The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Stebbings: Mental wellness apps like Calm and Headspace are not great businesses
“Calm or Headspace of the world, which makes mental wellness, health, they're not great businesses.”
Alex Tew: Calm reached a $60M run rate before its Series A
“I think we were on a sixty million dollar run rate at the time when we raised our series A.”
Stebbings: Calm is the largest mental health company at a $1.5B valuation
“Really the largest mental health company is, is what? Calm? Respectfully, it's not a huge business. It's, you know, one and a half billion. Fantastic journey, but it's not a huge business.”
Lerner: B2B companies should adopt consumer-style multi-step onboarding funnels
“If you go to some of these sites like Calm or Noom, they have these long convoluted onboarding flows that do a really good job of roping people in Getting them through the whole kind of information journey and building intent. And that's a neat thing because i…”
Schutz: Calm generated immense value sponsoring CNN's 2020 election coverage
“They were the sponsor of CNN's coverage for election night. Results. So it was like, election, 2020, brought to you by Calm. And it was like, hilarious, because people are like, of course, I'm freaking out mentally. It blew up on social, and I know they got li…”
Alex Tew: Calm acquired its first 100,000 users via a two-minute website
“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.”
Alex Tew: Religious overtones deterred mass consumer adoption of meditation
“Most people are not going to read a heavy textbook, and most people will probably be turned off by the religious and spiritual kind of overtones of meditation”
Alex Tew: Calm has been a profitable company for many years
“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 bee…”
Alex Tew: Brand is a customer's primary long-term interaction with a company
“In the long run, brand is the primary interaction that a customer will have over a lifetime. Because the products will often change.”
Alex Tew: Calm raised its Series A six years after founding
“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.”
Alex Tew: Tech prioritizes external efficiency over internal mental states
“A lot of technology is really focused on the external world, if you like, improving the efficiency of the world that is out there, as opposed to focusing on the world within, particularly our mind and the emotional states that we're in”
Harry Stebbings: Calm has raised over $143 million from top investors
“To date, the company's raised over a hundred and forty three million dollars in financing from some of the best, including Lightspeed, Insight, TPG, and then some very cool names, including Ashton Kutcher, Harry Styles, Brad Feld, and Jason Calicanis.”