First Time Founders with Ed Elson – This Founder is Disrupting Our Addiction to Our Phones

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Welcome to First Time Founders.

I'm Ed Elson.

Today's kids are growing up glued to their devices, and the numbers are staggering.

Teenagers now spend nearly nine hours per day on a screen, and it's affecting their education, with 72% of U.S.

high school teachers reporting that phones are a major distraction in the classroom.

My next guest saw an opportunity to change that by creating intentional, tech-free spaces starting in schools.

He built a simple yet powerful solution, a lockable pouch that allows students to hold onto their phones without having access to them.

Today, his product is used by millions of students across 35 countries, and it's giving them all something increasingly rare, a break from their phone.

This is my conversation with Graham Dugoni, founder and CEO of Yonder.

Good to have you on the show, Graham.

Thanks for having me, Ed.

So we will get to the company in a second, but I want to just start off with some stats.

Or I'll start with just a number, actually.

The number is 109, and that is the number of days that Gen Z spends per year looking at a screen.

And we spend 106 days asleep, which means that we have 150 days left over to do everything else.

And so, the way I often describe it is that basically 40% of our waking hours are spent on a screen.

Pair that with the fact that Americans are now spending 70% less time today with their friends than they were a a decade ago.

Pair it with the fact that 12% of Americans today say they have no close friends at all, which is up from 3% in 1990.

My view, and I think a lot of people's view, is that we are the loneliest and most depressed generation in history, and it's because of the phone.

So I want to get your view on that, but more generally, I just want to get your view on the following question, which is, what has the phone done to us?

I think the smartphone, and this goes back to maybe even before I started the company,

I started it in 2014.

Yeah.

I thought when the smartphone came along,

it was a hyperbolic expression of a very old theme.

You know, the drive to make things faster, cheaper, easier, and more available everywhere.

It's been going on for a very long time.

But the smartphone brought in so many new, unprecedented aspects of that.

So my hypothesis back then was that this younger generation growing up with the computer in their pocket, pocket, that's a fundamentally different human experience and that had not been tried before.

What was that going to look like?

I thought there were going to be a lot of possibilities, but a lot of unexpected consequences.

So when you talk about those things about social engagement, how do you develop a coherent worldview?

How do you learn to talk to people?

How do you read body language?

How do you build community?

A lot of the conversation back then around the opportunities related to not just the phone, but social media and the internet, I thought were very rosy.

But I didn't really see them mirrored anywhere in history or in human nature, honestly.

And so I think that's what we're starting to realize is that there are incredible possibilities on the internet and with tech and phones, but there's certain things that can't be replaced.

And when you bring those devices into certain situations, it tends to become a crutch and

a path of least resistance and erode some of the things in the skills that people really need.

We're losing our skills.

We're not as social as we were.

But I feel feel like that almost softens the blow because the depression rates outright have more than doubled since 2010, at least among the young generation.

And those are diagnosed rates.

Same with anxiety, diagnosed anxiety rates up more than 100% since 2010.

Is it a coincidence that this all went down when the iPhone came out, basically?

I mean, the iPhone came out right around then, and suddenly you had this gigantic explosion in depression, anxiety, loneliness.

That's not a coincidence, right?

No, of course not.

I mean, biologically, humans haven't changed much for how long?

A really long time.

What's changed recently?

The tools we use have changed.

So

it's an obvious tie to make.

The more difficult question is, what do you do about it?

You know, how do we wrestle with that, knowing that the world is moving so fast in a certain direction?

And so much basic infrastructure in daily life and society is being woven through these devices and, you know, forcing people kind of through these mediums to just live their life, access basic services, find information, navigate.

So it's, in a way, it's easy to diagnose, but what to do about it is, I think, the trickier thing.

In the intro there, I mentioned that seven in 10 high school teachers say that the phones are a distraction in the classroom.

I'm just curious to know a little bit more about about that.

What are we finding is happening in the classroom right now in America as a result of kids having phones?

Well, I think just in the last two years called post-COVID, the conversation radically shifted because we've been working with schools since 2014.

And back then, there was no terminology of a phone-free school.

That's something that Yonder coined was a phone-free school and a phone-free space.

So back then, the zeitgeist was generally, we're going to push more tech into schools.

That was the push.

And it was only post-COVID, I think, when people started to see what that was actually doing to kids and parents saw what it meant for remote learning and what their kids were actually doing that that narrative flipped very suddenly.

But what's happening in schools is,

again, it's a little different depending on

where in the country you are or what different country you're in.

But fundamentally, it's...

The vast majority of fights, disciplinary issues, and bullying is happening through the phone and social media, full stop.

Generally, when is brought into a school, what we tend to see on the positive side is we see an uptick in academic performance, much higher engagement in the schools, and better classroom and learning environment.

But to speak to what you talked about earlier, and I think this is less widely understood, when you think about anxiety and kids being anxious, one of the reasons that's not talked about is they're afraid of being filmed or recorded anywhere on campus at any time.

If you go to a high school, they're prom.

Kids aren't dancing.

Why is that?

Part of it is those skills have become enervated, enervated, you know, of being able to interact and socialize.

But the other is they're terrified of being filmed in an embarrassing moment.

