Headspace: Andy Puddicombe and Rich Pierson (2019)

Andy Puddicombe is not your typical entrepreneur—in his early twenties, he gave away everything he owned to train as a Buddhist monk. But after ten years, he decided he wanted to bring the benefits of his meditation techniques to more people. While running a meditation clinic in London, Andy met Rich Pierson, who had burned out on his job at a high-powered London ad agency. Together, they founded Headspace in 2010. Over ten years later, Headspace's guided meditation app has users in 190 countries and an annual revenue of over $100 million. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get The US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card.

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  Now you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

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• 3:40Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

  And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talked to on this show, because the best ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port-fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary.

• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey, everyone, and Happy New Year. You know, we wanted to set just the right mood for 2022, so we're running an episode that is so full of joy and good vibes and, of course, great advice. It's one of our favorites from the archives, the story of Headspace. Hope you enjoy.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  We knew the business that we had wasn't working. And so with the last bit of cash that we had, we managed to pull in every single favor that we had left. Our friends and family had said, look, we really love you guys, but we're not giving you any more money. This is a terrible business. Like, well done, but enough's enough.

• 5:54Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:08Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a Buddhist monk and a stressed-out marketing consultant sat down at a Starbucks and wound up launching Headspace, a meditation app that has millions of users around the world.

• 6:28Guy Raz?

  So we've had several episodes that feature cofounders. And if there's one thing that's clear, it's that all of them brought different skills to the table. At Method, Adam Lowry mixed the ingredients to make the soap. Eric Ryan designed the now iconic bottles. At Reddit, Steve Huffman did the coding. Alexis Ohanian did the content. So you get the point, right? And it's almost hard to imagine any of these companies making it without both cofounders. And that is also probably the case with today's story. Because it's a story of two totally different people with totally different strengths. One of them, Andy Puttycomb, trained as a Buddhist monk for more than a decade.

• 7:12Guy Raz?

  The other, Rich Pierson, was a rising star at a top-tier advertising agency in London. They met because Rich was spiraling. He was burnt out and looking for help. And Andy was the person he happened to come across. At the time, Andy was offering one-on-one meditation sessions out of a back room of a doctor's office. Neither Andy nor Rich could have imagined that eventually the two of them would build a meditation app, Headspace, now used by millions of people, and a business that generates more than $100 million in annual revenue. And the story of how they came together at the exact right moment, each with the exact

• 7:55Guy Raz?

  skill set they needed to cofound and build Headspace? Well, it's a pretty long journey. And Andy, the Buddhist monk, he would say that it took as long as it was supposed to. But it actually starts when Andy was growing up in the UK in the 1980s. He was first introduced to meditation as a kid, around the time his parents' marriage started to fall apart.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yes, my parents split up at ten and my mum was, I think she was, she was looking for a way to cope. Meditation definitely was within her kind of sphere of, of interest. And in Bristol, there was a, a local group, it was a TM group, transcendental meditation group. And she decided that she was gonna do a, a six week course. And my sister, I found out, was going along with her and I didn't wanna be at home on my own. So I asked if I could join them. Yeah, and it led to actually kind of a couple of years of doing that kind of thing into my early teens.

• 8:54Guy Raz?

  This is in like the early eighties when meditation was by no means mainstream. I mean, even the sort of western.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Oh, it was so outside of mainstream.

• 9:03Guy Raz?

  Yeah, and, and did it feel weird or different? When, when you were a kid, did you feel like this was a little unusual?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  It did, but I don't know if I had that point of comparison, you know? As a kid, you don't necessarily have the, this is, this is weird and that's not. My mum was going there, so I was going there. It wasn't until, um, I told a really good friend of mine, he's still a very good friend of mine. I shared with him, confided in him that I'd been going to do this thing. Cause I knew it was a little bit kind of weird. And, um, and I went into school the next day and, um, all the other kids in the class were sat on their desks, cross-legged, sort of omming, um, at me as I walked in the room. And it was at that point, I, I think then I registered that, oh, okay, this is definitely not something that is mainstream. It's probably not something that I'm gonna be able to talk about too much to other people.

• 9:53Guy Raz?

  And what, what was it? Was it focusing on breathing? Do you, do you remember what those group sessions were like?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  With TM, it's typically a mantra. So you're, you're given sort of a, a word or a phrase and you repeat it over and over for sort of a twenty minute period. And at that time, I found it really, really difficult as a, as an energetic young kid to sit there and be still and to focus. But it was definitely something that I still found, you know, I still look back at it with a, a sense that it was, it was a very positive influence at a, an early stage in my life.

• 10:27Guy Raz?

  When you were like sixteen, cause in, in the UK, it's a little different than in the US, which is certainly at that time, like the drinking age.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:36Guy Raz?

  Probably wasn't really enforced and it was typical for 15, 16 year old kids to go to pubs and get pints of beer and

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 10:43Guy Raz?

  Drinking cultures is very different there. Were you into that? Were you part of that?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  I was very into that. By that stage, I was playing in a rugby team as well and it was very much part of the, the culture. Yeah, we'd go out at the weekend with our, with our fake ID and go and find some drinks.

• 11:00Guy Raz?

  I read that around this time, like in your teens, while you were at a pub one night, you went through a kind of a pretty traumatic experience.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:13Guy Raz?

  What, what happened?

• 11:15Speaker 02

  It was Christmas Eve. We'd had a party at the local rugby club in, in Caneham. And so it was Christmas morning. By the time we all sort of came out onto the, the street and we were standing in a, a big group outside the, the club and a, a drunk driver came down the road and crashed into, to the group of us. And I was just very lucky to be standing on the edge of the group, but it, it killed two people and injured sort of put in sort of critical like intensive care, like 12, 12 of the group.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  And, you know, every single one of us there that night dealt with, dealt with it in a, a different way. I think we were all very confused. You know, we're still young, like 18 years old, you know? I don't know if we ever really kind of know how to deal with that kind of thing. I just wanted to get away. I think we often do this, right? Like the idea, the sense of getting away in a physical way, kind of we think that we're going to be able to outrun it mentally as well. And of course we never can. So, yeah, like I think a really, to this day, you know, kind of a really important and impactful part of, of my own journey.

• 12:32Guy Raz?

  So I guess eventually you left home, you went to college and you started studying at a place called De Montfort University. By the way, where is that?

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in Bedford. So it was a sports college. And actually, I didn't go straight there. So my grades weren't good enough. So I went and spent a couple of years, actually here in the US, doing some coaching, sports. I already trained prior to university. I trained as a personal trainer. So I was already working in sort of gyms and things. I'm really enjoying that. Till eventually, when I was 21, I got in as a, they call it as a mature student in England. It just basically means your grades don't have to be quite as good and you're a little bit older. So they let you in. I think it's a pity thing. And I started studying sports science.

• 13:20Guy Raz?

  So you're at university and you decide to drop out in the middle of it.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:27Guy Raz?

