YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Acton Smith

lines on the record: 105
first: 2022-01-31
most recent: 2022-01-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Because I could see it so clearly having been through it, you know, one of the best businesses to ever set up is one where you're scratching your own itch and you understood. And I didn't know what meditation was or mindfulness, but my very dear friend Alex Chu had been meditating with CD ROMs he bought when he was a teenager, a very unusual teenager, and he would often say to me, look dude, you need to try meditation. And I'd be like, you need to try effing off.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, wow, yeah, I think when we are struggling in life, we, instead of addressing the issue, we mask it, don't we? We seek things that avoid whatever the challenge is. And for some people, it's drugs, for some people it's alcohol. For me, I just became distant from the business. I just couldn't face going into the office every day. I take myself off to coffee shops, I suppose. Caffeine is not as serious a kind of drug as some other ones. But I also used to take painkillers every morning just because I woke up with such a headache and my body ached. I felt like I was hit by a truck every morning. So these painkillers would kind of help me get started in the day. It was a very tricky time. So not addressing the fundamental issues with the business or trying to, but not doing a very good job. For me, this is what led to.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were people in the world going through much trickier things than their business falling apart. But when it's you and you built your whole self-worth around it, it feels like everything is falling apart and the world is ending.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Um I'm lucky in that I have a very supportive family and I have some great friends who are also entrepreneurs and we've kind of all had successes and failures and at one point some of us are doing well and some are not. So we kind of pick each other up and give each other important pep talks. So I think having that community was very, very helpful. But, you know, I wasn't, when you're struggling like that, again, you create these vicious circles so you don't sleep very well and you wake up the next day just more tired than you were when you went to bed and you're irritable and your body is filled with cortisol and adrenaline and you don't eat well and put nutritious food in your body and you forget to exercise. So yeah, all these negative things start compounding. I was in a pretty bad state. But to put things in perspective, again, I did try and kind of be realistic.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you mentioned, my ego, my worth, myself was just so entined with my business and now the business was failing, I was a failure and worthless. And so it was a really, really difficult time. And that lasted for years.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So true. Yeah, that was exactly it, you know, when things are going well, it's a great thing. You feel wonderful. And the tricky thing was that it was the flip that I think was so stressful, the flip from being, I was sort of one of the poster boys of celebrity. Yeah, in Shortitch, I was on the front cover of Wired magazine. The press were just writing about us and me and glowing terms all the time. I just thought I could do no wrong. And again, the ego just got out of control. And then to have that flip, to suddenly be running a business that was falling apart, we did five rounds of layoffs are so difficult for again the team that had followed me and joined this business to be let go. Revenue started collapsing, board meetings became very stressful, press started writing negative articles. It was really, really, really tough. And as you say, you know.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Another, there's been quite a few. That's why I've got so many gray hairs. But again, learned a lot during that period, but that was a tough time.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“iPads and the mobile revolution, and we kind of had our head in the sand for a little bit and thought, you know, this isn't really going to take off in a huge way. And then we started to lean into it and figure out how we could adapt Moshi for this new world. But it was very, very difficult. And just the economics and the way kids would play with devices and it was much harder to create a monthly subscription service. It just started to unravel. And as fast as we'd grown, the revenue started to come down and kids were playing all these new free games through the app store. And we spent several years trying to kind of write the ship and keep things going, but that was an incredibly stressful period as well.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of playing games desktop, right? Yeah, desktop web, playing moshy or club penguin or stardol or neopets or all these other games”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we thought we could do no wrong. We were now just the usual curve of slow growth and then rocket ship. And we thought we were going to be the next Disney. And we had opportunities to sell the business for hundreds of millions of dollars. And I was like, no, thank you. You know, we are taking this all the way to the moon. And everything was just compounding. Almost everything we did seemed to just get bigger and bigger until it suddenly didn't. And the summer of 2012 was when things just suddenly stopped. And I was like, what on earth is going on? This is probably just an aberration. And we thought, oh, it's because it's a hot summer or because of XYZ, you know, you kind of make excuses. But what had happened was that there was a shift, a platform shift taking place. And kids were moving from using the web as their primary place of.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Instantly, it was just like, wow, that was the trigger point. Took away all the friction, and we were away. So suddenly we went from one or two signups a day to dozens of signups a day, then hundreds of sign-ups a day, then thousands. I think, you know, our peak days were over a hundred thousand children around the world were adopting a monster. It was It was breathtaking.