YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Tew

lines on the record: 149
first: 2025-05-26
most recent: 2025-05-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Just shook that rust off. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons from the world's greatest entrepreneurs, sign up for my newsletter at guyroz.com or on substack. This episode was researched and produced by Catherine Cypher with music composed by Rumtin Era Bluey. He was edited by Neva Grant. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Robert Rodriguez. Our production staff also includes Alex Chung, Elaine Coates, Casey Herman, JC Howard, John Isabella, Iman Mahani, Christmasini, Sam Paulson, and Carrie Thompson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Alex 2 and Michael Acton Smith. The co-founders of COM. Alex, now that we know each other a little bit more, we spent a long time together. You can give us a little beatbox. Give me a beat. All right. All right. Here we go. Let's go. Wow, that's no joke. That is a competitive level beatboxing.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, when you're working on something that you truly believe in and you think needs to exist in the world, I think it gives you the energy and the grit to persevere in the absence of evidence that it's working or in times of setback and stress. And calm is by far the most important meaningful thing I've worked on. And aside from any of the sort of financial elements and success of the business, just having had a positive impact on millions of lives is reward unto itself and also working with either my best buddy. It's been a lot of fun.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a tricky one. I think every business needs good timing. And as we've mentioned during our story, there are many kind of serendipitous moments along the way of luck where Alex and I met or how we connected with Timera or how we met the celebrities that fueled the sleep stories. So lots of luck along the way, but also a lot of very hard work.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You guys look back and see where this has landed and you both had successes early in your career, but now you've built this thing that is as real, enduring value. I mean, it's a company valued over several billion dollars now. When you think about where you started and where you are now, how much of it do you tribute to luck and timing and how much do you think has to do with the just the grind that you put into it?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think the other part of it is cal Primarily the content we offer isn't something you consume visually. You know, it's actually mostly audio. Interacting with karma is like you put on the thing you want and then you're not looking at the phone while you're listening to the content. We do have more visual content now. We are trying to make certain elements more accessible. But fundamentally, it's kind of like having just a teacher speaking to you in the room or someone telling you a bedtime story in the room. And you've got to meet people where they're at 5 billion smartphones. The idea that we can reach so many people so easily is a huge advantage. Yeah, it is been a contradiction that sort of people have raised over the years, but I think, you know, I think the world of smartphones needs apps like Calm.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a really good, important question. And one of the things Calm does is teach people to be more aware, sharpen their attention, make them more mindful, and so the idea is that you can use your phone in a more thoughtful way.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, there's no other option. I mean, it's a super convenient tool, but it's a I don't know. It's a bit of a contradiction in a sense, right? It's like on the one hand, we should probably just throw these things away. But on the other hand, it's not practical. It's not realistic. But it's also these things are having a deleterious impact on our brains.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know, I know this has been brought up before, but I, like many adults and children, but I think a lot of adults who are sort of Gen X and not just Gen X, but who didn't grow up with smartphones, have found themselves at a certain point in their lives addicted to their smartphones. So phones are, you know, phones are rewiring our brains. There's no question in my mind. There's a dopamine hit. I used to smoke cigarettes. I quit when I was in my late 20s. Horrible, awful, addictive. Honestly, one of the hardest things was quit smoking. It was so hard. And I found myself, you know, later on life thinking, well, is my phone just kind of replaced that, right? And yet, here we are talking about something that's designed to make us more mindful, more in our own bodies, but we have to go to the phone to use it, right?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we created Calm Studios in London where we're dreaming up future ideas for Calm and thinking about the future of mental health. So it's really energizing for us to get back to that zero to one phase, that creative, chaotic early phase.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. So the company we acquired, Ripple, the CEO, David Coe, because of our push into healthcare and his deep experience in that world, we decided it would make sense to step into a new role. And that's tough for entrepreneurs. We've been building this business for the best part of a decade. So it was not a decision we took lightly. But the other challenge was that we had moved back to Europe and London and most of our employees, hundreds of the team were based in the US. So having a CEO in the same time zone, in the same office as our team made a lot more sense. But we, you know, we're definitely not traditional chairman. We love this business and this brand so much. We often talk about how we can imagine being part of it for all of our lives.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, all right, so 2022, I mean, you guys really, the business is scaling and scaling and scaling. I think by 2022, you've got, I don't know, how many millions of users, I mean, probably about 4 million paid users by that point. That year, you guys stepped down as co-CEOs and become, I guess, co-executive chairman.