Venture Everywhere Podcast: Kieran Donovan with Chris Bergman
Chris Bergman, LP of Everywhere Ventures, partner at The Fund Midwest, and CEO/founder of Gylee Games chats with Kieran Donovan, co-founder and CEO of k-ID.
Listen on Apple & Spotify!
Episode 42 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Chris Bergman, Partner of The Fund Midwest, as part of Everywhere Ventures, and founder and CEO of Gylee Games, a company that makes premium games for PC and console. He chats with Kieran Donovan, co-founder and CEO of k-ID, a global compliance engine ensuring the safety and privacy of kids and teens online, providing age-appropriate and market-specific feature access in over 200 markets worldwide. Kieran shares his journey from law to entrepreneurship and how k-ID’s innovative solutions are shaping the future of digital safety, providing a safe and rewarding environment for children.
In this episode, you will hear:
k-ID’s integration of regulatory requirements into games without compromising user experience.
Empowering parents with informed decision-making tools, not restrictions.
The complexities of designing online platforms for youth across different regions.
Localizing features like chat functions and AI interactions to meet varied regulatory standards.
The startup community's supportive 'rising tides' attitude and network-building strategies.
Benefits of recognizing and accommodating youth audiences on online platforms.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Jenny Fielding: Hi and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:21 Chris: Hello everyone, my name is Chris Bergman. I am an LP in Everywhere Ventures. I'm also a partner at The Fund Midwest and currently the CEO and founder of Gylee Games. We make premium games for PC and console.
00:00:36 Chris: And today I have with me, Kieran Donovan. Kieran is the co-founder and CEO of k-ID, first of its kind global compliance engine that makes it easy for game developers and parents to ensure the safety and privacy of kids and teens online, providing age appropriate and market specific feature access in more than 200 markets around the world.
00:00:55 Chris: Kieran was an attorney for over a decade specializing in privacy and technology law. Throughout his career, he worked in various global hubs, including Sydney, London, and Hong Kong, advising clients on navigating complex compliance issues in the digital realm.
00:01:08 Chris: Kieran, welcome to the podcast.
00:01:11 Kieran: Great to be here, Chris.
00:01:12 Chris: How are you doing today, man? Tell me about your life.
00:01:15 Kieran: Yeah, it's exciting. I think the moment we're at, in time, I almost wake up to more news about kids online and regulation around this space almost every day at this point. So it's definitely the type of thing where I feel like we have struck a chord at the right time.
00:01:34 Chris: Absolutely, man. I had a previous company called FamilyTech and so I'm very passionate about family and technology. I also have a 12 year old and a nine year old, both sons and they're huge gamers, which is absolutely my own fault. I'm really passionate about what you're building. If you can, just give us a little bit about your journey, your career, how you got to this place.
00:01:52 Kieran: Yeah, totally. The number of conversations I've had since we began the company that start with, oh, I'm a parent and that could be investors. That could be clients. It could be partners. It could be platforms. It could be anyone. But the human core that it strikes is always just really exciting and really rewarding to hear.
00:02:10 Kieran: But yeah, it's been a really wild journey. I tend to get a bit of a reaction when I say that I was an attorney for over a decade and then jumped ship and decided to go both feet in on that startup journey. But it was really a natural extension of what I was doing. I've worked at the inflection point of different regulatory reforms throughout my career.
00:02:33 Kieran: When I started in Australia, it had just gone through a privacy reform and so there were new laws. And this is before data was really an issue back 14 years ago. And then I moved to London just as all the European madness was going on around GDPR and all the regulatory reform there. And then moved out to Asia as that wave started to crescendo.
00:02:55 Kieran: And so when really that light bulb went on around how complex the kids issue was becoming and not just data, but beyond data and online safety and the way algorithms working and the way that so many features are regulated in different ways around the world for youth.
00:03:13 Kieran: It was such a natural extension of what I had dealt with my whole career, having that global perspective, the complexity in how to navigate regulation, and then wanting to build a platform that would achieve that in a really efficient way, but in a way that democratizes access to that level of compliance that I knew that so much of the market was desperate for.
00:03:37 Chris: Interesting. That's awesome. Can you talk a little bit about how k-ID works from a user perspective?
00:03:43 Kieran: Yeah, I think what's really interesting about what we're doing is how many stakeholders are involved. So we obviously, as a compliance engine, are very cognizant of the regulatory piece. And so we have a lot of strong relationships with regulators or former regulators. And so we consider them to be one of the four stakeholders that we stay close to.
00:04:04 Kieran: The second one obviously are publishers. We operate the gaming industry. This is tech that's integrated into games. And so each publisher has its own experience. If it's a younger audience that they're targeting, if it's a teen audience, or even if it's an older game, but teens or younger kids might play it, they have different nuances around how they want to design that user experience and we're super aware of that.
00:04:27 Kieran: And then the third one is parents, because ultimately they're making a lot of decisions around what kids are doing online. The final and really the critical one are the kids or the teens themselves because you really want to make sure that you're delivering on the experience that they want in a way where all this complexity isn't getting in the way. And that's the real challenge.
00:04:48 Kieran: And so the way that we operate is, our technology layer sits within the game and is customized to whatever the publisher feels is right for their audience, for their game experience. It pulls in all of the regulatory requirements that are necessary for a particular market. And then it layers on top of that really beautiful parent interface with a lot of transparency around what kids are accessing, but also really empowering tools, really informed tools.
00:05:16 Kieran: We banned the word parent controls within the company because we just think it sets the wrong mentality. What most parents want, I'm a parent as well, is how can I make sure my kid has the best experience online, the most rewarding and connected experience online in the safest way. That's ultimately what I want. And so we built tools on top of that.
00:05:34 Kieran: And then for the kids and teens themselves, that integrates on the game interface as it can be single sign-on, it can be really fast access using QR codes or OTPs, things like that, really not getting in the way. And I think that's the reason why we've seen so much early success is because everybody's seeing this as a trade-off and we don't see it as a trade-off. We actually see it as something that really lives as part of synergy.
00:06:00 Chris: Do you feel like that there's, especially in the gaming space in particular, and this is the leading question, so forgive me, but there have been some bad actors that have caused this to be a particular problem in that space.
00:06:13 Kieran: I think what's really interesting is if you look at where regulation has come from and where the Internet is today, one of the things that I talk a lot about is that pop-up, “I confirm I’m over 13”. And that's in a real way the biggest lie the Internet ever told itself, because we all know, we all have kids that are accessing these spaces and clicking through that prompt.
00:06:38 Kieran: And that means that they're going into worlds that aren't recognizing that there are users under the age of 13 or kids, whatever the relevant age is in a particular country, not recognizing necessarily that those users are there and not providing all the tooling and safety net and guardrails and everything you'd expect to be there when you've got that youth audience.
00:06:58 Kieran: And so I think that's been the real challenge is so much of the Internet is built on that paradigm to come at this from a perspective of, well, what if we acknowledge that kids were there? What if these spaces that kids are going into, we said, okay, we recognize that somewhere between 10, 30, 50% of the audience is actually going to be in that, click through that prompt and not be over the age of 13 or 16 or whatever it is.
00:07:26 Kieran: And let's give them the tools to be inclusive of that audience rather than pretend they don't exist. And so I think that's been the biggest challenge because so much of the Internet is built around that. A lot of gaming is built around that. Obviously there's huge areas of the Internet that only exist in that way, that are 13 plus.
00:07:42 Kieran: And so how do we really change the paradigm for the developers building these experiences to say, hey, let's look at how you could include a youth audience in a safe and empowering way from day one. And we can forego the idea that you need a pop-up that we all know exactly what kids are going to do.
00:08:00 Chris: Yeah. For me, two places that I don't let my kids go as an example, online, Roblox and YouTube. YouTube, very algorithmically generated as far as what content's popping up, but in both cases, it's all user generated content. And so these platforms, I think, are really struggling with just the fire hose that comes through them, right?
00:08:23 Chris: What are some ways that you guys are thinking about platforms that are this big, specifically around UGC, because I think that's where a lot of the problem areas are when it comes to like kids online. How do you think about these platforms that are enabling UGC and what kind of tools can you give them to help make those areas safer?
00:08:43 Kieran: It really does come back to that challenge, which is if you look at most of these platforms, they were built upon at least initially the premise that there wasn't that younger audience engaged with the platform or on the platform. And so all of the infrastructure, all of the algorithms, all of the tooling that exists for you when you're building UGC, when you're sharing it was originally created on the basis that you didn't have someone who was 11 or 9 or 7 or 5 on these platforms.
00:09:16 Kieran: And so it's really, really hard to pivot from that when the business has been so fundamentally set up with that as the core fundamental to pivot in that direction where we're now going to try and accommodate youth because even what a child is, is different depending on where you are in the world. Right?
00:09:37 Kieran: It's, yes, it's 13 in the United States, but you look at say Australia, it's 15. In Korea, it's 14. It's different depending on where you are in the world. And so when you are trying to pivot into the space where you're now going to acknowledge a youth audience and you're thinking, okay, now I need to change my algorithms. Now I need to change where my advertising works. Now I need to change so many fundamentals of my platform, even the way chat works.
00:09:59 Kieran: You know, do I even allow this younger audience to access chat? Should I even get the parent involved? That's the piece where we come in. So that decision tree, when you're looking at all the features that exist within your platform, and it could be the user generated content, the types of user generated content, it could be chat functions, it could be interactions, even now with AI elements of the platform and what inputs can you have, what outputs are coming back, that's where our technology operates.
00:10:24 Kieran: And really localizing the experience, which I think is the big challenge. So a kid or a teen in Korea is different from a kid or a teen in the United States or different from a kid or a teen in Brazil. And what our system enables is that ability to localize based on that decision tree and the features within the particular platform.
00:10:43 Chris: So you have these giant companies that have been existing and essentially profiting on children's behaviors in some way, shape or forms, even if that's just in the form of eyeballs for ads, right? And you're essentially as a parent saying, hey, you've made an unsafe place for my children, so I need you to completely change your infrastructure, localize, do all this heavy lifting, and what you'll get in return is actually less profit, less business. You know, what incentive do these big companies have to go through this process to actually make their places safe for children.
00:11:21 Kieran: Yeah, I think there's a few factors. The first one is if you look at the regulatory environment today in terms of enforcement, it's very real. And there've been penalties to the tune of hundreds of millions of billions of dollars. And that's only increasing because the penalties are getting more significant in more places. Europe has traditionally been the place where you see really big penalties because penalties under data protection regulation are based on a percentage of revenue. So they can be really, really big.
00:11:50 Kieran: And that same mechanic is now cascading and that's appearing in places like Singapore, like Australia, and dozens and dozens of other countries around the world. So those significant penalties, that risk is real and it's going to exist in a more persisting way. The second one is all of the new requirements that these platforms have to deal with around online safety.
00:12:11 Kieran: So these could be the way that the algorithms work, the way that advertising works, the way that chat works, the way that AI works, and the way that kids are interacting with these services or teens are interacting with these services. This is all new regulation. So we're likely to see enforcement, you know, a few years out, but the risk is real, you know what's coming.
00:12:29 Kieran: And so all of the platforms are hit in the middle of that. And particularly if it's the type of thing where you are a 13 plus or a 16 plus platform and it will be, increased complaints from parents, increased complaints to regulators, all that sort of thing. So that's the macro environment that exists around this. That's what I would often refer to as, like, is the stick piece, right?
00:12:49 Kieran: We're going to, the regulator is going to beat you into submission to make sure that you're compliant with all of these rules. But I think what's more interesting, more meaningful and where we come in is what can we unlock? Yes, we all have to deal with this. Yes, it's going to be complex and yes, it's different in different countries. But if we do this right, what can that unlock? And I'll give you a few specific examples.
00:13:08 Kieran: So one that we've had is where we've been talking to a lot of game publishers that have big social communities within their experience. And traditionally, they haven't had an option for under 13s or under 16s to engage in that platform. It doesn't mean they're not there. It just means that they're not engaging with their own age group. They're not engaging with people where they are. They're not meaningfully engaging in a way where they can build a community there.
00:13:36 Kieran: Because even when say an 11 year old goes into some of these experiences, they're interacting with 25 year olds. The 25 year olds don't interact with an 11 year old, right? They wanna interact with, again, people in their own demographics. So I think what is really exciting and what we've seen is how we can build better communities as a result of this. And that means that you have a better game, you have more engaged users, you have younger audiences talking to younger audiences if you're enabling things like chat.
00:14:03 Kieran: And so it's just rethinking a paradigm around, how can we make this better? Yes, we have to do it, but how can we make it better at the same time? And by doing that, what's interesting and a lot of the metrics show is that you have this knock on effect where you don't have to compromise. It isn't a question of where you're saying, hey, I'm gonna have to make sacrifices to the overall business as a result of this. It actually enables you to do much cooler things.
00:14:27 Chris: And gives them new opportunities to engage their communities in different ways.
00:14:32 Kieran: Yeah, exactly right. I think we're already being asked to help because of what we know and understand about the cultural, legal and social nuances of those youth audiences around the world. How can we better provide a more meaningful experience in a way that makes sense for someone in Brazil, for someone in Rwanda, for someone in Japan?
00:14:56 Chris: Right on. Okay, so to that end, let's dream. It's 10 years from now. You guys are a massive success. What does k-ID look like?
00:15:06 Kieran: There are so many directions we can go with the infrastructure, with the platform we build. And so I don't want to bring up too much of the roadmap. But what I will say is, I think there is an opportunity to build something that changes the entire paradigm around kids online. Today, I have an eight-year-old and a two-year-old. They go online. Even my two-year old knows how to swipe on an iPad. My eight-year old is on and gaming.
00:15:34 Kieran: And it happens at least three or four times a week where he'll say, hey dad, log me into this. And the experience isn't great. And half the time you get lost and you're like, wait, who am I? Am I him? Am I me? Where, at what point am I in? There's some really popular games that we benchmark. I think the longest one we found was 45 steps. From the moment your kid asks you to get access to this particular title, really, really popular game, tens of millions of users, 45 steps.
00:16:05 Kieran: And that experience is not great as a parent. And what does that mean? That means that a lot of the time he'll say to me, can I just enter your date of birth? Can you just sign in using your Facebook account? Just get it. And I know in my head, well, that's one tap and I get him in. That's one answer and he's in. And I don't have to worry about that now because I'm busy and I have my own things and that's how most parents are.
00:16:28 Kieran: And it's mental that today, the compromise you make for your own child as a parent is I'm time poor and I don't have the time to sit there and figure out what those 45 steps are and go through them and go between three different devices and scanning things and entering codes and confirming things on my email and everything's going back and forth. And now I'm gonna get tons of email about everything that's going on and I'm going to get marketed to and all these different things that are going to happen as a result.
00:16:54 Kieran: What the statistics suggest is that most parents drop off and end up asking their kids to reinstall the game and just go in the easy way. That's what we want to change. We need to make the experience not just as good, but it needs to be better. If my eight-year-old is going to go and log into a game using his own identity, him as a person and be honest and transparent about who he is as a person, then we need a better experience.
00:17:22 Kieran: We need more holistic and meaningful experience for him and something that respects the fact that, yes, he will wanna get in and he doesn't want 45 minutes of tugging at my arm, pleading with me to try and get through each step of the process when I'm trying to cook dinner or I'm in the midst of something else. And that's the big piece we wanna change.
00:17:42 Kieran: And I would really summarize that by saying that the paradigm shift that we want a decade from now is that the next generation coming through does not have to lie as their first interaction with the Internet. And that the Internet respects them and who they are and where they are from the day they go online, which isn't the Internet we have today.
00:18:08 Chris: Lofty goal, I dig it.
00:18:11 Kieran: We're ambitious.
00:18:12 Chris: Yeah, so chasing down this goal, switching gears a little bit. I find it very interesting that you're an attorney and then decided to give all of that up, all the glory and gusto of being an attorney to start a company. Can you tell me what went into that decision-making process?
00:18:27 Chris: As somebody that's been a lifelong entrepreneur, I definitely feel like I'm broken in my brain in many ways in that I can't have a real job or I'm extremely unemployable or whatever, and here’s the one that was very employable. And so doing this is an impossible task in a lot of ways, and it's a grind and it's very difficult and taxing and not something that a lot of people would really want in many ways. So why make that decision and how did you get to that decision?
00:18:55 Kieran: And I would say that I didn't go in knowing all of that at the outset.
00:19:02 Chris: So you're learning that now. Yeah.
00:19:04 Kieran: I'm learning it now. I now know what I'm getting myself into. I think, even in my career as a lawyer, I'd always had that entrepreneurial spirit. I moved out to Hong Kong when the firm that I was working at didn't have a data and tech practice. I was first boots on the ground, I was relatively junior. And I was going around building a practice and you do that within the safety net of the firm and the resources and the support, which is fantastic.
00:19:32 Kieran: But I had that attitude that I wanted to go and build something for myself. Even within that, that's good. So I've always had that bug and the more I talk to founder friends now, though.
00:19:47 Chris: It's a bug.
00:19:48 Kieran: Yeah, they're like, you got the bug now, dude. It's real. Yeah, because you think, you know, I've had this conversation with so many people where it's like, oh gosh, I can't imagine doing this again. I don't know how people go back into it again. They're like, you just wait. So I think I'd always had that bug.
00:20:07 Kieran: And then there was this super compelling problem that I saw how to solve and having kids and looking at what the Internet would look like if this didn't exist, where every family experience is different. You as a parent are logging into hundreds of different things. As a kid, there's no interoperability. So it's a really clunky user experience. And sitting on what you think is the knowledge of the know-how and you're thinking, well, I could fix that. I could stop that from happening, or I could at least try.
00:20:41 Kieran: It's a pretty hard thing to walk away from when you see that sort of impact that you could have. So eventually it was such a compelling thing to go and do and take on that I had to do it. But again, I say, I didn't fully appreciate what I was getting myself into.
00:20:55 Chris: What were some of those conversations that you had with either your partner or close friends or whatever, when you told them that you think this is the path that you wanna take? What were those conversations like?
00:21:05 Kieran: I was very reluctant initially and I have three co-founders and I have a lot of folks who've been adjacent to or in the startup game for a long time. And so I had actually originally said, I don't want to be CEO. I'm very happy being head down on product, working on the strategy. I can see that piece, but running this startup and taking that leadership role wasn't necessarily what I wanted or felt that I was ready for.
00:21:37 Kieran: And then I had a couple of buddies of mine say, hey, can we meet at your apartment? And at 10 o'clock one night, I had nine people show up at my apartment and sit down. I recognized five minutes in that it was an intervention. And it was an intervention where they said, dude, you have to take this leap. You can't not. We will… we're all behind you. We'll follow you down this path.
00:22:02 Chris: That's a good group of friends, man.
00:22:05 Kieran: Yeah. What led to it was this reluctance and then having their conviction was what sold it to me, that I should go in both feet and do this. And so I'm now super appreciative of how intentional they were about that, that they were willing to back me as someone who'd never founded a startup before and say, you have to do this and we’re going to stage an intervention to make this happen.
00:22:33 Chris: A lot of times your friends know you better than you know yourself, right? They can see your strengths in ways that you can't in many different ways. Now you've been on this journey. I'm sure there's been a lot of twists and turns and challenges, but what's been something that surprised you in a positive way about this journey? What's something that was unexpected and is rewarding?
00:22:53 Kieran: The biggest surprise for me has been how willing to help everybody, is in this space. The collaborative mindset that founders have between one another, there's this attitude of rising tides that is really infectious and really exciting. I wasn't expecting to start this and all of a sudden find myself in this community of people who were all working super hard, really smart people who were also willing to carve out time to help.
00:23:27 Kieran: And that's something that I really credit our early success to, is just how willing people have been to step in and help. And this has been other founders, exited founders, founders who are at the beginning of their journey, other folks working in startup world. It can be tech companies who have a lot of work with early stage startups. The willingness for people to engage and help and get behind an idea and bring it to bear, I think there's almost a sense of collective ownership around some of the ideas and what's being built.
00:23:57 Kieran: And it's amazing. I love jamming with other founders. I love jamming with folks I know at tech companies who really want to just make this happen. And that's really accelerated us. But it's something I didn't expect would be here at this stage of the journey.
00:24:12 Chris: Well, I'm going to be one to add to your list of founders that want to help and have collective ownership on this, man. I mean, it's a problem that I've tried to tackle in the past. We'll talk about that offline, but I'm excited to see where k-ID is headed.
00:24:25 Chris: So before we get into the lightning round real quick, where can people find you online? Is there any particular place that you live, that you chat about your company and any place that you'd like people to go sign up?
00:24:36 Kieran: Yeah, you can always find me personally on LinkedIn. I post a lot about what's going on in the world. So folks can search my name and find me on LinkedIn. That's a public profile. And then I have a monthly newsletter that I send out, which you can sign up to at k-id.com. Man, you can learn more about our products there.
00:24:53 Chris: Perfect. And I also just want to plug that we just put out a new podcast called Gylee and Friends, which is about video games and video game shenanigans. You can find it on YouTube, G-Y-L-E-E and Friends or podcasts, any podcast place, Apple, Spotify, whatever. That's my one plug. Okay.
00:25:08 Kieran: Love it. I'm subscribing now.
00:25:10 Chris: Yeah. All right. Speed round and then we'll get out of here. What's a book you're reading or a podcast that you're enjoying?
00:25:16 Kieran: Roger Moore's, My Word is My Bond. Roger Moore was famously James Bond in the–
00:25:22 Chris: The best Bond, right?
00:25:24 Kieran: Fantastic book. Great, great book.
00:25:27 Chris: If you could live anywhere in the world besides Singapore, where would you live?
00:25:31 Kieran: For my honeymoon, we went to Rwanda and it is one of the most beautiful countries in the world, not just because of the place, the environment, but because of the people. I would love to go back and spend more time there because it is one of the most touching and incredible places I've ever been in my life.
00:25:51 Chris: Yeah, I've heard it's gorgeous. Favorite productivity hack?
00:25:55 Kieran: I keep a clean inbox. Done it for about a decade and it, while relentless.
00:26:01 Chris: Never ending.
00:26:02 Kieran: Exactly, it's never ending. But it means that you're always clear on what your priorities are day to day.
00:26:08 Chris: Yeah, I second a clean inbox. Well, Kieran, it's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, man. I’m really excited about where the company's heading and I’m excited to catch up with you in a bit and hear how successful you are.
00:26:21 Kieran: Sounds good. Great to be here, Chris. Thanks for having me.
00:26:23 Chris: All right. Take care, man.
00:26:26 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, Everywhere.VC, on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more from Kiernan Donovan in Founders Everywhere.