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

“We did, yeah, and I had known about Firebox because I used to log on to Firebox when I was broke looking at all the products that I wanted to buy but couldn't afford. And I think I may have even bought a few of them once the malepage started working. I was a fan of... Michaels, and then we just sort of hit it off from that moment.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember reading about the million dollar homepage and I wanted to connect and meet this genius that had created this. I just thought, wow. And I tried to get in touch with Alex and no joy. In fact, I had some of my investors pinging me saying, who is this guy? Let's find him. And no luck. And then we met at a party, didn't we? A mutual friend.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this is around 2006, your paths cross. Michael and Alex, you guys meet for the first time in London, Alex, you had come down, of course, to pursue the next thing, big thing on the internet. Michael, you'd been there building Mind Candy. And you guys just met at a random event or a party? Or how did you meet?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, as I say, it was extraordinary and incredibly creative, and we had a very, very passionate audience of players, but unfortunately the game was just so complex that the audience was relatively small. It was a few thousand people. So you're right, we won awards. We had incredible publicity, but the commercial piece of it was not there.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business model was inspired by Pokemon. We created these puzzle cards, and so you'd buy a pack with six cards and rip it open, but on the backs of the cards, if you put all 256 together, would create this massive map of the world of Perplex City where all the deeper clues were hidden. So yeah, the idea was to sell these packs for a few pounds each. And it was very, very complex, probably the most creative thing I've ever worked on, but one of the most commercially disastrous things I've worked on. So I learned some lessons from that adventure.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was buried in a field about one hundred twenty miles north of London, and we put clues in the classified sections of our newspapers around the world. We had helicopters at live events and there was...”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we buried, we created a story in all these characters. We buried this cube in a secret location and anyone that found this secret cube with all these strange engravings on would bring it to our office and win $200,000. That was the idea behind this game.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah. But I just thought, how cool to turn your life into a game you don't know what's real and what isn't. So I thought, wow, why don't I try and make a real life version of that? So that's what Perplex City was. And to kind of a very, very long story short, we buried a treasure worth $200,000 somewhere in the world. And then we set about releasing clues across all sorts of different media. Really?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, didn't happen immediately, but one of my loves is games. We've talked about chess, but I love everything from poker to backgammon to scrabble to video games. And around this time, it felt like gaming was going through a huge revolution. Video games had been one or two player, and now we were seeing games with multiple players, sometimes tens, hundreds of thousands of people online. So I just thought the next big revolution would be to make a fun multiplayer games. And so like the name Mind Candy, that was the starting point, and we created a game called Perplex City, inspired by a movie I'd seen, The Game by David Fincher. Oh, yeah.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to turn back to you, Michael, and jump back on your timeline because you left work the job with Firebox and you decided to start something new, which was a video game company. And because of, I am assuming because of your reputation with Firebox and what you guys managed to do, you managed to get some significant funding. You raised like $10 million to start this video game company called Mind Candy. Tell me about that.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it just opened my eyes to what was possible. I felt a lot of agency. I could go and build something. And I didn't really want to go to university in the first place. I was trying to be an entrepreneur. And so dropped out and moved to London. Similar story, I guess, to Michael, where all roads lead to London in the UK.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. All right. This prompts you understandably to drop out of university because you're thinking, look, the internet is the way to go. I don't want to spend all this time getting a degree. Is that fair to say that you thought I just need to just focus on this world?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and then every piece of press was making it more valuable. I remember one of the early interviews I did was on the BBC breakfast show. So this is like Good Morning America, right? But in the UK. Yeah. And I'm sitting on the couch and they're like, you know, why is this working? And I was like, well, you know, the fact I'm on the couch talking about it is why it's working. It was because of the... The attention gave it oxygen and made me money.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should mention that the million dollar homepage was to help finance your college tuition. And so that was a great sort of made-for-media story because, oh, here's this poor college student trying to raise money, but he's come up with this cool idea.