Calm App Founder: From $0 To $2 Billion By Making The World Meditate: Michael Acton Smith
Michael Acton-Smith, founder of the Calm app, shares his entrepreneurial journey, including building and pivoting multiple businesses. He discusses the critical role of curiosity, deep foundational work, and the transformative power of mindfulness and sleep in navigating challenges and achieving success.
Deep Dive Analysis
10 Topic Outline
Michael Acton-Smith's Early Life and Entrepreneurial Traits
Founding Firebox: Early Internet Commerce and Innovation
Lessons from Perplex City: A Creative but Commercial Failure
The Rise and Fall of Moshi Monsters
Personal Burnout and the Genesis of Calm
Overcoming Skepticism and Building Calm's Success
The Importance of Sleep and the Creation of Sleep Stories
Coping with Pandemic Stress and Burnout at Calm
Personal Growth and the Value of Human Connection
The Role of Psychedelics in Mental Health
6 Key Concepts
Entrepreneurial Mindset
This mindset is characterized by intense curiosity and creativity, which enables individuals to connect disparate ideas and innovate. The ultimate validation for these ideas comes from meeting the market and seeing if people resonate with, use, or buy what is created.
Go Slow to Go Fast
This philosophy advises entrepreneurs to dedicate significant time, sometimes months or years, to thoroughly research and immerse themselves in an idea before launching. This deep work builds strong foundations and conviction, allowing for a more stable and directed growth trajectory later on.
Storytelling in Business
Effective storytelling in business focuses on the human angle, including personal struggles, resolutions, and transformations, rather than just financial metrics. This approach helps communicate and connect with people more powerfully, making the business's narrative more engaging and memorable.
Meditation as Mental Gym
Meditation is likened to a mental gym, where consistent practice builds the strength of the mind. This mental exercise enhances awareness and attention, enabling individuals to navigate the constant stimulation of modern life more effectively.
Responding vs. Reacting
Mindfulness cultivates a slight pause between a stimulus and one's action, allowing for a thoughtful response rather than an impulsive reaction. This shift moves individuals from operating primarily from the amygdala to engaging the prefrontal cortex for better planning and perspective.
Story Slope
A narrative structure used for sleep stories, designed to be engaging at the beginning and gradually become more soporific. This helps listeners' brains become absorbed in the story, diverting attention from daily worries and gently guiding them into a state of sleep.
11 Questions Answered
An entrepreneurial mindset is characterized by curiosity, a fascination with diverse subjects, and the ability to connect disparate ideas to foster creativity and innovation, with the market serving as the ultimate validator of these ideas.
In the late 90s, people were largely skeptical of online businesses, believing no one would buy online due to credit card security concerns and that only a niche few were making money in that space.
This philosophy advises entrepreneurs to spend months or even years deeply researching and understanding an idea, building a strong foundation and conviction before rapidly scaling or seeking significant investment, ensuring a clear direction and trajectory.
Perplex City failed because its underlying business model and economics didn't make sense; the revenue generated from selling trading cards was nowhere near enough to cover the high costs of running the complex alternate reality game.
Moshi Monsters struggled due to a platform shift around 2012, as children moved from desktop web-based games to iPads and mobile apps, making it difficult to adapt the game's economics and subscription model to the new mobile-first world.
Meditation helps shift reliance from the amygdala (responsible for reactive responses) to the prefrontal cortex (responsible for planning and perspective), enabling individuals to respond thoughtfully rather than react impulsively to life situations.
The biggest misconception is disrespecting sleep and not recognizing its importance, often treating minimal sleep as a badge of honor, despite its profound impact on mood, creativity, memory, and overall well-being.
One effective strategy is implementing a 'mental health week' where the entire company takes time off simultaneously, allowing employees to truly disconnect and recharge without fear of missing work or calls.
The four foundations for being healthy and looking after oneself are nutrition (what you put into your body), exercise (how you move your body), mind (developing a mental practice like meditation), and sleep (ensuring adequate rest).
Effective communication involves listening more than talking, truly understanding the other person's viewpoint, and using techniques like replaying what they've said to show comprehension and validate their emotions, rather than just preparing a counter-argument.
He believes psychedelics, when combined with therapy in the right set and setting, will play an incredibly important role in solving the global mental health crisis by helping hundreds of millions of lives.
25 Actionable Insights
1. Prioritize Mental Health Universally
Recognize that everyone has mental health, just as they have physical health, and it’s crucial to understand, respect, and learn about our minds for overall well-being and to thrive.
2. Uphold Four Health Foundations
Prioritize nutrition, exercise, mind care (e.g., meditation), and sufficient sleep as the fundamental pillars for personal health and well-being, enabling you to support others and your work.
3. Prioritize Meaningful Relationships
Recognize that building and nurturing strong relationships with family, friends, and partners is ultimately more important than any other life pursuit, including career success.
4. Prioritize Deep Foundational Work
Before launching, invest significant time (months to years) in deep research, immersing yourself in the industry, and connecting dots to build a strong, clear foundation for your idea.
5. Achieve Product-Market Fit Before Scaling
Refrain from aggressive marketing or scaling efforts until you have a clear product-market fit and a deep understanding of your business model, as marketing is gasoline for an existing fire.
6. Implement Digital Detox Routines
Avoid checking emails or social media before bed and first thing in the morning to allow your mind to gently calibrate and prevent immediate overwhelm from the news cycle.
7. Practice Responsive Awareness
Cultivate a slight pause between stimulation and action, allowing awareness to kick in so you can respond thoughtfully rather than reacting impulsively in daily situations.
8. Strengthen Your Mind with Meditation
View meditation as a ‘mental gym’ to build mental strength, improve awareness, and enhance your attention in daily life, effectively upgrading your mental operating system.
9. Cultivate Attention Control
In the 21st century, the ability to consciously decide where, how, and when you put your attention is a highly valuable skill, essential for navigating constant noise and stimulation.
10. Listen to Pain as a Signal
Instead of ignoring or masking pain (mental or physical), lean in and listen to it, recognizing it as an important signal alerting you to an underlying problem that needs attention.
11. Embrace Curiosity for Creativity
Foster curiosity by exploring diverse subjects and connecting disparate ideas, as this mindset is a crucial foundation for entrepreneurial creativity and innovation.
12. Create Unique IP & Storytelling
Develop your own intellectual property and use compelling human-interest stories about struggles, transformations, and impact to generate buzz and connect with an audience.
13. Filter Ideas by Persistence
Only pursue ideas that persistently nag you and wake you up at night, as these indicate strong conviction and potential for deep commitment.
14. Master Business Fundamentals
Don’t be swayed by hype or awards; focus on understanding the core business model and economics, ensuring you can monetize and sell your creation for more than it costs to produce.
15. Build a Supportive Community
Surround yourself with a supportive network of family and friends, especially fellow entrepreneurs, who can provide pep talks and pick you up during times of struggle.
16. Seek Solo Retreats for Clarity
Take solo holidays or retreats to step back from daily pressures, gain perspective, and allow mental fog to clear, which can lead to breakthroughs and new ideas.
17. Practice Active Listening
Apply the ’two ears, one mouth’ principle by listening significantly more than you speak, especially in conversations, to truly understand others’ viewpoints and experiences.
18. Validate Partner’s Perspective
In arguments, pause, listen, and then repeat back what your partner has said to ensure they feel understood, rather than immediately countering their points.
19. Implement Company-Wide Mental Health Breaks
Offer full company-wide mental health weeks or days where everyone can genuinely disconnect and recharge, as this significantly benefits team well-being and productivity.
20. Maintain Calm Leadership
As a leader, strive for stability and avoid getting swept up in the extreme highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey, as teams are drawn to calm and steady guidance.
21. Invest in Inevitable, Skeptical Ideas
Look for opportunities where there’s high skepticism but an underlying sense of inevitability, as these ’non-obvious’ areas can become multi-billion dollar markets.
22. Embrace Failure as Learning
Recognize that business success often comes after multiple failures, as you only need to succeed once to achieve significant impact and learn valuable lessons.
23. Eliminate User Friction Early
To achieve rapid adoption, remove all barriers and friction points for users to engage with your product, even if it means delaying monetization.
24. Establish a Bedtime Routine
Develop a consistent and engaging evening routine, such as listening to a sleep story, to improve sleep quality and solve bedtime problems.
25. Cultivate Empathy with Meditation
Develop a meditation practice to enhance empathy, allowing you to better understand and see the world from others’ perspectives and improve relationships.
8 Key Quotes
One of the most valuable skills in the 21st century is to be able to decide where and how and when we put our attention.
Michael Acton-Smith
The human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe. And yet it doesn't come with an instruction manual.
Michael Acton-Smith
Everyone is interested in the human angle. You know, if, if you look at every article about a business, it almost always centers on, on the human angle, the stories of people using that products, the lives that have been transformed.
Michael Acton-Smith
Don't pour gasoline on the fire until the fire is, is going. You know, the gasoline is, is the marketing, get to product market fit first, kind of don't, don't turn on those afterburners until you really understand your business.
Michael Acton-Smith
Anyone who has a mind has mental health. And some days it's great and some days it's not. Anyone who has a body has physical health. And some days you can run up a mountain and other days you can't get out of bed.
Michael Acton-Smith
Meditation is like going to the mental gym. It's a way of building up the strength of your mind.
Michael Acton-Smith
Nothing in life matters more important than our relationships that we build throughout our life.
Michael Acton-Smith
Michael, you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that ratio.
Michael Acton-Smith's Grandmother
2 Protocols
Foundations for Personal Health and Well-being
Michael Acton-Smith- Nutrition: Pay attention to what you put into your body.
- Exercise: Ensure you move your body regularly.
- Mind: Develop a practice (like meditation) that works for you to take care of your mental state.
- Sleep: Prioritize and ensure you get adequate rest.
Improving Communication in Relationships
Michael Acton-Smith- Listen a lot more than you talk.
- Avoid just waiting to say the next thing; truly hear the other person.
- Respect and understand that people have different viewpoints and life experiences.
- In an argument, pause and let the other person talk without interruption.
- Instead of firing back, replay what they've said to show you understand and validate their emotions.