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

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“All right, so let's get back to you, Michael. You are still in the UK. Calm has debuted. You're kind of spinning out of running Moshi Monsters. And I know that you, I mean, I don't know how significant this is, but I read about a trip. You had to just get out. I mean, you were like not sleeping. It was just stressful. The business was, you could see it slipping away. And you decide that you need, this is the summer of 2014, you need a break. And I guess you just got like a room and a hotel in the mountains of Austria. And you just brought some books and you just got away from it all. But this was kind of an important... Turning point. What happened there”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there was, I think there was maybe 12 audio recordings in it, literally plus maybe 12 scenes. So there was a course called the Seven Days of Calm, and it was 10 minutes day for seven days, and it taught you the basics of meditation. We actually didn't use the word meditation. At that time, we thought we're going to teach people this stuff without telling them it's meditation. We later changed our mind on that strategy because meditation became this hugely mainstream thing, so we embraced it. But at that time, we just call it the seven days of calm. And there was like a couple of audio recordings for free, and then you would pay $5 to unlock the full app. There was no subscription. In fact, at the time, Apple hadn't embraced subscriptions at all. But it was encouraging because 10% of people who downloaded the car map were paying the $5. And that was right out of the gate. So that was a great signal that people would pay for this. It was small numbers.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you've got some cash to start this up. And also that month, February of 2013, you debut a mobile app. Did you build the app yourself or did you hire with the money that you raised, did you hire some people”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was actually much harder than we had anticipated. So it actually ended up taking a good six months, well over 100 meetings, I think in the end we raised from about 12 people. And they were all individual angels. The biggest concern people had was how is this going to be a business? You're going to build a business around calm, you're going to bring meditation people going to pay for that they just most investors just thought it was an admirable mission and a terrible business idea. But nonetheless, we persisted and cobbled together just over 400,000 dollars. And that was enough to kind of get to the next phase.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so you would launch in May of 2012, but now you want to prove this concept out, so you had to raise some money. Given that you were at that incubator and you already had a track record, was it hard finding angel investors or were there plenty of people who were like, I believe in this guy? I think this is there's something here.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just waiting for him to move to San Francisco. And my first sort of job really was to try and raise some money to actually build up the mobile app, build a small team. And that was kind of the next step.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, when you say we, was it? I mean, are you talking about you and Michael? Michael's in the UK, you're in San Francisco, or did you have anybody else working on it with you?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At some point in 2012, I can't remember exactly when we put them on. I think it was not too long after we put just the scenes up. And the idea of just starting on web was it was super cheap. We didn't need much, but we wanted to have something to prove to investors that there was interest.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, it starts as this web page, but this is already now 2012. The iPhone is out, the App Store is open, it's clear that you guys were going to move into that direction, but just initially, just to get something out there, you have this webpage with some, were there guided meditations yet in 2012 or not yet?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think even maybe 100,000 emails. And so that 100,000 emails, when we launched Calm.com with the sort of nature scenes, those people turned out, they really loved calm.com because it was a much better version of do nothing for two minutes.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you had that website do nothing for two minutes.com. At the end of it, And I guess you guys ended up collecting like tens of thousands of email addresses that way.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yet the first one was actually made. I hired someone on, you know, it was maybe Craigslist or something, videographer, who went out and filmed some beach scenes in the Bay Area and some other forest scenes and things. It got some really good organic traffic. I think there was a few hundred thousand people a month using that. So it served a... Need, albeit millions of users, but there was definitely an audience for it.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so that was really the first thing we put up. And it was just something we could get out quickly. We knew that do nothing for two minutes, that very, very simple website had a lot of attention. And it was kind of a better version of that instead of just this static scene with some wave sounds. There's going to be these full screen visuals. At the time, there weren't many websites you could go to and just suddenly would have a full screen video playing. So it looked quite dramatic. You had these beautiful... Scenes of nature with really high quality audio, but there were only 10 scenes or something.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Okay, so Alex, you're in San Francisco. Michael, you are still in London. And you've got this domain name now, com.com. And I guess around 2012, you decide to build a website around this domain name, which is just, I guess, initially, it just had sounds, right? Like the ocean and birds and like a bubbling brook that you could just kind of like sit and chill out and listen to these sounds.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, at the high level, the world needs more calm. And I felt like I was probably more representative of the average person who wanted to find a way to relax, really, and calm the mind for 10 or 20 minutes. They're not looking for some spiritual awakening. They're actually looking to manage stress. I think that was part of the appeal of building calm. Like, could we build a product that we wish existed?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a huge risk. Yeah, huge, huge bet. But, you know, to Alex's point, we both believed in this word and this opportunity so much. I think it's one of the most beautiful words calm is a superpower. It helps us. In so many ways. So, yeah, we thought it was a bet worth making.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michael and I would always riff on business ideas. And I think I had shared my passion around meditation and relaxation. And we talked generally about this bigger idea, this simple idea. And so we had discovered that this domain name.com wasn't being used. It was owned by this guy actually fortunately in England. But he didn't want to sell it unless we gave him, I think, something like a million pounds, just an absurd amount relative to... What we could afford. And so it wasn't the right time, but then at some point in, I think it was the summer of 2011, he was like, yeah, I actually want to sell it. And thankfully, Michael had enough money to buy it.