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that was the idea. We didn't really know how we were going to monetize it. And we decided to create these little phone charms that we would sell in shops. And you bought a phone charm for about 10 pounds. And then inside would be a code that you type into our website to adopt your monster. Disastrous idea. I think we've still got thousands of these phone charms sitting in a warehouse somewhere. And it was just too much friction. It was just too many steps, too complicated. And so after about a year of trying to make that work, we decided, do you know what? Let's just make it free. Forget.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Neopets was another great, great business. I think there's something kids, in fact most of us love nurturing and looking after things, and so I thought in the era of flash and that the web could we create these little monsters and”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was, yeah, you know, everyone thinks businesses that are successful just happen overnight. They don't. There's a lot of grind and hustle getting to that point. But the idea felt very strong. The idea of creating these little monsters that would live online that kids could adopt and look after. And I didn't know much about the kids' entertainment space, but I'd seen Tamagochi a few years before, and I thought, wow, what a business. Tens of millions of those little beeping characters were sold. And I thought there's something here. Could we take that concept? And before that, there'd been the pet rock, which I don't know if you ever came across that. Yes, a nearby.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did that turn out? Failed. There we go. We both got the scars. I mean, my body is littered with scars of things, but the great thing about business is you only need to get it right once to create a huge success.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“think not getting sucked into and believing the hype is wonderful to be written about in the press. It's wonderful to win awards, but that is not What a bit successful businesses are built on. It can help, it can give you a little bit of momentum, but you've really got to understand the fundamentals and you've really got to understand the business model and the economics. There's no point creating something extraordinary if you don't know how it's going to monetize and how you're going to create something and sell it for more than you create it for. So you don't need to be profitable from day one. You can build an audience, absolutely, but you do need to know how at some point this is going to become a success. And this is why I think successful businesses are so rare because you do need founders that are creative and they can see the future and where the puck is going. But also have strong commercial instincts and sense and understand margins and how to kind of build economic machine behind their crazy idea.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stealth education helped them learn, play games while being educated, and so that then we change the name to Moshe Monsters because it just sounded a bit more cool and alliterative. So that was the seed of Moshi.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This almighty pivot. And to be fair, and to give my board credit back then, they were like fair enough, Michael, you know, let's do it. You know, there isn't really another option. This, I described it as a final roll of the dice. And they all got on board. And so, yeah, we kind of took a very different new direction and we had some cards, some of the puzzles in Perplex City. We created these little characters called puzzle monsters. And the story of Perplex City was one of the many stories was that it was this world of mystery and puzzles. Parents would tell their kids if they didn't do their homework and their puzzles. The puzzle monsters would get them in the middle of the night. It's quite serious thinking about it now. Terrifying kids giving them nightmares. But I just love this concept. And so we were going to create this new idea, this spin-off called Puzzle Monsters for Kids.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had been thinking of a new idea. It was very different to the current idea. And so this was what I thought was the best thing we should do. We had, as I say, less than a million dollars left. We had two options. We can continue down the path we're on and hit the brick wall and just end. Or we can pivot do this dramatic pivot to this new idea with the cash we've got left and see if we can save the company. And we were going from this very complex, fascinating game perplex city to a kids game. And I tried to explain it to people and there were people shaking their heads and scratching their heads and not knowing what I was talking about. Amazingly a couple of people got it and wanted to stay on. We had to let many people go, many self selected out. It was also quite a stressful board meeting telling my board that we were going to do this.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was and I kept putting it off. That was a horrible thing to do. But one morning I invited the whole team. There was about 25 of us into our conference room, sat everyone down. I was shaking like a leaf. And, you know, these people had believed me. They followed me to this company, this big vision that I'd painted for them all. And I basically just had to say, this is not working. We're running out of cash. We're going to have to stop and kill this game. And it was part way through the second season. And there were just gasps of shock and horror.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This whole thing is going to have to shut down, will be declared bankrupt. I may never be allowed to be a director again. You know, it was quite terrifying. And not almost being paralyzed and frozen with fear, not knowing what to do next. Like, how do I solve this? Who do I speak to about it? I was a sole founder in that business, so it was kind of tricky. I had an amazing COO slash CFO slash everything O Divinia Knowles who worked closely with me. But yeah, I just didn't really know how to solve this conundrum we were in. And it manifested in high blood pressure, sleepless nights, not eating well, just, yeah, all the classic signs of stress and burnout.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So just Sitting there, I still can remember sitting at the office in Battersea just looking at the team kind of working away. Everyone happy and smiling and me staring at my screen knowing where our bank balance was and how fast we were burning money and thinking that in a couple of months.