  What, why? What happened?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I was just increasingly, you know, I just felt this sense of disturbance or unsatisfactoriness. I kind of felt like I was doing something I enjoyed, but I just didn't feel like it was really making me happy. And at the time, I was going out with this girl who lived there kind of locally. And we talked a lot, you know, she was really into Buddhism and stuff. And, you know, she talked with a huge amount of admiration about these monks and nuns that would go away and meditate and try and understand their mind, you know. And it was just into the second year. It was pretty early on. Just

• 14:10Speaker 02

  had a day, you know, where all of a sudden that seemed to make a lot of sense. I just, it was like an inexplicable feeling that I just had to do this, so much so that I went into university that same afternoon and said, I'm gonna leave. This is what I'm gonna do.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  So just, I just want to understand this. You are in your second year of college.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:33Guy Raz?

  You're kind of just, something's missing, which is not unusual for a young person in their twenties, early twenties to kind of experience.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:41Guy Raz?

  And you decide that you want to go and study Buddhism and become a monk. I'm, yeah, I mean, just...

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  I would frame it ever so slightly differently. You're absolutely correct, but my experience of it was not that, it's not that I sat there and chose to do it. I genuinely felt nothing else made sense. It wasn't, it didn't even feel like a choice. I didn't, I didn't sit there for days thinking, should I do this? Shouldn't I do this? What are the pros? What are the cons? Uh, it sounds, I'm aware of how strange that sounds. I just suddenly think one day you're gonna quit college and go and become a Buddhist monk. But at the time, for what it's worth, it felt like a calling I couldn't sort of ignore.

• 15:30Guy Raz?

  So this is like sort of really pre-internet, you know, browser days. So you couldn't just like go to the internet in your university library and like look up, you know, how to become a Buddhist monk or like where do I go?

• 15:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So what did you, so what, so you decided that you're gonna drop out of university? And how do you even find out what to do?

• 15:49Speaker 02

  I mean, firstly, I just love the idea that that's even kind of a search option on, on Google these days, how to become a monk.

• 15:57Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Um, but I guess it is. And there are probably people kind of Googling that. But no, back then I'd read a little bit and most of the stuff I had read was from Southeast Asia. So it has its home in, in Thailand and Vietnam and, and Sri Lanka. Um, so I started thinking, okay, I'm, I'm gonna go to Thailand. I knew of a teacher who was there, who I really kind of respected. I enjoyed their writing. So I thought, okay, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go there. But this girlfriend of mine said, oh, a friend of mine's just come back from, from the Himalayas. She went to visit the Dalai Lama. He was in northern India in this kind of small town. I went and got a Lonely Planet guide from the local library and looked it up and thought, well, that looks interesting. Okay, maybe

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I'll fly to Delhi instead. And, you know, the Dalai Lama's there. It must be a, a pretty good place. So I flew into, I flew into Delhi. Um, I think, um, I'd done a little bit of research and I printed some stuff out before I went. And I knew of a retreat center. So I went to a retreat center and said, kind of, you know, this is, this is what I'd like to do. Could I just start off maybe by working here, kind of maybe doing some retreat? And I was there for probably six months or so before then going on to Thailand and Burma, sort of to actually train in a, in a monastery.

• 17:11Guy Raz?

  And when you got there, um, to Burma, what, like, what was the commitment you were making? Like, how long were you gonna be there?

• 17:19Speaker 02

  In that particular tradition, you don't make a time commitment. I did it later on in the Tibetan tradition I did, but I started training as a novice monk and it was of all the, of all the training, it was really full on. It was way more full on than what I'd come from in, in India.

• 17:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, what do you, what do you mean? Like, what was a typical day like?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  So in Burma, it was just meditation. So we were doing an eighteen hour day. So it was eight hours of sitting and eight hours of walking meditation, all in the same room. Plus in the two hours for, for eating at five in the morning and eleven, you'd have lunch and then no eating after midday. And then you'd have somewhere around three, three and a half hours sleep at, at nighttime and that was it, seven days a week.

• 18:03Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  So it was, it was a really, I mean, really kind of quite extreme. Retrospectively, I think I would have done things a little differently. There was no one there, there were no English people there. There was no one who spoke really English. Even my teacher there didn't really speak any English. So every afternoon I had ten minutes with him and I'd go and sit there and he'd look at me and he'd sort of smile and look very kind of warm and happy. And sometimes I'd sit there and I'd smile and kind of laugh and other days I'd sit there and I'd cry and he didn't really have anything to say because he didn't speak English. Sometimes he'd just speak Burmese anyway and I would just sit there and kind of, you know. So there wasn't a lot of instruction taking place.

• 18:47Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I've talked to people who've done Vipassana, which is like ten days silent retreat and who, who've had like, and certainly in the first few days, really broken down, you know, really just emotional breakdowns. It's so hard. It's so, it's so isolating. You must have experienced that.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, I definitely, I, I, I met a part of myself that I had never previously experienced and it was vulnerable, it was painful, challenging in ways, yeah, I don't even know how to describe.

• 19:18Guy Raz?

  Were you still thinking, yep, I, I want to become a monk? Like, I, I mean, to, to me, I think ninety percent of people would have just dropped out of that point and said, this isn't for me.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  I think there's different ways of looking at it. I think. Through the lens of a Buddhist monk, I think you just look at it and say, well, karma, you know, kind of that was my journey and you know, this is the journey I'm on and I kind of it did. You know, when you're living your life and it just feels like you're in the right place in the right time, even if it's difficult, there's still a sense that this is, this is just where I should be right now. So even when it was difficult, I still felt that this is where I should be right now. But yeah, eventually kind of there was a point where I think I kept getting ill in Asia as well, you know, like that is the additional challenge. It's not just the challenges of the mind. It's the challenges of the stomach and the bowels as well. And I remember eventually a, a teacher from Australia coming and he said, look,

• 20:15Speaker 02

  honestly, he said, if you wanna kind of go and do like a, a year retreat or a two year retreat or something like that. He said, I'd probably try and do it in the West if you can. He said, find a good teacher, but he said, it's so much easier to do that. So I, yeah, I started sort of looking at some, some other places as well and, and I met this teacher, this Tibetan Lama and um, you know, we talked a lot. By that stage, I'd already kind of done multiple years, I don't know, probably four years, something like that, of training and we talked, we talked a lot. And I was so moved by his warmth, by his compassion, by his sense of joy. Things I'd not necessar- I'd witnessed a lot of awareness and focus and attention in other monasteries, but I hadn't really kind of seen this other sort of side.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  And yeah, I made the decision, it was really easy again, kind of actually, this is what I've been looking for and yeah, now I don't know how many years later, twenty five years later, he's still, he's still my teacher now.

• 21:10Guy Raz?

  Hmm. So Andy, I mean, during this period, like I, I assume that you'd go home now and again, uh, you know, to visit family and friends and when you did, like what did they think of you? Did they feel like you changed a lot?

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I do remember going back. Um, so I was, I was fully ordained and I remember walking down the high street. So I mean, this is a small town in the southwest of England. I'm walking down there in my bright sort of maroon robes and seeing kind of old school teachers and, you know, old mates and then saying to my friends, kind of, hey, it'd be great to all meet up together. And I'm, and they're like, sure, yeah, just come down to pub or be there, like where we always are. And I'm thinking in my mind, you know, there's this conflict of, I'm a monk, I can't walk into a pub as a monk and. Maybe it's okay if I just drink water and look, they're not going to meet me anywhere else because like genuinely, they've been sat in those same chairs for many years. They weren't going to give them up. So I did, I walked into our, our local pub where

• 22:08Speaker 02

  we all used to hang out as teenagers and I sat down around a table. I remember there were eight of us around this table. I drank water, they drank beer and we talked about the Himalayas.