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you and Michael are, of course, staying in touch because your friends and your collaborators. And at a certain point, you buy this domain site. This is, I think, in 2011 called Com.com, comm C-A-L-M.com. And we're going to get to what initially what this idea was, but from what I understand, you've been wanting to buy this domain for like two years already, been negotiating with the guy who owned the domain name to buy it from him.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I hadn't really invested it well. I had spent a lot. I really needed to, you know, find a way to make money and take the pressure off. So I think that was part of it. And I think it was an important moment moved to San Francisco, learn a lot from the Silicon Valley culture and meet lots of interesting people, which I did.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. That Yeah, I'm just curious. I mean, from the time you started million-dollar homepage, right, you mean a million dollars, literally, obviously a third of that or more went to tax, but you made a million bucks from that. By 2011, when he left for San Francisco, it sounds like you had not really made any significant money after that.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, so something else I think happens around this time, Alex, which is that you leave London and you move to the US to take a job. I think at a tech incubator in San Francisco. So, I mean, this was a big change for you, right? I mean, this is a major move.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really a fun exercise that, again, similar to the Melinda Lawpage, came out of a late night brainstorming session. Just, you know, what would the world's simplest web page be? Well, it would do nothing. And came up with this idea of this webpage would have a picture of sunset, sounds of waves crashing on a beach, countdown from two minutes, which would start as soon as you hit the page. If you moved your mouse or keyboard, it would reset to two and say try again. And I thought it was just a fun idea. And together with a friend, a guy called Ben Darling, we built it one afternoon and tweeted about it. And it just went viral. And within a week had about 2 million visitors. Wow. And funnily enough, only about 50% of people who went on the page could actually do nothing, like not touch their mouse or keyboard.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and right around the same time, Alex, I think you launched kind of an experiment, a website, which you called do nothing for two minutes, which I've seen. You can see this on the internet archive, the web archive. And this was literally a website, and you'd go on it and it would just have a countdown clock, and you would do nothing. It wanted you to do nothing for two minutes. And then the clock just runs down, and you're just looking at a sunset over the ocean. Was this just a gimmick? Was this going to be a business? What was this thing?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CDs that would have on the whole incredibly cheesy recordings with panpipes and lots of reverb with these relaxation things and I just thought a lot of this content that I'm consuming is really not designed for a mass audience. It's not very well presented even though the techniques are incredibly simple and powerful. And I even had that thought around meditation. You know, it's been around for thousands of years in various forms. But to the average person, it's unapproachable.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was born from a general interest in the mind and in psychology and in self-improvement. So, you know, I read all sorts of books. I read Tony Robbins' books. I read books about improving my memory. And then there was this one book I read called The Relaxation Response, written by a guy called Dr. Herbert Benson. And he was one of the first researchers into meditation from a scientific perspective. And I remember at the time I was kind of stressed out with exams and the general pressures of being a teenager and I would just sit and try and practice. And meditation I did find difficult. I think at that time it was a bit too esoteric. I found it easier to memorize relaxation techniques and then also started sourcing online but also in quirky bookshops.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's remarkable to me because I don't have teenage boys. I was a teenage boy. I don't know any teenage boys who can sit still. What would you do?”
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, Michael leaves the frenetic world of Moshi monsters to work with Alex on something completely different, an app called COM. Stay with us, I'm Guy Ros, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This I'm Guy Ross. So when we left off, it was 2012, and Michael's huge success with Moshe Monsters was starting to unravel. Meanwhile, the whole time he's been building that franchise, his housemate Alex has been trying to launch his own new ideas, but nothing is gelling. Still, there's one idea Alex just can't shake. And it's sort of out of left field.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's this horrible situation to be in where I was on billboards and posters around East London, being interviewed on TV shows, winning awards left, right and center, but knowing in the pit of my stomach and at 4 a.m. that this was unraveling and this was falling apart. This rocket ship suddenly started falling back to Earth.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they become obsessed. And then the new phenomenon comes along. And so as soon as kind of younger kids were starting to play the game, older brothers and sisters were moving on and Moshi went from being cool in the playground to not so cool. And we saw it in our numbers. And we did everything we could to try and turn it around, but we couldn't.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we kind of, first of all, when this happens, you think it's just a blip, and then it happens a second month and a third month, and you think, hang on, what's going on here? And what was happening was that... I didn't realize this because I'd never built a kid's entertainment company before, but kids moved on.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, in hindsight, right? But you're on this rocket ship, right, from the time you launch it, you got movie deals, licensing deals, merchandise. But from what I read between the lines already by 2012, even with all of the acclaim and attention, you guys were running into problems. What happened?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, we never got to termsheet phase, but they were very, very interested. But I was just full of confidence and wanted to keep building and creating new worlds and universe. And to be honest, I was just having too much fun. But when you're an entrepreneur, you do need to think of all the stakeholders and investors and employees not selling was probably a mistake in hindsight”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, we did think we could be the next Disney, the future of entertainment. And I think we got a bit too big for our boots, or I certainly did. Disney came knocking and we had some conversations. They'd bought one of our competitors called Club Penguin.