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to describe this for people, it's so crazy. It's like imagine a collage of just a million logos. And basically, you would sell... Pixels to anyone who wanted to put, and then you could just hover your pointer over each pixel and click it, and it would take you to a website. But you started to get attention. Again, I think people should remember this is like early internet days when websites would just get attention, like just a weird website would just get news coverage, right?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea was very simple. It was to try and make a million dollars with the silliest possible method, which is to sell a million pixels for $1 each on this one page website. Yeah, it was just one of those late-night brainstorms that I thought, okay, that's quite funny. It's quirky enough that it might just get a bit of attention.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you get to university in Nottingham One of the things that you did while you were there was to set up a web page. You bought a domain called Million Dollar Homepage.com. And tell me what this idea was, because this would, I'm giving away the plot here. It was going to get some attention. But what was the idea for million dollar homepage?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't enough for me to move out of home. Living with my parents and decided okay, I should probably take the traditional path that everyone is encouraging me to take. I should go to university, get a job, maybe leave the beatboxing behind.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had 300 beatboxes from all over the world come to London. And yeah, the event was amazing. We just sort of had this big showcase. I think we may have had a competition. And I think my entrepreneurial instinct was like, you know, could this become a business? The answer is no. There's not much money in a beatbox event.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I love this so much because you weren't just doing it, you were leading organizing events. You organized, I guess after you finished high school, what we call high school, you decided not to go to university right away, but to organize the world beatbox convention in London. I mean, you're 18. That's pretty awesome. Who came? How many people showed up?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not bad. I wouldn't be a competitive beatbugger. No Yeah, I was 16, 17, something like that. It was actually my second website. But it just became this natural idea to create a forum. And so use some software called VBulletin, which was like the premier forum software back in the day. And then suddenly just all these beatboxes from around the world started logging on. It was like the first place. It turns out there were tens of thousands of people also enjoying the same hobby, if you like. So it was super cool to build that community and actually learn better beatboxing techniques. We were all trading techniques on this website.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not bad. I wouldn't be a competitive beatboxer. No. I'm not going to make you do it. But talk about this because your entree into the internet was setting up a beatboxing website for like a forum. Beatboxing.co.uk. You started this. You were, what, like 15 years old, 16?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Beatbox Beatboxing's a funny one because at the time when I started doing it, it wasn't something that I knew anyone else did. It was just something that came naturally. And so from the age of maybe four, you know, I was running around the house just making rhythmic sounds. And then took it a bit more seriously as I got older”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know that you would eventually leave and start another business. And I want to come back to that in a second because we're around 2003-2004. But I want to turn to you, Alex, for a moment because you're about 10 years younger than Michael. You were, you're also grew up in England. You have very unusual interest as a, imagine unusual. In these 700 interviews I've done on this show, I've never had somebody who was like a semi-professional beatboxer.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. Yeah, we were profitable from fairly early on. We got our own office and grew the team to 10 and 20 people. Then 30, 40, we took on our own warehouse. So we kind of expanded at a nice sensible rate.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So this starts, I mean, you start to really expand half a million dollars. I mean, God, you're like 25, you know, years old, 24 years old. I mean, that just must have been mind-blowing to imagine what we could do with this. Didn't make any money?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pretty much, and the very first event we went to, we met an investor who liked the sound of what we were doing and he invited us into the office. And a couple of meetings later we had a half a million dollars of investment and we just could not believe it”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we were building this internet company from this attic in Cardiff and no one was doing anything similar around then. The bank thought we were completely mad. But then we read an article in a newspaper talking about an event in London called First Tuesday, which gathered internet entrepreneurs with investors. And we both looked at each other and went, wow, we literally decided to move to London almost the next day. We threw all our things in a van.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Firebox.com And this is again the late 90s, and you start to attract interest from investors. You guys moved to London. And I think you even raised a little bit of money, right, to expand Firebox out.