Kieran Donovan is the CEO and co-founder of k-ID, the first-of-its-kind global compliance engine designed to make online safety and privacy seamless for kids, teens, game developers, and parents alike. With a decade of experience at the forefront of data protection and online safety, Kieran has advised major online platforms and has been named Privacy Lawyer of the Year multiple times. In this episode, he shares his journey from leading privacy lawyer to entrepreneur, the challenges game developers face in creating engaging yet compliant experiences, and how AI is transforming the landscape of child safety online. Whether you’re a game developer, parent, or simply curious about the future of online safety, be sure to tune in to this week’s episode of the Here's Waldo Podcast!

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• How k-ID is bridging the gap between parents, kids, and game developers.
• How AI and global privacy laws are shaping the future of online gaming.
• Why compliance isn’t just a legal requirement but a business opportunity.

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Kieran Donovan on Linkedin
• k-ID.com
  

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives, founders, and executives about their journey. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. This episode is brought to you by Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruitment firm in games and tech that values quality over quantity. 

Today we have Kieran Donovan with us. Kieran is the CEO and co-founder of k-ID. In his role, Kieran uses his decade of experience working at the frontier of data protection and online safety regulation to manage the company and technology. 

Kieran is the only person to have ever been named Privacy Lawyer of the Year multiple times, and he has advised some of the world's most well-known online platforms on how to architect solutions to efficiently navigate emerging regulatory challenges across the world. Kieran has been featured in major press, including Forbes, Bloomberg, TechCrunch, and my friends over at VentureBeat. He has appeared in other popular podcasts, including Deconstructor of Fun and Navrit Gaming, and he has been recognized by the World Economic Forum as a technology pioneer for 2024, as well as winning recognition from Law.com, Chambers, Legal 500, Asian Legal Business. 

In this episode, we'll talk about privacy law in general, how Kieran founded the company, the latest in child safety, especially with the rise of AI. Thanks, Kieran, for being here. 

Kieran Donovan: Yeah, wonderful to be here. Thanks for having me, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: Nice to have you. We had to reschedule because Kieran got into a surfing accident. 

Kieran Donovan: I did, I did. I'm recovered, I think, at this point. But it turns out that, I don't know what you know this, when you break your nose, the way that you deal with it is to do nothing.

They sort of just make sure that it look like it's going to heal in the right direction. If it does, then good luck. 

Lizzie Mintus: And if it doesn't, you're a busy entrepreneur, so it is what it is. 

Kieran Donovan: Yeah, yeah, just no choice. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay, for context, can you share a little bit more about your company and how it works?

Kieran Donovan: Yeah, so I've been an attorney for about 15 years now and have worked at the intersection of technology, gaming and regulation of the course of that career. And so k-ID is really the product of that, which is how do you deal with all of the insane amount of regulation that comes out around the world when you're dealing with youth online, because that is typically the biggest barrier to building the experience in a way that can engage kids or indeed teens, because it's just so hard, so complex, so expensive. It takes so much time. It's not something you ordinarily think of out of the gate. That's why we see so many pop ups that say, I confirm I'm over 13 because it's really, really hard to manage the online experience for anyone younger than that. 

Lizzie Mintus: And you mentioned people can't develop an engaging experience due to these regulations. Can you talk about how it might get in the way if you're developing? What are the common problems that you see? 

Kieran Donovan: Yeah. I mean, if you take the US as an example where, there's a few things, one is the age of a child is 13, the age of maturity of an adult is 18. And so that should be pretty familiar to everyone who's listening. If you want to make your online product available to under 13s, then you need a parent to give that consent. There are specific ways that you can do that. There are specific information. You need to tell the parent. And you need to go through that cycle again and again and again as your product evolves. 

And so what that means is you have to build all the infrastructure for that to happen and to maintain it over the course of time. And when you're launching new features, particularly if you're early on and you've got that sort of velocity where you want to get things out there, get it in front of users, test it, and then iterate, iterate, iterate, hone in on the features that make sense. Adding on top of that, all of what I just described for under 13s is really, really challenging. And so that's why we so often see it being an afterthought much later on in product development. And, you know, often in some cases, never until the regulator knocks on the door. 

Lizzie Mintus: Oh, how frightening. And do you think people will tailor their game? So it's only available in America, for instance, and they'll miss out on other audiences because they don't want to deal or cannot deal with regulatory and other areas.

Kieran Donovan: Yeah, absolutely. So, one of the biggest challenges... so take a really simple question, like what is a kid? About 30% of the world defines a child at 13 in terms of online. So that's 70% of the world that sits anywhere between 7 and 21. And so now you have to go and adapt to all of that. That's just the very, very first basic question. Forget about chatting with people. Forget about monetization or payments or advertising or loot box. Forget about all that, right? 