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. So we had a model. So you would buy these trading cards a bit like Pokemon cards. You'd get a random collection of six in a pack for a few pounds. And these puzzles then played into a larger puzzle. There were 256 of them to collect. There were all sorts of hidden clues within them. And we sold a fair few. We made a bit of money, but it was nowhere near enough to cover the costs of this very expensive game we were running. So the economics and the business model didn't make sense. And so, yeah, as I say, we were running out of money fast. I didn't think we'd be able to raise another round. And I was just very stressed, extremely worried about what to do.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About 9 million. Yeah, we raised roughly 10 million and we burnt through almost all of it about nine million. And I was going back to waking up in the middle of the night this time was I was waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat thinking this is not working. This is not right. And the problem was the outside world was saying what a brilliant idea this was. We were winning awards. We were in the press all the time. It looked like we were geniuses, but in reality, deep in my kind of pit of my stomach, I was like, oh my goodness, we are heading towards a cliff very, very fast. And I need to do something urgently.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was found a couple of years later by the very passionate audience and community that was playing this game, but we released clues, we hit clues in classified sections of newspapers, we had skywriting. You'd get messages on your phone. We had helicopters at live events. I mean, it was just this extraordinary experience, very, very expensive to do. And it was called an alternate reality game. Basically, that was Perfect City, and it was probably one of the most creative things I've ever worked on. We had an incredible team and a very passionate audience playing it. Unfortunately, it was one of the most commercially disastrous things I've worked on, and my goodness, I learned some really valuable lessons building that.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That didn't just live online, it lived offline as well, that it would be all around you, it would be you would be a hero in sort of part game, part story, part movie. I'd watched the interesting theme here, watched a movie that I couldn't stop thinking about called The Game with Michael Douglas, where this person doesn't know whether it's real life or a game that they're part of. And I just wanted to bring that to the world. So that was the starting point of Perlik City. We raised some money. We buried a treasure somewhere in the world that was worth a hundred thousand pound reward for the first person. Where is that?”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“perplexity indeed where did that fit Oh wow, all right, this is going back a feral way. The reason why I stepped away from Firebox and the idea that I couldn't stop thinking about was around games. And I've always loved games. You know, I mentioned chess. I love Scrabble and Backgam and video games. I dungeons and dragons created all my own games. But I saw something really interesting happening just after the new millennium. And it was, could the internet revolutionize how we play games? Instead of games being, you know, just you and your mate playing on a Nintendo or whatever, could games be for three or four people or ten people or hundreds? What if games could be played by millions of people? You know, the massively multiplayer online gaming boom that was just getting going there with World of Warcraft and some of the ones coming out of the Far East. So that was what I couldn't stop thinking about. And so perplex city was this idea. What if we could create a game?”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go, and there's nothing quite like that being one of the first players riding a wave in a new market, and it felt like that for calm and meditation and mindfulness. Alex and I were out there paddling in the freezing cold waters waiting for that wave for years, and everyone thought we were a little bit crazy. But we weren't laying the foundations. We were doing the deep work and the research.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really good point. It feels like that if what you're doing is surface level. If what you're responding to is just other companies you're seeing doing well or an article you read last week and you haven't done that deep work, it does feel like urgent and you have to run because the race, the starting gun is already gone. If you do the deep work, you recognize that you can go a little bit slower because the market hasn't fully formed yet. It's almost one great analogy I think is surfing. When you're waiting for that wave, you don't want to be too late, obviously, because everyone's caught the wave and away they go. You don't want to be way, way too early while you're paddling there, you know, in the freezing cold, waiting for the sun to come up because you're freezed to death. You need to be a little bit early where you feel a little bit of the cold and then suddenly the sun comes up and you see that big wave coming and you're ready for it and you catch it and you go.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. It's then a very crisp, very clear idea. Now, the key here is it can change over time, but you start from very strong foundations and then you have that conviction. And that is very magnetic for other people to be around. The first wave of employees, the investors that you bring on board, the journalists that you chat to. So yeah, that's my philosophy, not rushing into new ideas, taking time to let them fully get ready before you move.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With every business left set up is go slow to go fast, do the work up front, spend months, sometimes years researching what it is that you're intrigued about, marinade yourself in this idea, you know, go to the business conferences, read every book you can, the documentaries, speak to people in the space. And a really interesting thing starts to happen. You start connecting these dots, this invisible work that no one else may be aware of, is you finding the magic, finding the secret to this industry, discovering where the opportunity is, where the alpha is. And once you've done that, you get to a point, as you say, whether it's the front of the shelf or whether it's for me, it's the idea that just wakes me up every single night. Let's go. This is it.