Sprinkling magic: the Calm playbook of play, resilience and creative risk
Key takeaways from The Business of Creativity interview with Calm co-founder Michael Acton SmithDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, in conversation with Sir John Hegarty (August 2026):
Calm at scale. Acton Smith says the company he co-founded in 2012 is now valued at over $2bn, with more than 150m downloads and tens of millions of monthly users, having helped bring meditation, sleep and mental fitness into the mainstream.
Sleep stories, the accidental hit. After noticing usage spike late at night around meditator Tamara Levit's voice, Calm created bedtime stories for adults; sleep stories are now the most-used feature, accounting for about two-thirds of in-app usage.
The Matthew McConaughey inflection. Acton Smith points to landing Matthew McConaughey to record a sleep story as the single clearest turning point, after which press attention and celebrity endorsements snowballed.
A long, hard start. Calm pitched roughly 100 investors and won only a handful for its seed round; it took years to reach a Series A before growth turned "hockey stick", underscoring resilience over early validation.
Data informed, not data driven. He frames Calm's method as balancing data with creative instinct — using the numbers as knowledge while reserving room for "left-field leaps", citing the iPhone and Dyson as products no data called for.
The danger of playing it safe. Acton Smith argues that avoiding risk after failure is its own kind of failure: companies run by committee drain out the fun and lose their way, and the biggest wins come only from playing at the edge where people think you are slightly crazy.
Learning from the failures. He is candid about earlier ventures — Firebox, the commercially challenging Perplex City, and Moshi Monsters, which peaked as a global kids' brand before missing the shift to mobile and iPad — as the source of the resilience that built Calm.
Taking Calm offline. The next phase is extending the digital brand into the physical world — clothing, drinks, hotels — invoking Richard Branson's Virgin as the model of a brand expanding across categories.
Read more: The Business of Creativity