• 22:18Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  But I, I never felt like I, I lost touch with the character or the person I grew up with. It wasn't like a different person. It was just, I was having a different experience.

• 22:30Guy Raz?

  Okay. I, I wanna, I wanna kind of fast forward just a couple of years to, to the early 2000s because I guess at a certain point, you actually wind up in Moscow in Russia, um, teaching at a meditation center there.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:43Guy Raz?

  And, and I guess you were sort of, you were supposed to be there like waiting until you get a spot at like one of these long-term retreats. Is, is that right?

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So there was a, there was a four-year retreat coming up at one of the monasteries and this retreat just kept getting pushed back. So I found myself in Moscow for a number of years, kind of teaching meditation, but waiting to go into long-term retreat. And so I think on the one hand, I was thinking, okay, I wanna make a long-term commitment to, to retreat and better understanding my mind. And on the other hand, I was getting this kind of experience of what does it mean to teach meditation, you know? And it wasn't what I'd set out to do, but I kind of accidentally found myself in a position where, where I was, I was then teaching.

• 23:29Guy Raz?

  You were teaching meditation in Moscow to Russians in English?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Correct. And mixed in with the Russians were a bunch of expats who lived in, in Moscow. And I got to know people who would come along to these centers, kind of alongside the, the sessions that we'd have at the center. I'd meet up with them. And then one of the expats had invited me to, to go in and teach his execs at an oil company in, in Russia. And he said, look, you know, kind of, you can't come in dressed as a Buddhist monk, you know? It's, it's an oil company. We're in Moscow. Um, and that had got me thinking about this whole idea of, you know, demystifying this and trying, trying to make it more accessible.

• 24:11Guy Raz?

  You go back to the UK in 2004, after a couple of years in Russia, to study circus arts. This is a total, like, let's say, out of left field. People are gonna listen to this and say, wait, what?

• 24:24Speaker 02

  I know.

• 24:25Guy Raz?

  Wait, I thought you were a monk. You were wanting to join the circus? What's, what's the story?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it sounds crazy. I know.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  It actually, stay with me, Guy. It does actually make more sense than it, than it first sounds. What happened was, I was in Moscow, and I'd already made the decision, actually, to sort of hand back my robes, to no longer be a monk.

• 24:50Guy Raz?

  Why?

• 24:51Speaker 02

  So I found increasingly, over the years that I was there, that, as I say, I was meeting people, and I was finding a way of talking about meditation in a way that I had never experienced myself, and, but that seemed to really resonate with people.

• 25:07Guy Raz?

  You found a way to explain it to people in language that you

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  you wished you had had.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Exactly that. So I found myself, living in Moscow, still teaching in the meditation center, but no longer living as a monk. And I hadn't done any exercise for 10 years. And I was really excited about doing some exercise. And a friend of mine there was doing a degree at Moscow State Circus. And he said, look, you know, I used to do a lot of acrobatics and stuff, and juggling. And he was like, oh, why don't you just come along, you know, meet some of my teachers? So I did, and I don't really kind of know how it happened, but I was there, and one of them said, hey, look, you know, you can do a degree in this back in London. And I was already thinking, okay, how do I make this transition from Buddhist monk, living in a monastery,

• 25:56Speaker 02

  to kind of making this content more available?

• 26:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:01Speaker 02

  I had no money. As a monk, you give away all your belongings. So I'd given away all my clothes, money, everything. So I was thinking, how am I gonna go from Russia back to England? And I kind of saw an opportunity, I guess, as a, now a very mature student, at 32. I was, I was in a position where the government would essentially kind of pay for everything.

• 26:21Guy Raz?

  Fund your education to study, to study circus, or?

• 26:25Speaker 02

  So, yes, so they funded not only the degree, but they also funded my, my living as well. So, you know, I was, I got into a situation where I didn't have to find kind of a job when I went back to the UK. So by, during the day, I went to school and studied circus arts. It was a big, big difference.

• 26:45Guy Raz?

  And meantime, in your mind, you had this idea of, I think I can make meditation more accessible.

• 26:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, every available, I was up at four o'clock in the morning, writing content. I'm trying to work out, kind of, okay, well, what is this thing that I want to do? But alongside that, running in parallel was, I managed to find a place where I could teach, teach meditation, just doing one to one at that point. I found a doctor who ran an integrative health center in London, where they had everything from sort of rheumatic specialists to cardiac specialists, you know, right across the board, all different disciplines. And he had heard of mindfulness. And he said, well, look, if you can make it work here, then I'm happy to give you one of the clinic's rooms.

• 27:32Guy Raz?

  Who were the kinds of people who were going to see you? Were they, were they people who were suffering from medical ailments? Were they people who just had work stress? Or were they kind of hippie dippy kind of people? Or people in suits and ties? Or, yeah?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, I deliberately chose that clinic, or that kind of approach, because I didn't want it to be in an alternative kind of health clinic or something like, you know, I wanted it to feel really kind of mainstream. That was, that was intentional. It was also in the city. It was in the financial district of London. So, most of the people I was seeing worked in the financial industry. They were struggling with depression, anxiety, insomnia, migraine. It was broad, but I would, I would say that they were all struggling with many of the, the things that we, we all suffer with in, in life now.

• 28:24Guy Raz?

  So, in London, were you convening like, larger meditation groups? Or was it mainly one-on-one groups?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  So, I did, I'd started with some workshops. So, the, in the clinic, I was primarily, yeah, but by that stage, I'd finished kind of studying at the circus school, I was working full-time in the clinic, seeing anything from six to 10 people a day. And I started at weekends, I started, I did a few, a few workshops. But it only really changed to sort of much larger, larger groups after I met.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  My now very good, good friend Rich, who's the co-founder of Headspace.

• 28:59Guy Raz?

  So this is probably a good time to bring you in, Rich. You've been sitting here patiently.

• 29:05Guy Raz?

  And I understand it, like when you met Andy, you were, I guess, in your mid twenties and working in London at this sort of high-powered ad agency called BBH. Is that right?

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was working on Kingly Street, right in the middle of Soho.

• 29:19Guy Raz?

  So, so your like sort of day-to-day life was probably like working all day and like not getting much sleep. And was that more or less what it was like?

• 29:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was working a lot. Like we, you know, if we were pitching, we'd often work fifteen, sixteen hour days and we would, it was client services. So you were, you know, you were at the behest of clients. So you had to work crazy hours. But at the same time, there was just a lot of, there's a lot of drinking and partying that went with the culture. And it was a way to kind of really let off steam. Everyone worked really hard and played really, really hard. It was very hard living, I would say, for, for in those early years when I, when I was working for sure.

• 29:58Guy Raz?

  Did you like that life?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Well, I'd loved, to be honest with you, I absolutely loved it when I, I felt like I'd found my career calling. And I loved that I could be around creative people and come up with creative kind of products. Over time, though, I think when I gave up drinking, when I'd kind of decided that I was not gonna kind of live as hard. You know, I just knew I didn't want to do that anymore. And I kind of, I felt the kind of, the shallow nature of selling people things that they maybe didn't want. And I just wasn't getting, I just wasn't getting any joy from that experience. And I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I was getting acupuncture at the time because I was just getting more and more anxious as I kind of didn't really feel like I understood my place in the world.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  And then that the, the person that was giving me the acupuncture said, look, and I was obviously telling you about my job and how unhappy I was. Said, look, I've got, I've actually got a course starting next month. Have you ever thought about being an acupuncturist? I think you'd be a brilliant acupuncturist. And I'd said, no, I've, I've never considered that. And, but I, yeah, I went in the, the next week and, and I quit and decided that I was gonna go and become an acupuncturist. Yeah, that's how that happened.

• 31:13Guy Raz?

  So, did you start taking classes?

• 31:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just felt like I wanted to do something that had some impact. And so I started the course three days a week in a normal academic kind of calendar. And then I was freelancing for the rest of the time to kind of make money.

• 31:31Guy Raz?

  Freelance advertising.

• 31:34Speaker 01

  Well, freelance is kind of just marketing of advice. It was weird when I kind of quit my job, lots of people reached out. And so I kind of managed to cobble together quite a few independent jobs that was enough to kind of pay my mortgage and I got a flatmate and I managed to kind of survive that way and pay for my course.

• 31:54Guy Raz?

  So you're doing that. And how did you come across Andy? I mean, at that time, he's teaching meditation in the city in London. Did you hear about him from someone else?

• 32:06Speaker 01

  Yes, the one of the, there's a guy called Adam Breeden who had a business called All-Star Lanes. And he had asked me to help him out with some marketing. So I was helping him. We'd become good friends and I was open about, you know, how anxious I was feeling and just how that was getting progressively worse. And he'd been getting one-on-one lessons from Andy. And he suggested I should go and meet Andy. Like Andy had this clinic and he wanted some help with it. So it was this skill swap. You know, I met Andy and he had the clinic. And so he said, look, why don't, you know, I'll put you through the clinic experience and I think I can help you. And maybe you can help me with some ideas for the clinic.

• 32:47Guy Raz?

  And Andy, what did you think that Rich could help you with? Did you think he might be able to help me figure out a way to get this out to more people?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think exactly that, you know? I could see that it was working for people and people who previously wouldn't have looked at meditation were getting benefit from it. At that time, I was starting to put together, I was thinking like, do I start trying to train other people to teach meditation? Do I try and take this into workplaces? I just didn't really kind of, I had no idea. I had zero business experience, but also no idea how to, to brand it or anything, you know, kind of. And I just thought that Rich could, could help sort of help me, yeah, take this idea outside of the clinic and beyond.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  That's right. So there was a Starbucks that was over the road. And so we would, before the session, we would go over the road and he, Andy tell me all his ideas. I'd give him loads of ideas. Um, and then we'd go over to the clinic and he would teach me meditation. So I really kind of started, it was a very much an exchange of skills with no real sense of where it would, where it would go.

• 33:52Guy Raz?

  But Andy, I mean, what, what did you say to Rich? Like, did you say, hey, you know, um, I want to start an education company. I want to make like pamphlets, like was it, was it not that specific?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  I think it was more about, look, I really want to demystify meditation. I want to get meditation out there. I want to get more people meditating. I don't know how to do it, kind of outside of the clinic.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  At which point I said, how do you feel about the name? Cause he's, he's, he's, he's like, I really want to demystify meditation. I said, talk to me about the name. It was, it was called Asunya.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Which Andy can.

• 34:25Guy Raz?

  That was the name of your clinic, Asunya?

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  It was, it was called Asunya. So, so, Sunya, Sunyata and Asunyata, which sort of the old Sanskrit words. But, um, Asunya means kind of bringing the, um, making something real out of emptiness. And so like the, the sentiment of it was kind of right in the sense that kind of, I wanted to bring something into the world that kind of, you know, people hadn't necessarily experienced. But I mean, an old Sanskrit name, probably not the right way to demystify something.

• 34:57Guy Raz?

  So you guys start this process of just kind of brainstorming. In the meantime, Rich, you're going through a course, right? Like a meditation course.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, Andy's teaching me as he would his clients in the clinic. It was a 10 week course and it was just a really good kind of training experience. The aim of it at the start, it really was just a kind of simple exchange.

• 35:18Guy Raz?

  This was like a, almost like a barter. It's not a great word, but like you, you gave, Andy, you gave Rich free meditation sessions and, and Rich, you gave Andy free consulting.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was very much how it worked.

• 35:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Who got the better end of that deal? Like, who was gonna lose more money out of it? Because Rich, you're probably charging a lot of money for your consulting fees.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  I think I got the better deal.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  No, I don't. No, honestly, I genuinely, I could kind of, you know. I remember when I, the second time I went to see him, I basically wrote out a stream of consciousness of everything that was in my mind. Because I couldn't make sense of it. And so I didn't know how to explain in words what was going on in my mind. And so I just wrote this. When I think back at this, this madness of like double sided, kind of 18 sides of pure drivel, really, when I think about it. And Andy, I gave it to Andy. I said, look, this is what's going on. And he patiently read every single word in front of me and never like a look of judgment or anything on his face. And at the end of it, it was just like, look, I think, one, I think this is very normal. And two, you know, I think I can help you with it.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  And so to hear that when you felt desperate is, yeah, one of the like the kindest things anyone can ever do for you. So I think, I genuinely definitely think I got the better. I got the better end of the deal than Andy.

• 36:42Guy Raz?

  So Andy, I imagine that most of the people who came and saw you really liked you because you are there to help them. What did you like about Rich? Or what did you, I mean, there must have been some kind of connection between the two of you pretty quickly.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  You know, obviously, we got on very well, but we had a shared sense of anything is possible. Just, I think that was just our character. I think whether it was, we were born with it or we kind of got brought up in different households. But we both had a shared sense that anything was possible. We both shared a naive optimism and ambition, I think. We both got energy from being with the other person.

• 37:20Guy Raz?

  So you're meeting regularly and you're kind of brainstorming. And at what point? Did the two of you say, hey, let's do something together? Was it the feeling from the beginning? Or did that evolve?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  Well, I think, yeah, I don't think it right from the beginning. I definitely didn't think that that was going to be the thing. I thought I was genuinely just helping Andy and I just felt very grateful that I was getting help with my anxiety. And so I just thought it was genuinely like a skill squad. But the, I think the moment it kind of became clear was when we were talking about what it could be. And we got a sense of that kind of shared understanding. And Andy actually said to me, would you come and would you like to work with me? And I thought he was saying, it's my business. Would you like to come and work for me? And I was like, yeah, sure. He said, well, I can't afford to kind of pay you.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  But would you do it? And I was like, yeah, of course. And it was at that point that Andy said to me, no, like as a 50 50 partner, like I want, I want, let's start this thing together. And that was the first time genuinely that I thought, oh, he actually wants to do a business with me.