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very, very, very true. And I think this is a really important point. There's a lot of entrepreneurs, many listening to this podcast, who probably have a great idea. Maybe they've started, maybe they're still thinking about it. And what I think is fascinating about this current moment in time is it's very easy to start a business. You know, there are so many tools out there to use and build upon to get going on day one. There's a lot of investment chasing great deals, and I think that's a positive thing and a negative thing. And I see this. There are too many people that just launch before they fully bake their idea. They haven't built the foundation of the skyscraper they want to build. And so they raise the money, they build the team, but they're being blown around like a paper bag as soon as they get new information. And that's a scary place to be, spinning around once you've got a team, once the clock is ticking, once the investors are on board. What I would strongly urge, and I've done this.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, quite a long way from it. You know, we'd been building the business we hadn't sold any shares, we hadn't taken any money out of the business, we were paying ourselves a very modest salary. And it was a challenging business to run. So we certainly were stable, we were profitable because we kind of had to be, but it certainly wasn't throwing off a lot of cash. But I just felt that I was, there was a new idea that I just couldn't stop thinking about that was waking me up every single night at 4 a.m. And I just felt I had to answer that call. And I certainly didn't want to leave Firebox or Tom or the team in the lurch. So again, we had some very important conversations, as I mentioned. But yeah, I felt I had to go and do something new. And the internet had evolved quite a bit since the first, you know, the web one era. Web2 was just gathering pace. You know, it was not just the read web, it was the read right web.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the entrepreneurial brain had been whirring away. There was a new concept. I was incredibly excited about and I had some very honest and important chats with Tom. And I stepped away and crated mine candy, which was the next big adventure I was about to embark on.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, so this was many years in, the business was going well. We'd built a team, we'd moved from Wales to London. We went to one of the first Tuesday events. I don't know if anyone listening remembers, but we read about this in the Guardian, this networking event where entrepreneurs and investors came together to do deals. And yeah, we were living in this attic in Cardiff and we thought, oh my goodness, we need to be in London, the promised land where the streets are paved with gold. So literally within a few days, we just piled up a van and drove to London and went to this event. And the very first one we went to, we met an investor who we met with him and the team and they invested in the business and we were just like blown away. For many years, got much, much bigger. But after a while, I decided I wanted to try something new.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well everyone is interested in the human angle. You know, if you look at every article about a business, it almost always centers on the human angle, the stories of people using that products, the lives that have been transformed, you know, storytelling is such a powerful way of communicating and connecting with other people. The struggle, the resolution, the transformation at the end. There's an amazing book by Will Storr called The Science of Storytelling, which kind of talks about this in great, great detail. And I think about it with every business I create every time I'm pitching my business to investors or trying to encourage someone to join. So it's a key piece, I think, of the entrepreneurial journey. And so, yeah, we realize that, you know, if we could, instead of putting out press releases saying this is our business and this is how much money it makes and this is our margin.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely. No one wants to see us. But yeah, a little snippet. And suddenly the orders just started to pour in. It was a real goosebump-inducing moment.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, amazingly, it's still going now. I was earlier on. A quarter of a century almost, it's been going, which is mind-boggling to think, an internet company. Think the real kind of tipping point for that business was when we made our own product. So instead of selling other people's products where the margins were just very thin and you could buy from other places, we developed our own IP. And that was a real kind of light bulb moment for me, recognizing that to do anything in business, you've really got to create something yourself, make something that hasn't existed before. So during one of our many board meetings and creator sessions in the pub, Tom and I, Tom and I were watching someone line up to keeler shots across the bar and this turned into a conversation of they look like pawns on a chessboard. You know, what if we could create chess but make it more interesting?”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We certainly weren't in danger of setting any kind of Commerce records, but it just was a very interesting period many months this went on and it just allowed us to kind of sort of test the systems and figure out what was going on and day by day just get a little bit better. And we had an amazing friend called Matt Shone who we also met at university and he would use secret names to order from the site to kind of cheer us up and let us feel that there were people out there buying these products. He only admitted that to us a little bit later, but that kind of”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Order form, then you had to fill it in with all your details. Then you had to write down your credit card details. Then you had to fax that to us using JFAX. I would print it out, type all the details in. We had a PDQ machine from the bank that I would manually type in, and then that would take the money. And then I would put the product once it arrived in a package and send it out. It was incredibly inefficient. And fortunately, we only had about one order a month, so it was”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh boy. Well, this is really interesting because, you know, around this time when we told people we were going to set up a business online, we got a few different reactions. One was that eye rolling people would tell us no one is going to buy anything online. You know, you have to put your credit card in line and, you know, who's going to do that? Far too risky and dangerous. So that was the prevailing wisdom. The second feedback we got was that the only people making money online are kind of porn barons. But we were like, no, we think there's a revolution happening here. We think, look at all the mail order catalogues. Look at the money being made. The internet is a much more efficient way of doing this. And this is long before Shopify, long before Stripe. So Tom was the technical genius. He kind of built a website and we couldn't figure out how to take payments online. So what we had to do was, if you wanted to order anything from our site, you had to find the product you wanted. Then you had to print out.