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solving the global mental health crisis it's a first order problem one in three of us will experience depression or
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anxiety and i realize that this could be one of the biggest opportunities and businesses in the world michael
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acton-smith he's the billionaire founder of the mindful meditation and sleep app
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calm everyone thought we were crazy the bridge between the seed money we raised and getting to a series a took years and
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years and then that was where the point was like we're taking off it's happening never have we been assailed with more
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noise and stimulation from social media to billboards to tv it's coming at us
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constantly one of the most valuable skills in the 21st century is to be able to decide
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where and how and when we put our attention the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and
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yet it doesn't come with an instruction manual quick one can you do me a favor if
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you're listening to this and hit the subscribe button the follow button wherever you're listening to this podcast thank you so much michael acton
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smith he's the billionaire founder of the mindful meditation and sleep app
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calm for the last 10 years michael has been one of the great uk entrepreneurial
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success stories but the really staggering thing about michael's story
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is how many successes he had that turned quickly into failures and honestly how
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he rose time and time and time again from those ashes to rebuild an even more
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successful business most people would give up and you almost wouldn't blame them when you hear what
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michael's been through his most recent success carmap is worth billions and
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billions of dollars and it helps people who are going through hard times or any pain at all reach mindfulness it teaches
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them the importance of slowing down stopping and meditation so one would think
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michael had an easy life and he was the master of his mind but he goes through the same battles as
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everyone else and he describes this last year as the hardest of his entire life
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michael thank you for being so honest on this podcast thank you for your vulnerability because i know this
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conversation is going to help everybody that takes the time to listen to it so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett
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and this is the diary of a ceo i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music]
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michael you've been described in the press as this uh this kind of like entrepreneurial rock star
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character and when i when i read through your story i was surprised and inspired and blown away by
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how early that entrepreneurial bug appeared in your life when you look back at your
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younger years are you able to pinpoint what you were good at the thing that made you different from your peers in terms of
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skill your skill set or talent ah i'm not sure i was very impressively mediocre at
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school like right right in the middle definitely not uh in the top set uh for anything but
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i think i if i had to pin down one characteristic it would probably be curiosity i was just fascinated by
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lots of different things and my dad was a librarian he used to bring books home for me and my sister all the time on all
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sorts of random subjects and i'd just devour them and so i think that kind of
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sparked uh this interest in in different areas of life and i think when you start
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when you're curious um everything becomes interesting in life everyone you chat to every magazine you pick up every
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country you go to and uh you start to kind of connect dots between different things and i think that's a really
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important part of the entrepreneurial mindset that inspires creativity then right
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because if you're if you've got so many dots to pick from you can create new things right exactly yeah so i think you
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know along with curiosity i think uh creativity is uh is part of it as well i
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love ideas i love taking the the random things that are kind of rattling around my head putting them onto a sheet of
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paper playing around with them thinking about them from different angles and then
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taking the best ones and putting them out there in the world and this is the beauty of being an entrepreneur you know
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you can talk about stuff endlessly but only when you meet the market do you find out whether there's any merit to
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your ideas and you can see whether people actually resonate and use or buy or talk about whatever it is that you're
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creating i just love that sales your sister said that uh i had a little story
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she told about you going to car boot sales and being a really remarkable seller when you were younger at car boot
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sales what role is was was that apparent when you're younger that you were you had a talent for selling things
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i don't know if i i've ever thought of myself as a good salesperson i think i get very animated and energized and
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passionate about things i really really believe in which i think is probably a key part of of being good at selling
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things um yeah we used to it was one of the many many uh uh
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endeavors when we were younger going to car boot sales and selling things and trying to match them with the people
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that were walking by so interesting she said that i never knew that did you fit did you fit in
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not really no if i if i'm honest i was a little bit of a um
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a square peg in a round hole at school um was quite small for my age
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and uh just didn't quite it's hard to describe but didn't quite
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click or understand the the cool kids and and kind of what was going on
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i think maybe that sort of forced me to kind of retreat into myself a little bit i became very
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passionate about reading as i mentioned kind of went down the path more of um uh
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sort of social pursuits rather than going to parties and events and i was pretty introverted and and shy uh until
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i got to university were you ever bullied in school did you ever i wouldn't i wouldn't describe it
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as bully but i i would certainly not class myself as one of the kind of um
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the cool kids sort of on the on the periphery looking in rather than uh in the center of everything that was going
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on and then at university that changed somehow it did i kind of you know the beauty about university is you can
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reinvent yourself and and you leave all the kind of uh sort of perceptions and views that people have of you when when
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you get there and uh some met some amazing friends and i just decided to kind of lean into
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everything joined every club going chatted to everyone i could it was a big kind of flip and some of my best friends
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now you know i met uh at university during that period and on that point of um
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identity when you got to university you could you could finally start i guess exploring your who you who you actually are and
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you shed that identity from school shed a lot of the maybe limiting beliefs about
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public perceptions of who you were and um at some point that went on to starting
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firebox later in five years but later on right 1998. exactly yes so um tom who i met at
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university and i uh were always talking about business ideas but when we left university we both got sensible jobs you
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know we were in debt uh and needed to um make some money and so
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my passion at that time was i wanted to become a trader uh in an investment bank
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i'd watch wall street and thought it was the most interesting world ever you know snapping the red
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braces and just kind of buying and selling and dealing and i lived in a little town called
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marlow and i saw in the newspaper that there was a job ad for a
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leasing company uh company cars and it it said you will be working with uh investment banks in london
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and i didn't know anyone that worked in the city um i did a geography degree so there wasn't i couldn't go in through
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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 uh just
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worked as hard as i could try to get noticed and i got put on the goldman sachs account and i thought this is
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amazing i travel up to london two days a week and got to work in their offices and hr department
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and uh i remember reading the ft and the economist and when i'd meet the traders
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i'd like throw in kind of random tips about things i'd read um hoping i'd get noticed and invited to join the company
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of course that that never happened and what i realized was that this probably wasn't
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the world for me it didn't kind of click it was great to kind of try on that uh
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that uh jacket for size to see what it was like but it it just it didn't kind of speak to my soul it
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just felt uh a bit false there was no creativity to it and so um after about six months or so
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uh stepped away from that and tom had left to he was programming breathalyzers
