Updated on December 2, 2024
From his early years tracking his athletic performance with pen and paper to leading Oura, Tom Hale’s life path has centered on empowerment through technology and wellness.
Tom sat down with Rent Responsibly Co-Founder and CEO Dave Krauss in a fireside chat at the 2024 RR Summit to share learnings from his path in tech through vacation rentals, data, and ultimately his current role as CEO of Oura, which makes a smart ring band that tracks 20 biometrics.
Watch the extended cut of the interview inside the RR Network >
At Oura, Tom continues to champion a data-driven approach to health and wellness. “When you can measure something, you’ll do a better job at understanding it or managing it,” Tom said.
Early years of fitness monitoring, tech, and vacation rentals
Tom’s early years as a self-proclaimed “nerd” passionate about computers, math, and cycling foreshadowed his leadership in tech, health, and wellness.
Growing up in Reno, Nevada, he admired local cycling hero Greg LeMond, the first American to win the Tour de France. Tom began logging his own cycling training, heart rate, and other metrics by hand. Like LeMond, Tom would also become a proponent of using technology to enhance performance.
After a diverse career in various tech roles, Tom joined HomeAway (now Vrbo) in 2010 as Chief Product Officer and immersed himself in vacation rentals. Soon after joining the company, Tom became a vacation rental owner to better understand HomeAway’s clients, buying a property in Sonoma, California – 1,500 miles from his office in Austin, Texas. In doing so, he experienced firsthand the challenges of managing a property remotely.
“So I really got into all the technology I could use to manage my vacation rental,” Tom said. “I rigged up the house for remote management, and that was really foundational in my understanding of the VR industry and, frankly, informed a lot of the decisions that we took at HomeAway.”
He was later promoted to Chief Operating Officer and helped steer the company to a successful acquisition by Expedia Group in 2015.
His experience at HomeAway also instilled in him a belief in the power of user experience and data to build trust and reliability.
This theme continued when he became President of SurveyMonkey, expanding his expertise in gathering, interpreting, and analyzing consumer feedback.
“As a product builder and innovator my entire life, what I have learned is that you have got to be super close to your customers, and you’ve got to talk to them, and you’ve got to listen to them and that that just needs to be a foundational element,” he said.
From Oura customer to CEO
In the fall of 2022, while still at SurveyMonkey, Tom went through a highly stressful period. Zendesk had bought the company, but Zendesk’s investors rejected the sale. Meanwhile, his kids were experiencing difficulties post-COVID. For the first time in his life, Tom struggled to sleep and felt like he was losing his mind.
He started researching solutions and came across the Oura ring. Guided by data from the ring, he made simple behavior modifications that dramatically improved his sleep, he said.
He stopped drinking coffee and alcohol, started going to bed early and waking up at the same time every day, stopped looking at devices late at night, reduced the temperature in his bedroom, and exercised more intensely.
“It transformed the quality of my sleep,” he said.
This personal transformation inspired him to contact Oura’s leadership to explore ways to get involved. By happenstance, Oura was searching for a new CEO, and Tom applied for the role.
Although they initially rejected him due to his software background – they were looking for someone with consumer product goods and hardware experience – Hale pushed back, writing a letter to convince them he was the right fit. His persistence paid off, and they ultimately chose him for the position.
“There are very few things in life where you can really have a profound impact,” Tom said. “Most products don’t necessarily have a profound impact, and this was one that had a profound impact. And I couldn’t help but jump at it.”
Oura’s smart ring has since become a leader in the wellness wearable market, recently reaching a milestone of 2.5 million rings sold. The ring monitors and interprets metrics such as heart rate variability and body temperature and gives practical advice and accountability on enhancing health and performance.
Under his leadership, Oura launched its fourth-generation ring with advanced capabilities, such as integrating with continuous glucose monitors (CGM), and inked a contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Takeaways for enhancing health and wellness
Tom’s journey at Oura reflects his broader philosophy on life, whether enhancing your health or your vacation rental business: incremental, data-informed changes lead to lasting results. Here are just a few of the actionable takeaways from his Fireside Chat that others can apply to their lives:
1. Small changes over time
Tom recommends making small, consistent adjustments to habits rather than trying to change your lifestyle overnight.
“You just gotta get up, show up, do something every day that’s going to move the ball forward, and do it with intention,” Tom said. “If you keep making the right decisions over a long period of time, those decisions compound to your benefit, whether it’s your health, the growth of your business, the richness of your life, or the sense you’re having a positive impact on the world one little step at a time.”
2. Sleep as the foundation
Adequate quality sleep affects one’s ability to show up and perform on multiple levels. “My cognition, my energy, my mood, all these things were transformed by the experience of improving sleep,” he said.
3. The power of deep breathing
Tom once regarded meditation as “some California poofy thing” until he saw his data insights from the Oura ring, which showed a correlation between deep breathing and lower stress levels.
“In that period where I was very stressed, one of the things that I learned was that if I took a short break, like a five- to 10-minute break, and I did some breathing exercises, my stress levels would drop.”
4. Building resilience
Whether physical or mental, resilience comes from small but increasing doses of stress followed by recovery periods.
“The way you build resilience is you stress yourself, and then your body recovers from that stress and then gets to a new level,” he said. “It’s just like working out. It’s the same idea: you stress your muscles, and in that recovery, your muscles get stronger. Then, the next time the stress comes, you’re more resilient.”
“It’s a philosophical approach to life, which is, you’re never going to avoid stress. You just gotta figure out how to manage it effectively,” he said.
5. Cultivating connections
Building connections and community benefits mental and physical health. “It’s one of the reasons why vacation rentals are essentially an exchange of value where one side of the value is a place to spend your night but also to have a connection.” Illustrating that point, Tom gave the example of a guest celebrating their 65th birthday with their entire family at his vacation rental in Sonoma. “I’m playing a small role in that and feel connected to you in that moment,” he said.
For more of Tom’s perspectives and advice on health, wellness, and vacation rentals, watch the full replay of his Fireside Chat on the RR Network.
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