So when we launch in a school, one of the metrics we try to help schools track is actually, and it's a little sad, but it's important, is how many lunches are being eaten at lunchtime.

And we see a big uptick.

And it's not because the kids are less distracted.

It's because they're no longer afraid of being filmed with food falling out of their mouth and it being posted on TikTok.

So you have to think about it in a broader perspective:

you're a kid and you're living in in this panopticon.

You can be filmed or recorded at any time.

And what that does to social activity, freedom of expression is pretty profound.

God, that's really scary that kids are afraid to eat because they're afraid they're being filmed.

So

tell us what Yonder does.

Tell us what you've launched and what you're selling to these schools.

There's, you know, multiple parts of the business.

And it's grown since 2014.

But the two pillars have always been

live shows.

So supporting artists to create these phone-free tours and shows like in Madison Square Garden and big arena tours and schools.

Those are the two pillars of what we do.

If you zoom back to 2014, when we were going around evangelizing, and you know, at first it was just me in the back of my Toyota Dolphin camper doing this door-to-door in the bay.

We were trying to support teachers who are starting already in 2014 to wrestle with what do they do about this, you know?

And we go in and we'd say, hey, we'll help you create a phone-free classroom.

And we had the product, which was, you know, a lockable pouch, like you mentioned.

And we try to coach them

through how to do it.

Basically, over the last 10 years, and COVID is somewhere in the middle, and a lot of experiences and a lot of growth, we've learned that what makes creating a phone-free school so difficult,

why there hasn't been such an easy solve, is because it gets down to these societal questions about the role of technology in life and younger people in particular.

And so if you want to make it work for a large school campus-wide, which you have to do, and I can explain why, or a whole district, you have to go in and treat it like a community action.

You have to get parents on board.

You have to support teachers, administrators, and you have to be honest with students about what it is and why it's important.

They're not always going to like it.

But you got to talk to them that way.

And so really now what the company does with schools, anytime we launch a big district, if they come to us and say, hey, can we have 20,000 pouches in two weeks?

Our answer is that that's great.

but have you walked through these steps?

And so there's a whole arm of the company that helps them with the pre-launch planning, communication, the rollout, the logistics, the ongoing support.

And those are not just nice to haves.

Those are things you have to do.

Because again, we're talking about things related to social etiquette.

Yeah, what does the pre-launch look like?

And I guess more specifically, what is the pushback that you're trying to wrestle with?

I mean, how do teachers feel about it?

I would assume that a teacher would be like, great, kids aren't on the phones.

They're paying more attention in class.

I'm all in.

I also would assume that parents would think the same thing.

I don't want my kid being on social media.

I don't want my kid being bullied.

I've seen the statistics.

I'm afraid of my child's addiction to the phone.

I mean, the only person who I think would not like it in a school is the kid.

But what say do they have?

Well,

you'd be surprised.

In some places, they can have a lot of say.

Okay.

For better or worse.

You know, they have an important voice.

But look, it's like anything.

It can be people's associations with the idea.

And it's part of the reason we use the language from the beginning of phone-free schools, not a phone ban, because it's not punitive.

So our message to parents is, hey, we're not taking something away.

These things that you as a parent are seeing, let's say you're a parent and you have a teenager who's on TikTok all the time and

they're scrolling the internet and you're worried about how they're developing socially.

You're worried about their development of critical thinking faculties, just as a person.

You're worried about

how they're forming or not forming a worldview, which I think people really need to develop.

And you develop it through experiences, not

simulated experiences.

What we try to do is talk to parents on that level and go, hey, these things you're observing at home, these real things that you're struggling with, a phone-free school is a concrete way to address those.

We're giving kids six to eight hours a day to just be kids.

And we're creating a framework.

So it's kind of like...

You have to think in a really practical sense about what you're trying to do.

Because if you just get caught up in the world of ideas, there's there's a real tendency for people to just go back and shout it out into the void, to hop onto social media or whatever.

And to me, the way technology affects people is, and especially smartphones, it's not really that way.

You have to create physical boundaries and then layer on the education.

How does it actually work when you walk into the school?

Does the teacher hand out a pouch and then everyone puts the phone in the pouch?

How does it actually work on a day-to-day basis?

So after all the pre-training and the launch and all of that, because remember, every school campus is totally different.

So like the ingress, the egress, just like every show we do, it's all super hands-on work that our team does.

And so our business strategy over the years and our whole growth as a company has been totally about being in person, total ground game.

You know, we have no social media outside of LinkedIn.

So our whole ethos as a company is being in person.

But once you get to day one and you're a student walking through the door, You've got your pouch.

It's assigned to you.

As you step in the door of the school,

your phone and any of your wearable tech goes inside the pouch.

Once you shut it, it's locked.

But the student keeps possession of it at all times.

So the school doesn't have to worry about confiscating it.

You know, the student is trusted to keep their property.

But inside that school day, it's entirely phone-free campus.

So at lunch, no phones out.

In classroom, no phones out.

Out of recess, no phones out.

And what we see spring back into life, it only takes, you'd be shocked, a couple weeks to go from kind of the doom and gloom story we talked about in a school

to chess clubs, basketball, sports, library books being checked.

It's amazing to see these things spring back into life once you kind of remove the anesthetizing agent, you know?

Yeah.

But then back to the day in the life, at the end of the day, a student, you know, they walk out any one of the exits and they just tap their pouch on one of the unlocking mechanisms on the wall.

Boom, pops open.

They call their parents, they hop on the bus or they do whatever.

And there's many wrinkles inside of that we make bespoke for different campuses and what they want to do with the system, but that's the bare bones of it.

Has there been any concern from parents or from teachers that

if you're restricting these kids' usage and access to a technology that is systemic to our society, then they're in some way going to fall behind or they're going to be sort of technologically illiterate.

I don't buy that argument at all personally, but I'm just wondering if that is a form of pushback that no, we need to be embracing technology in schools.

Our kids need to know how to use the phone they need to know and be aware of the fact that yes you can be filmed when you're walking out and about in the world is that a pushback that you have received in the past yes okay more recently i would say over the last couple years far far less but i think it is something some people kind of have a snap reaction to and will say that like we need to learn how to teach kids to use these devices right my answer is always absolutely we do need to teach them but also how do you suggest we do that you know you're again, we're talking about digital natives born into a world where

they've always had screens around them all the time.

So, look, I'm a little bit older generation that grew up without smartphones.

So, part of the genesis of the company was to go, all right, if I'm part of this younger generation, how would I have a flavor for what life looks like without these things if no one ever showed me?

So, our goal as a company is we create these spaces and try to frame them in a way that people understand, but to open young people, especially to the experience of what it's like.

They can make their choice later on as they become older about if they like that, if they want to have a smartphone, if they don't, the role of social media in their life.

But without a perspective on it or an experience of it, I don't think it's a fair question.

So, you know, that's it's like talking to anybody, an adult, and say, Hey, don't use your phone for four hours, but it's going to be buzzing in your hand, engineered to do what it does, and uh, just execute extreme impulse control consistently.

Yes, it doesn't really, it's not really how it works.

We'll be right back.

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We're back with first time founders.

I learned before this interview that you don't have a smartphone or use one

Which I just can't really wrap my head around.

I once actually tried to in high school I tried to play out what it would be like to get rid of my phone and get just sort of like

an old brick phone, but I realized that it would be too much of a problem largely because of maps.

I was like, well, I need to get around.

So I'm going to need, I'm going to need my phone.

And it became clearer and clearer to me, like, actually, I can't live without this thing.

And so I just didn't try, but I certainly thought about it.

How do you live a life and how do you run a company, more importantly, without a phone?

Well, yeah, I haven't had a smartphone for 10 years.

So the experiences you went through, just even thinking about it, like,

I could talk for days about it.

And how so my perspective on how the world is shifting and basic services, you having to be kind of funneled through these devices is interesting because I feel the walls closing in.

What I've seen is in day-to-day life, not having one creates a ton of inconveniences.

I won't say it doesn't.

And a lot of people around me would probably be like, it's a gigantic pain in the ass.

They don't want to text me because it goes, you know, green or all the things, right?

The green thing is a problem, man.

I hear about it.

I'm like, whatever.

Navigating new cities, like I'm writing down taxi cab company numbers and I get into all sorts of time-consuming situations.

On the flip side of that, in growing the company, I think what it's given me is a ton of experiences.

I've been in.

endless cities, tour managing our early shows to in things and in schools and random cities, and I interact with people.

I have to.

I'm like, hey, can you tell me how to get here?

Next block, can you tell me how to get there?

I'm sitting in a cab.

I got nothing to do but to talk to them.

So it kind of builds up this level of civil society and personal experience that's helped me just know what's going on.

But for a business perspective, I think the biggest part is it's slowed everything down.

So I manage my inputs that way.

You know, I don't hop in the morning on the news because I feel like it's not that I don't want to know what's going on.

It's that there's only so many things you can positively affect in a day or in your life.

Do you choose them or do they kind of solicit and choose you?

And if you allow yourself to be swept away mentally to all the things that you maybe can't directly affect, I feel like it becomes a river without banks.

You've got no energy left to affect the things you can positively affect and the chain that follows.

So that's the biggest thing is it forces me, it forces people in the business to talk through ideas, to think about it before they call me.

And then if they want to write me an email we as a company we place a huge emphasis on good clear writing like we cut out as soon as ai started to come into emails i blocked it immediately because i was like i value our team and the company way too much to have you know them outsource that resource or that faculty and beyond that the idea of two chatbots in different parts of the world sending automated messages to each other is just beyond silly.

So, you know, those are the kind of the ethos of the company and the lifestyle that I think are part of what have made us successful.

It's definitely true that without a smartphone, because of the access and the utility of it,

you have to be more efficient and more intentional in every aspect of your life.

And one thing that I found with

the young generation, with Gen Z, my generation,

is I think because of the phone and because of how easy it is to communicate,

there's a lack of clear communication, also a lack of accountability, a lack of an ability to plan for things and to show up for things for example you're you're planning a dinner uh if you don't have a phone i mean 50 years ago you you say we're going to have dinner on friday you have to show up for dinner on friday or if you're not going to show up you got to let them know somehow like at least 24 hours in advance it's just a basic example of how you need to have a certain level of accountability and clear communication you don't really need that anymore because you can just text like 10 minutes before or whenever oh I'm super busy with work.

I can't really do this right now.

Let's push to this time or this time.

And it does create an environment where everything is

just a lot more impulsive and a lot more scattered, I would say,

in overall living.

So I love that.

that has been a positive effect on your company.

It sounds like that there is more accountability in terms of communicating, this is what we have to do.

I'm not going to distract you with all of this dumb fluff around the point.

Here is the point and this is what we need to get done.

When you got rid of the smartphone,

what triggered that?

How was the adjustment?

And

why did you get rid of your smartphone?

I had had one maybe briefly for post-college.

And so I only actually ever owned a smartphone for probably three.

three years.

Okay.

And then in my mid-20s, as I was starting the company, I felt

it would be, I had to live the lifestyle I was going to talk about and Yonder was going to back up.

And so I felt like to make good decisions in the spirit of what Yonder was trying to do, I needed to try to embody that mindset.

Your decision to get off the smartphone coincided with starting the company.

Yeah, from the beginning.

In that case, let's hear the origin story of the company, how it all started back in 2014.

I was a soccer player in college.

I had no ambitions to start my own company.

I wasn't like, hey, I'm going to be a founder.

I'm going to be an entrepreneur.

I kind of fell backwards into the business because I got carried away with the ideas.

And the ideas for me, I started to go down that kind of rabbit hole maybe around 2012 when I was living in Atlanta and got my first kind of real job.

But it just so happened that the people I was reading at the time,

there was kind of a center of gravity pulling all these great thinkers like Heidegger Kierkegaard, Marshall McLuhan, William James, Albert Borgman, Hubert Dreyfus.

There's this theme that kept emerging of the role of technology in daily life.

And I think as a young person, like just kind of finding myself looking around at the world, I was going, what's going on?

What's going on around me?

What are smartphones about to do?

You know?

So that was kind of the bedrock, that exploration that went on for years before Yonder started.

It was kind of the shaping of my worldview that I still...

is basically the same as it as it is now.

But then where it came to a head is when I moved to San Francisco and I kind of got close up to the tech world, I went,

A, I read some of the white papers and I went, a lot of this is

not as altruistic as it sounds.

You know, there's a lot of talk about kind of hijacking people's biology and I didn't see the inspiration behind it.

But also I watched papers for this for like the

startups and iPhone.

I mean, what kinds of social media companies or apps or anything in that ecosystem, you know?

But I was also just shocked that I felt like many people hadn't read a lot of the foundational stuff behind philosophy of technology.

So my viewpoint was very different about where technology was going to go.

I'll call it that.

But then the catalyzing moment for me kind of came.

I was at a music festival in 2012 in San Francisco called Treasure Island.

And I was there, you know, with a bunch of friends.

And I was watching this guy.

There's a drunk guy dancing at one of the shows, just having a good time.

And I saw a guy behind him.

pull up his phone and start to record him.

I was like, all right, well, let's see what happens with this.

And then he kind of stopped recording.

He went down.

I saw him open up an app and he started to post it on social media and start to write a caption.

And I was like, whoa, and it just kind of washed over me.

All the things I'd been thinking about for a pretty long time, I went, this is not a sustainable view of the world.

If people can't go, not just to a show, but other parts of the public, you know, the public world and have some expectation of privacy,

you just follow that line logically and you go, well, there's going to be no freedom of expression.

No one can take any chances.

Artists can't perform.

Like, it's not just about distractions.

There's a much more existential view towards the whole thing.

And so that was kind of my moment where I was like, phone-free spaces

is coming.

It's a thing.

And we're going to need to create kind of a national park system of these protected spaces throughout society to protect things we actually that need to be protected.

It's less about the person and what it does to you as a person.

I mean, I talk about the distraction and the loneliness and all of that.

But what you're really describing is it's actually about the and it's about the venue.

And there are certain venues where we have almost a social responsibility to

treat each other with some level of respect.

That

a lot of it seems downstream of this privacy thing.

And I especially get worried about that if we're moving into an AI world where Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are developing this new technology, where it sounds like what's going to happen is it's going to be some sort of pin or maybe some sort of headset that that is constantly recording.

And

that's going to be the phone, except it's live and it's on all the time, which is a totally different way of operating.

And so I think that that point about we need moments where you know you're not being recorded and you have that assurance is probably going to be important.

That idea of recording in these newer devices of the future maybe and what they'll do.

Yeah.

I mean, look, it's back to the tech view of like, do you think you can get something for nothing?

Is there such thing as pure progress?

Like, let's say you're in London, you want to make the place safer so you put closed captioned television on every street corner, right?

You can make an argument that makes people safer.

What's the trade-off?

Personal privacy and the potential for retroactive justice.

Is that recognized in public discourse that these are trade-offs?

I don't think it always is, but everything is trade-offs to me.

Like anytime something new comes in, not labeling it good or bad, but it's going to push something out.

And so I think part of the wrestle, like what we're wrestling with this generation and in society at large is what do we value?

How do we protect what we value?

Adopt what's new, not trying to, you know, hold off the future, but also be eyes open about what we're walking into.

