different by people, but what's interesting is people migrate across those use cases and as they grow through their lives and they change or their health condition changes, it's really important to see how the application adapts to them. And I think that's part of our vision is that it's not just one thing, it's your health, which is many things and constantly changing. If you're a woman, it changes every 30 days. Your physiology goes through a hormonal surge that changes the dynamics of your body. And if you really understand that, what can you do with that knowledge? It's really powerful.
Josh King:
So as we conclude here, I mean we're recording this conversation early in 2023, what are you looking forward to the rest of the year and how do you measure success over a 12-month period? Is another appearance on the Disruptor 50 list enough or are you striving for something more?
Tom Hale:
We'll have to ask Julia if we can rate twice in two years. I'm not sure that's possible, but it'd be great.
Josh King:
I'd love to have you back at our reception for the Disruptor 50.
Tom Hale:
We'd love it. Love it. That would be wonderful. I would say, for us, I measure success in the lives that we touch and the positive impact that we have. That's the real metric of success. There are other metrics, of course, there's subscribers and retention and revenue and growth and all that stuff. But really at the end of the day, and we do this as a company, we start our most important meetings with a story about one of the customers and how we've affected their life positively. How we helped them determine that they were pregnant, how we helped them learn that they were sick with COVID and avoid giving other people an illness, how we helped them diagnose or recover. We're telling these stories because that's the mission of the company is to improve the lot of human health and do that as broadly as possible. So I think that's the real metric of success for the company. And as we look ahead, it would be great to be back on the CNBC Disruptor 50, but I think that's more of an outcome from having made an impact in the world.
Josh King:
And based on your career trajectory, it'd be great to at some point have you up on the podium of the New York Stock Exchange.
Tom Hale:
Thanks, Josh. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
Josh King:
And that's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Tom Hale, the CEO of Oura Health. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a question or a comment you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show or hear from a Disruptor 50 list member like Tom Hale, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @ICEHousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash with engineering from Ian Wolf. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources, and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