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in wales which was quite an entertaining job he'd have to drink cans of stella to
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calibrate these breathalyzers he was working on they were used by the police um but we both weren't uh we both
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weren't clicking with what we had and yeah we'd meet up and talk about business ideas and the internet was just
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starting to kind of really gain momentum sort of around 97 98 and uh it was
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during one of our chats in the pub that the light bulb went on and we realized that maybe we should leave and set up
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our own business so take me through that journey so you you hand in your resignation at some
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point or do you start while you're still at that company so it was a little bit of crossover as there usually is kind of
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um thinking about the idea but um once the idea that tom and i were chatting about just became so all-consuming that
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was the moment when we like right let's dive into the unknown leap out of the aeroplane and figure this out as we are
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plummet to earth and uh tom was living just outside of cardiff and i remember we were again
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walking around town chatting we went into a bookshop and we saw this book that was called um doing business on the
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internet and we knew we were both aware tom did ai and computer science at university so we knew something was
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going on in this in this world but we clubbed together we put 10 pounds in each to buy this book which was a lot of
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money for us living pretty much hand to mouth and i just remember reading it and just having
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my mind blown by you know what felt like what was coming this was going to change everything how we did commerce how we
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connected with each other how we were entertained and tom was just fascinated by this book as well so that was kind of
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that became our bible to create um what was hotbox which then became firebox the uh the gadget the
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games the sort of uh online retailer and so that was like kind of like an obscure gift
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um gadget online retailer yes yeah we felt that you know again
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this is the early days of the internet it was um predominantly uh
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young youngish people who were on it who were sort of figuring out how to um uh connect it wasn't the easiest thing in
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the world aol was just kind of getting going the search engines weren't fully developed um it was a lot more men than women on
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the internet at this time and we thought what if we could sell unusual toys and gadgets and games kind of quirky stuff
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um and uh it was sort of inspired by the innovations catalog and sharper image in
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america and so that was the idea and we would find products that we thought were quite cool we would list them online
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and then when someone bought them we would then go and buy the product uh from whoever was selling it because we
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didn't have the cash flow to you know hold anything in stock and then um send it out to the individual it
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certainly wasn't amazon next day delivery yeah yeah it was pretty clunky and the payment systems oh boy
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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
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reactions one was that uh eye rolling people would tell us no one is going to buy anything online you know you have to
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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
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the second feedback we got was that the only people making money online are kind of pawn barons uh
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so um but we were like no we think there's a revolution happening here we think look
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at all the mail order catalogs look at the money being made the internet is a much more efficient way of doing this
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and this is long before shopify long before stripe so tom was the technical genius he kind of uh
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built a website and we couldn't figure out how to take payments online so what we had
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to do was um if you wanted to order anything from our site you had to find the product you wanted then you had to
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print out an order form then you had to fill it in with all your details then you had to write down your
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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
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machine from the bank that i would manually type in and then that would uh take the money and then i would put the
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product once it arrived in a package and send it out it was incredibly inefficient and fortunately we only had
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about one order a month so it was uh we certainly um weren't in danger of
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setting any kind of uh commerce records but it it just it was it was a very interesting period many months this went
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on and it just allowed us to kind of sort of test the systems and figure out what was
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going on and day by day just get a little bit better and we had an amazing friend called matt shone we also met at
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university and he would use secret names to order from the site to kind of cheer us up and let us really feel that there
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were people out there buying these products he only admitted that to us a little bit later but that kind of
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kept uh kept our energy and our spirits up as kind of we sat there waiting for orders to come in what was the height of
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that website what was the highest moment well amazingly it's it's still i saw now
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yeah a quarter of a century almost it's been going which is mind-boggling to think
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an inter internet company i think that the real kind of uh tipping point for that business was when we made
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our own products so instead of selling other people's products uh where the margins were just very thin and you
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could buy from other places we developed our own ip and that was a real kind of light bulb moment for me recognizing
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that to do anything in business you've really got to create something yourself you know make
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something that hasn't existed before so during one of our many board meetings and creative sessions in the pub
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tom and i tom and i were um uh watching someone line up tequila shots across the bar
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and this turned into a conversation of um they look like pawns on a chessboard you know what if we could create chess
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but make it more interesting turn it into the drinking person's thinking game and you could have 32 glasses on a board
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and you fill them all with alcohol red wine against white wine or whiskey against vodka if you're very hardcore
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you move the pieces as normal but every time you capture a piece you have to drink it so you could make a queen
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sacrifice which would be like three shots make your opponent very drunk and hopefully kind of uh balance things and
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we just thought this was a really unusual idea and we sent out a press release for it
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to a bunch of magazines we didn't know about pr companies who went into wh smith one day and scribbled down all the
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addresses and the names of the editors and sent this out and the reaction was amazing
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we suddenly had all these magazines wanting to hear about this incredible shot glass chess set and so the other
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light bulb moment there was storytelling you know do something different uh we created this story about these two broke
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ex-students who'd made this game and we were in fhm and loaded and maxim and uh we made the
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local welsh newspaper and we've made it to page three of the sun which was quite
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exciting not the main picture unfortunately no um
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no one wants to see to see us but uh yeah a little snippet and suddenly the orders just started to pour
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in it was uh it was a real goosebump inducing moment and it's so there's two things there i
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want to just touch on the lesson you said you learnt about pr and storytelling i'm guessing that's a lesson that stayed with you
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till today oh boy absolutely and what are the principles of that listen what is what's the principles of storytelling
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for you that you learned done well everyone is interested in the
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human angle you know if if you look at every article about a business it almost
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always centers on on the human angle the stories of people using that products the lives that have been transformed you
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know storytelling is such a powerful way of of of communicating and connecting with other
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people the the the struggle the resolution the transformation at the
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end there's an amazing book by will's store called the science of storytelling which kind of talks about this in great
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great detail and i think about it with every business i create every time i'm pitching my business to investors or
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trying to encourage someone to join so it's a key piece i think of the the entrepreneurial journey
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and so yeah we realized that you know if we could instead of putting out press releases saying this is our business and
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this is how much money it makes and this is our margin you talk about the human angle and
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the story and the struggle and those aspects and it makes it much more interesting
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and at some point you decide to depart from this business yes yes so uh this was many years in the
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business was was going well we'd built a team we'd moved from wales to london
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we went to one of the first first tuesday events i don't know if anyone listening remembers but we read about
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this uh in the guardian this this um networking event where entrepreneurs and and
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investors came together to do deals and yeah we were living in this attic in cardiff and we thought oh my goodness we
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need to be in london the promised land where the streets are paved with gold so literally within a few days we just
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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 uh
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um we met with him and the team and they invested in the business and and we were just like blown away
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so yes five oaks grew for many years got got much much bigger but after a while i decided i i wanted to
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try something new you know the entrepreneurial brain had been whirring away there was a a new concept i was
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incredibly excited about and i had some very honest and uh important chats with tom
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and uh i i stepped away and uh created mind candy which was uh
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the next big adventure i was about to embark on what why why did you step away though so
00:19:02
you're you're saying there that you kind of ran out of love or excitement for the business ultimately were you were you at
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this point personally financially free state and stable or no no quite a a long
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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
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business we were paying ourselves a very modest salary and uh it was a it was a a
00:19:26
challenging business to run so we certainly we were we were stable we were profitable because we kind of had to be
00:19:32
but it certainly wasn't throwing off a lot of cash but i just felt that i was i
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there was a new idea that i just couldn't stop thinking about that was waking me up every single night at 4 am
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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
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lurch so again we had some very important conversations as i mentioned but uh yeah i felt i had to go and do
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something new and the internet had evolved quite a bit since the first you know the web one era web 2 was just
00:20:03
gathering pace you know it was not just the read web it was the read write where people were creating crowd sourcing and
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it just felt like i i had to yeah i had to answer this call that's really interesting you describe it as a call i
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was i was trying to think about a way to um give advice to entrepreneurs that have lots of ideas as all entrepreneurs and
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creatives do um how to filter out the ones worth pursuing and i was i was saying one of
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the things i think i've done over the years in hindsight is there's almost this sunday shelf in my mind where like new ideas come i put them on the sunday
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shelf and if they like nag me and if they stay at the front of the shelf and like steve you know then i'll
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pursue them but if they kind of fade off into the background and collect dust and vanish yeah then i don't pursue them it sounds like you're talking about a
00:20:44
similar mental system where if it nags you long enough you pursue very very very true and i think this is
00:20:51
a really important point there's a lot of entrepreneurs many listening to to this podcast
00:20:57
who probably have a great idea maybe they've started maybe they're still thinking about it and what i think is
00:21:03
fascinating about this current moment in time is it's very easy to start a business you know there are so many
00:21:08
tools out there to use and build upon to get going on day one there's a lot of investment uh chasing
00:21:14
great deals i think that's a positive thing and a negative thing and i see this there are too many people
00:21:21
that just launch before they fully bake their idea they haven't built the foundation of the skyscraper they want
00:21:26
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
00:21:33
they get new information and that's a scary place to be spinning around once you've got a team once the clock is
00:21:38
ticking once the investors are on board what i would strongly urge and i've done this with every business i've set set up
00:21:45
is go slow to go fast do the work up front spend
00:21:50
months sometimes years researching what it is that you're intrigued about marinade yourself in this idea you know
00:21:57
go to the the business conferences read every book you can the documentaries speak to people in the space and a
00:22:03
really interesting thing starts to happen you start connecting these dots this invisible work that no one else may be
00:22:09
aware of is you finding the the magic finding the secret to this industry
00:22:15
discovering whether the the opportunity is where the alpha is and once you've done that you get to a point as you say
00:22:22
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 that's at the point where you're like
00:22:27
right let's go this is it it you can't hold it back any longer and you have those strong foundations to then build
00:22:34
upon going forward and to communicate to the world exactly what you're exactly it's then a very crisp very
00:22:40
clear idea now the key here is it can change over time but um you start from
00:22:46
very strong foundations and and then uh you you have that conviction and that is
00:22:52
very magnetic for other people to be around the first wave of employees the investors that you bring on board the
00:22:58
journalists that you chat to so yeah that's my my philosophy not rushing into new ideas taking taking time to let them
00:23:05
fully fully get ready before before you move the problem entrepreneurs have in their
00:23:10
mind i think i'm thinking people listening to that why don't they heed that really great sound advice is because they always think that there is
00:23:17
a real urgency to the challenge they're trying to solve they see it as they're they're in a 100
00:23:23
meter sprint and they need to go now and go fast which means raise tons of capital and start sprinting yep and it
00:23:30
always feels no matter what industry um people are launching their businesses in whether it's like someone launching
00:23:37
cupcakes on instagram in the pandemic because sourdough exploded they think it's now or never what would
00:23:44
you say to that yeah it's a really good point it it feels like that if what
00:23:49
you're doing is surface level if what you're responding to is
00:23:55
just other companies you're seeing doing well or an article you read last week and you haven't done that deep work it
00:24:01
does feel like urgent and you have to run because the race the starting gun is already gone if you do the deep work
00:24:07
you recognize that you can go a little bit slower because the market hasn't fully formed yet it's almost one great
00:24:15
analogy i think is surfing when you're waiting for that wave you don't want to be too late obviously
00:24:20
because everyone's caught the wave and away they go and you don't want to be way way too early
00:24:25
while you're paddling there you know in the freezing cold waiting for the sun to come up because you'll freeze to death
00:24:31
you need to be a little bit early um where you feel a little bit of the cold and then suddenly the sun comes up and
00:24:36
you see that big wave coming and you're ready for it and you catch it and whoo you go and there's nothing quite like
00:24:42
that being one of the first players riding a wave in a new market and it felt like that for calm and you know
00:24:48
meditation and mindfulness alex and i were out there paddling in the freezing cold waters waiting for that wave for
00:24:54
years and everyone thought we were a little bit crazy um but we weren't laying the foundations we were doing the
00:25:00
the deep work and the research and then uh we were ready when that wave hit quick one at this time of year we always
00:25:07
see a huge spike in the amount of people that are buying huel and joining the huligan camp i guess um and i think that
00:25:14
speaks to the role that he plays in my life but also the role it plays to a lot of people's lives which was as we start to get a little bit busier typically we
00:25:20
fall into the trap of going for convenience food and convenience food for a lot of us means like junk food or
00:25:27
lots of sugary stuff whereas huel kind of safeguards us in that part of our lives it's completely nutritionally
00:25:32
complete as you'll know from listening to this podcast and i say it every single time i've had more tags on instagram of people joining huel in the
00:25:39
last i'd say a couple of weeks of january that i have in the whole last quarter of the year so if there was a
00:25:45
time where you're thinking about giving it a shot here's my recommendation try the salted caramel flavor that's my personal favorite we all have different
00:25:52
preferences the banana flavor i absolutely adore i love the cinnamon swell flavor and also the protein powder
00:25:57
the salted caramel flavor again that sits on top of my fridge over there is um incredibly useful if you are working
00:26:03
out and you're trying to get high levels of protein into your body give it a go tag me on instagram let me know what you
00:26:08
think and come and become a hue again with me so after firebox you you went on to mine
00:26:14
candy yes main candy yeah and perplex city perplex city
00:26:21
oh wow all right this is going back uh back a feral way the reason why i
00:26:26
stepped away from from firebox and the idea that i couldn't stop thinking about was around games and i've always loved
00:26:33
games you know i mentioned chess i love scrabble and backgammon video games like dungeons and dragons created all my own
00:26:38
games but i saw something really interesting happening just after the the new millennium
00:26:44
and it was could the internet revolutionize how we play games instead of games being you know uh just you and
00:26:51
your mate playing on a nintendo or or whatever could games be
00:26:57
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
00:27:04
boom that that was just getting going there with world of warcraft and some of the ones coming out of the far east so
00:27:09
that was what i i couldn't stop thinking about and so perplex city was this idea what if we could create a game that
00:27:16
didn't just live online it lived offline as well that it would it would be all around you it would be you would be a
00:27:22
hero in sort of part game part story part movie um i'd watched uh the
00:27:29
interesting theme here watched a movie that i couldn't stop thinking about called the game with michael douglas
00:27:34
where this person doesn't know whether it's real life or a game that they're part of
00:27:39
and i just wanted to to bring that to the world so that was the starting point of public city um we raised some money
00:27:46
we buried a treasure somewhere in the world that was worth a hundred thousand pound reward for the first person
00:27:54
it was found a couple of years later um by the very passion audience and community that was playing this game but
00:28:01
we released clues uh we had clues in classified sections of newspapers we had sky writing uh we
00:28:08
um you'd get messages on your phone uh it was that we had helicopters at live
00:28:14
events i mean it was just this extraordinary experience very very expensive to do and it was called an alternate reality
00:28:21
game uh and so basically that was uh perfect city and
00:28:26
it was probably one of the most creative things i've ever worked on we had an incredible team and a very passionate
00:28:32
audience playing it unfortunately it was one of the most commercially disastrous
00:28:37
things i've worked on and my goodness i learned some really valuable lessons building that
00:28:43
so i read that it cost nine million dollars about nine million yeah we raised um roughly 10 million and we
00:28:50
burnt through almost all of it about nine million and uh i was going back to waking up in
00:28:56
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
00:29:01
not working this is not right and the problem was the outside world was saying what a
00:29:07
brilliant idea this was we were winning awards we were in the press all the time it looked like we were geniuses but in