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, I wouldn't advise it, especially not at work. So we didn't think it mattered that we did known the dot-com to our name. We love the name Hotbox because our products were so hot, they were bursting out of the box. But it did matter because Hotbox.com was at the time one of the biggest porn sites in the world. So that was a little awkward, especially when my mum, who was so proud of her son, finally doing something and building a business, she'd tell all her friends to check out her son's new business hotbox and cause some very awkward moments.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, and this is now, we're talking about 98, 99 here, getting a lot of attention for this shot glass chess set. And meantime, you're having some issues with your name, which is hotbox. You guys owned hotbox.co.uk, but you did not own hotbox.com, which was a different website, I guess.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we eventually cobbled it all together. We tested the market by going to a shop that sold loads of magazines and scribbling down the names of the editors and the addresses of these magazines and then sent out our press release. We took some photos of the chess set and we sent it off to these editors, personalized everyone. And the hit rate was incredible. Something like half of them came back saying, what a genius idea. We want to feature this. And we were featured in all the men's magazines all around the world. It was amazing. So that was the sort of the tipping point, the start where we thought, wow, you know, storytelling is so important. This wasn't just a chess set. We were telling these editors we were two students building an internet company. And I think it really resonated.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, we would dreaming up all sorts of weird and wild ideas for new products and we were in a bar one night in Cardiff and saw some tequilas lined up across the bar, tequila shots. And I think in our slightly drunken state, you know, I think I mentioned they look like pawns on a chessboard. And then it got into a conversation of how you could make chess more exciting by making it a party game. So we called it the thinking person's drinking game. And you could play with red wine against white wine, whiskey against vodka if you're a little more hardcore. But every time you capture an opponent's piece, you have to drink their shot. And usually you don't remember who wins by the end of the game.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have a big break. It's a first break, which is you guys start to sell something called the shot glass chess set. So basically I'm imagining it's a chess set, but each piece is a shot glass. And this is something you guys came up with. You created this product, right?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, good question. Well, we put photos of products on the site. And if anyone ordered one of them, we would then go and try and buy it. And wholesalers were not too impressed at selling one unit at a time to us. So often we just buy it from some other location. We could find it and sell it for the same price we were buying it for. It was basically just testing things, no margin, and just seeing what products would resonate, whether we could actually make this work. And so it was a very, very slow progress.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. I mean, you have this website and you called it hotbox. Did you have inventory or were you just advertising things that you saw in catalogs and then people could order them from you and then you would order it from a catalog? What were you selling?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He figured it out. We'd been in this bookshop in Cardiff and we saw this book called Doing Business on the Internet. And it was massive. And we bought it. We clubbed our money together. And we both just absolutely... It is if it was a holy script and then were able to build the first version of the site. And it was still really, really clunky. We couldn't quite figure out how to get people to input their credit cards. So if you wanted to order anything, you'd print off a sheet of paper and fill in your credit card details and then fax it to us. Fortunately, we only got about one order every few days. And so we weren't too worried about scaling.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's amazing. I read about how you guys move basically 1997 time frame. You move to his parents' house in Cardiff. You use like a spare room in the house to start putting together a website. 1997-98, like this was a really hard challenge. First of all, most people didn't have access to the internet yet. And if they did, it was dial-up. Secondly, building a website. It's complicated. It was really hard to do.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was exactly it. Inspiration to get going. All sorts of quirky gadgets and games and, you know, chairs that would massage you as you watch TV, cocktail shakers, Swiss army knives. It just felt like selling these products online would be a really fun thing to do. But we had to solve a lot of early problems because Shopify was not around. Stripe was not around. Tom was obviously very, very good at engineering and was able to solve a lot of these early challenges, but it wasn't easy.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is kind of amazing because even doing it in the US, and again, no shade to the UK, but the UK was behind the US, right? Just in terms of the sort of the speed at which the revolution happened. But getting into e-commerce anywhere in the world in 1997 was totally nuts. People were like, what? Credit card internet? How do you sell to the internet? It's a computer. How do you sell through that? But I guess you guys start talking about... This idea. And at the time, and I remember this, I might still be around, there was a shop in the UK called the Gadget Shop. In the US, I guess it would be similar, like the sharper image, right?”