How Oura Ring is redefining health tech, with CEO Tom Hale

Note

• Aura Ring, led by CEO Tom Hale, has seen significant growth in sales, with over 2.5 million rings sold since 2022, showcasing a stunning example of scale in the wearable tech industry.

• The company’s success is attributed to strategic partnerships, such as with Gucci, retail expansion, and offering the product through HSA and FSA accounts, which have contributed to the rapid growth of the business.

• Tom Hale’s leadership approach emphasizes building trust with the team, focusing on customer needs, and aligning the company’s vision with the mission of improving healthcare, positioning Aura Ring as a key player in the digital health space.

Highlights

• 2025-01-09 17:49 Reid Hoffman: As the new CEO of Aura, Tom Hale was eager to experiment with partnerships for the health tracker ring. But. But Tom says even he was surprised that the luxury model of their wearable tech did so well.

• 2025-01-09 17:59 And I think the board had this view that what they were looking for was a cpg, consumer product goods person, maybe with a sports background.

• 2025-01-10 10:10 Reid Hoffman: Was that something that changed when you came in? Did you empower the team on that? Did you bring a team to do this or had this been like latent in the company and people were dying to try it?

• 2025-01-10 10:10 Tom Hale: I think we’d always believed that there was going to be things like Gucci where brand partnerships were going to be the key. What we didn’t necessarily think about until I came in was the platform and how to think about a platform enabling other partners. And by enabling other partners, they become your salespeople and your distribution channel and your referral network.

• 2025-01-10 10:10 Tom Hale: Beyond Gucci, Natural Cycles would be one. Strava would be another Chronometer. The CGM apps like Vary like there’s basically a whole set of apps for health and wellness and in many ways we sort of power them with our data. Natural Cycles in particular is one that has been been very successful. So partnership was a clear catalyst.

• 2025-01-10 10:06 It’s a product to help the world move from sick care, where you’re only getting healthcare at the end of your life, to preventative care. It’s about making you the CEO of your own health journey and doing it in a way that’s incredibly supportive and helps you find balance. That’s the culture of the product, that’s the culture of the company. Everyone at that company is really driven to help people. By the way, I found that inclusive, incredibly intoxicating.

• 2025-01-10 10:06 Just making just for clarity, let’s be sure from 200 people to 2,000 people. When you’re 200 people, there’s probably some things that are maybe not working so well and maybe you haven’t solved that problem as effectively as you might and maybe you don’t have a system for that and it’s really. It’s like a popsicle stick and two pieces of r rubber bands and some glue, and you’re trying to hold it all together. And then by the time you get to 2000, you’re like a real company and you’ve got some real scalability. And I’ve done that particular ride maybe three or four times.

• 2025-01-10 10:05 In fact, it’s one of the sort of five values of aura. You entrust us with your most sensitive healthcare data. Like you are trusting us. We need to earn your trust. So we are very serious about protecting your data and making sure that no one can see it and making sure that it’s not, you know, we don’t have advertising. We have no incentive to do anything other than protect your data. So earning trust is such a foundational element of, like, the company culture and the people. And frankly, you know, for me personally, like, I don’t know how to lead if I don’t have someone’s trust and confidence.

• 2025-01-10 10:11 strategically, we’re focused on people who are going to drive their own health journey independently, not without, but independent of the kind of clinical infrastructure and where we think we have a really interesting opportunity. Maybe this is where the regulatory stuff comes in, is you find those sort of connection points where it really matters. Somebody is going through chemotherapy, they want to be at home with their family, and they want to understand if they’re at risk for infection. Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you had a device that would tell you one, when the best time physiologically would be for your next bout of chemo and, and when. And if you were getting sick, that you needed to get to a hospital and get Some antibiotics on board because you’re starting to get an infection. Okay, that’s really profound, really powerful. But guess what? That would be regulated. We don’t do that today. That is not what Aura does.

• 2025-01-10 10:05 So women have been historically underserved by medicine because people weren’t studying women’s physiology in clinical trials up until the last 20 years or so. Okay. So I think this idea that it’s not going to be one system for everybody and maybe that’s not scalable. But I think the thing is that it might be different solutions for each person. The person who is managing chronic fatigue syndrome or long Covid.

• 2025-01-10 10:05 Tom Hale: Very different from the person who’s trying to lose weight. Weight. Very different from the person who is going through menopause and has lost sleep and is gaining weight.