Calm app creator Michael Acton Smith: ‘I want to help people to find peace’

The US President has been good for Michael Acton Smith’s business. When Trump was elected, downloads of the entrepreneur’s app Calm soared. It promises to “make you sleep better and feel happier”.

Calm, which offers meditation and mindfulness practices as well as sleep aides, is downloaded by more than 30,000 people each day and was awarded App of the Year 2017 by Apple. As Facebook bosses admit that social media can harm your mental health, Calm’s focus on wellbeing stands out.

Acton Smith, who was the poster boy for the Silicon Roundabout start-up scene when he founded children’s game Moshi Monsters in 2008, has serious ambitions for it.

“The world is only going to get more stressful, with more technology — but mindfulness can help you be a master of technology and not get drowned by it. I‘d like Calm hotels where you’re guaranteed a good night’s sleep and a Calm island.

“It sounds crazy but I think we can build one of the most meaningful brands in the world. I love what Nike did 50 years ago when the physical exercise boom was starting. Exercise wasn’t a thing, then doctors said it was good for you and it became huge. That’s now happening with mental fitness.”

Acton Smith, aged 43, has messy rock-star hair and wears a military jacket and a binary watch that shows the time in dots. “It’s useful when I’m playing poker, it distracts people. Poker skills come out in the dance you do with investors.”

When Calm launched in 2012, “investors thought it was a bit weird”. “Now they’ve changed their tune. We used to brag about how little sleep we got. Now it is prized and we can’t get it, we’re taking sleeping pills.”

Mindfulness is an antidote to 24-hour news and turbulent politics. “Everything is so binary now, Left-wing versus Right. It’s so entrenched but the world is more nuanced and complex, it’s shades of grey. Mindfulness is about respecting others’ opinions. You can still disagree but do it in a considered way rather than screaming at each other and getting nowhere.”

Michael Acton Smith

Calm came out of a testing time for Acton Smith. At its peak, Moshi Monsters had 50 million members; half of all British children played it. Being CEO was demanding. “During bumpy times in my business I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t eating well, I constantly felt stressed, with headaches and exhaustion.” He went on holiday to Austria alone and tried meditation on the recommendation of his “buddy” Alex Tew, who has been meditating since he was a teenager. Tew made a fortune at the age of 21 by selling one million pixels of internet ad space for $1 each on his Million Dollar Homepage. He’s now a co-founder of Calm. “In Austria I realised the more I practised, the better I was. Meditation rewires our bodies in profound ways. The light bulb went on and changed my life, and I want to build this business to spread it as far as I can.”

Acton Smith sees the company’s main rival, Headspace ,“as mindful competition”. “I’ve never seen growth quite like it. There’s space for both of us.” Calm has free exercises and it’s £40 a year to unlock all the content: “People are happy to pay for something that transforms their life; they pay to use the gym...”

Acton Smith now lives in San Francisco but “will always be a Londoner” and wants to buy a house here. We’ve met in Soho, near his old flat, where he used to put on a yearly festival called Berwickstock, with bands in the kitchen. He moved to America in 2012 because, “I thought Silicon Valley would be fun, open to the idea of meditation. London is catching up quickly. Silicon Valley is quite like the HBO comedy satirising it.”

He isn’t anti-technology. “Devices are not the problem, they are just tools — it’s how we use them that matters. The average person will check their phone more than 100 times a day, not consciously, just instinctively, looking at social media. Meditating means you do it when you want. Phones are extraordinary and add so much to our lives when you use them mindfully, when and how and where we want rather than on autopilot.” Acton Smith tries not to look at his phone until he has left the house in the morning.

The Calm app features a Sleep Stories function, where you can be lulled into slumber by the dulcet tones of Stephen Fry and Acton Smith’s sister Anna, an actor (she and his mother understand Calm more than they did Moshi). They are also working on Moshi Twilight, a collaboration with Acton Smith’s other business, to help children sleep. He’s still chairman of Moshi but not involved in the daily workings of the business. “I miss it occasionally but life is short. It’s always good to try different things.”

They meditate as a team at the Calm HQ in San Francisco, where the business has grown from nine people in a one-bedroom flat at the start of the year to an office of 25 with a branch in London too. “It sounds very Californian,” says a bashful Acton Smith. “But we don’t hold hands or sing. It’s a wonderful way to start the day. In the average office people are frazzled from their commutes before the day has even started, so we just spend 10 minutes doing exercises, checking in before we start work.” Meditation is rigorous. “If you fall asleep while doing it, you aren’t getting enough sleep. Meditation is not clearing your mind, it is a practice.”

Over the summer, Acton Smith went back home to Marlow, Bucks, because his mother, a former nurse and chiropodist, was diagnosed with bowel cancer. “It was a tough time. Fortunately the care around cancer is getting better”. She’s now been given the all-clear. His father, who has passed away, was a teacher at a school on an American military base. “He ran the library, which was his dream. My sister and I spent hours there. I loved The Hobbit.”