00:29:13
reality deep in my kind of pit of my stomach i was like oh my goodness we are heading
00:29:18
towards a cliff very very fast and uh i need to do something urgently because you hadn't figured out the underlying
00:29:25
business model correct so we had a model so you would buy these trading cards but
00:29:30
like pokemon cards you'd get a random collection of six in a pack for a few pounds and uh these puzzles then played
00:29:37
into a larger puzzle there were 256 of them to collect there were all sorts of hidden clues within them
00:29:44
and we sold a fair few we made a bit of money but it was nowhere near enough to
00:29:49
cover the costs of this very expensive game we were running so the just the the economics and the business business
00:29:54
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
00:30:00
able to raise another round and i was just very stressed extremely worried about what uh what to do
00:30:06
when you say so two points when i pick up on that when you say i was extremely stressed give me a clear picture of what
00:30:11
that means in real terms on a day-to-day basis so
00:30:16
just sitting there i still can remember sitting at the office in battersea just looking at the
00:30:23
the team kind of working away um everyone happy and smiling and me staring at my screen
00:30:30
knowing where our bank balance was and how fast we were burning money and thinking that in a couple of months this
00:30:36
whole thing is going to be have to shut down will be declared bankrupt i may never be allowed to be a director again
00:30:42
you know it was quite terrifying and not almost being paralyzed and frozen with fear not knowing what to do
00:30:48
next like how do i solve this who do i speak to about it um i was the sole founder in that business so it was kind
00:30:54
of tricky i had an amazing co cfo slash ever see everything er davinia
00:31:02
knowles who worked closely with me but um yeah i just didn't really know how to
00:31:07
solve this conundrum we were in and it manifested in high blood pressure sleepless nights uh
00:31:15
not eating well um just yeah all the classic signs of um stress and and burnout
00:31:22
and was there a day where you had to make that tough decision to wind the company down and to bring it to an end and how was that what was that moment
00:31:29
like there was and i kept putting it off uh you know that was a horrible thing to do but
00:31:34
one morning i um invited the whole team there's about 25 of us into our conference room sat everyone down i was
00:31:41
shaking like a leaf um and uh you know these people had believed me they'd followed me to this
00:31:48
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
00:31:54
out of cash we're gonna have to stop and kill this game and it was part way through the second season and there were
00:32:00
just gasps of shock and horror and um
00:32:07
i had been thinking of a new idea so it was very different to the current
00:32:13
idea and so this was what i thought was the best thing we should do we had as i say less than a million
00:32:19
dollars left we had two options we can continue down the path we're on and hit the brick wall and just end
00:32:26
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
00:32:34
and uh we were going from this very complex fascinating um game perplex city
00:32:39
to a kids game and i tried to explain it to people and there were there were
00:32:46
people shaking their heads and scratching their heads and not knowing what i was talking about
00:32:51
amazingly a couple of people got it and wanted to stay on we had to let many people go many self-selected out um it
00:32:58
was also quite a stressful board meeting uh telling my board that we were gonna do this almighty pivot
00:33:04
and to be fair and to give my board credit back then they were like
00:33:09
fair enough michael you know we we let's do it you know there there isn't really another option
00:33:15
this i described it as a final roll of the dice and uh they all got on board
00:33:20
and so yeah we kind of took a very different new direction and we had some cards some some of the
00:33:27
puzzles in perplex city um we created these little characters called puzzle monsters and the story of
00:33:33
perplex city was one of the many stories was that um uh it was this world of mystery and
00:33:38
puzzles parents would tell their kids if they didn't do their homework and their puzzles the puzzle monsters would get
00:33:44
them in the middle of the night it's quite quite serious thinking about it now terrifying kids giving them nightmares but i just love this concept
00:33:52
and and so we were going to create this new idea this spin-off called puzzle monsters for kids stealth education help
00:33:58
them learn play games while being educated and so that then
00:34:04
we changed the name to moshi monsters because it just sounded a bit more cool alliterative so that was the seed
00:34:10
of of moshi as you look back on public city in that journey
00:34:16
that strikes me as your first real probably significant business fail failing to some degree where you you
00:34:22
have people's jobs and careers on the line and you have capital a high big amount of capital on the line what are
00:34:28
the top line lessons where you reflect in your when you're on your own and you think i'll never do that again i'll
00:34:33
never do that thing again and this is the key lesson that i'm gonna keep with me for the rest of my life
00:34:39
i think not getting sucked into and believing the hype
00:34:44
it's wonderful to be written about in in the press uh it's wonderful to win awards but you know that is not what a
00:34:51
bit successful business is built on it can help it can give you a little bit of momentum but
00:34:56
you've really got to um understand the fundamentals and you've really got to understand the business model and the
00:35:02
economics there's no point creating something extraordinary if you don't know how it's going to uh monetize and
00:35:08
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
00:35:14
day one you can build an audience absolutely but you do need to know how at some point this is going to uh become a
00:35:20
successful business and this is why i think successful businesses are so rare because you do need founders that are
00:35:26
that are creative and they can see the future and where the puck is going but also have strong commercial instincts
00:35:33
and sense and you know understand margins and how to kind of build the economic machine behind their crazy idea
00:35:41
such a good point and i think i wish someone had said that to me when i started my first business wall park when i dropped out because i think i thought
00:35:48
people clapping and me being on news night and like being in the press as this 18 year old entrepreneur was
00:35:53
validation of my business so i pursue so i got more romantic about my failing hypothesis whereas really
00:36:00
the clapping and the press is validation of an interesting story there you go not very well
00:36:06
do you know what i mean so yep how did that turn out failed
00:36:12
we go we both we've both got the scars i mean my body is littered with scars of things but the great thing about
00:36:18
business is you only need to get it right once to create a huge success um i i was well aware of what she monsters
00:36:25
for a variety of different reasons um tell me about the the the growth and trajectory at the start of that i heard
00:36:31
it was very slow for the first sort of two years 18 months it was yeah you know everyone thinks businesses that are
00:36:36
successful just happen overnight they don't there's a lot of grind and hustle getting to that
00:36:42
point um but you know the idea felt very strong this uh the the idea of creating
00:36:49
these little monsters that would live online that kids could adopt and look after and um i didn't know much about
00:36:55
the kids entertainment space but i'd seen tamagotchi a few years before and i thought wow what a business tens of
00:37:02
millions of those little beeping characters were sold i thought there's something here could we take that
00:37:08
concept and before that they'd been the pet rock which i don't know if you ever came across that yes
00:37:14
and near pets neopets was another great great business i think there's something kids in fact
00:37:19
most of us love nurturing and looking after things and so i thought in the era of flash and uh the the wep could we
00:37:26
create these little monsters and so that was the idea we didn't really know how we were gonna monetize it and
00:37:32
um we decided uh to create these little phone charms that we
00:37:37
would sell in shops and you bought a phone charm for about 10 pounds and then
00:37:42
inside would be a code that you type into our website to adopt your monster disastrous idea i think we've still got
00:37:49
thousands of these phone charms sitting in a warehouse somewhere and it was just too much friction it was just too
00:37:56
too many steps too complicated um and so after about a year of trying to make
00:38:01
that work we decided you know what let's just make it free forget the physical product forget trying to monetize it at the
00:38:07
start any child could come along and just adopt a monster give it a name
00:38:12
start kind of um tickling it and feeding it and customizing its room
00:38:18
and instantly it was just like wow that was the the trigger point took away all the friction and we were away so suddenly we
00:38:27
went from one or two signups a day to dozens of sign ups a day then hundreds of sign ups a day then
00:38:33
thousands um i think you know our peak days were over a hundred thousand
00:38:38
um children around the world were adopting a monster it was it was it was
00:38:44
breathtaking so the business rose right and then obviously there was uh it struggled yeah because of the world
00:38:50
changed that's the understatement okay tell me about that well we thought we could do no wrong we
00:38:58
were now just the usual curve of slow growth and then rocket ship and
00:39:03
we thought ah we were going to be the next disney and we had opportunities to sell the
00:39:09
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
00:39:14
uh and everything was just compounding almost everything we did seemed to just get bigger and bigger
00:39:21
until it suddenly didn't and the summer of 2012 was when things
00:39:26
just suddenly stopped and i was like one earth is going on sure this is probably just an aberration and we thought oh
00:39:33
it's because it's a hot summer or because of xyz you know you kind of make excuses
00:39:38
but what what had happened was that there was a shift a platform shift taking place and
00:39:45
kids were moving from uh using the web as their primary place of kind of playing games desktop yeah
00:39:52
desktop web playing moshi or club penguin or stardoll or neopets or all these other games
00:39:58
to ipads and the mobile revolution and we kind of had our head in the sand for a
00:40:03
little bit and thought you know this this isn't really going to take off in a huge way and then we started to lean
00:40:09
into it and figure out how we could adapt moshi for this new world but it was very very difficult and
00:40:16
they're just the the economics and the way kids would play with devices and and
00:40:21
it was much harder to create a monthly subscription service it just started to unravel and as fast as we'd grown the
00:40:28
revenue started to come down and kids were playing all these new free games uh
00:40:33
through the app store and we yeah spent several years trying to kind
00:40:39
of write the the ship and keep things going but um weren't weren't able to sadly so that was a an incredibly
00:40:45
stressful uh period as well another stressful period another there's been quite a few it's why i've got so
00:40:51
many gray hairs but uh again learned learnt a lot during that period but that was uh that was a tough time tough times
00:40:57
in letting people go having to scale down the business trying to find new product market fear and yeah on a personal level what was
00:41:04
because i mean that is an even higher high to come down from right in terms of
00:41:10
your identity is like intrinsically connected to this company and
00:41:16
i've been there where when your company falls it's like your self
00:41:21
self-esteem is falling with it or your self-worth or your you know your identity is falling with it because you're intrinsically connected tell me
00:41:27
about that so true yeah that that was exactly it you know when when things are going well you
00:41:34
it's a great thing you feel wonderful and the the tricky thing was that um
00:41:40
it was the flip that i think was so uh stressful the flip from being i was
00:41:46
sort of one of the the poster boys celebrities yeah in shoreditch i was on the front cover of um wired magazine uh
00:41:52
the press were just writing about us and me in glowing terms all the time i just thought i could do no wrong and
00:41:59
again the ego just got out of control and then to have that flip to suddenly be running a business that was falling
00:42:05
