The Exchanges

Q That is very kind of you. I do want to kick off, though, with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups first? And take me back to the pad you had in Burwick Street with Michael Acton-Smith. And tell me how you came up with the idea of the calm while playing late night FIFA.

A Yeah. So, I mean, my journey into entrepreneurship started at a very early age. For some reason, I always dreamt of being an entrepreneur and started my first kind of endeavors. I think around the age of seven, I started drawing comics and selling them at school. Very unprofitably, it has to be said. I'm not sure the quality was that good. But yeah, I always just dreamt of doing something creative, doing something a bit different, starting a business of some kind. And as a teenager growing up with sort of Internet in its fledgling years, you know, the mid nineties, I was just fascinated by the potential power of it and was lucky enough actually to be taught HTML and JavaScript and some other stuff in school in the mid nineties, which was pretty cutting edge, I think. Yeah. And then just started building different websites and trying to make something of it. Then the calm story is a very sort of long time in the making for me. So Michael and I, we've known each other for about 15 years or so, and I had just done the million dollar homepage and met Michael on a houseboat in London. And we became fast friends and ended up Sharing a house in London, in Soho, and we would often play FIFA on the Xbox, and always sort of talking about different ideas that we had for businesses, and Michael was working on Moshi Monsters at the time, and I was working on a few different things, and Calm…

AI assessment note: “we ended up Sharing a house in London, in Soho, and we would often play FIFA”

Q Moshi, which was a wonderful creation, by the way. I enjoyed it a lot. But I have to ask, it's a super interesting product and a little bit out there. How do you think about how to make your product go viral? I know that's very generic and kind of strange, but I just have to ask that, like, how do you think about how to make products go viral?

A Yeah, I think there's a few different ways of thinking about it. My experience has been mostly in making things go viral right at the start, as opposed to building a viral business, like in Facebook or networks effects. Kind of business. And I think there are a few different ways to do it. I think the main thing you have to figure out a way of kind of cutting through the noise and capturing the zeitgeist, if you like. So a few examples. Million Dollar Homepage, I think, was a good example of that. It was sort of a very bold and kind of crazy idea that this kid would make a million dollars out of thin air, but because it got attention, that became true. That was a simple and slightly quirky or very quirky idea. And so the quirky, the better, I always find. I think more recently, it Pre-Calm, when we were thinking about the business, but we hadn't quite launched it, I created a web page called Do Nothing for Two Minutes, and this is actually how Calm got its first 100,000 users. Basically, the page had a picture of a sunset and a countdown from two minutes to zero, and if you move the mouse or keyboard, it basically reset to two and said try again, and it was a challenge to the world to see if you could sit still and do nothing just for two minutes, and it went viral on Twitter. It just happened to be Twitter that I Seated it on with a very simple bit of text saying, I just did n…

AI assessment note: “It's about hitting a nerve in some way.”

Q That is very kind of you. I do want to kick off, though, with a little bit on you. So tell me, how did you make your way into the world of startups first? And take me back to the pad you had in Burwick Street with Michael Acton-Smith. And tell me how you came up with the idea of the calm while playing late night FIFA.

A Yeah. So, I mean, my journey into entrepreneurship started at a very early age. For some reason, I always dreamt of being an entrepreneur and started my first kind of endeavors. I think around the age of seven, I started drawing comics and selling them at school. Very unprofitably, it has to be said. I'm not sure the quality was that good. But yeah, I always just dreamt of doing something creative, doing something a bit different, starting a business of some kind. And as a teenager growing up with sort of Internet in its fledgling years, you know, the mid nineties, I was just fascinated by the potential power of it and was lucky enough actually to be taught HTML and JavaScript and some other stuff in school in the mid nineties, which was pretty cutting edge, I think. Yeah. And then just started building different websites and trying to make something of it. Then the calm story is a very sort of long time in the making for me. So Michael and I, we've known each other for about 15 years or so, and I had just done the million dollar homepage and met Michael on a houseboat in London. And we became fast friends and ended up Sharing a house in London, in Soho, and we would often play FIFA on the Xbox, and always sort of talking about different ideas that we had for businesses, and Michael was working on Moshi Monsters at the time, and I was working on a few different things, and Calm…

AI assessment note: “we would often play FIFA on the Xbox, and always sort of talking about different ideas”

Q could say to Michael, hey, I've got this idea and I really want to pursue this. And you could go, ah, that's a terrible idea. And you can kind of revert to consensus and revert to the mean and what's kind of reasonable and right, which probably often is not the out-of-the-blue kind of viral idea. How do you think about kind of getting that input without reverting to consensus?

