Michael Acton Smith and the business of doing less

The stars arrived wearing evening dress. They walked the red carpet outside London’s Prince Charles Cinema, posed for photographs and left hoofprints in mud. The film was Baa Baa Land, its cast was sheep, and its running time was eight hours. Michael Acton Smith, one of its co-executive producers, had found a fairly economical way of dispensing with dialogue.

This was 2017. Four years earlier, a different film connected to his career had sent the colourful creatures of Moshi Monsters on an animated adventure. Now the action consisted of a flock in an Essex field. Somewhere between those two productions lies an explanation of the entrepreneur who helped create Calm.

Acton Smith has spent his working life finding things people might enjoy entering: a shop of peculiar gifts, an intricate fictional city, a world populated by monsters, an app of audio and stories. The scenery changes considerably. His interest in the invitation persists. Even a quiet field can be packaged with a joke, a premiere and a name you remember.

A child with a treasure map

He grew up in Marlow, beside the Thames, in a family that encouraged his schemes. His father was American, his mother Irish. Summer visits to America introduced him to children’s television; back in Britain, games, books and a ZX Spectrum provided other materials for invention. The Muppets offered a particularly useful precedent: peculiar creatures could have personalities, friendships and a world of their own.

For his seventh birthday he received Masquerade, Kit Williams’s illustrated puzzle book. Its pictures concealed clues to a buried treasure. A book could therefore extend beyond its pages, sending readers into the world to look for something. For a child already interested in puzzles, that was an appealing breach of the usual arrangement between author and audience.

University did not deliver him directly into entertainment. He studied geography at Birmingham, graduating in 1996, then spent a brief period in human resources at Goldman Sachs. The route sounds respectable enough to reassure a parent. It also left room for conversations with his university friend Tom Boardman about starting something themselves. Acton Smith’s formal subject had been maps. His early career was about to acquire several detours.

A chessboard with a punchline

In 1998, Acton Smith and Boardman co-founded the business that became Firebox, an online retailer of gifts and gadgets. They operated from Boardman’s parents’ home in Cardiff. A book about doing business on the internet had helped make the possibility seem tangible. You could build a shop without first obtaining a shopfront; you still had to persuade people to visit it.

The beginning was difficult. Banks were reluctant to lend, and the website did not immediately find customers. Then came the shot-glass chess set. Each piece was a drinking glass; taking an opponent’s piece supplied an additional consequence. It was an object whose appeal required almost no explanation, and magazines supplied the attention the shop had been missing.

There is something revealing about that first breakthrough. Acton Smith’s early product was a familiar game with one ridiculous alteration. Someone could see it, grasp the joke and tell a friend. The usefulness was largely social. Nobody needed a lengthy demonstration to understand why this chess set might improve a party while doing very little for the standard of play.

Investment followed and the business moved to London. The dotcom downturn brought another difficult stretch, including reduced operations and stopped salaries. Firebox survived. His introduction to entrepreneurship had included both the pleasure of a product catching on and the less photogenic work of keeping a business alive after the excitement moved elsewhere.

The puzzle that would not pay

Mind Candy, founded in 2004, gave him a larger canvas. Its early project, Perplex City, was a treasure hunt distributed across different media. Players followed puzzles and clues into a fictional world, with a cash reward waiting for the person who solved the central mystery. The childhood appeal of Masquerade had become an ambitious commercial undertaking.

It drew praise and awards attention. It also failed to find the commercial footing its creators needed. Acton Smith later described its complexity as a barrier to a mass audience. The ingenuity that made the project interesting could make it difficult to explain. A potential customer had to understand the proposition before deciding whether to enter it.

By then he was drawing monsters in notebooks. The drawings contained the beginning of another world, one whose invitation could be made considerably shorter. A child could adopt a creature. The creature could have a home, preferences and things to do. You did not have to solve an elaborate mystery to know why you might want a pet.

“keep things a little more fun and simple.”

Michael Acton Smith, on the lesson Perplex City left him

Six creatures, millions of owners

Moshi Monsters reached the public in 2008. Children chose from six monsters, explored the world and played games. The idea had an immediate emotional centre: this particular creature belonged to you. Its oddness was part of the attraction. A monster could offer personality without the inconvenience of muddy paws on the kitchen floor.

Its early reception still required work. Acton Smith identified the addition of social features in 2009 as a turning point. Children could connect with each other, making the world a shared experience. Ownership gave them a reason to arrive; the presence of other children gave them another reason to return.

The characters travelled into toys, books, trading cards, magazines, music and cinema. Moshi Monsters grew to 80 million registered users. In 2013, Moshi won the BAFTA Children’s Award for Original Interactive. His OBE for services to the creative industries followed in 2014. A notebook of drawings had acquired an audience and an unusually extensive range of merchandise.

The expansion also brought difficulties. He later acknowledged that the business mishandled the move from web to mobile and did not establish a successful second intellectual property alongside Moshi. The lesson was painfully relevant to a creator of worlds: an audience can love the characters while changing where it expects to meet them. The browser is a place, too, and people leave places.

The invitation gets quieter

Calm, co-founded with Alex Tew in 2012, brought another change of setting. Tew was already known for the Million Dollar Homepage, his experiment in selling pixels as advertising space. The two were friends before they became Calm’s co-founders. Their shared history included living together in London’s Soho and discussing ideas.

Tew’s earlier website, Do Nothing for Two Minutes, supplied an exceptionally clear proposition. Visitors encountered a brief pause rather than a complicated world to master. Calm began on the web, then arrived as an iPhone app in 2013. A short name and a simple experience left little translation work for the person opening it.

The product grew into a library of voices, music and audio stories. Acton Smith brought experience in creating entertainment that could travel across formats. With Moshi, characters had moved from the screen to the toy shelf. With Calm, a story could move from the phone into someone’s imagination while the screen ceased to matter.

Apple named Calm its iPhone App of the Year in 2017. A 2020 financing round valued the company at $2 billion. Those milestones belong to a business built with Tew and a growing team. The creative continuity is more personal: Acton Smith was still giving an audience a world to enter, now one that asked less of its eyes.

A voice has to bring something

Familiar voices became part of Calm’s storytelling. Matthew McConaughey and Harry Styles are among its narrators. For Acton Smith, the partnership has to extend beyond a famous name attached to an advertisement. He describes an approach built around investment, content and engagement: a stake in the company, a distinctive contribution and actual use of the product.

This fits a career spent making things with other people. Boardman helped build Firebox. Tew co-founded Calm. Artists, designers and writers made the Moshi world inhabit somewhere beyond its creator’s notebook. An appealing idea needs people who can give it a form, then keep producing work an audience wants.

The sheep film took that principle in an eccentric direction. Producer Peter Freedman conceived Baa Baa Land; Garth Thomas directed, filmed and edited it. Acton Smith and Tew were co-executive producers. The project’s solemn film-premiere treatment gave everyone permission to enjoy the joke. Its actual contents remained remarkably faithful to the title. Sheep have many virtues, but an appetite for plot twists is difficult to establish.

Still making things

His projects have also included Ping Pong Fight Club and Berwickstock, a music festival run from his Soho home with Boardman and other entrepreneurs. They belong to the same appetite for gathering people around something enjoyable. A company, a game and a party demand different paperwork, but each begins with an invitation someone accepts.

In 2022, Acton Smith announced that he and Tew would become co-executive chairmen of Calm, with David Ko taking the CEO role. He is now Calm’s co-founder and executive chairman. In 2025, he publicly backed the company’s expansion into licensing, products and experiences beyond the app. The old interest in letting a digital brand enter the physical world is still there.

In January 2026, he announced a speaking appearance at the Offscript Summit for people aged 16 to 25. That audience was being invited to consider the world ahead. His own route offers material worth considering: a conventional first job, an unusual shop, a celebrated idea that struggled, creatures that caught on and a partnership that found another direction.

It would be tidy to call the journey a retreat from spectacle. The sheep in evening dress complicate that reading. Acton Smith still seems to enjoy the ceremony, the absurd detail and the possibility of making something people will talk about. He has simply discovered that an experience can succeed even when its audience stops watching.