---
title: "Calm: The Making of a Meditation Empire | Trends by The Hustle"
description: "Time to Meditate: How Calm co-founder Michael Acton Smith built an $80 million-a-year business on the back of a stressed-out society"
image: https://www.nlopchantamang.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/lrg-calm-article_20190624225408-3.jpg
---

![](https://www.nlopchantamang.com/hubfs/Imported_Blog_Media/lrg-calm-article_20190624225408-3.jpg)

### What was your first business?

I started my first business when I left college in the late 1990s. It was called Hot Box. We saw this thing called the internet bubbling up, and we thought there was gonna be an opportunity to revolutionize commerce, and so we started selling quirky gadgets, toys, and games online.

And this is before Shopify, this is before Stripe, we had to kind of hack everything together ourselves. And we called it Hot Box because the products were so hot they were bursting out of the box.

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