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yeah, we felt that, you know, again, this is the early days of the internet. It was predominantly youngish people who were on it, who were sort of figuring out how to connect. It wasn't the easiest thing in the world. AOL was just kind of getting going. The search engines weren't fully developed. It was a lot more men than women on the internet at this time. And we thought, what if we could sell unusual toys and gadgets and games, kind of quirky stuff? And it was sort of inspired by the innovations catalog and Sharper Image in America. And so that was the idea. And we would find products that we thought were quite cool. We would list them online. And then when someone bought them, we would then go and buy the product from whoever was selling it. Because we didn't have the cash flow to hold anything in stock. And then send it out to the individual. It certainly wasn't.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We connected with each other how we were entertained and Tom was just fascinated by this book as well. So that was kind of that became our Bible to create what was hotbox, which then became Firebox, the gadget, the games, the sort of online retailer.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it was a little bit of crossover, as there usually is kind of thinking about the idea. But once the idea that Tom and I were chatting about just became so all-consuming, that was the moment when we right, let's dive into the unknown, leap out of the aeroplane, and figure this out as we are plummet to Earth and Tom was living just outside of Cardiff, and I remember we were again walking around town, chatting. We went into a bookshop and we saw this book that was called Doing Business on the Internet. And we knew we were both aware Tom did AI and computer science at university. So we knew something was going on in this world. But we clubbed together, we put ten pounds in each to buy this book, which was a lot of money for us, living pretty much hand to mouth. And I just remember reading it and just having my mind blown by what felt like what was coming. This was going to change everything, how we did commerce.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't the world for me. It didn't kind of click. It was great to kind of try on that jacket for size to see what it was like, but it just, it didn't kind of speak to my soul. It just felt a bit false. There was no creativity to it. And so after about six months or so, stepped away from that. And Tom had left to, he was programming breathalizers in Wales, which was quite an entertaining job. He'd have to drink Kansas Stella to calibrate these breathalizers he was working on. They were used by the police. But we both weren't clicking with what we had. And yeah, we'd meet up and talk about business ideas. And the internet was just starting to kind of really gain momentum sort of around 97, 98. And it was during one of our chats in the pub that the light bulb went on and we realized maybe we should leave and set up our own business.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I lived in a little town called Marlowe, and I saw in the newspaper that there was a job ad for a Leithling Company Company Cars. And it said, you will be working with investment banks in London. And I didn't know anyone that worked in the city. I did a geography degree, so I couldn't go in through the front door to get a job in a bank. So I thought this could be my route in. So I got the job and just worked as hard as I could try to get noticed. And I got put on the Goldman Sachs account. And I thought this is amazing. I travel up to London two days a week and got to work in their offices and HR department. And I remember reading the FT and the Economist and when I'd meet the traders, I'd like throw in kind of random tips about things I'd read, hoping I'd get noticed and invited to join the company. Of course, that never happened. And what I've realized was that this probably was...”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, yes. So Tom, who I met at university and I were always talking about business ideas, but when we left university, we both got sensible jobs. You know, we were in debt and needed to make some money. And so my passion at that time was”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It did. I kind of, you know, the beauty about university is you can reinvent yourself and you leave all the kind of perceptions and views that people have of you when you get there and met some amazing friends. And I just decided to kind of lean into everything, join every club, going, chatted to everyone I could. It was a big kind of flip. And some of my best friends now, you know, I met at university during that period.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't describe it as bullied, but I would certainly not class myself as one of the kind of the cool kids sort of on the periphery looking in rather than in the center of everything that was going on.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not really. No, if I'm honest, I was a little bit of a square peg in a round hole at school was quite small for my age and just didn't quite it's hard to describe, it didn't quite click or understand the cool kids and kind of what was going on. I think maybe that sort of forced me to kind of retreat into myself a little bit. I became very passionate about reading, as I mentioned. I kind of went down the path more of a sort of social pursuits rather than going to parties and events. And I was pretty introverted and shy until I got to university.”
2022-01-31 · The Diary of a CEO · Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT