Calm

“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”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”