Ben Drury: Founder and CEO of Yoto

0:01Ben Drury:Evening. Buyer's remorse. Buy a new car? I'll be moving in. Let's get started. Uh, sorry, I think there's been a mistake. I bought it from Carvana. You what? Yeah, great price. I even have seven days to love it or return it. So there's no... No, no buyer's remorse. More like buyer's rejoice? I guess I'll let myself out. Congratulations. I mean it. Buyer's rejoice. Buy your car today on Carvana. Limitations and exclusions may apply. See our seven-day return policy at Carvana.com. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place.

0:42Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead. With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Saturday, September 26th, two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon.

1:22BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishkondorea. What you're about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM. However, the music has been cut due to rights issues. The world's greatest jazz, soul and blues. From the world's greatest artists. This is Jazz FM. Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss in partnership with Mishkondorea. Tanderea. It's business, but it's personal. Welcome to Jazz Shapers with me, Elliot Moss, bringing the shapers of the business world together with the musician shaping jazz, soul and blues. My guest today is Ben Drury, founder and CEO of Yoto, a screen-free audio platform for children.

2:11Beginning his career as the founder of music website.music.com, a company he later sold to Yahoo, Ben co-founded in 2004 the media marketplace Seven Digital, running the company until it went public in 2014. But it was Ben's young children that inspired his next move. Driven by a shared concern over children's screen time and knowing the benefits of listening to audio without screens, Ben, with friend and fellow parent Philip Denker, started soldering prototypes for an audio player built for children, aiming to use physical audio cards to put kids in control of what they listen to in a safe, ad-free environment.

2:46Yoto was founded in 2015 with Time magazine welcoming its commercial launch as one of the best inventions of 2020. They're now used by over a million families across the UK, France, North America, and more recently Australia, and buoyed by an expanding community of developers and creators. Ben Drury is my business shaper, CEO and founder of Yoto, which I must admit, Ben, and it's great to have you here. Thank you for joining. I'm a father with four children, and I could have done with no... You're brave. I'm brave, and I think the word you're looking for is stupid. courageous on a good day but stupid on most days I would have loved to have known about Yoto back in the day when you actually launched it and here we are now talking about this thing which I've now obviously investigated wow it's brilliant tell me in your own words what it is and how it works

3:34Ben Drury:yes thank you so we actually launched commercially in 2020 but we did have this long period of messing around with soldering irons as you mentioned earlier prototyping. It was a lot of fun, actually. It was literally in Philip's shed in the back of his garden, which was a kind of classic Silicon Valley story. That was genuinely true. I tried to write some code for the early prototypes, but clearly I was not the right person for that. So my co-founder did most of that. But we really built this selfishly for our own kids. This is a product that we were so passionate about audio and listening. My previous business was in digital music and we knew that we just felt that putting an ipad in front of a one-year-old was maybe not such a good idea and there was a there was a pram that i saw on sale in john lewis which had an ipad attachment built into the pram and i remember thinking oh i love technology but this is going too far and then my kids went to montessori nursery um from from a very early like about one year old and kind of got indoctrinated into the montessori world which for those people don't No, it's sort of around independent learning.

4:40Ben Drury:It's around creativity. It's around autonomy. A lot of Montessori nurseries are full of wood and toys. Very tactile. Tactile, exactly. So we just kind of came up with this idea that we wanted a simple user interface for children to be able to access audio without the parent having to do anything. No microphones, no cameras, no smartphones. And that was the basis of YOTO, basically a user interface for children to access audio. And then we started looking to the research, and it showed that actually audio, I mean, it's pretty common sense, but audio is way better for creativity and imagination than screen-based content.

5:16Ben Drury:The brain has to do more work. Theater of the mind and all that. Exactly. And so that was really the basic thesis behind Yoto. And we'd never built hardware before, and we were very naive, and we said, how hard can it be? Turns out it's pretty damn hard. Quite tricky, yeah. But we just plowed ahead. We came up with a very simple form factor, which is a cube. And we hit upon this idea of using NFC cards, which are basically the same as... Near field, what does that sound for? Near field communication. It's the same technology as hotel key cards or the debit cards or oyster cards in our wallets.

5:51Ben Drury:It was very simple to produce. And so that became the format, essentially, of the audio. we knew that kids love cards and they're quite collectible and we figured out they're pretty much indestructible I've had several go through the washing machine and they survive so that's important for kids because kids are pretty good at destroying things so that became our format and we prototyped something this was probably back in 2017, 2018 and we tried it with our own kids and they loved it and then we thought well yeah Yeah, they're probably going to, although kids are hypercritical, right? Well, they're going to be honest.

6:30They're going to be honest. Adults are very polite on the whole.

6:32Ben Drury:Not every adult, but most adults know how to say something without defending you. But we do want to check that we weren't being guilty of confirmation bias, seeing what we wanted to see. So we tested it with a bunch of other families. We tested it with one family whose child was blind, and he was putting Braille stickers onto the cards. and it was amazing. The transformation of that child's interest in stories and listening, it was amazing and unlocked for us. So that really gave us a boost and thought, okay, this is real. This could be actually a thing and actually potentially a business. And that's where we started to really commit.

7:11Ben Drury:Really interesting exposition of it. And by the way, go and look on the website. These things are gorgeous. I say that as an aesthetic. Aesthet, is that the right word? I think as someone who appreciates aesthetics and Stuart Producer is very into the aesthetics of this product as well. Now, you talk about creating something, and this is your third time around, actually, in a relatively short life, Ben. Sudbury, Suffolk is where you were brought up, and I bring this up only to say, I think you've called it the middle of nowhere. And as I read that, maybe the good people at Sudbury will say, but no, we like being in the middle of nowhere.

7:44My mother still lives there, and I think she was very happy when I said that. well there's mums can get offended you know but it's okay he didn't he didn't mean it rudely he was just being factual but actually underneath it i was thinking about um a story i heard years ago about the weather in the uk and about different and creativity and being hemmed in by either boredom or cold you know literally being too cold and too wet to go out and whether that's to develop music it happens as an inspiration or whether it's to be an entrepreneur and build stuff and it reminded me of James Dyson and all those things.

8:16Do you think being, quote unquote, in the middle of nowhere made you a more curious child? Do you think it has anything to do with the Ben that has now founded three companies?

8:25Ben Drury:I think it probably does, yes. We actually grew up, I was born in Subway Suffolk and then we grew up in this tiny little village across the border in North Essex called Guestingthorpe and I was about five or six miles away from the nearest shop and there was a pub quite close but I wasn't allowed to go. as a kid. And my mother was a deputy head at the local school and she was very strict on, well, my parents were very strict on screen time even back then. We weren't allowed to watch much TV. I remember not being allowed to watch Grange Hill and all my friends were watching it and I felt socially excluded from that.

9:05Ben Drury:Just say no. Just say no. Just say no to watching Grange Hill. Yeah. Pause ammo. But it forced us to do other things, and so we were outdoors all the time, inventing games and being very creative. And I got really into tech from a very early age. I had got given an Acorn Electron computer, which was the junior version of the BBC Micro from about age nine, and I was instantly addicted. And back then, there weren't many games for it, so you had to type your own games in and start writing your own games. So I got into it. What code was it then? It wasn't BBC Basic. BBC Basic, that's right. BBC Basic, and then the more advanced stuff was Assembler, which was really hardcore, but I just embraced that whole world a lot when there's not much to do, when there's long summers.

9:53Yeah, and I think that's what I sense, just by looking at that and thinking about many of the people I've met. And this sense of importance of imagination and the fact that you did choose to put your children into a Montessori nursery, where's that appreciation of creativity come from because again you went on to do physics and philosophy of science quite sciencey and people would say well the creativity thing that's an interesting juxtaposition but for you it feels very much part of who you are i think the reason

10:25Ben Drury:i was drawn to physics with philosophy of science is i was always wanting to get down to the fundamental the fundamental truths of things i was really obsessed with that from quite an early age I remember doing physics and I kind of hated the lab physics bit because it was far too practical. I wanted to do the more theoretical stuff and I think that's why my interest in philosophy came from as well. And I never liked this idea that scientific people or mathematical people are not creative. I think it's completely untrue. I think there's a huge link between maths pattern recognition and musicians.

10:59Ben Drury:And Brian May, I think, is the astrophysics nerd. That's just one example, but there are many, many examples through history of the links between music and maths. I was a geek as a kid. I was messing around with computers and messing around with soldering irons. There's a link there, of course. But then I became obsessed with music, especially into my difficult teenage years. Yeah, you play, don't you? You play a couple of instruments, is that right? I remember being kind of forced to learn piano as a kid and didn't really like that. It was very like a chore. but then getting into that hormonal period.

11:35Ben Drury:Are we out of it yet, Ben? I'm still feeling very hormonal. I'm 55. I'm 50. I never want to grow up. But, yes. Bass. Apparently you play the bass. Not getting the spot. No, I play guitar. Guitar, right. I got given a nylon acoustic guitar that had been made in Germany at the end of the Second World War and it was given to an American serviceman and then he came to East Anglia and was on an American bass and he gave it to one of my relatives who then gave it to me. So still have that guitar. I feel like I'm in Pulp Fiction and this watch has got to be looked after. It was a beautiful nylon acoustic guitar and then I just dived into guitar and that was my thing for several years and started playing in bands and all those kind of things.

12:22We have a creative scientist with us and I think you're probably right. It's a false dichotomy. It's not true. much more from my guest Ben Jero came up in a couple of minutes right now we're going to hear a taste of from the Mishcon Innovation Series which can be found on all the major podcast platforms Lydia Kellett invites business founders to share their practical advice and industry insights for those of you thinking of starting your very own thing just like Ben in this clip focus on the edtech industry we hear from Chris Carla co-founder and CEO of Kinu a gamified learning app designed to increase the rate of knowledge acquisition the Mishcon Innovation Series inspiration from founders of cutting-edge businesses.

13:00In association with Jazz Shapers, with Mishkon Derea.

13:05Ben Drury:I think one thing that's interesting in edtech, but in startups in general, is that even if it's not a good time to raise capital, that shouldn't impact the ambition that you have in the long term. The weird thing is that if you want to do something that's truly bold or will have a lot of impact, and really, I think, impactful education startups feel like that because there's so much opinion and so much like momentum about how things should be done then i think you should always just ignore the state of the market and just do the thing that that really inspires you and don't be scared to to do something bold sometimes doing something bolder when the market is bad is easier because you'll just you'll stand out from the crowd of people trying to do something safe and so i think now is a great time to start something in learning or education because of that.

13:55The Mishcon Innovation Series. In association with Jazz Shapers with Mishcon Dorea. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishcon Dorea. It's business, but it's personal. You can enjoy all our former business shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast, and you can hear this very program again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your favorite podcast platform. My guest is Ben Drury, founder and CEO of Yoto, a screen-free audio platform for children. We briefly touched on it, Ben, but that point about audio is really good for you. Screens in moderation are good for you too. I remember as a kid, I've always loved radio, and I used to listen to a very small radio from the age of seven, and I was absolutely obsessed with audio.

14:38But the challenge has been parenting lots of children through this era that screens are rather easy and kind of engaging. And I think you talk about this zombification that happens, and you do this test with your kids, which I think is really funny, and we can talk about that in a moment. But that audio bit for you, was there science behind that, apart from the instinct of a parent which says it can't be good to just sit there looking at a screen?

15:01Ben Drury:Yeah, so I think my slight scientific background gave me the advantage of not just trusting the gut feel. If you can have a good intuition and gut feel, and then you can back it up with data, that's the best thing you can go with. So we started trawling some of the scientific papers around research around screen time. And we didn't have AI back then, so it was a bit more laborious. But we found some really interesting research from the 80s, which showed that listening to audio was way more stimulating for creativity and imagination than screens. It's common sense, but it's good to have that scientific background.

15:39Ben Drury:And there was also some research, the Audible Commission, from a professor at UCL. and I went to meet him and they used Game of Thrones, so it wasn't kids. They had adults wired up to brain sensors, neurological brain sensors, and they played the same, they had control groups and they played the same piece of Game of Thrones from the original video, the TV series, and then the audio version. And the proof was that the audio version was way more stimulating to the cortexes, the brain parts that were associated with that creativity and imagination. It is kind of common sense, but it needs to do more work.

16:21Ben Drury:But there's some data then. Some real data. And then there started to be other scientific research around how screen time for young children, particularly very young children who are fast developing, was potentially pretty negative. So around eyesight development was particularly one. We've seen this in China. and there's high degrees of myopia directly linked to too much screen time. And then there was things around melatonin suppression, so blue light at night. It's the same for adults and kids, but I think it's more pronounced with kids. So plenty there. Even like fine motor control development.

16:58Ben Drury:Really? Kids were great at swiping. Yeah, funny about that. But not much else. Yeah. So there was just all these signals that showed that screen time, too much screen time was a negative. And unfortunately, in the last 15 years or so, the kids have been guinea pigs to this. The rise of the smartphone, the rise of the iPad, the rise of TikTok, and all these things are quite addictive. They have been guinea pigs. And I think now society is figuring this out, and the research is really strong and really clear. And now we're starting to see, hopefully, a rebalancing happening. What I loved also is that, so you've got the fundamental pillar.

17:36The house is constructed on really good foundations. there it is, the data that says X. Then you go off and build this thing, which just looks really cool, and it does all sorts of clever stuff. But what I've loved about learning about what you've done is that you've built a community. You've basically said from the very beginning, well, this is kind of good, but actually, can you improve this for us? And I'm not talking about the most recent, which we'll come on to as well, the developer API stuff, but even back, I think back in 2020 itself, you were saying, here it is, what would you do to improve it?

18:05What makes you interested in the crowd and the community?

18:09Ben Drury:as it were. Well, we thought very deeply about what this business could be and the really great businesses in technology become ecosystems. They become much bigger than just a single product, etc. And we also thought, we're not hardware people, our hardware can probably get cloned really easily, so what can we do to make this a much harder thing to copy, essentially? The defensible moat. Defensible moat, yes, in the tech world. We made a decision early on that we were going to allow people to create their own content. So we have Make Your Own Cards. We knew that was important for families and kids because kids are learning the school play.

18:47Kids are learning musical instruments.

18:49Ben Drury:There's all types of audio out there which is not commercially available. And also, grandparents love to record stories or a parent who's traveling on business or traveling for another reason wants to create a story for the child. And then COVID happened just after we launched. So we launched commercially on February 2020. I remember it clearly. And then COVID happened. And that made, you know, grandparents couldn't see their, couldn't spend time with their grandkids. And they were recording stories in their droves on Yoto. So that was part of the community. And then since then, we've really broadened it out with a creative program of independent creators publishing content on Yoto.

19:30Ben Drury:And we have several making six-figure income from that now, given up their day jobs. One of them used to be a harp maker and has now become a full-time Yota creator. I feel slightly conflicted about that because I think the world needs more harp makers probably, but she's incredible. We also now have a developer program, so people are writing code. I think this is always my dream to have this kind of open platform approach. I remember interviewing someone called Lloyd Dorfman, who's behind a lot of important big businesses and investor as well as a creator of TravelX and all that. He used to talk about, isn't it lovely when the graph of growth goes from bottom left to top right?

20:10Life is not so straightforward, although I think I understand in the last couple of years you've had 80 % year-on-year growth of Yoto. But there have been some bumps. There's been a product recall. There's been entering the US with great pressure surrounding you from kind of German and potentially French competitors. How do you, Ben, cope with those challenges that you've had? What do you think is working for you to enable you to manage them and actually be better at the other side of them.

20:35Ben Drury:Well, you're completely right that the growth and success is not a linear. No. It might look like that. Wish it was. If you zoom out enough, then it probably looks like that. But under the water, everyone's frantically scrabbling. But that's part of the fun. I mean, that's part of the challenges. I think I'm a good problem solver. And if I don't have problems to solve, I'm bored. I'm always looking for problems to solve. And definitely in our world, there's lots of issues, lots of things to figure out. Hardware is hard is the cliche. And I can certainly attest that that's true. We've had all kinds of issues with things like tariffs last year.

21:15Ben Drury:Right now, memory pricing, transportation, problems. COVID and COVID, the freight costs went through the roof. There's always something going on, but that's part of the fun. and I'm a really strong believer in resilience. As a company, Yoto's dealt with some major challenges over time. We've got through those challenges and it's absolutely made us stronger. As a company, as a team, we all pull together and that really, really helps you in the future. People often talk about resilience and just to push on that for a second, when you talk about that word, what do you mean precisely? So resilience, certainly from a personal perspective, building resilience means the next time there's a challenge you put it instantly in perspective we say okay this is bad but it's not as bad as something i've already dealt with so you already have that perspective and you already know it's probably not that bad and there's always a solution we have a bit of a catchphrase in our household is when the kids get upset about something there's always a solution it's becoming a bit of a cliche but there is always a solution and I've also learned the hard way personally that you need to share problems.

22:23Ben Drury:So I used to try and internalize everything and try and figure it all out. I can figure this out on my own. Absolutely the worst way to go as I've got older. Share the problem. Get everyone involved. Get your investors involved. Get your board involved. Get your team involved. More brains thinking about the same thing. You will have better answers and more choices. And then I think from an organizational point of view, the company of Yoto has become more resilient. We've become stronger. We've got a deeper bench of talent. We have a deeper bench of experience. And we're able to figure solutions out faster than before.

23:01Well, it's certainly working. If I was to spend a bit of time reading out all the accolades that you've received as a business, we would be here till probably 3 o 'clock next Sunday. And I'm only going to say one win of the King's Innovation Award 2025. That sounds like a good one. No idea if it means anything more than the others, but it sounded good to me. A trip to Windsor Castle. Oh, there you go. There was the benefit. So it was actually the best one. I was right. That was lucky, wasn't it? Final chat coming up with Ben plus we've got some Professor Longhair. That's in just a moment. Don't go anywhere.