• 38:39Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Rich and Andy turned the one on one meditation experience in the clinic into an app used by millions of people all over the world. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 39:10Guy Raz?

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• 40:37Guy Raz?

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• 41:22Guy Raz?

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• 42:25Guy Raz?

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• 42:47Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's right around 2010 when Andy Puttycomb and Rich Pierson decide to go into business together. But at this point, they still don't really know what the business is going to be. They have a hunch that Andy's meditation training could help a lot of people. The problem is, how do you scale Andy?

• 43:10Speaker 01

  The very first idea, actually, that I think on the first or second time that we met in Starbucks, I said, you should put this on an app. And Andy was like, yeah, I like the idea, but it won't work because traditionally, it's always been taught in a kind of teach-to-student model, like in a kind of live in person. And so that's when we started to play around with the idea of events and live events.

• 43:36Guy Raz?

  So you were going to be like a live events business?

• 43:39Speaker 01

  We were.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  We were for several, several years.

• 43:41Speaker 01

  For two years, yeah. We were live. We did live events.

• 43:43Guy Raz?

  Andy, out of curiosity, I mean, Rich was kind of marinated in this world. He'd been in advertising and business development. Like, this was a totally normal pursuit.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:54Guy Raz?

  But you had been, like, you had given away all of your stuff, right? Like, you were like, living in monasteries and wearing robes. Like, was a part of you uncomfortable with the, with the idea of like, a business?

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if we really thought of it as it was almost more like kind of how do we just change the the behavior and the way people think about something. Obviously, to survive while I was working at the clinic, um I'd had to charge money. And so I'd kind of got past that point. That was at the beginning of the clinic. That was a really big leap for me to charge money to teach somebody meditation. Felt so fundamentally different from where I'd come from. I spoke with enough teachers that really kind of coached me through that and helped me get understand that well, that is the reality of living in the world, like your landlord is gonna want some rent. And if you have a skill, it's kind of okay to put a value on that and to

• 44:51Speaker 02

  in in order to share it. So I'd gone through that kind of more through the clinic process. So by the time we got to to Headspace, it was more about just this big idea of of demystifying meditation and getting it out there.

• 45:02Guy Raz?

  So you guys needed to to build an events company or to and events company is probably not the best description, but this idea that if you wanted to spread this idea, you still needed money to mount events and to advertise. And so so where did you go first?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  Well, we went to, um Andy had some clients at the clinic that he'd, you know, he'd worked with and people that he knew in Russia that had kind of contributed. So friends on that side. Went to my dad, my poor dad.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Richie's dad, by the way, like have to give him a shout out. He was amazing.

• 45:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  I mean, honestly, if it hadn't have been for Ian, like we we wouldn't have, we wouldn't have made it. And he, I remember going down to to see him and we presented him with this this big kind of pitch. We put together a business plan and everything. And at the end of it, he said, I don't know if it was like, it's a terrible idea. He said, I don't think this idea is gonna work, but he said, if anyone can make it work. He said, I think you two guys can. And he said, so, uh, you know, I'm prepared to, I'm prepared to.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  To give you a tenth of what you've asked for.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Exactly. But it's it's on you guys, not on the idea.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:15Guy Raz?

  And I read that your dad invested or gave you £50,000 to help start it.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:22Guy Raz?

  But I'm wondering, did you tell him, you know, oh, we're going to have events and people are going to buy tickets and, you know, we're going to create a sustainable business that way? Or was there more like, I mean, how would he have seen a return on his investment?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  At the time, it was purely just the events and we felt that we could build a business from that. And that was the business that my dad, quite rightly, actually, in hindsight, said would never make a good business. And it didn't. But the thing I would say is, one, he never, ever, once asked for any shares in the business or any return for any of the money that he gave us. And to the point that actually, when we finally did do a fundraise in 2015, like our first proper fundraise, that was when we kind of forced him to take shares for the amount that he'd invested in the early days. But he never genuinely, he said to me, I was never expecting to see any of that money back.

• 47:20Guy Raz?

  And how did you come up with the name Headspace?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  It was one of those beautiful moments. And trust me, there were so many bad names that we'd, I don't remember them all, but we were, we were actually going, I think we were going down to, was it down to your dad's?

• 47:36Speaker 01

  See my dad.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  And we were on the way, on the way down there and Rich kind of said, I really feel like it just, it needs to have something very tangible in there. Like the mind is so intangible, like, you know, kind of the word head, I think, is really kind of clear what it's about. And I was sat in the passenger seat and I said, yeah, but it needs to feel spacious. Like, that's what people want. That's what people are looking for. And we, you know, we looked at each other and went Headspace. It was just one of those. And we, I mean, we spent months trying to go through brainstorm all, there's so many bad ideas.

• 48:06Guy Raz?

  What were some of the, what were some of the names you were thinking of?

• 48:08Speaker 01

  I've got some. One of them was Recognition. I know that, which sounds like a bad German techno club in Berlin. There was Recognition, there was like MindSpace.

• 48:21Guy Raz?

  Oh, there was MindLab?

• 48:22Speaker 01

  MindLab, MindJim.

• 48:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  I mean, every combination that was, none of them good. None of them good.

• 48:30Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have a little bit of capital to work with. It's 2010.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:35Guy Raz?

  And what's the first thing you do? Do you like mount an event?

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Tell him how you spent the money Richie.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  Go on, tell him how you spent the money.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Well, there's a few things, but I mean, I winced now, but the, I felt, well, we both felt that meditation was really intangible and you couldn't touch it and you couldn't see it and you couldn't, what is it? And so we really wanted to create a physical experience. So we spent, of the 50,000 pounds, we spent 20,000 pounds of it on the, the kind of physical collateral to give out at the event. So we, we, we designed these beautiful cards, about 60 different cards, leading you through the 10 steps of meditation, tips for how to sit. And it was really the first version actually of the, of the app in a way.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think so. The 20 grand went on that. And then I remembered sitting on the back of Richie's moped, travelling around London, looking at, trying to find the right venue. And we eventually settled on, on BAFTA.

• 49:43Guy Raz?

  The, our film, right?

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Film and television, kind of fairly kind of luxy kind of feeling, um, like just as far away from the community centre vibe as we could get. Cause we were trying to, you know, put meditation in this new space. And I think it was 10,000 pounds a day. So basically on that first event, I think we'd already blown 30 before we even kind of turned up.

• 50:05Guy Raz?

  Okay. So, so this first event happens, I guess in May of, of 2010, right? And by the way, how many people showed up?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had about 200 people there. So it was.

• 50:14Guy Raz?

  And this is in, in London at BAFTA?

• 50:17Speaker 01

  It was in London at BAFTA, yeah. And it was off the back of, we'd had an article in the, the Times and it had launched about four weeks before the event. It was double page spread, which is really hard to get in the Times. And it said, Britain's. He's winning and he's winning.

• 50:34Guy Raz?

  Just say it.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  He said Britain's top meditation guru, the expert's expert. And it was about how Andy had been training some politicians and sports, you know, professional athletes who had been coming to the clinic. And it was a kind of profile piece on on Andy. And that, one, it helped to sell tickets to the events. And secondly, it started a process where we managed to get a book deal, a three book deal with Hodder and Staunton. And the advance from that, which I think, you know, still, at that time, it was like one of the highest advances paid for a debut nonfiction author, really funded the rest of the business. Yeah, it really did.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. It gave us, what was it, a hun-

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Hundred and eighty thousand pounds.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Hundred and eighty thousand pounds. Um, which at that time, at that stage in the business, that was huge.

• 51:22Guy Raz?

  Transformational, probably, yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  It was.

• 51:24Guy Raz?

  Because I have to imagine that the events that you launched weren't really generating because they're expensive, right? You've got to pay for the venue space and, you know, maybe provide, yeah.

• 51:34Speaker 01

  We were losing money on them, guys.

• 51:35Guy Raz?

  So describe what they were like. Would you sit like on a stage or in the front of the room and we eat meditations? Was there food? Was there coffee, tea?

• 51:45Speaker 01

  My favorite headspace moment was in the taxi on the way to the first event with Andy. And I just looked at him and I'd been so busy trying to work out all of the, you know, to get the event, the logistics of the event. I just turned to him, I said, what have you got planned for today? Do you know, do you know what you're going to talk about? And he's like, I'm just working it out. And I was thinking, we're like five minutes from all these people turning up. And it started like the first event was Andy on stage for eight hours with some breaks.

• 52:15Guy Raz?

  This is an all day event.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  You've got to feel, you've got to feel sorry for the audience, but it was, it was just, it was me, it was me. In fact, probably I'd say all the BAFTA ones, right? So probably for the first, I don't know, six or eight events we did, that was the format. It was, it was eight hours on stage, a break for lunch, like a couple of breaks, kind of midway through morning and afternoon and a break for lunch.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we did. We used to try and put them on every four to six weeks and they got shorter.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, as they got- Shorter, so we went from a full day to a half day, from a half day to sort of two hours, then eventually down to forty five minutes or something. Um, and I think the shorter they became, the more often we did them and we would do maybe sort of two or three in a day.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  On a Saturday, rather than sort of one big one every six weeks or something.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  But it was, it was like hindsight's no sight, but we got to speak to pretty much every single person that came to those events. And I don't know, if you think back to two thousand and ten, the UK, probably the most cynical market in the world at that time around this type of subject matter. So it was just really interesting for us to see how different people responded. We got feedback cards that were very detailed that we made people fill out.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  They weren't allowed to leave.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  They weren't allowed to leave until they filled them out. But it was brilliant because it, that really, that input and that feedback, it was just a big research group for when we eventually did launch the app.

• 53:38Guy Raz?

  So I guess it was twenty twelve when you launched the first version of the app. How did that?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:44Guy Raz?

  How did that happen? I mean, it sounds like, Rich, that you had already in your mind, you were thinking, we've got to put out an app. And Andy, it sounds like you were a little bit reluctant about doing that. So how did you kind of come to terms with turning it into an app?

• 53:58Speaker 02

  So we talked about how could we recreate that ten week journey in the clinic? How could we kind of give somebody that sort of same level of sort of benefit? And definitely I was reluctant. But then when we, I think eventually they just locked me in a studio or something and said, just, just try and record some stuff and see, see what happens. But I, yeah, together we chatted and translated the ten week course into a three hundred and sixty five day program.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  And the, the reason that we got to that point was that we knew the business that we had wasn't working. And our friends and family had said, look, we really love you guys, but we're not, we're not giving you any more money. This is a terrible business, like, well done, but enough's enough. And so with the last bit of cash that we had, we managed to pull in every single favor that.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  We had left.

• 54:52Guy Raz?

  And where were you recording the audio? I mean, did you have to get studio space and and do that?

• 54:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, I mean, so much of Headspace is down to generosity and kindness of friends and people we knew along the way. And Rich had, you know, whenever we needed something or had a problem, he'd be like, oh, I know a guy or I know a girl. And and we phoned him up and he had this friend, Dre, who's not the doctor, who's a very, who's a very dear friend of both of us now. And Dre was, I mean, he was amazing. I mean, the first version of the app, he basically gave us free access to his studio for the first couple of years.

• 55:34Guy Raz?

  He had a recording studio?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, he had, yeah, he had a recording studio as part of his business, his production business. And, I mean, maybe we paid for the engineer, but other than that, I mean, he did everything for free.

• 55:47Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  He was, again, we just couldn't have done it with without him.

• 55:50Guy Raz?

  You would just, you would record 10 minute meditations that you could?

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're actually longer. So it was, and at that time, we, you know, we just did them all real time and everything. And so it was, um, yeah, it was 10 minutes for 10 days, 15 minutes for 15 days. And then it was 20 minute meditations for the rest of the year.

• 56:09Guy Raz?

  And it was just your voice speaking a little bit, silence, coming in silence, like in real time?

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, all in real time.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  All in real time, yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  And yeah, and we put together this year long course.

• 56:22Guy Raz?

  But when it came to the app itself, like the the coding part, did you like hire a tech team? Or or did you just like have some outside company put it together for you?

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Well, the, my old agency at BBH helped us. They gave us some kind of help in kind of pulling it together. And then we also had a lot of freelancers. So we had a freelancer in Bulgaria. We had someone in India. We had people in London. We just, it was really as scrappy as we could make it just to get the thing up. And then we managed to convince. This was a really big thing for us. So two things that happened that really helped. The first thing was a woman called Cathy Waters at Virgin agreed to put our content on every single Virgin Atlantic plane. And we pitched her down at Gatwick.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  And she came back a couple of weeks later and said, yeah, we're gonna put it on, we're gonna put it on all our planes.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Which was massive.

• 57:17Guy Raz?

  We're gonna put Andy's recordings on our, our planes.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:20Guy Raz?

  And were they gonna pay you for this, or that you just would provide dog?

• 57:23Speaker 01

  No, they definitely weren't gonna pay.

• 57:25Guy Raz?

  It was a great exposure, right? It would be great.

• 57:27Speaker 01

  Marketing, yeah.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  It was massive.

• 57:28Speaker 01

  It was massive. And then, on the back of that, we then managed to convince The Guardian, newspaper in the UK, to put a million booklets on the front. And we didn't pay for it.

• 57:39Guy Raz?

  The booklets of, of what?

• 57:41Speaker 02

  So we, we put together, they, they wanted content and we wanted exposure. So it was, it was a great, it was a great deal. They, they said, could we come up with a booklet on, on how to meditate? But they, they would actually kind of, you know,

• 57:53Guy Raz?

  Print it out.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Pay for the booklets. Yeah. So we, we put together a little, a mini sort of manual for the start of the year on, on how to meditate and how to have a mindful year.

• 58:03Guy Raz?

  And did that immediately have an impact on, on the download to the app?

• 58:07Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. Like, in that first month that we launched, we took £32,000 in revenue in that first January. And that was, you know, based, we'd never made a single penny in any month leading up to that. That was a really amazing moment for the, for the team. And then it was like, oh, my God, this thing's gonna fall down unless we, we rebuilt it.

• 58:31Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Rich and Andy suddenly have to confront a totally unexpected challenge, when one of them is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

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• 1:00:32Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2013 and Rich and Andy's meditation app is starting to get some attention. And right around this time, they decide to relocate the business from London to Los Angeles. And this, by the way, is after they've already made a few promotional trips to the US.

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  And what we found was that every time we came over to the US, we were making great connections, great relationships, great friendships, but we would always be saying, oh, we're from the UK, we're going back to the UK.

• 1:01:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  And very often, those conversations would be, well, great, when you, when you move out to US, or when your company kind of moves out here, let's pick these conversations up. And so he got us kind of chatting, and I think both of us, and we used to love coming to California especially, it always felt like home for both of us, you know, I think we really connected with, with the feeling here, and there were a lot of, a lot of really good business kind of reasons for, for coming here.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, well, it's two things, I think in the UK, you speak to someone about an idea, and they'll give you a thousand reasons why you can't do it, and I think in America, you say the same idea, and they go, there's a thousand reasons why it'll work, and have you thought about making it bigger, and can I introduce you to X, Y, and Z?

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And it's just a different, it's built into the culture and the psyche here in a way that it's not extra, like you don't have to, it's kind of just part of the way that this country's been built, and I think that if you are positive and you dream big, like there is no better place, I think, in the world to build a project like Headspace, and I think we felt like that.

• 1:02:09Guy Raz?

  I do want to ask you, Andy, about, I mean, shortly after you moved to California, you were diagnosed with cancer.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  I was, yeah.

• 1:02:19Guy Raz?

  So, all of a sudden, you guys moved business there.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:23Guy Raz?

  And you're trying to grow it, and there's this huge setback, first of all, you are fully recovered today.

• 1:02:32Speaker 02

  I am, thank you, yeah, I am. Yeah, we're five, I guess, five years on from it now.

• 1:02:40Guy Raz?

  Did you, I mean, this is a real test, because you would work with people who were recovering from cancer treatment, probably at the clinic in, in London, and, and it's different when it happens to you.

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  It is, and it's, it's also different, you know, I'd spent many, many years kind of doing practices specifically reflecting on one's own mortality and impermanence and, and death, and it's very different doing that in an abstract way in a monastery when you're healthy. But I did find, I found meditation was kind of my rock throughout that period. It was, it was something that I came back to, not just once a day, but sort of many, many times a day. You know, it's not that I was free from fear, don't get me wrong, it was a scary time. But I think the temptation in those types of situations in life is to leap ahead to what might be, what could be, and to get kind of caught up in a lot of anxiety about

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  that, or maybe to even get into a kind of a conversation in your mind of, you know, is it fair, or am I, you know. And thankfully, like that training kind of allowed me to, you know, as much as possible to stay fairly kind of present and not to get sort of too, too caught up in that stuff.

• 1:03:51Guy Raz?

  So were you kind of out of commission for, for a while?

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  I was, you know, so I, you know, the, the first week, obviously, you know, we didn't, I didn't even have medical insurance, we were so new in America.

• 1:04:06Speaker 02

  And in the meantime, you know, we were having to establish ourselves in, in the US and kind of get set up here and also manage the team back home as well, because there were sort of, yeah, twelve, fifteen people in the office back in London.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, I think it was a challenging time, like, all round, really. It was a really, I didn't really know anyone, and we didn't know anyone.

• 1:04:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  Like, we, we were really kind of out here on our own, and so there was no other choice. And Andy had all these things booked in, all these speaking engagements, and the company needed money, and so we couldn't turn them down, and we'd signed contracts, so I had to learn how to kind of go out and do that, and it was, it was a really challenging time, but also just to see, I think Andy and Lucinda and his wife go through that and feel very helpless, it's tricky, like, it was just a really tricky. Mix of emotions, I would say, that I that I had and a lot of just uncertainty.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  I mean, guy, the the load that Rich took on, like alongside just running the business, the day to day of running a a fast kind of growing company, he basically took on all of the events and talking kind of, you know, engagements, which were in Europe and in Asia. And I mean, Rich was, I can't remember how many miles you flew in. There was a space of like a month. I mean, tens and tens of thousands, just he was he was living, living on planes. So it was it was really amazing to kind of watch, actually, just the the capacity that he had to do that.

• 1:05:40Guy Raz?

  When you guys got to LA, was it already clear that to build this into something bigger, you would have to raise outside money?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Well, we were all, to be honest with you, we were a bit, not a bit, we were very nervous about it. And it took us a, well, I think it took me a long time, actually, to get comfortable with it. Um, it was kind of irrational fear about losing control of the the vision and the mission.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  I don't know if it was that irrational. It happens a lot.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  It does happen a lot. And we'd probably heard a lot of bad stories. And so when we got to California, it was, the product was, it really did take off in a different way. And the business was really making serious kind of money. And so at that point, when like, when people were coming to us, saying, we want to invest in your company, I do think we had a lot of leverage because the business was generating a lot of cash and we didn't have many people working at the company. So it enabled us. We probably, to be honest, we probably went overboard, but we met over sixty different investment houses, would be the best way to describe it, until we found someone that we really felt aligned with and we could get the deal done that would work for us.

• 1:06:51Guy Raz?

  I I'm trying to imagine like pitch meetings. I know that a lot of investors, when you got to California, were really interested and and you probably didn't have to sort of sell them on the idea too hard. But Andy, I mean, just wondering, given like your background and like, you know, you studied to be a monk and you like gave up all your possessions and you had this epiphany as a, you know, twenty four year old, twenty three year old to live a simpler life. Now you are.

• 1:07:19Guy Raz?

  All those things that you did were going to be built into a business that these investors were talking about scale and you know billion dollar company and was a part of you uncomfortable with that I have to imagine it was.

• 1:07:32Speaker 02

  I'm sure there were there were moments of discomfort. I think the bigger kind of thing that when if they're talking about scale well that's great we were talking about the same thing we wanted to get this out to as many people as possible and we couldn't do that without the money. I think that the temptation very often is to is to look at it in a very sort of black and white way in just in society in general and say kind of like you know okay money money's bad you know you guys are trying to do this it's good money's bad I didn't really look at it in that way I kind of I think money can be incredibly helpful you know I was really excited about getting meditation out there and getting it to to more people so that was a way of doing it.

• 1:08:12Guy Raz?

  It seems like one of the ways you guys have also managed this process because I think you've raised almost 75 million dollars after a few rounds the first round was 2015 I think you raised about 30 million dollars that Rich you handle the business side really and Andy you kind of focus on just really the content.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Yeah they don't let me near the books and rightly so yeah Richie Richie looks after the the business.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Yeah but we you know like Andy said like we we work more as a kind of creative right partnership on the things that you know Andy's passionate about and I'm passionate about and yeah the day to day running is Andy's not involved in in a lot of that.

• 1:08:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah you know once you guys raised to these rounds you had capital for marketing and to really push this out in in new ways and there was an ad I think it came out in 2016 it was a it was um the ad was something like you know when I when I meditate I crush it when I meditate you know I'm focused and so some people criticized this and said look you know meditation is not about performance this is not the point of meditation is not to make you a better investment banker it's not to make you you know a better football player it's it's that is not what it's about.

• 1:09:31Guy Raz?

  How do you feel about that when people say that?

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  It was interesting that that campaign because I think I think it actually did something really kind of helpful. We wanted to we wanted to show people that meditation isn't this thing, you know, and we're going to tell you how you're going to benefit from it. We wanted to say, look, there is this skill. Anybody can learn this skill and you can apply it with your own intention to any aspect of your life. The reality is, as I've seen over kind of a lifetime, is that very often the reason people start meditating isn't the reason they necessarily continue meditating. And that they might begin it because they want to be better on the football pitch. But over time, they start to realize it's showing up in other areas of their life as well.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  And yes, they're performing better, but actually they're starting to have better relationships. And and we wanted to break the mold and kind of say it's not just about feeling calm and having relaxation. You know, that kind of traditional way of thinking about meditation, that it can also be active. It can also be exciting. It can be joyful and it can be different.

• 1:10:37Guy Raz?

  And and I mean, I guess one of the reasons why you have to advertise your, you know, your app, your product is because you have competitors, right? There are other meditation apps out there, which is which is like one of these kind of weird aspects about this whole world. Because you kind of expect the meditation space to be like peaceful and kind and gentle. But like this is a big business now, right? Like there are other people in the space. So do you guys? I don't know. I mean, do you sort of, if you've got competitors, are you kind of looking over your shoulder to see what they're doing? And are you trying to beat them?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  No, I think there are different ways of of kind of looking at it. Personally, I don't necessarily look at it as as competition in the conventional kind of sense. I feel like we have a job to do and we'll sort of keep doing that. And what other people do, other people will do. And I don't really like the idea of, I think it's a very strange idea of competing for people's happiness. I mean, that sounds like a, it sounds kind of absurd in a way. So I kind of feel like, look, if our mission genuinely is to improve the health and happiness of the world, then if anyone's out there doing things that will genuinely improve the health and happiness of individuals, then that's something to celebrate. It's not something to, you know, feel bad about from a competitive point of view.

• 1:11:57Guy Raz?

  So, anyone listening to this interview who's familiar with Headspace will recognize Andy's voice right away. I know, Andy, you probably, like, people come up to you in cafes, "Are you Andy from Headspace?"

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:12:08Guy Raz?

  Because it's so distinct. And no wonder. I mean, is Headspace a company, an idea, that can live without Andy's image and brand and the personality behind it?

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  It can definitely live without my image. I mean, this is a face for radio, trust me. But this is probably a question for Rich rather than me.

• 1:12:30Speaker 01

  I think, so if you think about it, we do have a English female voice in the product at the moment. So that shows you that the essence and the quality and the authenticity of the content is still there, but it's just delivered by someone else.

• 1:12:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  So, we're in French, we're in German, we're gonna be in Spanish, we're gonna be like, there's other languages coming out this year, and the same, the same kind of idea. So I definitely think it's not just about Andy's voice. And so, as long as we always stay true to the way that we build products, I think there's a huge room to bring in other voices, other experts that aren't Andy. So...

• 1:13:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah, but you almost have to. You have to think about what is, right? Because the value of a company can't be wrapped up around a single personality. And I don't say that. I mean, I love Andy's voice.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, noticing that's right.

• 1:13:22Guy Raz?

  I love listening to you, you know, on the app, but if one day you both decide that you want to step out of this and your investors want to sell it or whatever, it can't be wrapped around Andy.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  No, that's correct.

• 1:13:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's a lot, it's a lot of pressure to have it in, in just that. I think, I think that, that cancer kind of scare actually was a really good, you know, good wake up for, for us to start thinking about that kind of, you know, it's too risky to have it, you know, what if that person, you know, or if I get knocked over by a bus or eaten by a shark, or whatever happens in California. But, you know, like, there is a risk, right? And so, I think it's not only part of improving, you know, it's de-risking things for the company, but it's also helping to improve the experience for our members as well.

• 1:14:10Guy Raz?

  Andy, when you think about all that you had wanted when you were 23, 24, and a life of simplicity, you have a very complex life now. You guys have, what, 200-plus employees?

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:14:23Guy Raz?

  You know, you've got investors, you've got to have investor calls.

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  Family.

• 1:14:27Guy Raz?

  You've got family. You're running a business, people depend on you now. That's a very different life than the one that you had originally signed up for.

• 1:14:43Guy Raz?

  But do you prefer it this way?

• 1:14:44Speaker 02

  I honestly can't compare the two. I can't say, kind of, I can't look at one and say I prefer it to the other. Because for me, they're not separate. Obviously, they are different experiences of life, different environments. But their minds still the same, right? And I didn't necessarily go into the monastery because that was necessarily how I would always want to live. It was more, I thought it would take that long for me to understand my mind. And I feel really lucky to have been in a position where I was able to go to that environment, to experience the simplicity of that, and then have this incredible, almost what feels like a second chapter, where I get to kind of share that.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  But it's a, you know, it's something that, all the kind of complications and stuff, yeah, they're not easy, but you kind of, you live with them because you care about it.

• 1:15:37Guy Raz?

  How much of what happened with Headspace do you attribute to your hard work and your intelligence and your skill, and how much to just luck?

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Did the laugh give it away? Yeah, I think, I don't know, I would describe it as just a lot of generosity. I'd say it's one of the things that, without that from a lot of people, that really did just believe in us in the early days. Maybe you classify that as luck, I don't know, probably.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  But I would also say we've worked, we've worked really, really hard, as hard as, you know, I've never been more committed to anything in my whole life because our hearts are in it.

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there's, there's just a set of ingredients that come together and we've contributed to that. But we've often said as well that sometimes it feels like there's just this, there's this momentum. It's almost like a train that's just going. And it's like we grabbed on to, to the back of it. And to start with, we felt like we were kind of, you know, sort of just comfortably sort of traveling along. And then it just sort of picked up a load of speed. And now we're just hanging on to it at the back of the train. Because it's, it's been incredible to, to be, we feel like we are part of something rather than necessarily making something happen.

• 1:16:53Guy Raz?

  That's Andy Puttycomb and Rich Pierson, co-founders of Headspace. Today, Headspace has millions of users in 190 countries and a last reported valuation of $320 million. And even though Andy is no longer the only voice narrating on the Headspace app these days, he and Rich joke that if anything ever happens to him, at least he still have hours and hours of his meditation recordings.

• 1:17:21Speaker 02

  So I think, I think they've worked it out. There's a couple of thousand kind of in total.

• 1:17:24Guy Raz?

  So if you are eaten by a shark, there's 1,000 hours that are still there on tape.

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. I'm hoping it's, it's not going to go down that way. But look, if it does, yes.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  On that cheering note.

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Thanks for having us.

• 1:17:42Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. This episode was produced by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from David Ja. Our production staff includes J.C. Howard, Julia Carney, Elaine Coats, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, and Harrison V. J. Choi. Our intern is Catherine Seifer. Jeff Rogers is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.

• 1:18:14Guy Raz?

  This is NPR.