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Met Tom at chess club. We were both real rock and roll students and we just became great friends. And the internet was just getting going. We started university, I think about 1993. So it was very, very early days and Tom was doing a degree in artificial intelligence. And everyone would make fun of him because no one really knew what that meant back then. People thought you were a bit weird if you were going into internet cafes and banging on about the internet. But we both definitely saw an extraordinary revolution taking shape. And so we had a lot of different ideas. But yeah, we settled on e-commerce as the starting point.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Investors just didn't believe people would pay to meditate, especially on their phones, but pay they did. By 2022, COM had more than four million paying subscribers. But what makes this story even more interesting is what Michael and Alex were doing before COM. Both had already launched a bunch of internet businesses. For starters, Alex had created something called the million dollar homepage, a viral stunt that actually made him a million dollars. And Michael, he opened one of the very first online gadget shops in the nineteen nineties, back when most brands didn't even know what e-commerce was. Both Michael and Alex grew up in the UK. We'll hear from Alex in a bit, but first to Michael. He was a student at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1990s, and it was there that he made a friend named Tom Boardman.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over the past 15 years, meditation, at least in the West, has gone from fringe to fortune. By twenty twenty four, the global meditation market hit nearly nine billion dollars with about a quarter of that driven by meditation apps. And a few years ago we told the story of one of those apps, Headspace, and if you haven't heard it, it's worth looking up because there are obvious parallels with today's story. The story of Headspace's biggest competitor, COM. When COM launched in 2012, Headspace had already been around for two years, and coincidentally, independently of each other, both apps were started by British co-founders. And just like the headspace team, Comms founders, Michael Acton Smith and Alex Tew had a hard time raising money early on. In twenty twelve.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Welcome to How I Built This is a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, How Two Struggling Tech Entrepreneurs decided to go all in on an ancient practice, meditation, and built an app that's now valued at nearly two billion dollars.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, pitch of sunset, sounds of waves crashing on a beach. And if you moved your mouse or keyboard, it would reset to two and say try again. Only about 50% of people who went on a page could actually do nothing.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You would go on it and it would just have a countdown clock, and you do nothing. It wanted you to 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
“And when you're ready to launch, you offer code built to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Loans issued by Celtic Bank and serviced by Stripe. All loans subject to credit approval. You launched a website which you called Do Nothing for Two Minutes. 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
“At airbnb.ca slash host. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I talk to entrepreneurs all the time who are looking for a way to upgrade their digital footprint. Well, whether you're just starting out or you're scaling your business, Squarespace is the easiest way to build a great website that stands out. It's an all-in-one website platform that gives you everything you need to claim your domain, showcase your products, and get paid. Anyone can use Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools to build an online presence that truly reflects what makes your business special. There are templates, intuitive drag and drop editing, and even an AI enhanced website builder. Then, Squarespace's built-in analytics tools help you make smarter business decisions, review website traffic, learn where to focus engagement, and track revenue all in one place. Looking to grow your business, Squarespace even offers fast, easy business financing through Squarespace Capital. Go to Squarespace.com.”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of my favorite parts of traveling is getting a feel for a neighborhood, the way locals do. A few summers ago, I was in Rome and stayed in an apartment I booked on Airbnb. It was tucked in a quiet neighborhood just outside the Roman forum. Every morning I'd walk to the corner cafe, grab an espresso, and just watch the world go by outside. I even managed to chat with the owner about the neighborhood he lived in for nearly forty years. And he got me thinking about my own neighborhood. There are incredible hiking trails and great restaurants and, of course, the beach. And when I'm traveling this summer, listing my own place on Airbnb could be a really smart way to let someone else experience the area the way I do, like a local. Listing your home on Airbnb while you're traveling is a great way to make some extra money. You could put the money toward your next trip. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much”
2025-05-26 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calm: Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT