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Hello, Karl and Steve. Thanks for spending some time chatting with Amy and me this afternoon and talking about BrightCanary . Let's start with you briefly introducing both yourselves and just a little bit about the company.
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Yeah, thanks for having us Chuck and Amy. I'm Karl Stillner. I'm one of the co founders of BrightCanary, also the CEO. BrightCanary is a service that helps parents stay engaged with their kids' digital lives. I'm also the father of two.
I have a soon to be 14 year old boy and an 11 year old boy. Steve?
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I'm Steve Dossick, also a co founder and CTO and also a father of two. I have twins who are gonna be 16 next week and driving.
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Lovely, lovely. Let's talk a little bit about how it began. What's the origin story behind the company?
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Karl and I had a previous company that we did together called Pushspring that was also a trilogy portfolio company. And we had kids kind of around the same period in our lives. My kids are a little bit older, but we'd constantly be talking about, you know, oh, they're starting to use iPads. How do you stop them from going to see the wrong thing on YouTube? And then it gets worse and worse as they get older because they get access to more and more stuff.
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And we sort of realized that there just wasn't any good technology for parents. There's command and control software, basically. It lets you say when they can use the device, what apps are they allowed to use, but really has no information for you about what it is they're doing inside those apps. So that was kind of the place that we started with was to give parents more insight into what the kids are actually doing as opposed to, hey, they used iMessage for two hours. Well, what did they do inside iMessage for two hours?
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What did they watch on YouTube? And so that's kind of where we started. And it's turned out that that's actually something that's resonating a lot with parents, you know, thankfully for us.
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Karl, anything you wanted to add on that?
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No, I mean, think Steve and I, we just sold our last business to T Mobile. And so there's a lot of water cooler talk when we were at T Mobile. And we are small company guys or least early stage entrepreneurs who like to build businesses. Being at T Mobile, it was a great place to be. But we, at the heart of it, were itching to get back into the startup world.
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And as Steve pointed out, we were living and breathing this kind of reality, having kids that are growing up in the digital age and frustrated as technologists that there weren't solutions that we could use that we thought were pragmatic for what was actually going on. And so that was really what inspired us both to get back into the early stage entrepreneurial venture area. And, you know, it's been great because we have beta testers with our own kids. And so it makes it much easier than if it's a theoretical, like we're living and breathing this every day. My kids are at the perfect age being 14 and 11.
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They're really transitioning into this phase where they're using devices more and more and trying to help guide them. So not only am I living at work, living at at home as well.
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And my kids constantly tell me how much they their friends hate the software that we build. So that's that's great. Talk
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a little bit about your differentiation as a company, how you think about the competitive landscape and the market and why BrightCanary now made sense versus existing solutions. Lots of parents who are listening probably are used to researching endless solutions or hoped for solutions. Talk a little bit about where you guys fit into that mix.
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Yeah. I mean, as Steve pointed out earlier, we aren't focusing on blocking or preventing kids from accessing certain content like the first generation of solutions do. We just don't think that's a pragmatic approach in today's day and age. Kids have devices at school. They have devices, you know, on the bus.
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They have devices everywhere. And so this notion of being able to prevent kids from using the internet is antiquated. You know, I think that might have made sense fifteen, twenty years ago. It doesn't make sense today in 2025. And so instead, we're focused on keeping parents surprised at what the kids are doing.
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And to do that, you really have to be broad in terms of your ability to catch communications and content consumption across all services that kids are using, not just a subset. And so we use a different technology, a different technological approach than our competitors. And we actually use a couple of different solutions, which enables us to have a much bigger net, which makes it much more comprehensive than just using a VPN or just using an MDM like some of our competitors will. And it also allows us to really focus on iOS. In The US, 87% of kids use iOS devices.
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That's certainly not true internationally, but in The US, that's the reality. And the solutions that exist in the market today are really focused on Android because of the technology approaches they're using. And we realized that the kids are on iOS, and so you really need to have a solution for that market. And so we're unique in our ability to address that market comprehensively. Further, you know, we started this ten years later, ten, fifteen years later than our competitors.
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And so for us, AI has been something we've been able to integrate into the product from the get go. So it's not a bolt on. It's not a nice to have that people kind of throwing together after the product has been conceived of for a decade. This is something that's really integrated into the whole user experience.
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For us, you know, we we kind of started the project just as LLMs were becoming kind of a thing. And that's really enabled us to do a great job in helping the parents understand what the kids are doing and what the content the kids are engaging with is all about. The previous generation of tools that did any kind of monitoring were using off the shelf machine learning models that would help categorize content as not safe for work, etcetera. Those models are really built to help large companies like someone like an Etsy or a Yelp who are hosting user generated content to make sure that what was being uploaded wasn't porn. And that's great.
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That doesn't always work for the kind of content kids are getting into. When kids are reading and writing stuff online, they're using, you know, basically snippets. They're not writing full sentences. The models are not trained on that kind of content. They don't work very well for kid language.
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Turns out that the LLMs, because they're just more fluid with written content, are much better able to understand the meaning and emotion behind communication that is written in snippets, kind of text message style. And so that's really been kind of a rocket, you know, to power our product for the for the moms and the dads. It's a it's a big differentiator for us that we're so focused on using LLMs to to provide all of that processing.
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You guys, you did talk about the origin story being that you're parents yourselves and starting to sort of struggle with your own old children using devices and sort of had an idea that there could be a solution there and maybe apply some technology to that. Talk a little bit about the journey between that idea and when you started to get some feedback of it, Hey, we might actually have a solution here and there might actually be some demand outside our own personal households for this solution. Talk about that sort of feedback loop and how that went over time.
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Yeah. Mean, in terms of the feedback loop, I don't think we were ever concerned that there was a market here. Look, Jonathan Haidt's book has been The Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty seven weeks now. And so it's clear this is something that parents are struggling with. If you go if, you know, any soccer game I go stand on the sideline of, any school event I go to, this is the number one, two, and three issue parents are talking about.
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So I don't think Steve or I ever had any doubt that there was a huge market here. I think the the hard part for us was figuring out what part of the market to really attack. And we originally started with this notion of content, really focusing on the content that kids are consuming on the device largely through YouTube and Google. And there's certainly demand for that. I think parents are concerned about the content but what we realized in the first year of the company's existence is that there's a lot more concern about the messaging that's going on between kids.
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That's unfiltered. That's unmoderated. Parents do not want to restrict that because they don't want their kid to become a social pariah. They want their kid to be integrated into social life. So they're not willing to say, hey, no, you're not able to use iMessage or you're not able to use whatever messaging platform.
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Instead, they realized that there's a huge need for parents to have visibility into what's going on in those communications. And that took us a good, I don't know, twelve, fifteen months to figure out. And we heard that from customers, but, you know, it was something that we were not expecting. So I think it took probably the signal strength to be pretty strong for us to realize we really needed to pivot more aggressively into the messaging space than we had originally intended. And that was a different technology solution we had to build as a consequence of that, which took us a good six to twelve months.
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That was the most important learning for us in the first year or so was this notion that messaging is really where the the key concern is.
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And that messaging is not only, you know, iMessage. Right? Instagram is a messaging app. Snap is actually a messaging app. Right?