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I read somewhere, and this makes a lot of sense to me because I've had. I've encountered this on the show in the past where we've had guests who have started media companies that have blown up. And inevitably, there's a conversation where somebody in the organization says, we're the next Disney. Like this is just the start. Look how fast we're growing. And I think those conversations were happening at Mind Candy around Moshe Monsters, right?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, a whole range of things. So, one of the first things we made was a magazine that featured content from the world. And then we did trading cards. And then we did books. In fact, the first deal was a book deal we did with Penguin talking about all the different moshling characters you could collect in the world. And then a music album that went to number four in the charts and a movie with Universal. It was just...”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You name it. Yeah, exactly. All these worlds. And Moshi was at the right moment in time. And one of the really key turning points in the growth of the business was when we decided to do physical products.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is 2008, 2009. And I mean, from what I gather, it actually hit profitability pretty quickly. We're getting within two or three years, like $80 million in revenue. I'm just curious, how did you How did you get the word out? How did people find out about it? Was it just that the, I mean, it's 2008, 2009, the internet is still fairly new, that it was still easier to get attention for a website?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was about that, yeah. And again, very challenging because, you know, it's the parents that would pay, but the kids were the one playing the game. But I think because the parents could see it was a safe world, there was an educational component that they were happy to do so.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We just made the decision why don't we just make the game free and allow any person that wants to come along, any children to adopt a monster to enable them to do it for free? And wow, the floodgates opened dozens of signups the first day, hundreds, day two, the first month. We were thousands a day. It was just, it was incredible. So we still hadn't figured out how it was going to make money. So we just grew the audience and kept improving the product. And then we added a subscription.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you would adopt your own pet monster, you'd give it a name, you'd customize it, it lived in its own room so you could design what its environment was. And kids don't have an awful lot of control over their world. They're told what to eat and when to go to school and so to have their own space, their own online environment where they are in control was really exciting. And one of the key things we did in this world, we talk about this idea of stealth education. So the core loop of the game”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, it was a website where what kids would create a pet and then they would care for the pet. Just briefly explain how it worked.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we explode lots of different names. We just quite like the alliteration of Moshi monsters. And then I didn't want to start it as a completely new company. I felt really bad for all the investors that had backed me and believed me. So I wanted to keep the same cap table, even though it probably would have been simple to start from a fresh sheet of paper.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Called Moshi or Mashi monsters. Was it sort of inspired like that name? Sounds a little Japanese. Was it inspired by that kind of Japanese aesthetic?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little pixelated pet that you would look after and feed and very, very simple, but nurturing is a really powerful human emotion and all ages love it. And so we thought, could we create a sort of digital pet, a little monster for kids to look after and feed and dress up and go exploring this world? So I basically said, let's try this completely new idea. And to the board's credit, they were obviously a little surprised, but they were like, okay, you know, I think they saw the writing on the wall. The money was running out. We didn't really have many options left. So it was one almighty pivot. And we gave it a go. So with a little bit of cash left, we started trying to build this kids entertainment company.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was horrible. Really, really difficult and stressful. I would wake up every single night at 4am just staring at the ceiling, knowing in the pit of my stomach, and I think most entrepreneurs have had this feeling that it is not working. You can't continue. Like this, you have to do something, but it was so hard to kind of change. And I didn't know what else to do. And just watching the bank balance dwindle, board meetings were getting more stressful. And then eventually I thought we have to try something new, a Hail Mary. And within the world of Perplex City, there was this legend that we had created called Puzzle Monsters. And the world was all about puzzles. And if kids didn't do their homework, the puzzle monsters would come and get them in the middle of the night. It was quite dark. But I love the name puzzle monsters. And even though I'd never built anything in the kids' space before, I thought maybe we could create a web.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time, Michael, you're still trying to get perplexity To gain some traction, but it's really not. I mean, I think you get to a point in 2007. Where you have less than a million dollars in the bank, and you guys had raised 10. So you're, I mean, and you're not bringing in any significant revenue. Tell me about that time. I mean, that must have been quite stressful for you because that means this thing is probably going to die.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, business is so much about storytelling. And the millions of homepage had a great story with Pixelotto. It was It was not that at all. And I looked back and I sort of squirm at the fact I did that as opposed to create something more meaningful. But I think it's just part of learning what works, what's worth working on. And I think the reasons for doing Pixel Auto weren't the right reasons. I was just trying to create another version of the Millions of homepage, which is not so exciting.”
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 you guys are in this house. And meantime, Alex, you start a business called Pixelado, which I guess is inspired by this million-dollar homepage where you're selling pixels of things. But from what I read, you didn't quite have the same traction with it. You weren't kind of, it wasn't taking off in the same way.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a great house, wasn't it? Very entrepreneurial. We'd sit playing FIFA on our Xbox in the evenings, talking about business and ideas, and we'd throw great dinners and parties. Most of our friends were building tech companies, so it was a really, really exciting time.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, and we got on really well when we met at this event, and I was renting a house in Soho, which is right in the beating heart of London. And we had a spare room. And I said to Alex, do you want to move in?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT