1:02:33ex-WHOOP PM, YC Founder Ben Katz: AI-Native Sports Training for Everyday Athletes & Why Coding Agents Are the New 10x Workforce
In this episode of Masters of Automation, Alp Uguray sits down with Ben Katz, co-founder of Hybrd and former growth product manager at Whoop, to explore what happens when a lifelong athlete turns a personal frustration into a Y Combinator-backed AI fitness platform — and why the rules of building a startup have fundamentally changed. Ben's path is anything but linear. He started in sales, moved into analytics at Wayfair, spent years trying to break into product management, and eventually landed at Whoop — where he found the rare intersection of passion, craft, and career. After a stint at Apex, a mobile app portfolio company, he realized the founders he was evaluating weren't smarter than he was — they just had the agency to start. That was the push. Together with three co-founders — including a U.S. national rowing team member, a former Whoop analytics lead, and a senior AWS engineer who also happens to be a former U.S. national rugby player — Ben launched HYBRD on a plane to San Francisco, writing the first line of code en route to Y Combinator. The conversation opens with Ben's unconventional career arc — what he calls "getting an MBA by doing" — and how sales became the most underrated founder skill. From there, Alp and Ben trace the development of HYBRD: from the initial hypothesis that serious athletes don't want an app telling them what to do (which turned out to be wrong), to the breakthrough of invite-only user acquisition, to the science-backed training plan engine built in partnership with the University of Utah and Complete Human Performance, the company founded by Alex Viada — the man who literally wrote the book on HYBRD athletic training.…