Because that view of the world that total transparency in all things is going to create this kind of perfect egalitarian society.

is pure rubbish.

It's nonsense.

And it's going to eviscerate privacy.

And without privacy, there's no such thing as intimacy.

And there's no such thing as personal expression.

And I think anyone who can't recognize that is maybe

hasn't looked at history, but is also not looking at the effect the tools are having now.

The counter-argument that I'm sure people would say is you can't just stop progress.

You can't just stop technology from existing.

These things are incredibly useful, incredibly important.

We rely on them for so many different things.

I don't think you're saying stop it.

right?

Yeah.

Of course not.

Because first off, it's impossible to do.

Secondly, there's incredible advances that have happened in different fields that have allowed people to do things that we couldn't imagine.

But also, technology like capitalism, it has its own center of gravity.

It won't knock at the door and ask permission to enter in a situation.

So it's like if it's introduced into a scenario where maybe it doesn't jive well with what you're trying to do, let's say again, a show.

Maybe an artist wants to protect their content.

But also, why do people go to live shows you go to a 20 000 person arena to step over the threshold feel the energy in the room have that build in the presence of a great artist some people do it to post it on their stories that's true no doubt no doubt there are some shows yeah yeah so you go in that's the experience you want and in a great show you get to that like kind of ecstatic moment It's not just about people taking photos and stuff.

It's if people are texting and emailing constantly, that energy kind of bleeds out.

So it turns out, I think, in that context, digital devices just don't really help what the show is meant to do.

You know what I mean?

So it's not about saying the phone is evil.

It's going about, like you said, it's back to spaces.

How do you create spaces to support what we're trying to support and not totally negate the other?

So let's go through the spaces that Yonder is being used for.

So schools, it sounds like that's the main one and that's the largest part of the business.

Shows, music, concerts is what we've gone through so far.

What are some other spaces where

yonder is useful?

There's a ton.

We're used by a lot of people in the home.

We hear about that every day.

We're in, obviously, a lot of comedy, a lot of venues.

We do a lot with courthouses around the world.

So that's it.

I find that one very interesting, just because it relates to people being present and paying attention, but also degrees of privacy for people giving testimony.

So it kind of cuts through interesting lines.

We're used in warehousing facilities.

We're used in testing centers.

We're used on college campuses.

We're used for tons of weddings and parties.

So it's a very, very broad range.

So you launched in 2014.

I assume you're going around the country to different schools trying to pitch them on this idea.

At what point

did things really start to take off?

At what point did

the customer, you realize, oh my God, the TAM here is huge.

People really want this.

Again, when I started in 2014, you have to remember, I knew nothing about business, nothing about music, nothing about schools, and I was on unemployment.

So I had no money.

I had

a few thousand bucks.

So that's what I started with.

So the early product development and stuff, I went around and tried to do early pitch meetings in San Francisco because that's kind of what people did.

And I got laughed out of like every room.

Oh, yeah.

Like, and which in hindsight was good.

A lot of it was on me.

I didn't know what I was doing or talking about.

I also just didn't like a lot of the personalities I encountered, but it also reinforced.

You've been locked out by VCs or by potential customers.

Both, but particularly VCs.

Okay.

Because it wasn't even that.

That doesn't surprise me.

Yeah.

You're the guy who wants to roll back technology and you're pitching it to the technologists.

Right.

Yeah.

I shouldn't have been surprised.

But from there, like, you know, the early yonder product and stuff, like I handmade those in Knob Hill in San Francisco, going to the hardware store.

And then I created an account on like Alibaba.

You know, I do this at night.

And so all that stuff took me a a long time to start to wrap my hands around.

So before I even got to the first few thousand pouches that I chucked in the back of my old like Toyota Dolphin camper that I would cruise around in, I was doing all that stuff, going and printing out the little pamphlets I made in Chinatown and like every little thing.

And then after that, I was on the ground for about eight months.

I'd pitch door to door.

I'd go to six schools every single day.

I'd go to two or three venues every single night.

And I'd go door to door trying to sell.

I did it all through the Bay, up up through the Northwest and LA.

And I did that all before I got a single sale.

So in terms of the potential of where the business could go, I knew that from the beginning.

I knew where I thought it was going to go.

But the reality of getting anyone to remotely adopt it, like that took me a long time.

And even then, the first show was a burlesque show at a biker bar in Oakland.

And I did the gig for free.

And from that point, I just kind of, I got lucky and I took shots, you know, like we did at that.

I did a little launch party and a reporter came and wrote a little blurb.

After that, we did, I think, a show with the electronic artist zoo in like Brooklyn.

And you mentioned like flying around the country to meet people.

There was no money for flying.

Like I did, got one gig, went out there to Brooklyn, brought some, brought my future brother-in-law and a friend.

We were out there in like eight-degree weather outside with these handmade pouches trying to lock up all these young people's phones and just getting screamed at and torn apart.

So like the whole early growth of Yonder was that way.

When was the moment where it

it exploded?

And do you think it was because you got good at pitching or do you think it's because society changed and everyone realized we don't want these things around?

Well, there's phases of the company.

There's pre-COVID and post-COVID.

So like the trajectory after COVID was wildly different.

We've been kind of turbocharged.

But the earliest kind of like sense of somebody getting it was with Chappelle in probably 2015.

Dave Chappelle?

Dave Chappelle.

Yeah.

And he, when he kind of came back on the scene, one day I got a random call out of the blue and it was his manager and I flew out to LA to meet his manager.

And three days later, I was doing a run of shows in Chicago, not knowing how to do shows of that size.

It was only 3,000 people.

But that was the first one because that put us on the map.

You know, that was a big deal.

The shows went okay.

And from a Yonder perspective, but it was like, it was huge validation that we could start to do something.

i think for children and in schools the kids are probably going to be pissed off and i know this because when i was in high school they had these

it was sort of my high school's attempt at doing yonder they had these little phone baskets that they would put on the dining tables and they'd be like okay this is the phone basket like everyone put your phone in and we laughed it off.

We like threw the basket off to the side.

We don't want this.

You guys are telling us what to do.

and as a kid you know that's frustrating to be told what to do and say you can't access this thing that you're kind of addicted to but i think for kids that's fine for adults do you ever have an issue with an adult being like i can do this on my own i'll just not look at my phone but why am i being mandated by you this random company that i'm not allowed to take my phone out anymore is that a big issue not to be a broken record but like all these there's kind of a time spectrum you know so in the early days days like the questions we got in the pushback were way different than they are now because at a show if you're talking to an adult coming in and uh talking this way the general awareness of what yonder is what a phone-free space is what we do is so much higher that the comp we have very little friction actually even at a big show yeah but still we'll get we'll get questions like that and a big part of our staff's job on the ground is to go hey

If you need access to your phone, we understand.

You keep it on you at all times.

But also we set up phone use areas inside the venue.

They're equivalent of like a smoking section.

So if someone says, oh, the babysitter might call me, we're able to say, no worries, you'll have your phone on you.

If you need to go use it, just go to one of the marked phone use areas.

You can unlock it there and you can use it.

So we've always tried to meet people halfway.

Like, yes, it is a phone-free show.

And yeah, that is a rule.

But also, you know, here's what will make it easier for you to do.

That's been core to how we approached everything.

And even for kids, the interesting thing is now, a lot of kids don't like it.

We know that.

But a lot lot of kids, if you pull them aside one-on-one, and teachers do, they'll admit they feel a sense of relief.

They actually do enjoy it.

It just takes experiencing it first and getting over the discomfort to kind of get there.

Talk a little bit about the business model.

How does Yonda make money and how does that all work?

Well, sure.

For schools, we provide a full program.

The product is one part of that program.

But the most important elements are the pre-planning, the policy, the messaging, everything and the preparation, which is more than it seems.

And then there's the kind of implementation and support and rollout, which we a lot of times will do in person, sometimes remote.

And then there's the ongoing stuff, which is ongoing support, being there to fix any problems, help collect information that's going to be helpful for showing the efficacy of the program, you know, the stats I talked about and huge reductions in fights, you know, academic performance.

Let's talk a little bit more about

the effects in schools once pre and post yonder.

Academic performance is huge.

So, seeing that go up is

obviously important.

Having a better school environment, more engaging classroom environment is huge for students, but it's also what teachers are looking for.

They want to have their kids back.

You know, they want to see their eyes.

So, some of this is quantifiable.

Some of this is what you hear from educators.

They're going, after Yonder launches, I'm seeing my students.

It's so simple.

I'm seeing my students' eyes again.

Their body language changes.

They're not down.

They're not grumpy.

Their eyes are open, right?

But also disciplinary issues and fights is a big one.

I think for people not in schools, thinking about or hearing maybe who are older going, I'm bullying in schools.

And you go, all right, well, there's always been bullying.

Yeah, there has.

But when you add in the phone, it's another dimension of that.

Because when I went to school, I was younger, it kind of would boil up during the day, simmer down overnight.

Now it's almost the opposite.

You know, if you have phones around the school, it kind of keeps going and accelerating.

And then you add in the kind of panopticon effect I talked about of being filmed recorded put on the hook and it's a whole other layer and then you can have students airdropping and you know to the entire school there's crazy stories about that so what we found is again

going in establishing what the culture helping what the school wants to do to create a phone-free culture but then having all students participate that's what creates the space for some of these things to to improve so

You build those programs with the schools.

You also mentioned that you're using Yonder in the home.

I assume that's not, you don't come in with a plan for the household.

How does that work?

That's for people to decide.

And we have a product

on the website for home use.

It's a box and people can use it.

It also blocks signals if that's important to people.

But it's more about creating the ritual of spaces for something other than being on your phone or technology and what they represent.

And we find that a lot of parents, especially at Yonder schools,

they see the benefits of what it's having on their kid in school and they want to bring those back home.

So, and that's another thing I guess I didn't mention with the program.

There's things we see in school, the positive effects.

One of the biggest things we look for is hearing from parents that they notice a change in the pattern of use of the phone from their student at home, which makes sense because you've started to break and develop new habits, which is kind of what it's all about.

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We're back with First Time Founders.

What are some other spaces that you think

could benefit from being phone-free?

So we've got, we've said,

shows, concerts, comedy shows, schools, homes.

I mean, at a certain point, it's starting to feel like we're kind of describing like, just get rid of them in all of life.

But what are some other spaces that you haven't explored yet that you think would benefit from this?

I think there's other that are where information is really needs to be private, you know, or that's around privacy.

I think places like that.

We've worked with some churches, which has been really fascinating to see that they've wanted to, at the simplest level, just create a place where people can be there and be present.

So I think that's a really interesting one.

Yeah.

And then there's always new ones popping up every day.

That's the exciting part of our job is we.

We hear from people all over the world all the time.

And when we do a show, a big show, for instance, like you're getting every subsection of society going to that show.

Right.

And you're going to have a a million conversations and people are going to say, I'd like to use this here.

So that's part of just the way our business is set up because we have such a large on-the-ground presence that we're constantly kind of, you know, picking up on those things.

Yeah, you've grown it.

It's a big company.

You've grown it to over 100 employees.

What have been some of the learnings you found about being an entrepreneur, but also being a manager of people and of an organization?

Because I kind of fell into the business part.

I think the most challenging part for me has been to learn the business part of, you know, of kind of accepting that it is a business and then what I don't know to become better at that and how to build it.

So I've learned, I mean, look, if I could go back, there's a lot of things I'd do differently and there's a lot of mistakes I've made and I'm still making as I go.

So I think the main thing I've learned and I've stuck with me from the beginning is this idea of a kind of

First off, enjoying what you do for the sake of what it is and not what it can bring you.

I think that's like foundational.

If you're just focused on what something can bring you, and I see this in a lot of maybe young people coming out of college now, just thinking about the destination,

then like

the objective can seem so big that there's going to be so many setbacks that can put you off the path, you know?

But if you start to embrace, you enjoy what you're doing and you embrace the process of just learning and getting better and trust that it's not who you are today that's going to take you where you want to be.

It's who you're going to be in three, four, five years and how you grow and develop to make those decisions.

I think that's the ethos I've tried to inhabit.

I think that's a really constructive framework.

But in terms of learnings and how I've grown into it, the fact that I'm still growing into it, you know, once I kind of get comfortable with, all right, we're 40 people, then COVID hits.

All right, now we're 80 people.

Everything changes and changes again.

So I'm still, you know, once I get comfortable, I have to adapt to another size and scale and management style.

That,

you know, I guess that's the interesting part of the challenge.

What are your views on the amount of time that we're spending on our computers?

And how do you use computers and laptops and just other technology that isn't the phone in your business?

Do you have any restrictions on that?

Do you feel strongly about that?

Well, the biggest one I mentioned is that we cut off the use of AI and emails immediately as the feature came out.

And the reason is,

you know, I want a team and a company of people who know how to think critically, know how to communicate, and know what a customer is looking for and how to help them.

If you start to off-board those, you can lose that function incredibly fast.

And critical thinking is not, I think, it's not necessarily a native faculty, you know, in humans.

So you have to develop it.

And it's very, if it's not developed, it might not come.

So that's the part of AI that I think is

I'm very, you know, leery about.

What about social media and specifically like like marketing like

I mean you said that you guys aren't on social media except for LinkedIn it's interesting that you're down with LinkedIn but not the others but I kind of get it

how do you operate a business and how do you become successful I mean you're a successful business at this point how have you done it without social media marketing I feel like a lot of social media is so

it just bombards people so much information and it imparts it feels so lame to me me that I just didn't want us to have it as a business.

I felt like, you know, you walk down any city street and there's so much visual clutter and advertising and stuff slapped at people.

And I just, as a person, I don't like it.

It feels chintzy to me.

And I guess I wanted Yonder to stand for, very simply, for quality, that we're going to do what we say we're going to do.

And that trust that if we do that, show that an like utterly traditional business model of just doing right by our customers, making more money than we spend could be done and could be effective.

Because especially when I started the company, at some degree now, there's been some correction.

This idea of like maising, you know, raising massive VC money and going out and buying users and then you'll figure out profitability later.

Like, to me, that's not a new business model.

That's just a market permutation.

That's just spending a boatload of money and then fattening something up to sell it to the next highest bidder.

Yes.

And what I didn't like about that is that's, that's indicative of a lot of things in Western culture now.

It becomes very derivative.

You know, it's like you're just creating liquidity to spin it, to spin it to spin it i'm like what's the point of that like what we do is we're very direct we we help people create a phone-free space it has a direct effect on their life that needs to be true in everything we do so why are we going to put up crummy banner ads that say something else or you know i've been approached for years about putting ads on yonder pouches like that's really lucrative and i'm like yeah but it's a shitty thing to do who wants to look at like no knocks on doritos but who wants to look at a doritos ad like on your pouch like i don't want to do that yeah so come come back at some level maybe to just motives.

Like, what do you want?

What are you doing it for?

And that to me is why the business has always been second by far to the mission.

I think it's remarkable, to be clear, that you guys have hit success without leveraging social media and the fact that you're operating this company without a smartphone.

But you're well positioned to do that because that's the thesis and the mission of the company.

Do you think that other companies could, you know, say you're just like a, I don't know, CPG company, say you're Doritos.

Do you think other companies

could benefit from going the less technological route that you've taken, from not advertising on social media, from not using a smartphone constantly?

Is that an actual, is that a legitimately viable way to run a business?

Or do you think you are in a unique position because of what you offer?

It's tough because everything, you know, even with technology and the tools we choose as a society to develop or not develop, right?

There's game theory in everything.

It's kind of like, well, if we don't do it, someone else will do it.

And it kind of drives everybody faster towards the abyss a little bit.

Yeah.

That's a hard one to unravel.

I do think it's possible to instill a culture and use tools or not use them that can have much better effects than people realize.

I think that is possible.

Like when I was in San Francisco, there's the adage and still is of move fast and break things.

I met a lot of people over the years there who I was pretty sure were breaking a lot of things and not building a ton of stuff because they were just like

their head was about to pop off their body.

They were just doing so many things and frantically optimizing and shooting emails unthinkingly.

I was like, so our ethos as a company has been, and we try to mirror this in the tools we use is, you know, basically speedwalk, but don't don't spill your drink.

It's not like move, you know, don't lose your head in the things you do.

And I feel like, you know,

it's just not even productive.

I mean, I think of sort of like the Elon Doge model where it's like, just get in there, be an absolute wrecking ball.

And it looks productive because they're making all these announcements and they're saying all this stuff about, here's what we cut, here's what we did.

And then by the end of it, he leaves.

I'm sorry to bring politics into this, but I think it fits.

He leaves and it's like, oh, Doge is being shut down now.

And they made...

however many cuts, which is just going to be added on again in the deficit.

It's just a perfect example of just because you're taking on this wrecking ball mentality doesn't mean you're actually getting stuff done.

And it sounds like that's kind of what your ethos too.

I think so.

I think if you a measure twice cut once attitude is it turns out to be faster even in the startup world.

And if there's one piece of advice I could give myself way back is like don't lose the urgency.

You need the urgency to build something.

Totally.

But sometimes if I could have accepted to make one good decision in a week and do nothing else,

good God, how much time I would have saved in the long run versus trying to do 50 things and shoehorning that one really important decision into amidst those.

You know, that's still, it's tough to practice that even today, but like, boy, that would be helpful.

Yeah.

It's like focused urgency versus just spray and pray urgency.

Well, like getting yourself in the right frame of mind to make important decisions.

Because like,

you know, again, if you're on social media reading the news, it's, it's,

you could be kind of tasked with like 20 decisions before lunch.

So then when an important important decision comes up, you got decision fatigue.

You got nothing left.

Yeah.

And I think that's another aspect is if you have to protect that, your frame of mind a bit.

So when important things come up, you're

important.

Exactly.

Talk a little bit about the fundraising.

Have you raised venture funding?

How did that all work?

Yeah.

So in the early days, it was, you know, like I said, I funded it myself.

And then I did some very early friends and family, very small amount.

The first kind of real investor we had was actually Dave Chappelle.

Oh, wow.

yeah so he came in and that was great on many levels because he's kind of for us he's a he's a north star and you know artist but also he's he's tied to the business which which means a lot so that was an important mark for us and then much much later really coming out of covet we did a little larger round but still no institutional money so and then now we're in a position where again you know we're we're profitable and we're growing so you know we we kind of have the ball in our our hands.

And that, that was a decision I made very early in the company was after those terrible VC pitches, which I, you know, I probably would have back then wanted them to go well.

I'm glad now they didn't.

I realized that also a lot of this decision points we've talked about, you know, how to grow, what tools to use, social media advertising.

I couldn't have made any of those choices if someone else owned yonder, you know?

So it's been a harder path.

It's been a longer path, but I still can dictate what I want the company to do.

And I don't need to answer to people who are following a playbook.

And it's not a knock-on VCs.

I know that they have LPs and they have a return profile to look for.

I just thought for the type of company I wanted Yonder to be and the longevity of it at those stages of the business,

it wasn't really what I was looking for.

It sounds like we both agree we're not going to get rid of phones.

Phones are going to exist.

But if you had to build sort of an ideal world

in 2025

where phones exist, what would that look like?

What would a society look like that is healthier and had a healthier relationship with the smartphone today?

How would that play out?

Maybe social media, phones, digital tools being in some ways less of a centerpiece of people's lives.

It's hard because so much work happens now through that.

And I recognize that.

But at the personal level, I think if people put more weight on the experiences they have without them and the things they enjoy doing in the physical world and with community, I think that's a shift.

And I think a way we'll maybe know if and when that happens is to see young people taking more chances and maybe seeing it as, you know, you mentioned earlier, do kids like yonder and does it take something away?

I guess the way I try to talk to them about it is like, when you step into the digital world, you're stepping into a board that is already set for you.

There is personal expression, there's information to find and useful information, but the adventure, the exploration, the rebelliousness that a counterculture kind of requires and for young people to find their feet and to change the world, like

isn't it a little more raw to go out in the world and do that without those things?

And maybe if you try, you'll like it.

You know, maybe that's the vision of the world that I hope comes about.

Graham Degoni is the founder and CEO of Yonder.

This was great.

Thank you for joining me.

Thank you, Ed.

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Allison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer.

Our associate producer is Dan Shallon.

Thank you for listening to First Time Founders from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'll see you next month with another founder story.

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