Calm

“I think in, in the end we raised from about 12, 12 people and they were all individual angels. The biggest concern people had was, how is this going to be a business? You know, you're going to build a business around Calm. You're going to bring meditation. Lik…”

“There was like a couple of audio recordings for free, and then you'd pay five dollars to unlock the full app. There was no subscription. In fact, at the time, Apple hadn't embraced subscriptions at all but it was encouraging because 10% of people who downloade…”

“Silicon Valley was the place to build this business. You know, the, there was more investors who were open to ideas like this. The climate was more open to it as well. A lot of our friends and people we knew in London were very, very skeptical of meditation an…”

“The market we did feel was absolutely enormous. It wasn't just the people who are meditating. It was, you Pretty much anyone with a mind. So we felt there were going to be multiple winners. Not a winner takes all market, but a winner takes most.”

“Yeah, we went up and down Sand Hill Road and struck out.”

“She helped do our first successful user acquisition, and it was in, I think, January, 2017, we had our first million dollar month, and it's because we had cracked the UA code.”

“So our revenue went from, you know, seven million to twenty one million to eighty million.”

“So, you know, the very first subscription we had was 10 dollars a year, and then I think in 2015 we made it 40, then it was 50, and then 60. And each time the conversion rate would be lower, but the net of it would be that we would make more money, you would h…”

“So all the key talent we brought on board are on our cap table.”

“I think if we had raised tons of money very, very early, we may have not had the scrappiness to, say, do sleep stories. You know, we may have just kind of been drunk on, you know, expensive, unprofitable user acquisition. So I think we kind of got the foundati…”

“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.”

“Calm or Headspace of the world, which makes mental wellness, health, they're not great businesses.”

“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…”

“Alex Tu created a website that was basically just some waves lapping on the beat. And it was called do nothing for two minutes.com. And you literally had to just stare at these waves for two minutes and not move your mouse or tap on the keyboard. And not many …”

“You know, when I was at Calm, Calm when I joined about 25 engineers, about a hundred when I left, And when I joined, we were going through a migration from our monolith to a number of services, and I canceled that migration.”

“Many of those are amazing companies, but it's hard to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue on, on things like those.”

“It certainly saved Calm, and it gave them a, you know, I think almost a billion dollar valuation. What saved them was Sleep Stories”

“They had, it was four million dollars, we put 378 K in on six percent, and they didn't raise any money. Until it was a two hundred fifty million dollar valuation, so no dilution.”

“We have a marketplace where we've integrated into head Space and the Calm and Equinox and SoulCycle and InsightTrack and all these other things where we'll tell the company the exact service to buy for that employee based off the data that we're seeing.”

“I invested in Uber, Thumbtack, and Calm for fifteen million dollars combined. That was their combined valuation.”

“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…”

“It's my third biggest win. Uber, calm, and then this one.”

“The folks like Calm and Headspace have gone on to build great businesses, and I think the killer application for those businesses is not meditation. I think it's sleep”

“That's what Peloton should do, honestly, like, because they're not going to find another bike. Like, even the treadmill, they're not going to find another treadmill. There's only so many of these, like, places to expand. They should go straight to the bed and …”

“I was on their podcast a few months ago, and my website crashed, actually”

“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.”

“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”

“In the long run, brand is the primary interaction that a customer will have over a lifetime. Because the products will often change.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think we were on a sixty million dollar run rate at the time when we raised our series A.”

“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”

“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…”