Michael Acton Smith Keynote Speaker

Michael Acton Smith OBE is a highly successful technology entrepreneur and leader. He is the co-founder and Co-Executive Chairman of Calm, a firm whose mission is to make the world a happier and less stressed place by bringing meditation and mindfulness to the mainstream.  In 2022, Time Magazine listed CALM as one of the world’s Most Influential. Companies, alongside Apple, Disney and other top firm.

Over the past 10 years, over 100 million people have downloaded the Calm app.  Calm is the #1 app for Sleep, Meditation and Relaxation, with over 4 million subscribers and millions of 5-star reviews. They were an Apple BEST OF 2018 award winner, Apple’s App of the Year 2017, Google Play Editor’s Choice 2018, and to be named by the Center for Humane Technology as “the world’s happiest app”. In 2020, Calm consolidated their position as the World’s First Mental Health ‘Unicorn’ – and is valued now at more than 2 billion USD.  They would like to make Calm the Nike of the mind.

Michael’s book – “Calm” has been described as “a practical and pleasurable guide to twenty-first century mindfulness. The Daily Telegraph calls him “a rock star version of Willy Wonka”; The Independent “a polite version of Bob Geldof.”

In 2004, Michael founded entertainment company Mind Candy, and from a sketch on a napkin in a South London coffee shop, he built Moshi Monsters into a global online brand with over 80m registered users. Moshi Monsters was later expanded offline into books, magazines, toys, music albums, trading cards and a movie. Mind Candy, valued at £200 million, also produced the award-winning Perplex City, a global hunt for a buried stash of £100,000 with players searching for clues across various online media and real world locations.

In 1998, Michael co-founded the online gadget and gift retailer Firebox.com which became the UK’s 13th fastest private business and was listed on the Sunday Times ‘Fast Track 100’. It has successfully diversified into the mail order, corporate and wholesale sectors. Michael is a founder of Silicon drinkabout, a weekly tech/media meetup in Shoreditch, London and Berwickstock, a boutique music festival. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the creative industries.