Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith | E117

Michael Acton Smith traces his journey from a self-described mediocre, introverted student into a serial entrepreneur driven by curiosity, creativity and storytelling. He recounts the rise and collapse of multiple ventures, including the commercially disastrous Perplex City and the platform-shift-driven decline of Moshi Monsters, and the personal toll those failures took on his self-worth and health. His own burnout led him to discover meditation, which sparked the creation of Calm after years of waiting for the cultural 'wave' around mental health to break. He shares hard-won lessons on doing deep foundational work before launching, building real business models, sleep science, and treating nutrition, exercise, mind and sleep as life's foundations. The conversation closes on relationships, communication, vulnerability, and his investment in psychedelic mental-health company Atai.

• Perplex City raised about $10 million and burned through roughly $9 million, becoming one of the most commercially disastrous projects he ever worked on.
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• He gathered his 25-person team and, shaking, told them the company was running out of cash and the game had to be killed mid-second-season.
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• Moshi Monsters' collapse forced five rounds of layoffs and made him feel that because the business was failing, he himself was a failure and worthless.
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• A solo holiday in the Austrian Alps where he first tried meditation cleared his mental fog and planted the seed for Calm.
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• Calm nearly ran out of money around 2015; a book advance from Penguin editor Vinisha unexpectedly kept the startup alive.
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• Raising the Calm subscription price from $10 to $40 a year caused no drop-off in sign-ups, a key tipping point proving the product's value.
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• Calm reached about 8 million downloads before spending any money on marketing.
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• He describes 2021 as the hardest year of his life, suffering a herniated disc, chronic pain, burnout, painkiller use and isolation.
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• Firebox's first online orders required customers to print an order form and fax credit-card details, which Michael manually keyed into a bank PDQ machine.
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• A friend, Matt Shown, secretly placed orders under fake names to keep the founders' spirits up while waiting for real customers.
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• Firebox's breakout product was a shot-glass chess set where capturing a piece means drinking it, earning press in FHM, Loaded, Maxim and The Sun.
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• For Perplex City they buried real treasure worth a 100,000 pound reward, found by a player a couple of years later.
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• Before Moshi Monsters, similar nurturing toys included Tamagotchi, the Pet Rock and Neopets.
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• Michael argues mental health is not 'one in four' but 'one in one' since anyone with a mind has mental health.
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• Meditation shifts reliance from the amygdala toward the prefrontal cortex, helping you respond rather than react.
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• Calm discovered an 11pm global usage spike of people using Tamara's voice to fall asleep, which led to the invention of Sleep Stories.
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• Calm's Sleep Stories use a 'story slope' instead of a three-act structure, gradually becoming more soporific so few listeners hear the end.
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• Calm gave its entire 300-plus person team a full mental health week off, which Michael calls one of the smartest decisions in company history.
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