apart we did five rounds of layoffs uh so difficult for again the team that had
00:42:10
followed me and joined this business having to to be let go revenues started collapsing board meetings became very
00:42:16
stressful press started writing negative articles it was really really really tough and as you say you know like like
00:42:23
you mentioned my ego my worth myself was just so entwined
00:42:28
with my business and now the business was failing i was a failure and and worthless and so it was a really really
00:42:35
difficult time and that lasted for years how did you cope with that
00:42:41
um i'm lucky in that i have a a very supportive family and i have some great
00:42:48
friends who are also entrepreneurs and we've kind of all we've all had successes and failures and
00:42:55
at one point some of us are doing well and some are not so we kind of pick each other up and and uh give each other
00:43:01
important pep talks so i think having that community uh was very very helpful
00:43:06
but you know i i wasn't when you're struggling like that again
00:43:12
you create these vicious circles so you don't sleep very well and you wake up the next day just more tired than you
00:43:18
were when you went to bed and you're irritable and your body is filled with cortisol and adrenaline and
00:43:24
you don't eat well and put nutritious food in your body and you forget to exercise so yeah all these negative
00:43:30
things start compounding i was in a pretty uh bad state but to put things in perspective again i
00:43:36
i did try and kind of be realistic that there were people in the world going through much trickier things than their
00:43:42
business falling apart but when it's you and you built your whole self-worth around it it feels like everything is
00:43:47
falling apart and the world is ending there's two questions i wanted to ask you which was about when you're going
00:43:52
through those stressful moments and at a time when men in particular didn't really understand the concept of
00:43:58
mental health did you find yourself turning to escape source medicate like
00:44:03
medicating yourself with some kind of escape and the secondary question was about the topic of mental health broadly
00:44:09
when did you discover that it was a thing so wow yeah i am
00:44:16
i think when we are struggling in life we instead of addressing the issue uh we
00:44:22
mask it don't we we seek things that avoid whatever the challenge is and for
00:44:28
some people it's drugs for some people it's alcohol for me i just i became distant from the business i i just
00:44:34
couldn't face going into the office every day i take myself off to coffee shops i suppose caffeine is is
00:44:40
not a serious uh kind of drug as some some other ones but um i also used to take um
00:44:46
uh painkillers every morning just because i woke up with such a headache and my body ate i felt like i was hit by
00:44:52
a truck every morning so these painkillers would kind of help me get started in the day
00:44:58
it was a very tricky time so not addressing the fundamental issues with the business or trying to but not
00:45:04
doing a very good job for me this is what led to calm because i could see it so clearly having been
00:45:11
through it you know one of the best businesses to ever set up is one where you're scratching your own itch and you
00:45:16
understood and i didn't know what meditation was or mindfulness but my very dear friend alex chu had been
00:45:23
meditating with cd-roms he bought when he was a teenager very unusual teenager and he would often say to me look dude
00:45:30
you need to to try meditation and i'd be like you need to try effing off
00:45:36
that's the last thing i need look um give me something practical but slowly but surely that the penny started to
00:45:44
drop and i kind of got it and the key breakthrough for me was when i did something i'd never done before i took
00:45:50
myself off on a solo holiday i went away to the austrian alps to this
00:45:56
kind of um resort where i played tennis in the morning i scribbled in my notebook i read books
00:46:02
and i i started to try to meditate because i'd heard about it and uh it was just incredible the fog
00:46:09
started to clear i'd been had my face pushed up against the the cliff and couldn't see a way out of this problem
00:46:17
that i was facing with my business and just taking a step back and getting perspective was hugely valuable and i
00:46:22
read a bunch of books and research papers and i realized that you know this is science mindfulness is
00:46:29
a way of rewiring the human brain what if we could make this simple and
00:46:34
relatable and accessible to everyone this could be one of the biggest opportunities and businesses in the world
00:46:39
and i came back i remember chatting to alex about it and he was like right dude you finally get it let's go
00:46:45
because he'd been he kind of knew this and this was all around the the time where we'd been talking about um
00:46:51
creating a new business um he found a person that owned calm.com the
00:46:57
domain and i remember we were playing video games in our house in soho and he said this domain calm.com is available
00:47:02
and i said oh my god what a great domain what a business we could build there helping the world become more calm
00:47:08
and i said how much is the domain and he said um it's about a million pounds and i said right
00:47:14
[ __ ] off yeah we don't have money uh to uh to buy that but about a year later we're
00:47:19
playing video games again uh a consistent theme here and he said the guy that has calm.com
00:47:25
wants to to sell it and he's willing to to do a deal we were able to buy it for much much less idea mark this money to
00:47:31
put a deposit down on a house um but thoughtbuyingcalm.com might be a more sensible thing to do even though my
00:47:37
parents and i thought it was the silliest idea uh but um yeah so we bought calm.com and that was uh that was
00:47:44
kind of the starting acorn that was planted for that business so here is where
00:47:50
mine and alex's paths kind across so i had left my company wallpark when i described there um and this was in the
00:47:57
transition of me starting social change so i knew i had this thesis about social media i moved out to san francisco to work at a place called monkey inferno
00:48:04
and i was helping them with growth using social media i still had like millions and millions of followers online maybe
00:48:10
10 20 30 million followers across multiple facebook instagram like twitter pages whatever
00:48:15
and i was helping them scale their products using social media and as i landed
00:48:20
um sean who is the ceo there said to me oh kid just left called alex he said he's gone to do this meditation
00:48:27
app and i swear to god i thought what a [ __ ] hippie i thought like what i
00:48:32
thought what uh what a weird guy he left here to go do med because at the time it's different now at the time
00:48:40
meditation was like hippy hocus pocus nonsense yeah i
00:48:45
remember thinking it was how i feel now do you know what you want you weren't the only person
00:48:50
people would back away from us at parties when we said we were building a meditation company and uh
00:48:56
it was um and i remember other people like thinking i'd had a nervous breakdown because of my previous business and now
00:49:01
i was setting up a meditation company oh good good luck with your non-profit mate
00:49:07
with all the healing and like wearing he had such negative connotations for something that
00:49:12
is so valuable and transformational it's extraordinary as an entrepreneur you look for those moments and we both felt
00:49:18
society was going to shift we didn't think it would take as long as it did but we felt there was change coming the
00:49:24
actual story um about how i felt when sean told me that and then watching what that company
00:49:30
became this multi-billion dollar just business that everybody knows that everyone that i know speaks to has
00:49:36
taught me a very profound lesson about life which is when you play at that kind of like intersection of disbelief
00:49:42
and belief where you're like again i the analogy i use is the wave coming into shore like you guys were really early
00:49:49
with the surfboard and you were betting on that wave coming into shore and ever so now i look for i want to play in
00:49:55
spaces where there's high levels of skepticism but i feel like it's inevitable yep and i always think about that converse that
00:50:02
when i always think about calm because i was a skeptic the wave came in and i was
00:50:07
like wildly wrong and i just wish i'd left with alex i think you've done
00:50:13
quite all right there's multiple multiple routes to huge success but that's so interesting you said that yeah
00:50:18
it i'm thinking back now to again that time when it was so non-obvious i remember the
00:50:25
number of meetings we had with investors where they were like well this is so niche you can get meditations for free
00:50:30
on youtube and and if no one is going to pay for this and mental health is something that
00:50:36
isn't talked about mental health has stigma around it how on earth are you going to build a business and get people
00:50:41
to talk about the mental health and we're like no the world is changing this is important what is more important than
00:50:46
our minds look at all the people suffering all the clinical depression the anxiety the ptsd surely at some
00:50:53
point we're gonna wake up to this and the the penny will flip and the light bulb will go on in society again
00:51:00
it took years but eventually uh it happened and now thank goodness we get it you know if people often say that
00:51:08
there's a an often quoted stat that one in four people will suffer from mental health issues in their life it's not one
00:51:15
in four it's one in one anyone who has a mind has mental health
00:51:20
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
00:51:25
run up a mountain and other days you can't get out of bed and we have to understand this and we have
00:51:33
to respect and learn about our minds because there is nothing more important
00:51:38
solving the global mental health crisis which is the mission of calm i think is one of the most important
00:51:44
challenges in the world it's a first order problem because if we can end all this unnecessary
00:51:52
suffering if people can become masters of their mind instead of controlled by their minds
00:51:58
everything starts to change you know we can start to tackle the climate change and inequality and
00:52:05
racism and homelessness and all these other problems that stem from people having healthy
00:52:11
minds with greater resilience and empathy and compassion and gratitude so yeah it's uh it i get very passionate
00:52:18
about this as alex and the team do but we think it's a very important mission that we're working on
00:52:23
i agree thank you i can't think of a more important one other than maybe climate change but you know survival and
00:52:29
happiness seem like the two fundamentals i mean happiness is maybe not the right word but um survival and um
00:52:36
enjoying life so like making sure we have life and then enjoying the life we do have it feels like that must be the
00:52:41
two sort of foundational challenges and opportunities of our time exactly
00:52:47
helping people not just survive but to thrive in life and why not
00:52:52
and the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe you know 90
00:52:57
billion euro neurons trillions of connections between them and yet it doesn't come with an instruction manual
00:53:05
we're not taught this in schools or we certainly weren't when we were growing up it's starting to change thank goodness but we're just
00:53:12
left to get on with life and no wonder there's so much suffering and unhappiness and
00:53:18
and uh mental health issues and it doesn't need to be that way and i
00:53:23
think meditation and mindfulness is it's almost like a way of um upgrading your
00:53:29
os your your mind it enables you to to see and the world differently and to
00:53:35
think differently and it's not a silver bullet but it's a it's an important starting point to then build upon
00:53:42
it's a great way to upgrade your operating system you said so how does that work from a neuroscience perspective how is
00:53:48
it upgrading my os what's happening well so this is this can get quite
00:53:55
complex but at a sort of basic level uh the amygdala
00:54:02
the amygdala is the oldest part of our brain and most people operate from there
00:54:08
and in very very simple terms what building a meditation practice and becoming more mindful does is it changes
00:54:16
our our reliance from the amygdala to more prefrontal cortex thinking where we're
00:54:23
able to to plan a little bit more to think into the future to put things into perspective
00:54:29
one way of thinking about it and a real kind of key moment for me as i developed my meditation practice
00:54:35
was i now respond to situations in life instead of
00:54:41
reacting and that seems like what is he talking about but when you stop and think about it it's we have so much stimulation in