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Even though they have features like Reels and things like that, where kids are posting, you know, short snippets of video or photos or whatever. The actual content that's going going on is is what's going on in the direct messaging or the group messaging. And, again, as Karl said, you know, there's very good content moderation going on on YouTube and on Instagram and on Snap even to make sure that no overt pornography, for instance, is being posted or nothing that's truly gore and, you know, truly violent content. That's stuff that's technically public content. Anybody can unless it's a private account, anyone can go to any Instagram profile and see any content.
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The direct messages, though, are completely unmoderated by Meta, in the case of Instagram. Same for Snap. If my son direct messages a group of friends from his school, no one at Snap is moderating anything going on there. And so it's kind of the Wild West. And and as Karl said, you know, no parent wants to stop their kid from communicating with their friends.
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Right? Especially kind of this really started during COVID, I think. My kids were at the exact age for this. They were just beginning to become kind of digital citizens as COVID happened. And so, of course, you're gonna let them play Roblox online with whoever from their class, because you want them to be connected in some way to someone.
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But then it's the Wild West. There's no moderation going on.
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Yeah. It's it's a good point. I mean, during COVID, we saw digital use double, and it hasn't reverted back to the pre COVID norms. So what's happened is parents started using the device rightfully or understandably so to help kids communicate and stay connected with their friends. But it's been incredibly hard to pull back on that.
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And as a consequence, you have kids using digital devices much more than their parents ever intended for them to use them. And we see upwards of six, seven hours a day of non school related digital use, which is the majority of time the kid is awake outside of school. And just to put a little more emphasis on this, it's really hard to be a parent if you have no idea what your kid is doing in the majority of time they're out school.
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To put some numbers on it, the average kid on our platform is sending and receiving over a thousand messages a day.
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So Yeah. Wow.
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You know, to all their friends. So that'll just show you kind of, you know, they're typing a lot, and they're reading a lot. And before tools like ours, parents had no idea what was going on.
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One follow on. Why don't you talk just a little bit about what have you learned about the, you know, universality of folks of parents looking for these solutions? You know? Is it folks in San Francisco and in Seattle, sort of digital native parents, if you will?
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Yeah. Mean, we had a hypothesis when we launched this business that it was gonna be more concentrated on tech workers, people who have insight into the problem from their own professional path, potentially, high household income, high disposable income. These are the type of things we thought would be
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Trying to solve a problem they'd created, basically.
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Right, right. And what we've learned is it's really much, much broader, this problem than that. In fact, if anything, that particular segment under indexes, and we see much more over indexing in the Midwest, in the South, across faith based organizations, across military backgrounds, etcetera. And so it's really broad. As many people pointed out, this is a bipartisan issue.
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It's not political, which is really nice. Hopefully, that actually drives some policy change as well. But it means that our customer base is extremely broad. And it's not just US as well, of course. This is an international problem as well.
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I think The US is kind of at the forefront of it because I think kids got earlier than most places, but it's coming for the rest of the world, unfortunately.
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Let's talk a little bit about, your learnings as entrepreneurs in terms of building a company second time around, successful business. So lots of folks who are aspiring entrepreneurs or just starting on the journey. Think about how do I use the right culture into my early stage company? How do I build the right team in those first early hires? And what are the hacks you guys are using with regards to your development process with the small team tools that you're using, things that tricks of the trade that would be helpful to other entrepreneurs.
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You want us to give away all the secrets? Yeah. I mean, come on. Yeah. I think trade is good.
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Well, first, we don't sleep a lot. That's the first thing you do. Three hours a night maximum, you know, is kinda what you're looking at. No. I'm joking.
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Of course. So as I mentioned before, Karl and I had a previous business that was successful, and and he said we as he mentioned, we sold it to T Mobile, and we learned a lot of things there. We had both done startups before as well. So we've we've both done multiple of these sort of journeys. In our last company, we sort of formalized, and then we've kinda continued it here even though we're still a very small team.
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We have kind of a no asshole policy. For instance, I have a set of engineers that I've worked with over the years. You know, I've been doing this now for I got, for twenty six years. I have a set of engineers who I or I call the smartest engineers I'll never work with again because they're just impossible people. Right?
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Brilliant. Right? But we'll ruin the team because no one would want to work with them. And so we don't hire anybody like that, for instance. I think it's also helpful for everyone to understand the mission really, really deeply.
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You know, the majority of the people who work for us have kids. Not everybody. But even the ones who don't have kids yet, like, we we just hired someone who has a sister who who has who has multiple kids, right, and is very involved with with those kids. And so, you know, I think that's really helpful. You know, you have to have someone to align with the mission of what you're trying to do here because it really is kind of a mission, Right?
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Where we can't pay as well as Amazon can. Right? We work harder than they do in a lot of ways. You know? We're more flexible in a lot of ways, but, if they're not aligned with the mission, they're not gonna be able to do this long term.
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Yeah. It's it's interesting. Our last business, of course, was before COVID and this business has been entirely post COVID. Obviously, remote work has become more of a tool and impediment as well. And so it's easier to find great talent and that has been a huge benefit to us, but it's also harder to build culture when you have everyone remote or most people remote.
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And so that's been something that's been new for us to figure out. We still consistently, as Steve pointed out, hire the best people we possibly can. We And give them a lot of room to run. Like we don't micromanage. We have few meetings.
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One of the benefits we can offer people coming from an Amazon is you're not gonna have your calendar totally constrained by meetings back to back all day. And so we do that. We provide, you know, we give people lots of room to maneuver. We provide a lot of trust and it seems to work out well, but it's, you know, that's admittedly harder to do when you're trying to scale the team very aggressively. Fortunately, our business right now doesn't require hundreds and hundreds of employees.
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And so I'm not sure we'll ever get to that point because of how scalable inherently the business is. But I think that is a challenge if you're trying to grow really fast. We do get together in person twice a year. I'd like to that more often. Think it's important just to have that face to face and establish trust and a rapport with people over dinners and and and the like.
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You know, hiring developers is always really difficult for startups, especially if you're in place like Seattle where they can go work at any number of large companies that will pay them sort of ungodly amounts of money and have stock that is immediately tradable once it's vested unlike ours. And so we've been successful finding people who have kind of what I call alternative backgrounds that generally will get overlooked by those companies. So you find someone who has, for instance, a an undergrad degree from UW in physics, learned how to do a lot of programming doing that because you have to do that these days to do that kind of degree, But was not formally trained in CS, and instead did a six month kind of coding boot camp about five years ago, then worked at a sort of midsize engineering organization and, you know, learned how to be a developer professionally, but could not get arrested by a recruiter at Amazon or at Microsoft. He's great. Right?
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He's he's our newest employee. He's fantastic. He's, you know, fitting right in. We like to hire people who wanna work on lots of different things as opposed to kinda specializing in one thing. And so someone like that who is just kind of early in the career and trying to understand all the different things they could focus on, they can get exposed to a lot of different pieces.
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You know, we have mobile. We have back end. We have database stuff. We have huge data scale issues because of the amount of data we're collecting and processing for kids. We have data security issues because it's kids' data.
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So, you know, it's we make it a very interesting place as well as, you know, recruiting people who are kind of ready to go on a different journey.
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I'll ask a a follow-up question here in the business building category. As you have mentioned, we, you know, we worked with you guys on on your last business, which was a a b to b business. This time around, you're building a b to c business. That's not often the case. I think that entrepreneurs, you know, Steve's laughing, entrepreneurs, you know, move from, from B2B or to B2C or vice versa.
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Talk a little bit about, about what you've, what you've learned, or maybe I should say what you're learning with that different business model, if you will.
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I think we've learned that the phrase, how hard could it be? That's maybe not one.
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I mean, it's a fair point, Chuck, to point out that our last business was an entirely different ecosystem. When we went into it, we knew nothing about advertising technology. It was a totally new ecosystem. And I think Steve and I both enjoy a challenge and we like building something that's new and innovative for our category. And we did that at PushBring.
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And I think actually having no knowledge of the ad tech ecosystem helped us because we just built what made sense. We weren't encumbered by all the baggage associated with that ecosystem. And there's certainly a lot of it. And so we just built something that made sense and it happened to make sense for lots of people to agencies who were buying and were relatively new in the ad tech ecosystem themselves. They just wanted tools that were useful.
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And so when we were thinking about launching another business, I think we'd certainly realized that B2C is inherently very different. Launching an app business in 2022 is very difficult, especially given all the attribution issues that have come down the pike. So the level of difficulty is extremely high, but I think we both view that as a challenge. And also, to Steve's earlier point, we have a mission approach here. This is mission based.
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And so that makes all these challenges a lot more palatable. We get feedback from parents all the time that we're helping them raise their kids and that we've, you know, averted all kinds of terrible situations because of our offering. And that, you know, I think is really inspiring for us. So that's been, I think part of the enticement for going into B2C, but it's entirely different in many ways. I mean, the brand obviously matters a lot more.
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There's a much bigger focus on marketing, on spending to get customers in. Economics of the business are oftentimes upside down for many, many years before it actually makes sense, which is something that was inherently very hard for both Steve and I to get our head around because we're used to, know, our last business was EBIT positive for the last few years of its existence before it was bought. And to us, that's kind of the natural place a business should be. And so this notion of having a business that isn't profitable for many years is new to us. But you also understand that this is the game that all the almost every b to c business has has played in in the tech space has has done this.
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So we're learning as we go, but it's it's certainly been, yeah, a rough education in many ways, but I think we're we're both learning quickly, which we enjoy.
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I like how the ultimately, you tied it back to the mission. Right? Hey. That just falls out of what we're try what we're trying to do here. We didn't choose to do a b to c business.
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That's right.
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We chose to go solve solve this problem. We're on a mission to solve that problem, and this model comes out of that.
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Of the things that makes it even harder is, you know, in our last business, we we had the we were fortunate in that we were selling something we a slightly different version because it was kind of a mobile focused data product, but it was something that our customers who were ad agencies bought regularly. So they had budgets. We just showed up, and we said, hey. We have this slightly different thing. We have these great tools to work with it.
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And they all kind of glonged onto it and loved it. In this universe, you know, we know there's a problem. Right? As Karl said, Jonathan Hite's book been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and a almost a year and a half now. But there isn't, like, a category winner in this space that has
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You're not stealing share from somebody.
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No. And it's not like we're coming into something where where a 100,000,000 people have bought something, and now we have a new better version of it. This is kind of also market making, which is difficult, to say the least.
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You talked about, you know, sort of starting out, focusing on thinking the solution had to be around content, you know, YouTube, Google, that sort of stuff, and then sort of have the moment about, hey. It's, it's about messaging. Right. At least a big part of it's about messaging. I've spent some time now getting that part of the solution in place.
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As you look forward, what's next?
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I think that the one thing that's become apparent in the last couple of years is kids have become much more savvy about the costs associated with digital overuse. I think five years ago, they were as parents were totally blind to this notion that there was a lot of hidden costs, hidden at the time at least, associated with getting on a device for six hours whether it's social media or whatever it may be. That's gone. Parents are aware of it now. There's awareness across that ecosystem.
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Kids are aware of it as well. They've become much, much more savvy in the last couple of years about the price that's being paid. And we view that as an opportunity because we serve kids, parents of kids, let's call it age eight to let's call it roughly 16. As kids get into the 13, 14, 15 year old range there's more need for autonomy and we think there's an opportunity to provide kids with tools that helps them navigate the digital world without their parents. Right?
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This notion of having something that's AI driven, that's fully context aware of everything that's going on in the kids' digital life, I think it's extremely powerful. And I think puts a lot more trust and agency back back with the kids, which I think they're asking for. And so we view that as a huge opportunity to have a product that's really designed for parents of kids age eight to, let's call it 13, 14. And then they graduate into a service that really has them in the driver's seat. And it provides them with kind of this companion that is trusted, objective, and private to them as well.
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And so I think that's a huge area of interest for us that works for us.
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Yeah, interesting. Wonder, couldn't all of us perhaps use a little bit of that in our digital lives, right?
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Absolutely. I don't think kids, I don't think anyone ages out of that. I could use that. I think anyone could use that. And so I don't think it's confined to that.
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It's just an interesting point when the kids are fledging, right? They're getting out of the nest and that's a good opportunity to provide them with some help, and they'll probably continue using it, at least a large percentage of them would.
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You know, these interviews are always a mixed bag of questions, but there's always something that we forget. So what did we not ask you that you would like to mention, either to prospective BrightCanary parents who are considering your service, to entrepreneurs, or thinking about taking the leap, to other investors who you might meet down the road? What do you wanna say?
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Well, I mean, I think one of the obvious things is entrepreneurs need to have fun doing this. It's far too stressful to do without having a notion of enjoying it. Steve and I worked together for a long time, and so we have the benefit of having a long term relationship. We understand how we work, each other work. And we also, you know, I think appreciate each other's sense of humor.
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And I think that helps a lot. And I think it's really hard if you're a sole founder, not to have someone along the journey with you, especially someone that, you know, you see eye to eye with. And so, I think it's really important to find someone you can work with to make the journey a lot less lonely and a lot more enjoyable.
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I think that's the case also on the investor side, not to sound too much like a Trilogy shiller out here, but
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I mean That's okay. You can be a little bit of it. Alright. A little bit.
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There's a reason that we came back to you guys. Right? I mean, you know, I I've done this is actually my the sixth startup that I've been involved with over my ridiculous career. I can tell you some hair raising stories about investors and what they have done to companies that I've been involved with. Trilogy is not that.
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Right? Trilogy is pretty amazing to work with. So I feel like friends and partners, not adversaries. Thanks, Steve.
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Appreciate that. Appreciate that. A few lightning round questions here at the end. If you guys could send your text message back to yourselves back in time, you know, on the the day you were just starting out, what would you what would and the answer can't be, for god's sake, don't do this. Yeah.
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That's a good caveat because that was gonna be my
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Yeah. Sorry.
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I'm joking.
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What would you do you wish you could have texted yourself?
00:25:48.735 --> 00:25:50.175
It's gonna take longer than you think.
00:25:50.280 --> 00:25:50.840
Yeah.
00:25:50.840 --> 00:26:07.495
Right? I mean, we haven't got into tons of detail on our product, but we're basically in the kind of the third iteration of our product now. And, you know, it's not like we've thrown away pieces and we don't have them anymore. I mean, we started with content. We still have you know, more than half of our users are using YouTube and and Google search moderation that that we offer.
00:26:08.215 --> 00:26:41.335
The second generation was the first step into messaging where we became the only product on the market that can really monitor iMessage. And now we've recently released a third version kind of of the app that, in addition to those two things, also offers the ability to monitor everything the kid is typing on their device by installing some software on the device itself. And so this is three turns of a crank, and and it's really three re envisionings of the whole. And I think each piece kinda builds on the others, incorporates everything we've learned about what's important and what the parents really want. And that newest version has only been out for a few weeks.
00:26:41.335 --> 00:26:50.055
Early returns are kind of, you know, ridiculously positive from my perspective. Obviously, we still have some bugs and issues to work out. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's gonna take longer than you think.
00:26:50.240 --> 00:27:19.195
It's funny you came up with that, Steve, because mine was very similar. It was don't rush the product market fit phase and getting the product right. You know, if we were being self critical, I think we kind of came out of the gate really aggressively before we had that fully locked in. And I think we could have used a little more patience in the very early days in terms of our go to market because obviously the go to market will be that much easier if you've nailed the product market fit and you have the product coming. And I think we were trying to do too many things at once at the very beginning.
00:27:19.320 --> 00:27:43.965
You already mentioned, you know, as second time founders, the importance of partnership, you know, partnership both between yourselves and maybe a little bit with your investors as well. Anything else is sort of the second time go around, as Amy alluded to, sort of first time founders out there, lessons that folks should watch out for?
00:27:43.965 --> 00:28:02.870
Yeah, I think Steve already alluded to it, finding a good partner with your investor. I think there's a lot of first time entrepreneurs who focus on the key financial terms in fundraise. What's the valuation, etcetera, versus who am I going be working with? Who are the individuals I'm going to be working with? Not necessarily even the firm, but the individuals who will be around the table with me.
00:28:02.870 --> 00:28:10.595
And making that the first priority and the financials the second priority, it's worked out well for us. And I've heard others as well say similar things.
00:28:10.595 --> 00:28:30.750
I think it's also something you have to understand, you know, like Karl and I focus on different parts of a business. Right? So when we've been through this, like, full cycle in our last company, so we know how this goes. This early part of the business is much more, you know, it's much more difficult, I think. And I think you would agree with for me, than it is for him, since that, like, I'm running the team that's building the product here.
00:28:30.750 --> 00:28:54.580
And is also running all the infrastructure, and trying to figure out what we should go build next. That flips around. Because if the product is successful, you know, probably within the next, you know, year or so, as we start to get to the point where things are stable enough, and we have enough users that we are out trying to get partnerships with folks, etcetera, that all fall falls in in Carl's universe. And I'm not gonna be the one on planes every other week flying to different places to do meetings with big companies. Right?
00:28:54.580 --> 00:29:08.795
So it it sort of there's a natural rhythm to this. I think something that if you haven't done this before, if you have a co founder who's not, know, you sort of an identical skill set to yours, you have to realize that there's gonna be different contributions at different times from different folks.
00:29:08.795 --> 00:29:28.630
Well, I'm being wise that that that transition is gonna happen over time and building a team from the start that is that is built for that to happen. Right? Sort of speaks to ultimately to sort of scalability, I think of of of the team team a little bit. Let's conclude here. What do you what what do you guys, you know, paying attention to out there?
00:29:28.630 --> 00:29:42.605
What what's interesting that you're watching that you're reading that you're sort of listening to that sort of either informing the business you're building or just maybe more importantly entertaining you so you get some relaxation when you're
00:29:42.605 --> 00:29:44.285
not thinking about the business.
00:29:44.285 --> 00:30:19.900
Yeah. Well, having a 14 year old and an 11 year old makes it hard to find a lot of free time for pleasure reading or watching. I am reading or attempting to read. I read about two pages a night before I I pass out a book called The Organized Mind, and it's written by a neuroscientist, and it's talking about how we all are confronting information overload and how our brains are ill equipped to actually handle that from an evolutionary standpoint. So it's obviously relevant for our work, but I find it fascinating from a personal perspective as well because I think we're all struggling with it, especially as you age, and there's this more and more stimuli, more inputs coming.
00:30:19.900 --> 00:30:37.395
So I'm finding that to be somewhat useful. I'm listening to a podcast right now that is the founder of Whoop. I think his name is Will Ahmed. And he's talking about the early days of Whoop and how they intentionally limited the product so they wouldn't have unintentional product scope creep. They didn't have a screen on the device.
00:30:37.395 --> 00:30:57.630
They still don't have a screen on the device because they didn't want to become a wearable watch. And it's been really interesting to listen to how they thought about building a business for a very specific segment, and that was hardcore endurance athletes. And then how they're kind of gradually expanding after they've done that for many, many years. I like watching Seinfeld with my kids. They enjoy that.
00:30:57.630 --> 00:31:04.175
And then the laugh, always like, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, which I view as like a darker version of of Seinfeld.
00:31:06.335 --> 00:31:29.610
I mentioned that the at the beginning that my kids are gonna be driving as of next week officially on their own. So in an attempt to sort of connect with them because, you know, when they're 16, you they don't wanna talk to you anymore unless they're asking you for money. They actually showed me that there's a subreddit called idiots in cars, which is basically people doing really stupid things on the road. And so it's it's the sort of don't do that, please. You know?
00:31:30.705 --> 00:31:34.225
So that that's that's that's our, like, nightly look look at this.
00:31:34.225 --> 00:31:46.545
Well, guys, thanks so much for being generous with your time this afternoon. It's been great chatting with you, Steve, and and more importantly, been great being being partners with you on the bright bright canary journey.
00:31:46.840 --> 00:31:48.440
Yeah. Well, thanks for having us.
00:31:48.440 --> 00:31:51.000
Thanks, guys. You bet. Thanks, guys.
Hello, Karl and Steve. Thanks for spending some time chatting with Amy and me this afternoon and talking about BrightCanary . Let's start with you briefly introducing both yourselves and just a little bit about the company.
00:00:34.880 --> 00:00:46.945
Yeah, thanks for having us Chuck and Amy. I'm Karl Stillner. I'm one of the co founders of BrightCanary, also the CEO. BrightCanary is a service that helps parents stay engaged with their kids' digital lives. I'm also the father of two.
I have a soon to be 14 year old boy and an 11 year old boy. Steve?
00:00:50.865 --> 00:00:59.730
I'm Steve Dossick, also a co founder and CTO and also a father of two. I have twins who are gonna be 16 next week and driving.
00:01:00.610 --> 00:01:09.010
Lovely, lovely. Let's talk a little bit about how it began. What's the origin story behind the company?
00:01:09.255 --> 00:01:30.060
Karl and I had a previous company that we did together called Pushspring that was also a trilogy portfolio company. And we had kids kind of around the same period in our lives. My kids are a little bit older, but we'd constantly be talking about, you know, oh, they're starting to use iPads. How do you stop them from going to see the wrong thing on YouTube? And then it gets worse and worse as they get older because they get access to more and more stuff.
00:01:30.060 --> 00:01:55.780
And we sort of realized that there just wasn't any good technology for parents. There's command and control software, basically. It lets you say when they can use the device, what apps are they allowed to use, but really has no information for you about what it is they're doing inside those apps. So that was kind of the place that we started with was to give parents more insight into what the kids are actually doing as opposed to, hey, they used iMessage for two hours. Well, what did they do inside iMessage for two hours?
00:01:55.780 --> 00:02:02.660
What did they watch on YouTube? And so that's kind of where we started. And it's turned out that that's actually something that's resonating a lot with parents, you know, thankfully for us.
00:02:03.225 --> 00:02:05.225
Karl, anything you wanted to add on that?
00:02:05.545 --> 00:02:25.740
No, I mean, think Steve and I, we just sold our last business to T Mobile. And so there's a lot of water cooler talk when we were at T Mobile. And we are small company guys or least early stage entrepreneurs who like to build businesses. Being at T Mobile, it was a great place to be. But we, at the heart of it, were itching to get back into the startup world.