A Yeah, I think the question is who are you bouncing the ideas off? If you're doing it with a huge group, and you don't have a huge amount of conviction in the idea itself, then maybe you will sort of revert to consensus if they don't particularly take to it, but if you have a lot of belief in the idea itself, and you reflect it off a couple of people to see how they respond, but you still have a lot of conviction, then you then go for it. If I had listened to various people along the way, then calm wouldn't exist, and sometimes you really just have to follow your intuition and conviction on something. But yeah, Michael's brilliant, and so I will always seek his counsel on an idea.

AI assessment note: “reflect it off a couple of people to see how they respond, but you still have a lot of conviction”

Q feel that now, and I think it's a little bit young for me to be feeling that. But I do have to ask, like, unpicking those a little bit, you said about kind of getting the best people around you. We operate in some of the toughest talent markets there is in terms of competitiveness. How do you think about what it takes to fundamentally acquire the best talent today?

A Yeah, I think it's a bunch of different things. I think fundamentally you have to have something worth Working on. You have to have something meaningful and important, because the folks who are going to come and join you on the journey are going to be spending the majority of their waking life working on the business with you, and so it should be meaningful. It should have an impact. It should be something that the world needs. That, I think, is a very important part of attracting the very best people, and with Calm being so mission-driven, we've benefited from that. Folks who are joining us are so keen to do something that has a positive impact on the world, and then obviously you need to be competitive on compensation and everything, and have a great culture, and provide bold Objectives and a clear strategy, but it is very competitive. Hopefully the new world we're in where we're working remotely will allow the playing field to be a little more level as we can now look for talent truly anywhere in the world. In Calm's case, we were very SF focused. The vast majority of the company was based in SF, but now that limitation is no longer really there.

AI assessment note: “fundamentally you have to have something worth Working on. You have to have something meaningful”

Q and he said something that's always stuck with me. He said, today more than ever, Harry, has a fundamental lack of free and open distribution. I'm really intrigued being kind of, as Michael said, kind of the genius that you are in terms of virality and customer acquisition. Would you agree with him? And how do you compare acquisition environments today versus the five to seven years we've experienced previously?

A Yeah, I'm not sure I totally agree with Peter's comment. I think maybe the point he's getting at is that it is a lot more expensive to kind of take part in the distribution channels. Facebook and Google obviously soak up the maturity of ad dollars, and you need to really kind of be a certain kind of size or have a certain amount of capital to really be effective in the marketplace. But I don't necessarily think that it's Free or open, I think that you can still leverage the mechanics that are available, even if they are slightly more closed. I've always thought that the best way to be viral is independent of any particular mechanic or channel. It actually rests with the idea itself, and if you have a powerful enough idea, people will find ways to share it. It doesn't kind of necessarily matter that the channels have changed or the distribution mechanisms have been tweaked over time, but it for sure is more competitive and expensive to compete on the kind of paid acquisition side. We've seen that with cart. In the early days, it was obviously much cheaper to cart customers, and then as we scale up, it becomes more expensive.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure I totally agree with Peter's comment.”

Q board meetings, we both have teams, both have a lot of responsibilities. I didn't find myself having the time and freedom to be like, hey, this would be a great, fun project to work on that could acquire 10,000 new users through this cool new music video or whatever that is. Do you set deliberate time aside for creative thought for projects like this, or does it just happen naturally?

A I think you kind of need to make time as you become busier, and I think earlier on in my life when I was sort of busy or had smaller teams or whatever, it was much easier to kind of daydream and just sort of use your imagination, and now when you're sort of back-to-back Zoom calls all day, there's not much room left for coming up with kind of crazy ideas for user acquisition, but that being said, if you're diligent about carving out time, then you can hopefully come up with things, but then the one downside with carving out time is that you're putting yourself under pressure, and I do think sometimes pressure can be the enemy of creativity, and sometimes the Best ideas will just pop out of nowhere. I find actually these days that the best ideas will happen if I'm on vacation or doing something where I'm just really not thinking necessarily about the day-to-day in the office.