00:54:48
life so many things happen and most of us react you know your first thought someone cuts you up in traffic you honk
00:54:54
your horn your partner says something slightly passive-aggressive you snap straight back at them into a big
00:54:59
argument what if there was a slight pause a fraction of a second where
00:55:05
you held and you thought and you kicked in you your awareness enabled you to
00:55:10
respond to that stimulation rather than reacting another is you know a good analogy is
00:55:16
going to the gym we talked about the physical and and the mental and our minds and our bodies are very
00:55:22
interconnected but we go to the gym and we lift weights and that that resistance builds up the
00:55:28
the muscle the the strength um in our body meditation is like going to the mental
00:55:33
gym it's a way of building up the strength of your mind it enables us in everyday life to be
00:55:40
more aware to improve our attention and my goodness we need that muscle
00:55:46
of attention in this modern age because never have we been assailed with more noise and stimulation from
00:55:54
social media to billboards to tv it's coming at us constantly and one of the
00:56:00
most valuable skills in the 21st century is to be able to decide where and how
00:56:05
and when we put our attention that is a dying art it is are you optimistic about our
00:56:12
ability to correct course
00:56:17
this is a this is a big question i am optimistic i'm very very glass half full person and
00:56:24
i do despite the many many challenges we see in the world it feels like the world
00:56:30
isn't inflamed and in crisis if we listen to the news and we look at traditional media i think
00:56:36
the world is actually getting better in many many different ways you know there's a wonderful book factfulness
00:56:41
which talks about the data of how the world is getting better as i say it doesn't always seem it so i am
00:56:46
optimistic and i'm optimistic also because we're seeing this incredible shift in
00:56:52
society where people are taking more care of their minds that it is okay to be vulnerable and to talk about your
00:56:58
mental health to your partner to your friends to your boss can you believe that a few years ago the idea of asking
00:57:05
your boss for a mental health day off or or saying you're crazy it would be great you'd probably got fired yeah and now
00:57:12
not all companies but but most companies are starting to recognize how important that is and i think that is fantastic
00:57:19
for society the trajectory of calm has been just phenomenal um was there a
00:57:24
tipping point as such was there a moment where you thought oh my god this is actually going to work
00:57:30
and also conversely was there a moment where you thought no so when we were out there on our
00:57:35
surfboards and it was freezing cold and everyone thought we were mad waiting for that wave to come
00:57:40
yeah we did feel as if this this wasn't working alex and i had some very kind of difficult stressful conversations
00:57:47
wondering how many more years we need to wait um and we couldn't we found it very
00:57:52
difficult to raise money we were able to get some seed money in the early days but the bridge between the seed money we
00:57:59
raised and getting to a series a took years and years and we had no choice to
00:58:06
make the business profitable we had to have an incredibly lean team there was only about six or seven of us for for a
00:58:12
long time and we're running out of money and i remember i think this is around sort of 2015 we had to get very creative
00:58:19
with how we kept the lights on in the business and i gave a talk um
00:58:24
and there was a lady in the audience uh vinisha from penguin and she emailed me afterwards and said
00:58:30
your story is fascinating could we make a book about calm and i was like um well it's not really core it's not our
00:58:37
key focus at the moment but okay could we talk about in advance and literally our cash amounts were
00:58:44
dwindling and um she said sure and the money that came in from that offer um
00:58:50
kept the business going so a very unusual way to to keep the lights on at a startup so
00:58:55
we're very grateful to to vanessa and the penguin team and then we had a subscription business model so uh we put
00:59:02
the price up from 10 a year to 40 a year which was a key tipping point because we
00:59:07
didn't see any drop off in sign ups which was just amazing so we started to
00:59:12
make more money we realized this service that we were offering these meditations were valuable for people they were
00:59:18
really getting something out of it and then that was where the point was like hang on a minute
00:59:23
we're taking off it's going it's happening that was then you shift from kind of
00:59:28
uh the ice cold uh winter to just holding on to the rocket ship for dear life trying to stay on the surfboard
00:59:34
exactly yeah mixing metaphors there but yeah the rocket ship surfboard was was a way yeah okay
00:59:40
and then that it presents a whole another set of challenges you've got to hire people you've got to raise more money scale up
00:59:47
how is that for you we were we were underway there and um again the business was starting it was
00:59:53
an extraordinary place to be because we were bringing a lot of um downloads and
00:59:58
we were generating a lot of revenue i think we got to about 8 million downloads before spending any money on marketing and this is an important
01:00:04
lesson that i that i always say to entrepreneurs don't pour gasoline on the fire until the fire
01:00:12
is is going you know the gasoline is the marketing get to product market fit first kind of
01:00:18
don't don't turn on those afterburners until you really understand your business and we did we knew we had something it was a
01:00:25
way we were really really roaring and so a lady joined us called dunn uh who's
01:00:30
just brilliant at user acquisition and she understood facebook marketing inside out and that was the kind of the next
01:00:37
sort of uh piece of the puzzle that really started to take the business to the next level
01:00:43
and when i looked at the app store you now have the word sleep in the title as well of calm so it started with predominantly
01:00:49
meditation and now you've kind of branched out into sleep and i'm sure that's just another step in many steps
01:00:55
so sleep why is sleep important where does that fit yeah well we'd seen something interesting in the data about
01:01:02
11 o'clock every night all around the world we saw this big spike in usage and
01:01:07
we realized that people were listening to tamara's voice to help them fall asleep and we were like what don't do
01:01:13
that that's not what i am that's not how you meditate and uh we were like well hang on maybe there's something here and
01:01:20
so that led to sleep stories we took this age-old
01:01:26
thing of a bedtime story which we all love um and we kind of modernized it and we
01:01:32
created a sleep story and it's a mix of a beautiful soothing voice with sound effects
01:01:38
with music and it starts in a really sort of interesting engaging way and then gradually becomes more soporific so
01:01:45
instead of your traditional three-arc uh structure of a story we call it a story
01:01:50
slope um chris who runs our sleep stories kind of uh has pioneered this and so before you
01:01:56
know it you're listening your brain is engaged instead of wondering about your to-do list or what someone said to you
01:02:02
at work that day you're engaged in the story and then before you know it we've taken you into uh a state where you're
01:02:08
half awake half asleep that liminal mode and then you're fast asleep and very few people get to hear the end of the story
01:02:14
and this was just huge hundreds of millions of them have been listened to we've had massive
01:02:19
amounts of press lots of celebrities have reached out to us wanting to read them and uh
01:02:24
the final thing i'll say on this is the great thing about sleep is what a market
01:02:30
7.8 billion people go to sleep every single night of their life or try or try
01:02:36
exactly um so if you can create something new if you can create a new habit around bedtime if you can make
01:02:42
your evening routine a little more interesting and entertaining um and help solve a problem oh my goodness you can
01:02:49
build something huge and that's what sleep stories has been for calm so that was the next massive massive growth
01:02:54
area there's a lot of misconceptions around sleep and insomnia and i've seen you talk about some of
01:03:01
them online what are some of the big misconceptions that you've discovered during your work with sleep and insomnia
01:03:08
that people tend to believe about sleep that are most harmful or least conducive with being a successful sleeper
01:03:14
well sleep has gone through a similar kind of metamorphosis in society as
01:03:20
mindfulness has you know just a few years ago uh it used to be a badge of honor to show off how little sleep you got
01:03:27
for something we spent a third of our life doing people gave it very little thought and and respect
01:03:33
and uh that shifted you know matthew walker's book why we sleep has has played a huge part in that
01:03:39
hopefully karma's has played some part of that as well so i think the biggest thing is people just recognizing how
01:03:47
important it is everyone needs a sort of different amount of sleep depending on our genes somewhere between seven and
01:03:53
nine hours sleep every night uh for me i need about eight and a quarter uh to feel good i don't know if you know your
01:04:00
level you can probably cope on about three hours given how much you do
01:04:06
i need to figure that out but i've i mean i've yeah it's thinking about something you said earlier about how in
01:04:12
your toughest times you you know when uh mine candy was struggling you started to neglect like the fundamentals of being a
01:04:18
human being yeah like nutrition and water and sleep these
01:04:24
these things have become like as you said i mean it's changing slowly now but they became like disregarded as as being important things
01:04:30
it's like we got further from being human beings yep and it's like i i write about in my book as well that
01:04:36
it's so it's so um inspiring and amazing that a lot of the
01:04:41
cures to the ailments or the mental health elements in our lives or the problems we encounter are just like
01:04:47
going back to being a human being like drink water instead of coke like try not
01:04:52
to eat too much caffeine sleep yeah talk to your friends it's like there's no
01:04:57
like proof there's no like prof and but the problem is as well there is a culture of trying to make the
01:05:02
solutions feel complex so i can sell you some [ __ ] whereas really they appear to be so simple well said we always look for the
01:05:10
over-complicated solution don't we we think it has to be but fundamentally those are the basics that you just
01:05:15
mentioned johann hari talks about in his book lost connections is one of my favorite books we're disconnected from
01:05:21
what made us human as our brains and bodies evolved over 100 000 plus years
01:05:27
and it's so basic so sleep is one of those key things and if we're not getting enough good
01:05:34
sleep if we're disrespecting it if we're drinking alcohol before we go to bed it affects every aspect of our life and
01:05:39
we're more irritable we're less creative our memory gets shot we we just go into a negative compounding
01:05:46
situation and uh so yeah treating sleep with respect i think is one of the most important things we can do
01:05:53
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01:06:54
tough time sleepless nights let's talk about that then this year difficult for everybody
01:07:00
for everyone's own reasons some people lost their jobs some people lost family members some people
01:07:05
lost their i guess their purpose in life generally and a lot of people because we're all now you know we were pushed to live our
01:07:12
lives through glass screens more than ever before lost a lot of other things and um
01:07:18
how was this how was this last year and this tumultuous pandemic been for you
01:07:26
it's been a very challenging time uh
01:07:32
the pandemic as you say has affected everybody on earth in in many many
01:07:37
different ways it has been extraordinarily difficult so my perspective is is more
01:07:44
you know a personal uh perspective but i think stepping back a little bit if we
01:07:49
go back to 2020 you know when this first hit it was all unknown there was a lot of anxiety
01:07:55
but this was uh we were in this together and
01:08:00
there was a lot of uh intrigue about what was going on we didn't have to commute into the office anymore we could work from home zoom was
01:08:07
this incredible opportunity and so 2020 for for myself
01:08:12
uh and the whole company i think generally was was um
01:08:18
not too bad you know it was it was uh it was all bearable 2021 for myself
01:08:23
personally has been pretty challenging i think months and months and months of staring
01:08:28
into a tiny little screen hunched over my laptop like everybody else has taken its toll and i didn't
01:08:36
treat my posture with respect i didn't i didn't look after my mental health the way i should and i started to this
01:08:44
started to compound and i i had quite a serious back problem i had a herniated
01:08:49
disc um because of all the hunching and that pushed on a nerve which meant i couldn't
01:08:55
walk and i had very serious pain every day um which meant uh
01:09:01
i couldn't sleep very well i saw multiple physios i started to take painkillers which stopped the pain but
01:09:08
then filled my head with cotton wool and so but i still had to work and i still had to kind of communicate with my team
01:09:16
and lead the company and i couldn't do exercise and so for many many months i was not in a great place it was a very
01:09:23
very difficult uh summer and beyond this year
01:09:28
um so yeah 2021 has been tricky uh i'm in a much better place now but it it has
01:09:34
been very very challenging and i'm very fortunate in that you know i haven't lost any loved ones and it's we've got
01:09:40
to put things in perspective but from a health and work uh angle uh this has i think been one of
01:09:46
the the toughest if not the toughest years that i've i've personally been through
01:09:52
so many people as you've described they're staring at the screen every day end up burning themselves out
01:09:58
what's your experience with burnout as a topic and is that what you're describing
01:10:03
happened this year i think it was a combination of things i think it was burnout
01:10:09
connected to chronic stress connected to the back pain and um again all these
01:10:15
things start to negatively compound the lack of exercise uh i was living on my own and didn't have uh
01:10:23
much kind of human connection um all these things kind of came together and created a
01:10:29
perfect storm and we have over 300 people at calm now
01:10:34
and the team were going through their own versions of that it certainly wasn't just me struggling and we do this survey
01:10:41
every six months called culture amp where the whole team kind of answers a bunch of questions and they can leave
01:10:47
anonymous comments with thousands of anonymous comments and the last one we just did and we've never seen anything like it in
01:10:53
in the data that the the number of people talking about stress
01:10:58
and burnout is way beyond anything i've ever seen in my career and so i think it is just now
01:11:04
we've been in this situation for 18 months and it's just gone on and on and on it's it's really affected everyone and
01:11:11
we're seeing this now across pretty much every company at the start of the the lockdown going
01:11:17
back i think what companies were seeing was a real surprise instead of people bunking off and taking it easy and
01:11:23
putting their feet up and watching netflix all day people were working harder we saw this at calm
01:11:29
and i think many companies have i think there was a harvard study done recently showing that the average work day has increased by almost an hour when people
01:11:36
are working from home so people are working harder they they can't really switch off there's no
01:11:41
boundary between work and and non-work and it's creating this this compounding
01:11:46
um toll on the minds and bodies of everybody so it's a crisis it's a very
01:11:52
very serious uh issue we are taking this very seriously at calm obviously we are
01:11:58
uh we want to support uh our own team and other companies around the world and
01:12:03
just a few things that we've tried to do we're still figuring this out ourselves figuring out what the best way to work and support our teams are
01:12:10
so one thing is we have you know unlimited holiday but teams don't take them because it's very hard to do i've
01:12:16
taken a few breaks during the pandemic but i don't think i've had a single break where i wasn't on at least one
01:12:22
zoom call or i didn't check slack or email at least once or twice a day and we made the decision back in october
01:12:29
to do a mental health week we've done a few mental health days where everyone sort of steps away
01:12:34
and previously i'd have said what a ridiculous idea who on earth gives the
01:12:39
whole company a week off you know we are in such a competitive space we can't afford to do that and we did it and we agreed it would be
01:12:46
the right thing to do and i think it's one of the smartest decisions we've made in the history of the company because it
01:12:52
gave the whole company a chance to properly step away and recharge their batteries knowing that there wasn't any
01:12:59
calls they were missing or any important things going on and you know what we came back a week later and everything was fine the business was still there we
01:13:06
fortunately had a few colleagues that stayed to make sure everything stayed up and could support our audience but yeah
01:13:11
that was one of the smartest things we did to support the mental health of the team
01:13:16
what changes have you made now in your life based on the last year which you describe as being the
01:13:22
hardest of your your life um to make sure that you are taking better care of yourself as you've
01:13:28
as you've alluded to yes and so there were a few other reasons why it was a very hard year sort
01:13:34
of beyond work which um uh were compounding all the different
01:13:40
challenges i just think i've learned a lot about being a better leader by developing kind
01:13:46
of a meditation practice and being more mindful of so many different things one is just not
01:13:51
getting sucked into the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey you know nothing is ever amazing or as disastrous as it
01:13:58
seems and i think teams want to follow calm leaders who are stable and you know
01:14:04
celebrate the wins but but don't get sucked into the vortex of negativity when things go wrong
01:14:10
i don't go to bed anymore doing emails and waking up in the middle of the night with a phone glued to my face i don't
01:14:17
reach for my phone first thing in the morning anymore as something like 60 percent of people do because suddenly uh
01:14:23
instead of gently coming into the day and letting your mind kind of calibrate with the the world you're
01:14:29
you're throwing yourself into twitter and instagram and the news cycle and everything else i think that's been a really really important thing
01:14:35
um four areas that i that i really think about that are the foundations to uh being healthy and looking after yourself
01:14:41
which then enables you to look after your friends and family and your your company and employees um one is
01:14:48
nutrition what you put into your body number two is exercise how you move your body um uh so important number three is
01:14:56
your mind taking care of that you know developing a practice that works for you and number four is sleep and making sure
01:15:03
you get that right sounds very simple but you keep those things in balance you respect them and again going back to
01:15:09
this idea of a foundation that is a very powerful foundation to stand on to to do
01:15:15
everything else you want to do in life amazing i can agree more
01:15:20
philosophy again about being being a little bit more human one of the things that um wasn't on that list is
01:15:28
in like meaningful connections and one it's interesting because when i was reading through your story and if
01:15:33
i'm being nosy here just tell me to [ __ ] off like i'm feeling like oh i couldn't hear you
01:15:38
um i couldn't see you speak openly much about your your relationships and your like
01:15:45
you know that that kind of thing something i talk about a lot here because i struggled a lot to form uh
01:15:51
relationships over many years for lots of different reasons ego problems thought the world revolved
01:15:57
around me yeah like totally selfish guy unwilling to compromise
01:16:03
flipping that question to you how have you gone through the years of building these great companies and going through the
01:16:10
tumultuous storms of their you know inevitable rise and fall and rise
01:16:16
whilst maintaining healthy romantic relationships yeah good
01:16:21
good question i think we're we're similar and i think because i've been so obsessed and focused on my my business i
01:16:29
haven't been the best partner to my girlfriends and uh they have been
01:16:35
you know i look back and and think of the many kind of mistakes i've made along the way
01:16:41
and now i haven't kind of uh i haven't been mindful and thoughtful
01:16:47
and respectful in the way that i uh connect with someone on on that level so
01:16:52
yeah i've done a lot of thinking and a lot of learning um over lockdown and um
01:16:58
i think it's made me not just a better leader but a better human being and a better person so
01:17:05
um yeah very excited about what comes next on on that level was there a moment where you realized the true value of
01:17:12
that of meaningful connections with another person because it took me a long time i thought money was the only thing
01:17:17
that mattered in life it's not being successful and people and being like well-known and all these
01:17:23
things and having a lamborghini i thought that was the the pathway to happiness and at some point i've
01:17:28
realized actually probably from learning like vicariously through people who had who were like further up the path and
01:17:35
were miserable that i maybe needed to change course was there a point where you and i also
01:17:40
remember listening to the ted talk um about a 100-year study of men who were
01:17:46
married or single and those that were married not only were healthier they had less
01:17:52
disease they lived longer and they reported to being happier and then obviously i read
01:17:58
johanna hari's book one day well i was actually in our new york office and it was just no one was in the office and
01:18:03
for some reason you know how like youtube loops through it stumbled onto one of his conversations
01:18:08
and i just couldn't i was like i couldn't work i was transfixed on what he was saying it just the penny was just
01:18:14
dropping for me in so many ways about this like lost connections and the importance of connection and purpose and
01:18:20
i [ __ ] i sent him an email i was like come on my podcast i have no listeners then so i'm so glad he did it but i
01:18:25
became obsessed with that and that's when i started saying okay if the north star of life is to be happy
01:18:31
and fulfilled i need to start compromising some of this like money-making selfishness
01:18:36
even though it feels so counterproductive and pursue and invest in
01:18:41
connections and romantic connections so true and not yeah not just romantic
01:18:47
connections but friendship connections family connections when entrepreneurs are stuck on their
01:18:53
vision and off they go holding on to that rocket ship you sacrifice so much and
01:19:01
and it's not just money i'm not driven by money that i think that's a byproduct of building
01:19:06
something successful to me what kind of puts the blinkers on is just a big vision and just going charging through
01:19:12
walls and making it happen but even then you're sacrificing a lot along the way and so being more thoughtful and a
01:19:18
little more mindful for this next phase i have recognized that i need to get a little more balance in
01:19:24
my life i need to make sure i am um when i'm in a relationship that i'm
01:19:31
supporting and looking after and spending time with my girlfriend that i'm spending time with my family that i'm calling my mom every day that i'm
01:19:37
you know uh showing up for for people you know when i'm
01:19:43
playing with my daughter in the playground not feeling that urge to check my phone but being fully fully
01:19:48
present and it's it's not easy to do but it's incredibly important because
01:19:55
yeah i mentioned those four things that are important to building that foundation but nothing in life matters
01:20:01
more important than our relationships that we build and throughout our life so that has been a massive learning for me
01:20:08
and uh yeah i'm asking this question maybe because i want the answer for myself but i i i
01:20:13
feel myself so much in your words which is knowing the right answer but struggling to do it yes when it comes
01:20:21
down to it yeah how how oh it's such such an important question
01:20:26
i'm still trying to figure this out my myself one of the things that
01:20:31
developing a meditation practice has helped me do uh is improve my empathy and
01:20:40
i now am better at seeing the world through other people's eyes and before
01:20:45
that again very self-centered and self-centric i couldn't do it and i used
01:20:50
to just assume my girlfriends thought just the way i do that their brains were wired like mine if i thought they had a
01:20:57
if i thought there was an area they needed some help on i'd buy a self-help book for them to to to sharpen them up because that's
01:21:04
what i'd love to happen and then i realized that no our brains are wired very differently they need very different things they need that she
01:21:10
needs her emotions validated instead of me trying to solve the problem every time she
01:21:16
uh mentions something so i think that's made a massive massive shift and i think
01:21:21
just again being being more responsive instead of reactive so when
01:21:29
you can you just hear better you the brightness is turned upon life when you develop a a meditation practice you can
01:21:36
see these warning signs of what someone needs and then respond to them instead of just being lost in your own world so
01:21:43
if your girlfriend is asking you for a walk or if she is saying something to you you not only hear what she's saying you can understand what's behind it as well
01:21:50
and i think that's important again not easy to do and get right all the time but it's
01:21:56
it's it's vital if you were to build strong healthy relationships in life communication
01:22:02
vulnerability all kind of all kind of mixed together i mean great
01:22:08
communication i think is whether it's with your team or with your partner is centered on being open and vulnerable
01:22:13
about how you're feeling what journey have you been on in terms of learning how to be a good communicator whether it's with your girlfriend or whether
01:22:19
it's with your team what is the what is the the foundations of successful communication
01:22:25
i remember my grandmother uh many years ago telling me when i was jabbering away
01:22:31
and talking non-stop at a a dinner as a young lad she said michael you have two ears and
01:22:38
one mouth use them in that ratio what are you talking about grandma um
01:22:43
but the penny dropped you know years later uh and i try and listen a lot more
01:22:49
than i talk and i try not to do that thing that most people do is when they're talking just not listening just
01:22:55
getting ready to say the next thing and also respecting and understanding that that people have different viewpoints
01:23:01
and different life experiences and there isn't
01:23:07
ones and zeros it isn't right and wrong life is not black or white it's
01:23:12
beautiful shades of grey and nuance and i think we've lost that you know in the culture wars and the
01:23:18
the intense political environment of today and the immediate dopamine
01:23:24
frazzled social media world that we we live in so
01:23:29
yes to in in short just trying to to to listen and understand
01:23:35
where someone is coming from i think a good whenever you're in a an argument with with a partner a very good
01:23:42
technique i've learned is instead of just back and forth i'm right you're
01:23:47
wrong and getting nowhere is pausing and stopping and saying letting them talk
01:23:53
and then instead of firing back and telling them why they're wrong replaying what they've said
01:23:59
and having them and seeing that light come on their eyes and going oh my god you get it and them doing the same for you
01:24:06
and you're like wow all right simple little breakthroughs uh like that i think um are very effective isn't it
01:24:14
so true my girlfriend started to say something to me which really opened my eyes to this she said i just want to be understood
01:24:20
and so i tried that as a technique exactly what you've described which is when she's finished giving me her side
01:24:26
of the events i will repeat back to her what she said to me yeah because i'll say i want to be like super clear that i understand here
01:24:33
what you're saying is it and you can see her her smile it's like ah yeah because when you're in combat it's
01:24:39
so unclear whether the message is landing so you it ends up being this like broken record of i'll try and land
01:24:44
it again i'll try and land it again it's such a pacifying amazing thing if you're actually trying to solve a problem versus trying to win a win a
01:24:50
battle to wreck it as you said to use that tactic of sort of wrecked point recognition well said esther perel is is
01:24:57
brilliant at this um she's written some amazing books on relationships and podcasts and
01:25:03
yeah she understands the the nuance of all this better than anyone so if anyone's struggling with their relationship i'd suggest uh doing some
01:25:10
homework with esther one might think that the founders of an app like calm that has reached so many people um and
01:25:17
that continues to scale and do so much good in the world must be the most calm humans ever
01:25:23
they must have peaceful you know super just like i kind of imagine them being like living in bali
01:25:30
like long hair like just you know like couple of like tattoos like t-shirt with their chakras pinpointed on
01:25:37
um that's what one would assume because that's what the way people assume [ __ ] like how accurate is that for you and
01:25:43
alex uh not accurate and and i think that there's a little bit of that and i think we have
01:25:50
certainly become a little more like that on this journey but um
01:25:55
no i think one of the reasons why calm has been successful is that that is not the brand that we have built we've tried
01:26:02
to help people learn this practice that is thousands of years old in a very
01:26:08
modern way as i mentioned earlier made it simple relatable um
01:26:13
i had a bit of fun sprinkled a bit of hollywood stardust on top of it you know
01:26:18
as mary poppins once wisely said a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down and so
01:26:25
we have tried to respect the authentic roots of mindfulness but also adapt it for the
01:26:31
modern age and so being calm isn't just about sitting in a
01:26:36
lotus position 16 hours a day on top of a mountain it is about weaving it
01:26:41
thoughtfully throughout your life uh so you can improve your own journey through life and and
01:26:48
those of all the people around you i think like you know i always conclude this podcast with like you know
01:26:55
thinking of uh something nice to say to the guest but in your case you've just done a tremendous service to the world
01:27:01
and it's so obvious what the the compliment is for you like i i think of all the things i've done in
01:27:06
my life and i'm like the the good you've done by building that business to millions of people you'll never meet
01:27:14
i mean [ __ ] hell you know what i mean if if businesses are seen as vehicles for change in the world
01:27:20
unbelievable like unbelievable imagine there's people in the do you have do you ever like
01:27:27
feel that there's some young girl in the corner of india or some country a
01:27:32
gazillion miles away that you've made and your team have made their day a little bit better
01:27:39
something horrific's happened to them the stress they've gone through some you've helped them do you have it like
01:27:45
do you know what i mean that is just it just feels like the most incredible thing oh well i really appreciate you saying
01:27:51
that thank you do you feel that i do we do as a as a team um we have what we call the warm fuzzies
01:27:59
channel uh in our slack at work and we read one out in every big meeting of how calm has changed someone's life
01:28:06
and um whenever we're having a really tough day and we're really stressed and this helped me this difficult year
01:28:12
is going on the app store and reading the millions and don't read all of them but there are millions of five star reviews covering all aspects of life
01:28:19
it's just the most incredible tonic to recognize the impact we've had it's everything from little kids who are
01:28:25
being bullied at school who find calm kind of supportive and helpful for them
01:28:30
to couples that were on the brink of divorce doing the daily calm every day and it reuniting their love to addicts
01:28:36
giving up um their drugs to people who are suicidal having their lives saved because calm
01:28:42
and the the content that we create has has transformed them it's it's goosebump inducing and we feel very lucky and
01:28:50
grateful that we get to work on this every single day unbelievable well thank you because you've done the most uh
01:28:57
most incredible service to the world we talked earlier about the the two foundational challenges of our time being like saving the planet and then
01:29:02
making sure the people on it are you know fulfilled happy whatever you know calm
01:29:08
um and that's exactly what you're doing so thank you thank you um i'm also as you know a big
01:29:15
someone who's very interested and trying to support the mental health crisis in whatever way i can and actually one of
01:29:21
the joint investments we have is um in a company called a tie i i heard about psychedelics i
01:29:27
dabbled sue me um you got no evidence um other than my words um i dabbled in i
01:29:35
did magic mushrooms for the first time and then i was reading the data and the research online and i was looking for companies and i came across compass
01:29:42
pathways and then at thai life sciences which is using psychedelics and non-psychedelic
01:29:47
therapies to help cure the men's health crisis and then when i joined the company as an investor and as the creative director now i learned that you
01:29:54
are an investor as well why did you support that company
01:29:59
wow i think this could be a whole new podcast all on its own i'll give a short answer i think psychedelics
01:30:06
will play an incredibly important role in solving the global mental health crisis uh these
01:30:11
compounds that have been under our nose for decades and vilified you know from the war on drugs back in the 60s could
01:30:20
could and the scientific evidence is showing that they may well be able to help hundreds of millions of lives um so
01:30:27
that to me ties into khan's mission and i think it's incredible work that they're doing there not just with
01:30:32
psilocybin but with ketamine with ibogaine with mdma a whole range of of different substances that that interact
01:30:39
on the brain in in different ways those compounds combined with therapy in
01:30:45
the right set and setting i i think it is it is a a golden key
01:30:50
that uh can unlock so much positivity for humanity so that's why i invested
01:30:56
and uh also because christian anger mayor who's part of the company i met him years and years ago he came into
01:31:02
the calm office like a tornado and i thought whatever he is on i want some of that and i was like where do i sign i'm
01:31:09
in and um so yeah very proud uh investor and supporter of that business
01:31:14
amazing so as i told you there's a closing tradition we have here on the diary of a ceo it's a new one but i love
01:31:20
it our previous guest has written a question for you what is the pain
01:31:26
you enjoy having
01:31:35
pain is horrible no one wants it but pain serves a very important
01:31:43
it alerts us to it purpose a problem and uh without pain sensors we
01:31:51
are going through life blind and and it's very dangerous
01:31:57
so pain whether it's mental or physical is horrible but it's valuable
01:32:03
and so any type of pain rather than just ignoring it and trying to mask it it's
01:32:10
important to lean in and listen to it so uh i could give many many different examples maybe one we've talked a little
01:32:16
bit about today is the sleepless nights it's it's the pain of waking up at 4 am
01:32:21
in the morning in a cold sweat staring at the ceiling and being so unhappy and frustrated with
01:32:28
that development but recognizing that that pain that
01:32:33
mental pain is there for a purpose it's my subconscious brain telling me to pay attention and to sort out
01:32:40
a problem that i'm not addressing during my waking hours brilliant
01:32:45
thank you so much michael it's been such a tremendous honor um having this conversation with you and i can speak to
01:32:50
you for hours but i won't um i followed you for a good decade since moshi monsters and i i saw your meteor
01:32:56
meteoric rise then and you've risen even higher and done even more goodness to the world with your with
01:33:03
calm and along with alex and i just want to say thank you thank you for the inspiration you're one of the entrepreneurs that inspired me you know
01:33:09
when i started out and you've you continued to inspire me to this day with your sense of purpose but also your
01:33:14
entrepreneurial prowess so um it's an honor to meet you it's nice to have you on the show and you've been just you
01:33:20
know superb superb as a guest well thank you and thank you to you for for having these conversations um during lockdown i
01:33:27
lived on the west coast of ireland in galway and i would run up and down the promenade by the sea god knows how many
01:33:34
thousand times and listened to your podcast multiple times through the rain and the wind and just been just so
01:33:40
inspired and delighted by that and uh so thank you for that well you've you've continued to the tradition and you've
01:33:47
added to it in a really profound way i really really mean that thank you so much michael thank you
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