00:02:25.740 --> 00:03:00.535
And as Steve pointed out, we were living and breathing this kind of reality, having kids that are growing up in the digital age and frustrated as technologists that there weren't solutions that we could use that we thought were pragmatic for what was actually going on. And so that was really what inspired us both to get back into the early stage entrepreneurial venture area. And, you know, it's been great because we have beta testers with our own kids. And so it makes it much easier than if it's a theoretical, like we're living and breathing this every day. My kids are at the perfect age being 14 and 11.
00:03:00.615 --> 00:03:09.290
They're really transitioning into this phase where they're using devices more and more and trying to help guide them. So not only am I living at work, living at at home as well.
00:03:09.290 --> 00:03:14.730
And my kids constantly tell me how much they their friends hate the software that we build. So that's that's great. Talk
00:03:17.130 --> 00:03:37.790
a little bit about your differentiation as a company, how you think about the competitive landscape and the market and why BrightCanary now made sense versus existing solutions. Lots of parents who are listening probably are used to researching endless solutions or hoped for solutions. Talk a little bit about where you guys fit into that mix.
00:03:37.790 --> 00:03:54.845
Yeah. I mean, as Steve pointed out earlier, we aren't focusing on blocking or preventing kids from accessing certain content like the first generation of solutions do. We just don't think that's a pragmatic approach in today's day and age. Kids have devices at school. They have devices, you know, on the bus.
00:03:54.845 --> 00:04:12.900
They have devices everywhere. And so this notion of being able to prevent kids from using the internet is antiquated. You know, I think that might have made sense fifteen, twenty years ago. It doesn't make sense today in 2025. And so instead, we're focused on keeping parents surprised at what the kids are doing.
00:04:13.220 --> 00:04:48.485
And to do that, you really have to be broad in terms of your ability to catch communications and content consumption across all services that kids are using, not just a subset. And so we use a different technology, a different technological approach than our competitors. And we actually use a couple of different solutions, which enables us to have a much bigger net, which makes it much more comprehensive than just using a VPN or just using an MDM like some of our competitors will. And it also allows us to really focus on iOS. In The US, 87% of kids use iOS devices.
00:04:48.485 --> 00:05:11.655
That's certainly not true internationally, but in The US, that's the reality. And the solutions that exist in the market today are really focused on Android because of the technology approaches they're using. And we realized that the kids are on iOS, and so you really need to have a solution for that market. And so we're unique in our ability to address that market comprehensively. Further, you know, we started this ten years later, ten, fifteen years later than our competitors.
00:05:11.655 --> 00:05:26.190
And so for us, AI has been something we've been able to integrate into the product from the get go. So it's not a bolt on. It's not a nice to have that people kind of throwing together after the product has been conceived of for a decade. This is something that's really integrated into the whole user experience.
00:05:26.590 --> 00:06:04.290
For us, you know, we we kind of started the project just as LLMs were becoming kind of a thing. And that's really enabled us to do a great job in helping the parents understand what the kids are doing and what the content the kids are engaging with is all about. The previous generation of tools that did any kind of monitoring were using off the shelf machine learning models that would help categorize content as not safe for work, etcetera. Those models are really built to help large companies like someone like an Etsy or a Yelp who are hosting user generated content to make sure that what was being uploaded wasn't porn. And that's great.
00:06:04.530 --> 00:06:17.155
That doesn't always work for the kind of content kids are getting into. When kids are reading and writing stuff online, they're using, you know, basically snippets. They're not writing full sentences. The models are not trained on that kind of content. They don't work very well for kid language.
00:06:17.155 --> 00:06:38.755
Turns out that the LLMs, because they're just more fluid with written content, are much better able to understand the meaning and emotion behind communication that is written in snippets, kind of text message style. And so that's really been kind of a rocket, you know, to power our product for the for the moms and the dads. It's a it's a big differentiator for us that we're so focused on using LLMs to to provide all of that processing.
00:06:38.755 --> 00:07:17.975
You guys, you did talk about the origin story being that you're parents yourselves and starting to sort of struggle with your own old children using devices and sort of had an idea that there could be a solution there and maybe apply some technology to that. Talk a little bit about the journey between that idea and when you started to get some feedback of it, Hey, we might actually have a solution here and there might actually be some demand outside our own personal households for this solution. Talk about that sort of feedback loop and how that went over time.
00:07:18.660 --> 00:07:41.485
Yeah. Mean, in terms of the feedback loop, I don't think we were ever concerned that there was a market here. Look, Jonathan Haidt's book has been The Anxious Generation has been on the New York Times bestseller list for sixty seven weeks now. And so it's clear this is something that parents are struggling with. If you go if, you know, any soccer game I go stand on the sideline of, any school event I go to, this is the number one, two, and three issue parents are talking about.
00:07:41.485 --> 00:08:12.785
So I don't think Steve or I ever had any doubt that there was a huge market here. I think the the hard part for us was figuring out what part of the market to really attack. And we originally started with this notion of content, really focusing on the content that kids are consuming on the device largely through YouTube and Google. And there's certainly demand for that. I think parents are concerned about the content but what we realized in the first year of the company's existence is that there's a lot more concern about the messaging that's going on between kids.
00:08:13.025 --> 00:08:28.130
That's unfiltered. That's unmoderated. Parents do not want to restrict that because they don't want their kid to become a social pariah. They want their kid to be integrated into social life. So they're not willing to say, hey, no, you're not able to use iMessage or you're not able to use whatever messaging platform.
00:08:28.290 --> 00:08:58.630
Instead, they realized that there's a huge need for parents to have visibility into what's going on in those communications. And that took us a good, I don't know, twelve, fifteen months to figure out. And we heard that from customers, but, you know, it was something that we were not expecting. So I think it took probably the signal strength to be pretty strong for us to realize we really needed to pivot more aggressively into the messaging space than we had originally intended. And that was a different technology solution we had to build as a consequence of that, which took us a good six to twelve months.
00:08:58.925 --> 00:09:07.005
That was the most important learning for us in the first year or so was this notion that messaging is really where the the key concern is.
00:09:07.005 --> 00:09:14.070
And that messaging is not only, you know, iMessage. Right? Instagram is a messaging app. Snap is actually a messaging app. Right?
00:09:14.070 --> 00:09:46.530
Even though they have features like Reels and things like that, where kids are posting, you know, short snippets of video or photos or whatever. The actual content that's going going on is is what's going on in the direct messaging or the group messaging. And, again, as Karl said, you know, there's very good content moderation going on on YouTube and on Instagram and on Snap even to make sure that no overt pornography, for instance, is being posted or nothing that's truly gore and, you know, truly violent content. That's stuff that's technically public content. Anybody can unless it's a private account, anyone can go to any Instagram profile and see any content.
00:09:46.690 --> 00:10:03.165
The direct messages, though, are completely unmoderated by Meta, in the case of Instagram. Same for Snap. If my son direct messages a group of friends from his school, no one at Snap is moderating anything going on there. And so it's kind of the Wild West. And and as Karl said, you know, no parent wants to stop their kid from communicating with their friends.
00:10:03.165 --> 00:10:20.500
Right? Especially kind of this really started during COVID, I think. My kids were at the exact age for this. They were just beginning to become kind of digital citizens as COVID happened. And so, of course, you're gonna let them play Roblox online with whoever from their class, because you want them to be connected in some way to someone.
00:10:20.500 --> 00:10:23.395
But then it's the Wild West. There's no moderation going on.
00:10:23.395 --> 00:10:42.320
Yeah. It's it's a good point. I mean, during COVID, we saw digital use double, and it hasn't reverted back to the pre COVID norms. So what's happened is parents started using the device rightfully or understandably so to help kids communicate and stay connected with their friends. But it's been incredibly hard to pull back on that.
00:10:42.320 --> 00:11:07.180
And as a consequence, you have kids using digital devices much more than their parents ever intended for them to use them. And we see upwards of six, seven hours a day of non school related digital use, which is the majority of time the kid is awake outside of school. And just to put a little more emphasis on this, it's really hard to be a parent if you have no idea what your kid is doing in the majority of time they're out school.
00:11:07.180 --> 00:11:12.140
To put some numbers on it, the average kid on our platform is sending and receiving over a thousand messages a day.
00:11:12.780 --> 00:11:13.500
So Yeah. Wow.
00:11:13.500 --> 00:11:24.555
You know, to all their friends. So that'll just show you kind of, you know, they're typing a lot, and they're reading a lot. And before tools like ours, parents had no idea what was going on.
00:11:24.635 --> 00:11:40.810
One follow on. Why don't you talk just a little bit about what have you learned about the, you know, universality of folks of parents looking for these solutions? You know? Is it folks in San Francisco and in Seattle, sort of digital native parents, if you will?
00:11:40.890 --> 00:11:58.455
Yeah. Mean, we had a hypothesis when we launched this business that it was gonna be more concentrated on tech workers, people who have insight into the problem from their own professional path, potentially, high household income, high disposable income. These are the type of things we thought would be
00:11:58.615 --> 00:12:01.095
Trying to solve a problem they'd created, basically.
00:12:01.095 --> 00:12:27.975
Right, right. And what we've learned is it's really much, much broader, this problem than that. In fact, if anything, that particular segment under indexes, and we see much more over indexing in the Midwest, in the South, across faith based organizations, across military backgrounds, etcetera. And so it's really broad. As many people pointed out, this is a bipartisan issue.
00:12:27.975 --> 00:12:41.820
It's not political, which is really nice. Hopefully, that actually drives some policy change as well. But it means that our customer base is extremely broad. And it's not just US as well, of course. This is an international problem as well.
00:12:41.820 --> 00:12:47.965
I think The US is kind of at the forefront of it because I think kids got earlier than most places, but it's coming for the rest of the world, unfortunately.
00:12:47.965 --> 00:13:18.205
Let's talk a little bit about, your learnings as entrepreneurs in terms of building a company second time around, successful business. So lots of folks who are aspiring entrepreneurs or just starting on the journey. Think about how do I use the right culture into my early stage company? How do I build the right team in those first early hires? And what are the hacks you guys are using with regards to your development process with the small team tools that you're using, things that tricks of the trade that would be helpful to other entrepreneurs.
00:13:18.205 --> 00:13:21.965
You want us to give away all the secrets? Yeah. I mean, come on. Yeah. I think trade is good.
00:13:23.005 --> 00:13:30.980
Well, first, we don't sleep a lot. That's the first thing you do. Three hours a night maximum, you know, is kinda what you're looking at. No. I'm joking.
00:13:30.980 --> 00:13:49.075
Of course. So as I mentioned before, Karl and I had a previous business that was successful, and and he said we as he mentioned, we sold it to T Mobile, and we learned a lot of things there. We had both done startups before as well. So we've we've both done multiple of these sort of journeys. In our last company, we sort of formalized, and then we've kinda continued it here even though we're still a very small team.
00:13:49.395 --> 00:14:04.480
We have kind of a no asshole policy. For instance, I have a set of engineers that I've worked with over the years. You know, I've been doing this now for I got, for twenty six years. I have a set of engineers who I or I call the smartest engineers I'll never work with again because they're just impossible people. Right?
00:14:04.480 --> 00:14:15.675
Brilliant. Right? But we'll ruin the team because no one would want to work with them. And so we don't hire anybody like that, for instance. I think it's also helpful for everyone to understand the mission really, really deeply.
00:14:16.635 --> 00:14:36.675
You know, the majority of the people who work for us have kids. Not everybody. But even the ones who don't have kids yet, like, we we just hired someone who has a sister who who has who has multiple kids, right, and is very involved with with those kids. And so, you know, I think that's really helpful. You know, you have to have someone to align with the mission of what you're trying to do here because it really is kind of a mission, Right?
00:14:36.675 --> 00:14:47.475
Where we can't pay as well as Amazon can. Right? We work harder than they do in a lot of ways. You know? We're more flexible in a lot of ways, but, if they're not aligned with the mission, they're not gonna be able to do this long term.
00:14:47.635 --> 00:15:09.895
Yeah. It's it's interesting. Our last business, of course, was before COVID and this business has been entirely post COVID. Obviously, remote work has become more of a tool and impediment as well. And so it's easier to find great talent and that has been a huge benefit to us, but it's also harder to build culture when you have everyone remote or most people remote.
00:15:09.895 --> 00:15:23.960
And so that's been something that's been new for us to figure out. We still consistently, as Steve pointed out, hire the best people we possibly can. We And give them a lot of room to run. Like we don't micromanage. We have few meetings.
00:15:23.960 --> 00:15:48.770
One of the benefits we can offer people coming from an Amazon is you're not gonna have your calendar totally constrained by meetings back to back all day. And so we do that. We provide, you know, we give people lots of room to maneuver. We provide a lot of trust and it seems to work out well, but it's, you know, that's admittedly harder to do when you're trying to scale the team very aggressively. Fortunately, our business right now doesn't require hundreds and hundreds of employees.
00:15:48.770 --> 00:16:08.095
And so I'm not sure we'll ever get to that point because of how scalable inherently the business is. But I think that is a challenge if you're trying to grow really fast. We do get together in person twice a year. I'd like to that more often. Think it's important just to have that face to face and establish trust and a rapport with people over dinners and and and the like.
00:16:08.415 --> 00:17:02.525
You know, hiring developers is always really difficult for startups, especially if you're in place like Seattle where they can go work at any number of large companies that will pay them sort of ungodly amounts of money and have stock that is immediately tradable once it's vested unlike ours. And so we've been successful finding people who have kind of what I call alternative backgrounds that generally will get overlooked by those companies. So you find someone who has, for instance, a an undergrad degree from UW in physics, learned how to do a lot of programming doing that because you have to do that these days to do that kind of degree, But was not formally trained in CS, and instead did a six month kind of coding boot camp about five years ago, then worked at a sort of midsize engineering organization and, you know, learned how to be a developer professionally, but could not get arrested by a recruiter at Amazon or at Microsoft. He's great. Right?
00:17:02.525 --> 00:17:19.370
He's he's our newest employee. He's fantastic. He's, you know, fitting right in. We like to hire people who wanna work on lots of different things as opposed to kinda specializing in one thing. And so someone like that who is just kind of early in the career and trying to understand all the different things they could focus on, they can get exposed to a lot of different pieces.
00:17:19.370 --> 00:17:29.155
You know, we have mobile. We have back end. We have database stuff. We have huge data scale issues because of the amount of data we're collecting and processing for kids. We have data security issues because it's kids' data.
00:17:29.155 --> 00:17:36.755
So, you know, it's we make it a very interesting place as well as, you know, recruiting people who are kind of ready to go on a different journey.
00:17:36.835 --> 00:17:59.825
I'll ask a a follow-up question here in the business building category. As you have mentioned, we, you know, we worked with you guys on on your last business, which was a a b to b business. This time around, you're building a b to c business. That's not often the case. I think that entrepreneurs, you know, Steve's laughing, entrepreneurs, you know, move from, from B2B or to B2C or vice versa.
00:17:59.825 --> 00:18:10.320
Talk a little bit about, about what you've, what you've learned, or maybe I should say what you're learning with that different business model, if you will.
00:18:10.320 --> 00:18:14.480
I think we've learned that the phrase, how hard could it be? That's maybe not one.
00:18:18.655 --> 00:18:38.200
I mean, it's a fair point, Chuck, to point out that our last business was an entirely different ecosystem. When we went into it, we knew nothing about advertising technology. It was a totally new ecosystem. And I think Steve and I both enjoy a challenge and we like building something that's new and innovative for our category. And we did that at PushBring.
00:18:38.200 --> 00:18:57.695
And I think actually having no knowledge of the ad tech ecosystem helped us because we just built what made sense. We weren't encumbered by all the baggage associated with that ecosystem. And there's certainly a lot of it. And so we just built something that made sense and it happened to make sense for lots of people to agencies who were buying and were relatively new in the ad tech ecosystem themselves. They just wanted tools that were useful.
00:18:58.060 --> 00:19:23.435
And so when we were thinking about launching another business, I think we'd certainly realized that B2C is inherently very different. Launching an app business in 2022 is very difficult, especially given all the attribution issues that have come down the pike. So the level of difficulty is extremely high, but I think we both view that as a challenge. And also, to Steve's earlier point, we have a mission approach here. This is mission based.
00:19:23.435 --> 00:19:44.005
And so that makes all these challenges a lot more palatable. We get feedback from parents all the time that we're helping them raise their kids and that we've, you know, averted all kinds of terrible situations because of our offering. And that, you know, I think is really inspiring for us. So that's been, I think part of the enticement for going into B2C, but it's entirely different in many ways. I mean, the brand obviously matters a lot more.
00:19:44.005 --> 00:20:18.980
There's a much bigger focus on marketing, on spending to get customers in. Economics of the business are oftentimes upside down for many, many years before it actually makes sense, which is something that was inherently very hard for both Steve and I to get our head around because we're used to, know, our last business was EBIT positive for the last few years of its existence before it was bought. And to us, that's kind of the natural place a business should be. And so this notion of having a business that isn't profitable for many years is new to us. But you also understand that this is the game that all the almost every b to c business has has played in in the tech space has has done this.
00:20:18.980 --> 00:20:27.485
So we're learning as we go, but it's it's certainly been, yeah, a rough education in many ways, but I think we're we're both learning quickly, which we enjoy.
00:20:27.485 --> 00:20:36.285
I like how the ultimately, you tied it back to the mission. Right? Hey. That just falls out of what we're try what we're trying to do here. We didn't choose to do a b to c business.
00:20:36.285 --> 00:20:36.765
That's right.
00:20:36.765 --> 00:20:42.685
We chose to go solve solve this problem. We're on a mission to solve that problem, and this model comes out of that.
00:20:43.000 --> 00:21:02.295
Of the things that makes it even harder is, you know, in our last business, we we had the we were fortunate in that we were selling something we a slightly different version because it was kind of a mobile focused data product, but it was something that our customers who were ad agencies bought regularly. So they had budgets. We just showed up, and we said, hey. We have this slightly different thing. We have these great tools to work with it.
00:21:02.295 --> 00:21:15.670
And they all kind of glonged onto it and loved it. In this universe, you know, we know there's a problem. Right? As Karl said, Jonathan Hite's book been on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year and a almost a year and a half now. But there isn't, like, a category winner in this space that has
00:21:15.830 --> 00:21:17.990
You're not stealing share from somebody.
00:21:17.990 --> 00:21:28.295
No. And it's not like we're coming into something where where a 100,000,000 people have bought something, and now we have a new better version of it. This is kind of also market making, which is difficult, to say the least.
00:21:28.295 --> 00:21:48.730
You talked about, you know, sort of starting out, focusing on thinking the solution had to be around content, you know, YouTube, Google, that sort of stuff, and then sort of have the moment about, hey. It's, it's about messaging. Right. At least a big part of it's about messaging. I've spent some time now getting that part of the solution in place.
00:21:48.810 --> 00:21:52.730
As you look forward, what's next?
00:21:52.730 --> 00:22:19.480
I think that the one thing that's become apparent in the last couple of years is kids have become much more savvy about the costs associated with digital overuse. I think five years ago, they were as parents were totally blind to this notion that there was a lot of hidden costs, hidden at the time at least, associated with getting on a device for six hours whether it's social media or whatever it may be. That's gone. Parents are aware of it now. There's awareness across that ecosystem.
00:22:19.480 --> 00:22:50.835
Kids are aware of it as well. They've become much, much more savvy in the last couple of years about the price that's being paid. And we view that as an opportunity because we serve kids, parents of kids, let's call it age eight to let's call it roughly 16. As kids get into the 13, 14, 15 year old range there's more need for autonomy and we think there's an opportunity to provide kids with tools that helps them navigate the digital world without their parents. Right?
00:22:50.835 --> 00:23:23.785
This notion of having something that's AI driven, that's fully context aware of everything that's going on in the kids' digital life, I think it's extremely powerful. And I think puts a lot more trust and agency back back with the kids, which I think they're asking for. And so we view that as a huge opportunity to have a product that's really designed for parents of kids age eight to, let's call it 13, 14. And then they graduate into a service that really has them in the driver's seat. And it provides them with kind of this companion that is trusted, objective, and private to them as well.
00:23:23.945 --> 00:23:27.145
And so I think that's a huge area of interest for us that works for us.
00:23:27.145 --> 00:23:33.270
Yeah, interesting. Wonder, couldn't all of us perhaps use a little bit of that in our digital lives, right?
00:23:33.270 --> 00:23:39.750
Absolutely. I don't think kids, I don't think anyone ages out of that. I could use that. I think anyone could use that. And so I don't think it's confined to that.
00:23:39.750 --> 00:23:49.495
It's just an interesting point when the kids are fledging, right? They're getting out of the nest and that's a good opportunity to provide them with some help, and they'll probably continue using it, at least a large percentage of them would.
00:23:49.495 --> 00:24:10.260
You know, these interviews are always a mixed bag of questions, but there's always something that we forget. So what did we not ask you that you would like to mention, either to prospective BrightCanary parents who are considering your service, to entrepreneurs, or thinking about taking the leap, to other investors who you might meet down the road? What do you wanna say?
00:24:10.260 --> 00:24:31.330
Well, I mean, I think one of the obvious things is entrepreneurs need to have fun doing this. It's far too stressful to do without having a notion of enjoying it. Steve and I worked together for a long time, and so we have the benefit of having a long term relationship. We understand how we work, each other work. And we also, you know, I think appreciate each other's sense of humor.
00:24:31.410 --> 00:24:47.345
And I think that helps a lot. And I think it's really hard if you're a sole founder, not to have someone along the journey with you, especially someone that, you know, you see eye to eye with. And so, I think it's really important to find someone you can work with to make the journey a lot less lonely and a lot more enjoyable.
00:24:47.345 --> 00:24:52.145
I think that's the case also on the investor side, not to sound too much like a Trilogy shiller out here, but
00:24:53.270 --> 00:24:56.150
I mean That's okay. You can be a little bit of it. Alright. A little bit.
00:24:56.150 --> 00:25:11.675
There's a reason that we came back to you guys. Right? I mean, you know, I I've done this is actually my the sixth startup that I've been involved with over my ridiculous career. I can tell you some hair raising stories about investors and what they have done to companies that I've been involved with. Trilogy is not that.
00:25:11.675 --> 00:25:20.635
Right? Trilogy is pretty amazing to work with. So I feel like friends and partners, not adversaries. Thanks, Steve.
00:25:20.760 --> 00:25:40.815
Appreciate that. Appreciate that. A few lightning round questions here at the end. If you guys could send your text message back to yourselves back in time, you know, on the the day you were just starting out, what would you what would and the answer can't be, for god's sake, don't do this. Yeah.
00:25:40.815 --> 00:25:43.855
That's a good caveat because that was gonna be my
00:25:44.095 --> 00:25:44.975
Yeah. Sorry.
00:25:44.975 --> 00:25:45.695
I'm joking.
00:25:45.695 --> 00:25:48.495
What would you do you wish you could have texted yourself?
00:25:48.735 --> 00:25:50.175
It's gonna take longer than you think.
00:25:50.280 --> 00:25:50.840
Yeah.
00:25:50.840 --> 00:26:07.495
Right? I mean, we haven't got into tons of detail on our product, but we're basically in the kind of the third iteration of our product now. And, you know, it's not like we've thrown away pieces and we don't have them anymore. I mean, we started with content. We still have you know, more than half of our users are using YouTube and and Google search moderation that that we offer.
00:26:08.215 --> 00:26:41.335
The second generation was the first step into messaging where we became the only product on the market that can really monitor iMessage. And now we've recently released a third version kind of of the app that, in addition to those two things, also offers the ability to monitor everything the kid is typing on their device by installing some software on the device itself. And so this is three turns of a crank, and and it's really three re envisionings of the whole. And I think each piece kinda builds on the others, incorporates everything we've learned about what's important and what the parents really want. And that newest version has only been out for a few weeks.
00:26:41.335 --> 00:26:50.055
Early returns are kind of, you know, ridiculously positive from my perspective. Obviously, we still have some bugs and issues to work out. But, yeah, I mean, it's it's it's gonna take longer than you think.
00:26:50.240 --> 00:27:19.195
It's funny you came up with that, Steve, because mine was very similar. It was don't rush the product market fit phase and getting the product right. You know, if we were being self critical, I think we kind of came out of the gate really aggressively before we had that fully locked in. And I think we could have used a little more patience in the very early days in terms of our go to market because obviously the go to market will be that much easier if you've nailed the product market fit and you have the product coming. And I think we were trying to do too many things at once at the very beginning.
00:27:19.320 --> 00:27:43.965
You already mentioned, you know, as second time founders, the importance of partnership, you know, partnership both between yourselves and maybe a little bit with your investors as well. Anything else is sort of the second time go around, as Amy alluded to, sort of first time founders out there, lessons that folks should watch out for?
00:27:43.965 --> 00:28:02.870
Yeah, I think Steve already alluded to it, finding a good partner with your investor. I think there's a lot of first time entrepreneurs who focus on the key financial terms in fundraise. What's the valuation, etcetera, versus who am I going be working with? Who are the individuals I'm going to be working with? Not necessarily even the firm, but the individuals who will be around the table with me.
00:28:02.870 --> 00:28:10.595
And making that the first priority and the financials the second priority, it's worked out well for us. And I've heard others as well say similar things.
00:28:10.595 --> 00:28:30.750
I think it's also something you have to understand, you know, like Karl and I focus on different parts of a business. Right? So when we've been through this, like, full cycle in our last company, so we know how this goes. This early part of the business is much more, you know, it's much more difficult, I think. And I think you would agree with for me, than it is for him, since that, like, I'm running the team that's building the product here.
00:28:30.750 --> 00:28:54.580
And is also running all the infrastructure, and trying to figure out what we should go build next. That flips around. Because if the product is successful, you know, probably within the next, you know, year or so, as we start to get to the point where things are stable enough, and we have enough users that we are out trying to get partnerships with folks, etcetera, that all fall falls in in Carl's universe. And I'm not gonna be the one on planes every other week flying to different places to do meetings with big companies. Right?
00:28:54.580 --> 00:29:08.795
So it it sort of there's a natural rhythm to this. I think something that if you haven't done this before, if you have a co founder who's not, know, you sort of an identical skill set to yours, you have to realize that there's gonna be different contributions at different times from different folks.
00:29:08.795 --> 00:29:28.630
Well, I'm being wise that that that transition is gonna happen over time and building a team from the start that is that is built for that to happen. Right? Sort of speaks to ultimately to sort of scalability, I think of of of the team team a little bit. Let's conclude here. What do you what what do you guys, you know, paying attention to out there?
00:29:28.630 --> 00:29:42.605
What what's interesting that you're watching that you're reading that you're sort of listening to that sort of either informing the business you're building or just maybe more importantly entertaining you so you get some relaxation when you're
00:29:42.605 --> 00:29:44.285
not thinking about the business.
00:29:44.285 --> 00:30:19.900
Yeah. Well, having a 14 year old and an 11 year old makes it hard to find a lot of free time for pleasure reading or watching. I am reading or attempting to read. I read about two pages a night before I I pass out a book called The Organized Mind, and it's written by a neuroscientist, and it's talking about how we all are confronting information overload and how our brains are ill equipped to actually handle that from an evolutionary standpoint. So it's obviously relevant for our work, but I find it fascinating from a personal perspective as well because I think we're all struggling with it, especially as you age, and there's this more and more stimuli, more inputs coming.
00:30:19.900 --> 00:30:37.395
So I'm finding that to be somewhat useful. I'm listening to a podcast right now that is the founder of Whoop. I think his name is Will Ahmed. And he's talking about the early days of Whoop and how they intentionally limited the product so they wouldn't have unintentional product scope creep. They didn't have a screen on the device.
00:30:37.395 --> 00:30:57.630
They still don't have a screen on the device because they didn't want to become a wearable watch. And it's been really interesting to listen to how they thought about building a business for a very specific segment, and that was hardcore endurance athletes. And then how they're kind of gradually expanding after they've done that for many, many years. I like watching Seinfeld with my kids. They enjoy that.
00:30:57.630 --> 00:31:04.175
And then the laugh, always like, it's always sunny in Philadelphia, which I view as like a darker version of of Seinfeld.
00:31:06.335 --> 00:31:29.610
I mentioned that the at the beginning that my kids are gonna be driving as of next week officially on their own. So in an attempt to sort of connect with them because, you know, when they're 16, you they don't wanna talk to you anymore unless they're asking you for money. They actually showed me that there's a subreddit called idiots in cars, which is basically people doing really stupid things on the road. And so it's it's the sort of don't do that, please. You know?
00:31:30.705 --> 00:31:34.225
So that that's that's that's our, like, nightly look look at this.
00:31:34.225 --> 00:31:46.545
Well, guys, thanks so much for being generous with your time this afternoon. It's been great chatting with you, Steve, and and more importantly, been great being being partners with you on the bright bright canary journey.
00:31:46.840 --> 00:31:48.440
Yeah. Well, thanks for having us.
00:31:48.440 --> 00:31:51.000
Thanks, guys. You bet. Thanks, guys.