AI assessment note: “I think you kind of need to make time as you become busier”

Q a personal one. And it's like Million Dollar Homepage was such a success very early on. Did you feel a weight of expectation on your shoulders from society, from yourself, to really move the needle on the next step? And how did you deal with that? It's something that I think about a lot with, like, moving from successful podcast to, like, successful fund manager in a really meaningful way.

A Yeah, I think the Million Dollar Homepage was a fascinating experience to go through. And in the space of just a few months, went from being unknown and broke, sitting in my parents' bedroom, to having some money, and being known, and having a lot of press, and it was just a crazy, crazy ride, but yeah, it did come with a lot of expectation after that, thinking, how can I follow that? And I think that my thinking at the time got a little bit warped, because I think that the expectation I put on myself was greater than any other expectation, thinking that I've got to do something bigger and better, and pressure is not a great place from which to be creative, and actually have Useful insights , I think. At least not in that context. And so the subsequent years from after the Million Dollar Homepage, I really was trying to find my purpose and find something meaningful to work on. And it was kind of funny that the most meaningful thing that I should be working on, which is now Calm, was something that I'd been thinking about even before the Million Dollar Homepage. And sometimes the ideas that we should be working on have actually been right in front of our face for a long time. We just haven't, like, seen it clearly. And I think the Million Dollar Homepage really took me on this different path where I was kind of more focused on success than I was on creating value. And then you d…

AI assessment note: “yeah, it did come with a lot of expectation after that”

Q a personal one. And it's like Million Dollar Homepage was such a success very early on. Did you feel a weight of expectation on your shoulders from society, from yourself, to really move the needle on the next step? And how did you deal with that? It's something that I think about a lot with, like, moving from successful podcast to, like, successful fund manager in a really meaningful way.

A Yeah, I think the Million Dollar Homepage was a fascinating experience to go through. And in the space of just a few months, went from being unknown and broke, sitting in my parents' bedroom, to having some money, and being known, and having a lot of press, and it was just a crazy, crazy ride, but yeah, it did come with a lot of expectation after that, thinking, how can I follow that? And I think that my thinking at the time got a little bit warped, because I think that the expectation I put on myself was greater than any other expectation, thinking that I've got to do something bigger and better, and pressure is not a great place from which to be creative, and actually have Useful insights , I think. At least not in that context. And so the subsequent years from after the Million Dollar Homepage, I really was trying to find my purpose and find something meaningful to work on. And it was kind of funny that the most meaningful thing that I should be working on, which is now Calm, was something that I'd been thinking about even before the Million Dollar Homepage. And sometimes the ideas that we should be working on have actually been right in front of our face for a long time. We just haven't, like, seen it clearly. And I think the Million Dollar Homepage really took me on this different path where I was kind of more focused on success than I was on creating value. And then you d…

AI assessment note: “it did come with a lot of expectation after that, thinking, how can I follow that?”

Q Can I ask, how long does it take to know if something's gone viral? Is it like instantaneously put it out there and you know, or like, I always wonder when thinking about kind of product iteration and pivoting, how long is long enough to have enough data to make decisions on whether to pull or whether to continue?

A Yeah, from my experience, it has to be pretty much instantaneous, otherwise the ingredients are not right, and within a couple of days, I think, otherwise you need to kind of go back to the drawing board, and it may be that you've got one or two ingredients wrong, because every detail matters, I think, when you're trying to make something go viral, or just the fundamental core premise is, is not going to gain traction. So that's one of the exciting things, is that you can try things quickly, and you'll know quickly. You don't have to wait around for a long time. And these days, with social media, things will go viral in even faster time, and even greater scale than ever before. So I think if I'd done the Million Dollar Homepage today, I think it would have been completed within two weeks rather than four months, potentially.

AI assessment note: “from my experience, it has to be pretty much instantaneous, otherwise the ingredients are not right”

Q feel that now, and I think it's a little bit young for me to be feeling that. But I do have to ask, like, unpicking those a little bit, you said about kind of getting the best people around you. We operate in some of the toughest talent markets there is in terms of competitiveness. How do you think about what it takes to fundamentally acquire the best talent today?

A Yeah, I think it's a bunch of different things. I think fundamentally you have to have something worth Working on. You have to have something meaningful and important, because the folks who are going to come and join you on the journey are going to be spending the majority of their waking life working on the business with you, and so it should be meaningful. It should have an impact. It should be something that the world needs. That, I think, is a very important part of attracting the very best people, and with Calm being so mission-driven, we've benefited from that. Folks who are joining us are so keen to do something that has a positive impact on the world, and then obviously you need to be competitive on compensation and everything, and have a great culture, and provide bold Objectives and a clear strategy, but it is very competitive. Hopefully the new world we're in where we're working remotely will allow the playing field to be a little more level as we can now look for talent truly anywhere in the world. In Calm's case, we were very SF focused. The vast majority of the company was based in SF, but now that limitation is no longer really there.

AI assessment note: “fundamentally you have to have something worth Working on. You have to have something meaningful”

Q because we chatted before, and we mentioned a couple of things, especially on brand, and you highlighted the power of brand, but also why Silicon Valley overlooks it. I did want to kind of dig into this, and it's like, from your perspective, what do you think the Best brands do fundamentally. How do they message? How do they present? What is that kind of visual experience to the world?

A Yeah, I think it kind of goes to the previous point I was making that you have to have a really clear purpose and a clear reason for existing in the world. The best brands, I think, deliver on that promise that they figure out. They figure out what they're trying to do in the world and deliver on it. And when we were thinking about Calm in the early days, we were really excited by this really singular clarity and purpose that we had for what Calm could So I think that that is the thing that people sometimes overlook. They might start with an idea that is very much focused on like a product experience, and then they build a company, and eventually they might think about a brand. And that's one way to do it, and a lot of folks have success that way. The other way to do it is to think about those fundamental core principles from the outset, and that's exactly what we did with Calm. And it's interesting to think that in the long run, brand is the primary interaction that a customer will have over a lifetime. Because the products will often change. Apple's consistency, or Coca-Cola's consistency, or Nike's consistency is rooted in the values that they have, and the kind of brand principles that they follow, even though that the details may change in sort of years and decades in between. So I think that thinking about brand is important, and in Silicon Valley, I think it's sort of lo…

AI assessment note: “The best brands, I think, deliver on that promise that they figure out.”

Q board meetings, we both have teams, both have a lot of responsibilities. I didn't find myself having the time and freedom to be like, hey, this would be a great, fun project to work on that could acquire 10,000 new users through this cool new music video or whatever that is. Do you set deliberate time aside for creative thought for projects like this, or does it just happen naturally?

A I think you kind of need to make time as you become busier, and I think earlier on in my life when I was sort of busy or had smaller teams or whatever, it was much easier to kind of daydream and just sort of use your imagination, and now when you're sort of back-to-back Zoom calls all day, there's not much room left for coming up with kind of crazy ideas for user acquisition, but that being said, if you're diligent about carving out time, then you can hopefully come up with things, but then the one downside with carving out time is that you're putting yourself under pressure, and I do think sometimes pressure can be the enemy of creativity, and sometimes the Best ideas will just pop out of nowhere. I find actually these days that the best ideas will happen if I'm on vacation or doing something where I'm just really not thinking necessarily about the day-to-day in the office.

AI assessment note: “I think you kind of need to make time as you become busier”

Q Can I ask, it's been a competitive market since, with many different competitors for you. How do you think about the right way to think about competition? Competition. And what have been some experiences there in terms of whether to row your own race or to actually be cognizant of what's around you?

A Yeah, I think you can do both. I think it's very important to really focus on building your own company and your own products and having your own strategy and having your own ideas and being creative, but it's always good to keep an eye out on what's going on in the marketplace, but not get caught up in it and not worry too much about the competition. With Calm, it's become a very competitive space in recent years, and we're just laser focused on what we want to do. And what we have in mind for the future. The problem with competing one-on-one and only looking at what the competitors are doing is that you're sort of obsessing about the output that they're creating, and you can't really replicate what's going on internally. You have an idea of what they might be doing internally, but you can't replicate their DNA. And ultimately, companies should just try and be the best it can be, as opposed to trying to imitate. There are times when it obviously makes sense to copy certain strategies or things, but you would be better off being the instigator of those Strategies and ideas than being the second in the race.

AI assessment note: “I think you can do both. I think it's very important to really focus”

Q because we chatted before, and we mentioned a couple of things, especially on brand, and you highlighted the power of brand, but also why Silicon Valley overlooks it. I did want to kind of dig into this, and it's like, from your perspective, what do you think the Best brands do fundamentally. How do they message? How do they present? What is that kind of visual experience to the world?

A Yeah, I think it kind of goes to the previous point I was making that you have to have a really clear purpose and a clear reason for existing in the world. The best brands, I think, deliver on that promise that they figure out. They figure out what they're trying to do in the world and deliver on it. And when we were thinking about Calm in the early days, we were really excited by this really singular clarity and purpose that we had for what Calm could So I think that that is the thing that people sometimes overlook. They might start with an idea that is very much focused on like a product experience, and then they build a company, and eventually they might think about a brand. And that's one way to do it, and a lot of folks have success that way. The other way to do it is to think about those fundamental core principles from the outset, and that's exactly what we did with Calm. And it's interesting to think that in the long run, brand is the primary interaction that a customer will have over a lifetime. Because the products will often change. Apple's consistency, or Coca-Cola's consistency, or Nike's consistency is rooted in the values that they have, and the kind of brand principles that they follow, even though that the details may change in sort of years and decades in between. So I think that thinking about brand is important, and in Silicon Valley, I think it's sort of lo…

AI assessment note: “The best brands, I think, deliver on that promise that they figure out.”

Q business was viewed externally, but you know, for the last few years, Calm has obviously been an absolute tear. In terms of like fundraisers, I'm sure they've been very fast and different to the early days to do in terms of the amount of people that want to join. How do you think about investor selection? What governed your decisions as to who you took versus who you didn't take?

A Yeah, no, it has been a bit of a sort of a whirlwind in recent years. You know, in the early days, Calm found it very hard to raise money. We were not particularly attractive to investors, I think, because people didn't really understand what we were trying to do, even though the sort of business fundamentals were pretty good. So it wasn't until 2018 that we did our series A first institutional capital. We've raised from Insight Venture Partners And that was six years after founding. So that was a pretty long gap when so many companies do a series A within a year or two. So we had a bit of a different story. But I think at that time, we were in a really healthy position, very profitable. I think we were on a sixty million dollar run rate at the time when we raised our series A. So we were definitely sort of able to call the shots in terms of who we chose to work with. I think it really boiled down to not only having a good fund, who had a lot of great experience to bring to bear, but really it boils down to the partner or the partners that you fundamentally work with. On a regular basis. So I think looking for folks who obviously truly understand what you're trying to achieve and have the, again, patience to see that vision come to fruition, I think is key and bring great energy and ask great questions and help you push the business forward as much as they can. I think there's …

AI assessment note: “really it boils down to the partner or the partners that you fundamentally work with”

Q business was viewed externally, but you know, for the last few years, Calm has obviously been an absolute tear. In terms of like fundraisers, I'm sure they've been very fast and different to the early days to do in terms of the amount of people that want to join. How do you think about investor selection? What governed your decisions as to who you took versus who you didn't take?

A Yeah, no, it has been a bit of a sort of a whirlwind in recent years. You know, in the early days, Calm found it very hard to raise money. We were not particularly attractive to investors, I think, because people didn't really understand what we were trying to do, even though the sort of business fundamentals were pretty good. So it wasn't until 2018 that we did our series A first institutional capital. We've raised from Insight Venture Partners And that was six years after founding. So that was a pretty long gap when so many companies do a series A within a year or two. So we had a bit of a different story. But I think at that time, we were in a really healthy position, very profitable. I think we were on a sixty million dollar run rate at the time when we raised our series A. So we were definitely sort of able to call the shots in terms of who we chose to work with. I think it really boiled down to not only having a good fund, who had a lot of great experience to bring to bear, but really it boils down to the partner or the partners that you fundamentally work with. On a regular basis. So I think looking for folks who obviously truly understand what you're trying to achieve and have the, again, patience to see that vision come to fruition, I think is key and bring great energy and ask great questions and help you push the business forward as much as they can. I think there's …

AI assessment note: “really it boils down to the partner or the partners that you fundamentally work with.”

Q Yeah, no, I do totally agree. Can I ask, in terms of like the next five years for you and for Calm, what does that look like? Paint that vision for me, Alex.

A We want to build one of the most meaningful and valuable companies in the world, one of the most loved brands, and we're well on our way to doing that. We want to help many, many millions more people out there with the tools that we've created, and we have millions of members today, but we would love to have hundreds of millions of members in the years to come and be sort of one of those household brands, one of those Utility kind of products that everybody needs and has. Everybody, as I was saying earlier, has a mind. Everybody sleeps. Everybody experiences the ups and downs, the stresses and strains of modern living, and we want to be there to help no matter what time of day or stage of life. So our ambitions are very big, you know, in terms of the scale we want to reach, and at the same time, we want to have a great business and do things in a way that allow us to build for the long term, and that can mean being a profitable company as we have been for many years. And at some point, I imagine becoming a public company will be a milestone along the journey. But our work is really only at the very early stages. We have a lot of people to help. There's a lot of pain in the world, quite frankly. And if Calm can help in even just a small way, or in some cases a big ways, then I think the work is worthy.

AI assessment note: “we would love to have hundreds of millions of members in the years to come”

Q Do you think that's enough? Like, I don't mean that badly, but like, one to two years is quite long. Like, if you factor in churn assumptions, you're like, on a consumer subscription business, churn assumptions would be relatively high. Actually, I'd be concerned by one to two years.

A Yeah, I mean, it depends on, obviously, your retention and things. And so if you've got high churn, then you obviously have a bigger problem, and it depends on how much cash you've got in the bank, and whether you're free cash flowing, or whether you're burning a lot of cash. So it really depends on the sort of situation that you're in. But some businesses obviously have really long three or four years, which is kind of a little bit insane. It's very hard to predict how things are going to be that long, but one to two years doesn't seem unfathomable. I think particularly as your business matures, and you're able to sort of better predict your kind of revenue streams and things.

AI assessment note: “one to two years doesn't seem unfathomable. I think particularly as your business matures”

Q to ask you, because we've seen the rise of founder brands specifically as well, and often founder brands even driving kind of company brands in some respects, when you look at your Austin at Lambda schools or your Dom at Fars. How do you think about the rise of founder brands, and what do you think that means for the future moving forward in terms of the power of brand?

A Yeah, I think it's a reflection on the power of social media and the democratization of these distribution channels so that people can now be the primary product. And I think it's, it's phenomenal. I think it really depends on, do you have something useful to say? Do you have something useful to put out in the world? There are lots and lots of folks out there putting out similar kind of thinking and to have a unique take on the world is an important part of building that brand. Personally, I'm a little quieter on social media. I'm not quite sure how folks have time to do a lot of tweeting, but somehow they manage it in the cases you mentioned.

AI assessment note: “reflection on the power of social media and the democratization of these distribution channels”

Q Can I ask, it's been a competitive market since, with many different competitors for you. How do you think about the right way to think about competition? Competition. And what have been some experiences there in terms of whether to row your own race or to actually be cognizant of what's around you?

A Yeah, I think you can do both. I think it's very important to really focus on building your own company and your own products and having your own strategy and having your own ideas and being creative, but it's always good to keep an eye out on what's going on in the marketplace, but not get caught up in it and not worry too much about the competition. With Calm, it's become a very competitive space in recent years, and we're just laser focused on what we want to do. And what we have in mind for the future. The problem with competing one-on-one and only looking at what the competitors are doing is that you're sort of obsessing about the output that they're creating, and you can't really replicate what's going on internally. You have an idea of what they might be doing internally, but you can't replicate their DNA. And ultimately, companies should just try and be the best it can be, as opposed to trying to imitate. There are times when it obviously makes sense to copy certain strategies or things, but you would be better off being the instigator of those Strategies and ideas than being the second in the race.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, I think you can do both.”

Q that, like, if you had listened to people, you know, it would have been a very different story. Com's been such a category creation play and a consumer education play. It is fundamentally different to serving an existing kind of consumer need. What advice would you give to founders who are embracing or engaging in fundamentally creating their own category and really setting out to educate a generation of consumers?

A Yeah, I think the main thing I would say would be to ignore anything short term and ignore the critics and the folks who will tell you that the idea is not a good one and really follow your own conviction because, you If you have that conviction, if it's strong, you should be able to do that. You should be able to easily focus on what the work that needs to be done is, and not focus on critics. Now, I think the details obviously are subject to inquiry and debate and things, but again, if you have, like, a core premise, if your idea has deep roots, then you can kind of weather any short-term criticism, and hopefully be proved right in the long run.

AI assessment note: “ignore anything short term and ignore the critics... really follow your own conviction”

Q that, like, if you had listened to people, you know, it would have been a very different story. Com's been such a category creation play and a consumer education play. It is fundamentally different to serving an existing kind of consumer need. What advice would you give to founders who are embracing or engaging in fundamentally creating their own category and really setting out to educate a generation of consumers?

A Yeah, I think the main thing I would say would be to ignore anything short term and ignore the critics and the folks who will tell you that the idea is not a good one and really follow your own conviction because, you If you have that conviction, if it's strong, you should be able to do that. You should be able to easily focus on what the work that needs to be done is, and not focus on critics. Now, I think the details obviously are subject to inquiry and debate and things, but again, if you have, like, a core premise, if your idea has deep roots, then you can kind of weather any short-term criticism, and hopefully be proved right in the long run.

AI assessment note: “ignore anything short term and ignore the critics and the folks who will tell you”

Q Do you think that's enough? Like, I don't mean that badly, but like, one to two years is quite long. Like, if you factor in churn assumptions, you're like, on a consumer subscription business, churn assumptions would be relatively high. Actually, I'd be concerned by one to two years.

A Yeah, I mean, it depends on, obviously, your retention and things. And so if you've got high churn, then you obviously have a bigger problem, and it depends on how much cash you've got in the bank, and whether you're free cash flowing, or whether you're burning a lot of cash. So it really depends on the sort of situation that you're in. But some businesses obviously have really long three or four years, which is kind of a little bit insane. It's very hard to predict how things are going to be that long, but one to two years doesn't seem unfathomable. I think particularly as your business matures, and you're able to sort of better predict your kind of revenue streams and things.

AI assessment note: “one to two years doesn't seem unfathomable”

Q How do you think about the right ratio of paid to organic? It's a big one that I always think through.

A Well, I mean, the right sort of ratio depends particularly on your own business, and if you're a hundred percent paid, but you're inefficient in spend, then you've probably changed that ratio. I think having a healthy mix of paid and organic is great. You know, it's very rare that a business will be hundred percent organic. I can only think of a few examples, particularly the businesses that have network effects that are truly organic in nature, but yeah, I think it very much Depends on the business, but in the case of Calm, we have a really healthy mix of organic and paid, but most important thing is to have a paid acquisition that is efficient and profitable and on a reasonable timeline. If you can have one of those businesses that is largely organic, then more power to you.

AI assessment note: “most important thing is to have a paid acquisition that is efficient and profitable”

Q How do you think about the right ratio of paid to organic? It's a big one that I always think through.

A Well, I mean, the right sort of ratio depends particularly on your own business, and if you're a hundred percent paid, but you're inefficient in spend, then you've probably changed that ratio. I think having a healthy mix of paid and organic is great. You know, it's very rare that a business will be hundred percent organic. I can only think of a few examples, particularly the businesses that have network effects that are truly organic in nature, but yeah, I think it very much Depends on the business, but in the case of Calm, we have a really healthy mix of organic and paid, but most important thing is to have a paid acquisition that is efficient and profitable and on a reasonable timeline. If you can have one of those businesses that is largely organic, then more power to you.

AI assessment note: “the right sort of ratio depends particularly on your own business”