The Health Effects of Being a YC Founder: A 3-Year Data Analysis (Part 1)
“Guys remember to sleep well, and please workout. Life still goes on during your start-up” - Harj Taggart YC group partner
In the beginning of August, I took the first few days off building Laudspeaker I had taken all year, and had a rare few moments to reflect, and also catch up on sleep. It had been a fun, but long and hard 8 months, and the year had been speeding past. I had a look at my long list of personal projects, and the time felt right to tackle one of them: looking at all the health data I had been collecting over the last few years.
I had started wearing a WHOOP (a heart rate, and sleep monitor) in 2022, and recently learnt that Apple health had also been tracking my activity (even though I had not explicitly turned it on) for at least 5 years. I loved jumping into data, so decided to whip up a juypter notebook, that I will share at the end of the series.
I started off by exporting my WHOOP data. WHOOP makes it very easy to export the data it tracks. As off August 2024, the data export consists of 4 csv files: journal_entries.csv, physiological_cycles.csv, sleeps.csv, workouts.csv. Journey entries and workouts are only as valuable as make them be as they involve a decent amount of manual data input via the whoop app, while physiological_cycles.csv and sleeps.csv are very rich sources of information.