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want to bring calm to as many people as possible. We launched a B2B division where companies pay for calm for their employees and that's been a hugely successful part of the business, particularly at the start of COVID. And the next phase is can we work in the healthcare system in the US? Could CAM be provided to insured patients to ensure that they live a more mindful life that they get good sleep, that they're conscious of the food they eat and the exercise they take, which the theory is downstream will prevent more physical health issues such as obesity and diabetes and others. So last, this is why we acquired Ripple and the team that have such deep healthcare experience. And last year we signed a big deal with United Healthcare to bring calm to”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you guys have also done some partnerships and acquisitions. I mean, you acquired a company called Ripple Health Group. Tell me about what that means. Does COM want to start tapping into the healthcare system somehow?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think again, time is somewhat of an advantage. It means that you've put in so much work, it's hard to replicate potentially. I think if we had raised tons of money very, very early, we may have not had the scrappiness to, say, do sleep stories. We may have just kind of been drunk on expensive, unprofitable user acquisition. So I think we kind of got the foundations that were stronger, basically, I think.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I bet, yeah. Apple called you the app of the year, so that certainly helps. Yeah. Because, I mean, I'm sure, you know, you guys, even though your experience, certainly, Michael, you had a lot of experience with investors. They have the leverage oftentimes, right? And the terms can be difficult, but app of the year, changes the equation a little bit. But again, it's a long journey. You launched this thing in 2012, so it wasn't like it was an overnight success story.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, that was a big one. Big jump from our one and a half million that we'd done for the seed round, and during that negotiation, which was quite tense, we won App of the Year. So that definitely helped our negotiating position.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're kind of at this point off to the races. I mean, you're 2018, that Series A values a business at $250 million. You guys raised $27 million in that round.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, all the key talent we brought on board are on our cap table. So they really feel they're part of calm. That's important. Secondly, the C is content. We want them to create something unique that they're not just saying go and download Calm. They've created something, whether it's a series like LeBron or Harry's sleep story. And then the E is engagement. We want to make sure they actually use the product, that they have got value from it. And when those three things come together, it creates a really deep, authentic connection between us and the talent. And then the talent fans really connect with Calm. So yeah, it has been a critical part of our success.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another big hit was Harry Styles. And, you know, he opened up a completely new audience for us. And the great thing about each celebrity that we've worked with is we've always made sure, you know, we have this acronym Ice. So the I is for Invest. We want the talent to have skin in the game.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think it was really important. Not only did it lead to a lot of additional downloads, but it gave us press moments. We were able to talk about calm in new ways. And people started to see calm as more than just a meditation or a mindfulness app. We opened up the market potential massively. When someone like LeBron James comes and says, you know, mental health is important. That appeals to hundreds of millions of people. So it was crucial. I think we did a better job than a lot of the other apps in our space at connecting with the celebrity talent. And yeah, it's been part of our secret source.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, even then, I think, well, we didn't have the big bucks to pay them. Yeah, even then I'm not sure people would have done it but as calm started to get a little more into the zeitgeist and as you say celebrities started to mention it and Stephen Fry was one of the first and I managed to track down his agent and asked if he'd do it and after a bit of negotiation he agreed and then the next big breakthrough that really took us. Forward was Matthew McConaughey. The story has been one of our most popular ever since.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd actually been trying to get celebrities to narrate sleep stories for quite a while before that. And we were knocking on the door of Hollywood and trying to reach out to every connection we could. But no one wanted to do it. Calm was still too much under the radar.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, you figured out how to grow it without any outside, a whole lot of outside money took you a while to get it. But one of the things I think that also happens is that a few celebrities start to just organically tweet about it, like John Mayer, Stephen Fry, because eventually celebrities, including Stephen Fry, would start to record stories and motivation, things like that for the app. Was it seeing people like Stephen Fry tweet about it that led to that idea?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. So, you know, the very first subscription we had was $10 a year. And then I think in 2015, we made it $40. Then it was $50 and then 60. And each time the conversion rate would be lower, but the net of it would be that we would make more money. You would have more money to spend on user acquisition, have a higher lifetime value. And it worked partly because people were willing to pay more for their personal well-being, but also because the app got better and because we built trust in the brand. And so, yeah, the sort of equation for how do we grow this business finally clicked”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the things you guys also did was, I think you did it the year previously, was you raise the price, which meant that you had fewer people paying for it because it was a freemium. It was free too. There's a free version. But the paid version you raise a price, which meant that you had fewer subscribers initially, but more money coming in because the price was higher.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People shared the ad. You know, it's unusual for people to. Send an advert to their friends, but they did it in droves. And so that was a really key moment for us because that meant we could put a dollar into our marketing and get a big multiple of that out. And so we just scaled that up very, very, very rapidly. So our revenue went from $7 million to $21 million to 80 million. It was extraordinary.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the fun story is that we sort of reached back to the past and took the idea of do nothing for two minutes. And we made an advert out of it. And it was do nothing for 30 seconds. And it was a video advert, which was a pretty new format time, primarily on Facebook, where we had first success. And we had these adverts that didn't look like adverts in people's social media feeds with rain and a countdown saying do nothing for 30 seconds. And it just looked very, very different to other ads for mobile apps. And the ads were so successful and so profitable for us that we were able to scale that channel up massively.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now we are. Yeah. So at the end of 2016, Michael mentioned Dun Wang, who came on board as our first product manager but actually ended up doing so much more than just product management. She helped do our first successful user acquisition. And it was in, I think, January 2017. We had our first million dollar month. And it's because we had cracked the UA code.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so now we're in well into, we're now into 2017. And again, like, are you guys using any money to advertise, to do social media ads, or is it just you're on the App Store and you've got your mailing list and it's just growing organically? Or are you spending money on customer acquisition?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We saw the spike, and we were obviously like, well, hang on, that's not how you meditate, but we adapted the product for them and thought. Yeah, why don't we create a new type of content? We hacked it together very quickly in weeks and created a few of these sleep stories we called them, put it out. And very early on we could see the signal that people were using this. And the key thing was that there's still, even today, a fair bit of stigma around meditation. It's not easy for people to develop a regular Meditation habit, but everybody goes to sleep every night. So many people struggle falling asleep. And so this was such a absolutely key turning point in the growth of the company”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still going. And Alex and I just chatted about it, and we thought, well, could this be an opportunity for us? And we'd also looked at the data. We had a brilliant person we'd hired called Dunn who looked at the data with us. And we realized that a lot of people were falling asleep to Tamera's voice in the evening about eleven o'clock at night. So they were using her voice to help them drift off.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was around 2015 where we started to think about it. And I'd been seeing a few signals that there could be something here. So I think there was a podcast called Sleep with Me, where the narrator would just tell boring long stories.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the things that happened that year may or may not have been a turning point, but you launch sleep stories. And I mean, lots of people, including one of my children, they fall asleep to boring stories every night. And I will come into his bedroom at like 11 at night and turn the story off because it's like four hours long. His iPhone. But this is something you guys started offering on the app in 2016. What did you notice about how the app was being used? Or how did you come to this realization that this was something that was worth trying?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was. I do remember 2016 being somewhat mystifying and tricky because we felt like we had proven that there's a business here. So it was actually an incredible signal. There's amazing word of mouth. The market really wants it. We've had some good press. We've got millions of users that have all come effectively organically. We've tried paid user acquisition, but we haven't quite cracked it. You know, there may have been some sense that, well, this business, it's a nice small business, but it's not going to, they're not going to be able to scale it.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I understand that you had to make it profitable, but I want to just dig into this for a moment. In order to grow, you needed money, right? You are now getting some revenue coming in. And it's probably certainly very helpful. But you're still small. 2016, you've got fewer than 10 people. You're working really long hours. I mean, we're both of you guys just saying to each other, how is it that nobody wants to put money into this thing? It doesn't make sense.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we didn't overhire. We could use equity as a big part of compensation over cash. We had a one-bedroom apartment rather than some fancy office. Well, even before that, we were in just a little co-working space with like 100 other startups. So it's just that traditional arc of being very, very scrappy. And I think we thought, well, we might not ever be able to raise VC money. So we're just going to have to make this business super profitable.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we had a fair bit of different feedback. I think a lot of people dismissed it as a content app and so very readily copied. You could get free meditations on YouTube. There's going to be thousands of competitors. You're not going to be able to build a moat. And I think a lot of the VCs discounted the fact that we were very focused on brand. And it's a little more intangible and it's hard to believe that that could have become so valuable. But so we just kept our heads down, kept the cost very low.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What would they say? I mean, this is 2016. It's like there's a lot of money flying around Silicon Valley for all kinds of businesses. What was the pushback that you were getting? Because, I mean, these guys are smart. They're going to make mistakes, obviously, but they're experienced and they have pretty good perspective.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she applied for our community manager role and Alex and I got on a, I think it was a Skype call with her and really liked her and really liked her voice. And I think she offered to do some meditations, didn't she? She'd been a meditation teacher. We felt her voice and her experience as a meditation teacher was going to be much more valuable than joining on the community team. And Tamara recorded these. it suddenly made meditation and developing a habit easier for people. You'd come back every day and hear a new story, a new lesson. There'd be an inspiring quote at the end. And even though it was a huge amount of work to create all this unique content, it was a step change for the business.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's the one that you would hear, you would hear calm. That boxray, that calm, and that voice is so It's like Andy Puttycombe's voice, but she was somebody who contacted you guys, right? She was, she got in touch with you in 2014 to say, hey, you need a community manager, right? Like, well, tell me the story because she would become a turning point for you.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the key turning points was around this time when instead of us having all these pre-recorded meditation content for people to listen to that was the same every day, we had the idea to create the daily calm, which was going to be a unique meditation every day.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we come back in just a moment, how calm gets a major boost for people like Stephen Fry, Matthew McConaughey, and LeBron James. Stay with us, I'm Guy Ross, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Ros. So it's 2014 and COM has hundreds of thousands of users and a core team of just four people. But they're about to make one very significant hire.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a lot of investors pushed back and said, yeah, Headspace are the winners. This market has sewn up. But we believe so strongly in what we were doing that we didn't think it was an issue that we were behind. We were closing the gap. And to your point, the market, we did feel was absolutely enormous. It wasn't just the people who were meditating. It was pretty much anyone with a mind. So we felt there were going to be multiple winners, not a winner takes all market, but a winner takes most.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But headspace was, as you say, had been out a year longer. Andy had done a very popular TED talk. He was getting more attention. Or are you worried that they would dominate the market share and that maybe you couldn't compete or did you think, oh, there's enough space? We'll be fine.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that book was definitely part of it. I think there were other things going on. I think the body of scientific research was kind of exploding. So there had been this sort of growing wave, this growing swell of interest in meditation and mindfulness. And I think part of what we got right through luck or foresight was just the timing. We were just well placed to benefit from this huge wave. And I do also credit Andy Puddicum and Rich Pearson from Headspace. They were, I think, maybe a year ahead of us in terms of getting an app out. And I think they were also part of that story.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, Alex, you are, you're kind of manning the store in San Francisco. And you launch the app in 2014. You raise another $500, almost $600,000 in angel funding. In 2014, the book 10% happier came out, which I've read Dan Harris's book. I know Dan, it was a very accessible book. It was talking about all of these people who brought Eastern mindfulness ideas to the West. And how he, Dan Harris, kind of went on this journey to learn about it. And I wonder if that book was kind of a turning point just in mainstreaming meditation, in your view.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think we'd both realize that Silicon Valley was the place to build this business. There was more investors who were open to ideas like this. The climate was more open to it as well. A lot of our friends and people we knew in London were very, very skeptical of meditation and mindfulness and talking about mental health. It was really not the hot important topic that it is now. So California was much more open to that. I think another reason was there was just so much more talent who had been at companies like LinkedIn and Facebook and others who had seen firsthand how to build and scale companies rapidly. We didn't have as much as that in London. And then finally, I think we both just wanted to... Extreme place to build a business and wanted to see if we could cut our teeth there.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Practicing myself and realize the value and that if we could make this ancient practice accessible and relatable and simple, we could connect with millions, maybe tens, maybe even hundreds of millions of people.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just really struggling with the business and burnout and lack of sleep. And I think sometimes as entrepreneurs, you've just got to step away from that cold face. You've just got to get perspective and realize you are not your business and get into nature and fresh air and just kind of calm your nervous system. So that was a really important trip for me. And it was unusual as well because it was on my own. I just was alone with my thoughts. As you mentioned, I was reading books and research papers and just so fascinated by what we were doing with Calm. And it really was the really bright light bulb moment going, what am I doing? I need to be, I need to be working on this full time with Alex. I've got to find a way to make this can change the world. I just realized that it was a way of rewiring the human brain. It's been around for thousands of years for good reason. And so I started practicing.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT