Alex Tew
Co-Founder & Co-Executive Chairman, Calm. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@tewy ↗LinkedIn ↗calm.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Alex Tew is a British entrepreneur best known for co-founding Calm, a meditation and sleep application. He first gained worldwide recognition in 2005 by creating The Million Dollar Homepage to fund his university education.
2shows
2appearances
28statements
3resolved
3supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Alex Tew said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Alex Tew: True virality depends on the idea itself, not channels
“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.”
Alex Tew: Three to four year customer payback periods are insane
“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”
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.”
Alex Tew: The UK has very few publicly successful entrepreneurs
“Richard Branson, childhood hero in many ways, and one of the very few examples of publicly successful entrepreneurs in the UK. Obviously, the US has many, many more”
Alex Tew: Startups can pursue fast growth while maintaining profitability
“I don't think it necessarily has to be a choice. I think you can do both at the same time. I think you can grow as fast as possible at the same time as being sensible about your expenditure and ultimately be profitable. And you don't have to be insanely profit…”
Tew: Calm raised over $400k from 12 angels after 100+ meetings
“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…”
Tew: Early capital constraints forced Calm to innovate sleep stories
“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…”
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: 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: Companies that ignore brand intentionality end up with accidental brands
“If you're not intentional about it, you'll just have one accidentally. And so if you're not intentional about your brand, you will end up with a brand anyway”
Alex Tew: Pure organic customer acquisition is rare without network effects
“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”
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: Viral products must gain traction within a couple of days
“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 wr…”
Alex Tew: The Million Dollar Homepage would take two weeks today
“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.”
Alex Tew: Bouncing ideas off large groups dilutes high-conviction concepts
“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 …”
Alex Tew: Copying competitors fails because you cannot replicate their internal DNA
“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 …”
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”
Alex Tew: Social media consumes idle time required for creative imagination
“Time that we would have had to just kind of idly look out the window and think up things is now kind of occupied with social media or incoming messages. So I think that you kind of have to dedicate a bit more intention around the idea of using your imagination…”
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…”
Tew: Early Million Dollar Homepage advertisers got massive returns
“People were getting something in, in return, you know, they were getting an advert that people could click on, and some of those early Advertisers got an insane return on their investment.”
Tew: Press attention drove the Million Dollar Homepage's viral loop
“Every piece of press was making it more valuable. I remember one of the early interviews I did was on the BBC breakfast show. So this is like Good Morning America, right? But in the UK. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sitting on the couch and they're like, you know, why i…”
Tew: 'Do Nothing for Two Minutes' gained 2M visitors in a week
“We just, we built it one afternoon and tweeted about it, and it just went viral. And within a week, had about two million visitors.”
Tew: 10% of early Calm mobile app downloaders paid the $5 fee
“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…”
The other half of the tape: Alex Tew's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Jude Gomila 4Andy McLoughlin 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 8
2020 4 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Alex's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder & Co-Executive Chairman, Calm | 1 | 19 | 100% 2/2 | full record on 20VC → |
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Co-Founder & Co-Executive Chairman, Calm | 1 | 9 | 100% 1/1 | full record on How I Built This → |