Just being able to define what is my age gate set to is super challenging. And so it is a barrier. It is a reason why we do see games that will target. Key markets and then either just take that and export it and apply those same rules to the rest of the world, which increasingly doesn't work or choose not to launch there until they're much more mature. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Or just don't comply. Okay. Fine. 

So can yoUShare more about your journey? You went from being a lawyer in this space to founding a company in this space. Was there a moment where you're like, I have to do this thing where you're working on a really big games case? How did it come to be? 

Kieran Donovan: So I've worked in a number of different cities. I started practice in Sydney and that was when privacy reform was hitting. It's kind of wild to think about it, but there was a time where the idea of privacy and data, it just wasn't a thing. It wasn't an issue. And increasingly it's become so over the last 15 years, Australia was at the very, very beginning of that. And then I moved to London. So I dealt with all of the European regulatory reform and then moved out to Hong Kong and was advising lots of different clients in that part of the world that were looking to get into the US market or getting to Europe or elsewhere around the world.

And what typically happened was they would call me and say, Hey, we want to launch this game in these 20 countries. These are the features within the game. What do we need to worry about? And over the course of about seven or eight years, I developed a mental map of a heat map of where all the regulatory complexity was. And the prediction I had was, well, you're going to have two different versions of the world with all of the online safety kid focused regulation that was coming in.

Two different versions of the world. One was, lawyers were going to go and continue to get tons and tons of work because the world was getting really, really complex in terms of the regulatory environment. And so more and more people are going to have to call lawyers and it's going to get harder and harder and harder. And everybody's going to have different ideas about how they build all of what I'm describing for their game, which turns out it's not a great experience for anyone. 

It's not a great experience for devs because they now have to go and build compliance infrastructure. They just want to build a cool game. It's not a great thing for regulators or governments because now they're seeing all these different forks of how people interpret regulation. It's not a great thing for the players. Because now they're jumping from game to game and it's totally different. It's like, wait a minute, I'm a kid over here and I'm not a kid over here. Or I'm like a teen here and I have access to this. This is crazy. Like my experience differs so wildly. And then finally for parents. And so that's one version of the future. 

Second version, which I saw was, well, if I got ahead of it and I built a SaaS platform that delivered all of this in a consistent way to everyone in the same way that payment licensing works or payment rails work. Now everybody gets a common baseline to operate from. And so how you define a child, what features go on and off, all of that can be a consistent taxonomy delivered in the same way to everyone. And it's a better thing for all those stakeholders.

That was kind of my vision of the future. And probably about a year of going back and forth in my head of hoping someone else was going to do it. And then when nobody did, I thought. Okay. I can't not. I was compelled enough that I had to go and solve this problem. 

Lizzie Mintus: And how did you find your co-founder? 

Kieran Donovan: So my initial co-founder, Timothy, he was my client. We'd lived through this together. So he was the Head of Privacy and had previously been the Head of International Legal at Tencent. And so he'd lived through all this. And he and I had both sort of grown up together in a way around this issue. We'd seen it, saw the opportunity to do something really exciting for the industry there, and then started sort of prototyping and building out the rails of the company. And inevitably we added two more co-founders, one in the trust and safety space, Jeff, who'd been at Facebook and he'd been at Google and he built out and managed trust and safety. And then Julian who had been in the business of gaming. And so the four of us sort of assembled to take on the challenge, bringing that relevant expertise. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That makes sense. All different areas. And so that was your initial vision and your initial thesis.

How has that evolved since you started the company? What were your like, Oh, we thought it was going to go this way, but it really went this way. I'm sure there's so many. 

Kieran Donovan: Did you know what? This is really timely because we recently onboarded a number of new people. And one of the things I created was a deck that stepped through exactly what you're asking.

What did we get right? What did we get wrong? And in both of those permutations, that could have been good or bad. Because you can not predict things that end up being really, really good. We cannot predict things that actually don't go so well. 217 slide deck that we ended up with by the end of it. So there was a lot that we went into. But the fundamental of it is we did not anticipate, I did not anticipate, how fast all of the regulatory environment would move in so many places around the world all at once.

And a year ago when I started the newsletter that I send out every month, one of my co-founders said to me, Do you think you'll have enough content because how much changes really around it? Law doesn't change fast, right? Surely it can't be moving so fast that you'll have something to write about every month in kids compliance in gaming, which ostensibly is quite narrow. And it's crazy. 

My last update that I sent out my newsletter about a week ago, there were 60 updates that were part of that. And I cut it down to about half before I distributed it. And these are things like new loot box rules, new things around advertising in gaming. It could be new rules around how parents are approving games. There can be classification rules. It can be all sorts of different things because it's all moving at such a momentous pace. That to me is the single fundamental that we both bet on, but also didn't anticipate how fast it would move. 

Lizzie Mintus: What is prompting it to move so quickly? 

Kieran Donovan: I think two things. I think one thing is the desire from the community to impose rules around how the entire kids' experience is managed online has moved well beyond what I would call a self regulatory approach where the idea is leave it to the technologists and the online platforms to figure out how best to do this and adapt these experiences to one where we're more educated on the impact of algorithms online. We're more educated on, you know, the psychology of kids and teens online today. We know more about how kids and teens are building more of their identity and their community online than ever before, and at a younger age than any of the people who wrote the regulations have experienced. And so all of that is happening on the one side.

And on the flip side, I think what we're seeing is the pace of technological change and the shifts, the fundamental shifts we're seeing, partly brought about by AI, but I think it's much broader than that. I think it's UGC. I think it's the way that younger audiences are attributing value to digital identity and digital goods in a way that certainly I never did. And all of that's happening at the same time. And so both of these things are happening in parallel. And so there is a desire to regulate for all sorts of good reasons. And the question is, how do you do it? And that's the thing that is very, very different from country to country. 

Lizzie Mintus: I mean, as a startup founder myself, that seems like a complete nightmare to deal with. Like, oh, hey, now all of a sudden there's this regulation that might not be communicated to you, that you need to comply with or else. It's like hiring people in different states, but way, way, way worse. 

Kieran Donovan: It is, it is. It's an insane challenge. And I actually think that we caught the wave at the right time because if I was trying to build k-ID today, I'd have to catch up on the last 18 months worth of everything that's changed.

We've invested huge amounts of time and resources into keeping all of our system updated. And a whole thing, it's almost like in the old days of software updates where you'd have like the monthly update and like everything, all the new definitions and everything get downloaded. It's a similar sort of model that we have where all of the new regulatory changes get sort of downloaded into the engine. And then you as a dev decide, Oh yeah, I'm going to push that or actually that's guidance, and for whatever reason, take a different view. So I'm going to do something slightly different. And that's sort of the complexity of the world we deal with now. But yeah, the whole point is that we take the edge off.

Lizzie Mintus: Like a payment platform. I like the analogy. Okay. So I just made a game, let's say, and I'm relatively successful. At what stage should I start thinking about integrating your product? Probably very early, but when is it too late? I mean, do people come to you with fully fledged games who are like, help. I should have thought of this so long ago. What is too early? What is too late? Or you can encompass the whole thing. 

Kieran Donovan: So we can. There's different challenges based on a few different things. One is, if it's a brand new game, it's always good to be in as early as possible with one caveat that I'll mention. And then if it's an existing title, then it's never too late. And in fact, we do see scenarios where publishers hang on and hang on, hang on. And then inevitably there's the regulatory hit. And now you're in a position where you no longer have control of how you're going to implement compliance because a regulator is going to tell you exactly how you're going to have to do it. 

And you could be subject to as we saw recently with the FTC, a 10 or 20 year reporting obligation. And so you as a game dev who's just successful, you're now thinking, wait, wait, wait, hang on. So not only do I have to tell the FTC everything I do, not only are they going to tell me exactly how I'm going to modify my game and my game experience, which is so sensitive to me, but they can actually prevent you from making changes. 

So all of the pace of change and features that you would typically have on your roadmap, now you have to second guess everything because you no longer have that sort of license to operate. So it's never too late. That's the nightmare situation. So it's never too late. And we do work with lots of publishers at all sides of the spectrum. 

Now, the two things that are super important is we spend a ton of time Looking to understand the player experience that the publisher wants, that the developer wants because it's so important that we align with that. And I'll give you a few examples. So, when we went into VR, when we prompt for parental consent, we can do it in two ways. Either you can do it at the very beginning, when you sign up for an account or you can do it when you run up against a feature that says you as an 11-year-old, you want access to chat or go get mom or dad to turn this on for you.

So there's two different ways of doing it. And depending upon the type of title you are in the platform you're on, I could tell you pros and cons of both approaches. But the really interesting thing is understanding the player community and what their sentiment is, is so so important because often we will find that if you communicate it in the right way, it can be a huge net gain, net gain for the community.

One example is if you're dealing with chat and if you've let everyone chat to everyone up until now, ask the community if we were to go and say segment between kids and and everybody else, what would you want to see there? And what we typically see is in those environments, the older audience are actually really excited to be able to just now hang out with because they don't want the younger demographic. And the flip side is also true. And that's where you can actually engage the player community in a way where you then involve them in the design and integration of something like k-ID into the system. 

Another example is, so this was so fascinating to me, but you wouldn't think that child psychology and development would click into out of the gate in terms of what we were doing. But when you prompt a parent to go and get consent, if you think about like Netflix today or Apple or something where you'll often get prompted with QR codes to go and approve things and things like that, or you might get a one time passcode or you might enter an email, those sorts of things. And we support all of that.

In VR, QR codes obviously don't work because you're in a headset. And an email can be a bit more clunky in terms of entering it. And so the natural thing is to say, well, we're going to show a one time passcode of six digits that a parent then goes and enters on the website to approve access to audio chat or whatever it might be.

If a child is between the ages of nine to 11, then in terms of development, the actual cognitive ability to remember a six digit randomized code is much harder and to describe the purpose for which it's being used. And so what we discovered really early on was Oh, actually, this idea we had, this premise we had, where the players would find this really easy, turned out not to be true.

What they wanted was to just say, Mom, Dad, what's your email? Let me put in your email. That's what the players wanted. And so that's where I say, to sort of bring that thread together, knowing your player community, knowing what they want, knowing what the younger audience wants, what the older audience wants, and involving them as part of the experience and the integration when we come into an existing experience is so, so important.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. And then maybe it's also an advantage because you can target the demographics a little bit better and you have more knowledge based on ages and preferences and things like that, that you wouldn't before. 

Kieran Donovan: There's a total net gain, total net gain that we see across the board. So we see better engagement in terms of the community. We see better stickiness. We see people rating things in terms of social interactions much higher. We integrated into a number of hypercasual titles and discovered that it had no impact on monetization, which was wild because you would think the second you're adding, say an age game into a hypercasual title, which is just in out, in out, it didn't have that impact on monetization.

In fact, we're actually now working on things to see a net gain because if you were presenting say ads in a hypercasual title to everybody. And now you're able to screen out the 16 % of your user base who's under the age of 13 or 16. Now you're only surfacing that inventory to people who are actually likely to click on the app. So it really changes the fundamentals of different monetization models within gaming. 

Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. Yeah. I could see that being a huge positive. 

And then how do you make it appealing to both the child and the parent? How do you balance that? 

Kieran Donovan: So the core fundamental is we want to unlock as much of the experience as we possibly can. Now, the baseline for most games today is, I confirm I'm over 13. If you get caught, they kill your account. They have to. By law, they have to kill the account. And so that can mean you lose your identity, your progress, your friends, whatever it might be in that online experience. And now you have to create a new account and get back in again. That's not a cool experience. 

And so the fundamental of what we want to do is to unlock more of the experience for everyone. Both by age and in terms of the actual features. And so the core value proposition that we want to be for kids is just be honest about your age. We'll take care of the rest. So you can be 11, you'll get in. You can be 9, you'll get in. You can be 14, you'll get in. Don't worry. We are going to make sure that there is a pathway for you to get in and have an amazing experience. 

And then you make it really cool. And so one of the things that we've seen is being able to put fun spins on feature modifications that need to happen. So an example would be with chat, now for anyone under the age of 13, particularly in the United States, chat needs to be off by default. 

But one of the nuances we found was that actually kids like to talk to each other. And they don't necessarily want to talk to adults. And so in, say, VR, if you're dealing with audio, if you replace the, if you allow the chat with other kids around the same age, then kids will find that fun. And if you exclude adults and when adults come and try and talk to them in terms of, you know, through the audio headset, you're actually changing that into some other things. So like gorilla noises or whatever it might be, like you actually changing it to make it fun. You're now making a part of the organic experience of the actual game. Now it's making it special. If there's an intentionality of like, no, we built the experience with you in mind. And we're doing more and more of that, which is really, really fun. And then when parents know that they get excited because they recognize that actually that's a much, much more empowered experience for their kids.

Lizzie Mintus: That's very clever. Is this a gorilla tag reference? 

Kieran Donovan: Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: Very cool. What do you think is the most common misconception about child safety and games? 

Kieran Donovan: I think the biggest misconception is, I need to exclude kids from my title, under 13s from my title, because if I let them in, then it's going to be hard and at the end of the day, if they really want to get in, they'll get in anyway.

And so the biggest misconception is, I take that approach and that's what everybody does and I'm probably okay. What I can tell you is the regulatory environment is such that we have lots of game publishers from indies through to big triple A's who get that letter from a regulator or they deal with class actions or whatever it might be.

So the regulatory risk is real. And so most folks historically when you talk to them about this, that's kind of what's sitting in the back of their mind is how big is the regulatory risk? Is this really going to become an issue for me? But the thing is, actually it's good for the game And it's good for business to do this in the right way, and to open up to that younger audience, particularly if the audience is already there because they want to be there and they want to build their account. They want to build their identity. They want to build their community. And if they know that the second they get caught you know, that's it. It's all wiped out. Then what we've seen is when you flip the script and you're inclusive of it, it builds the most amazing community for the player base as a whole. And so I think that to me is the biggest misconception. 

Yes, historically there are a bunch of reasons why people take that approach. But the better way actually turns out to be a better way, not just for players or parents, but also for the business of the game. 

Lizzie Mintus: And I would say many of the most successful titles these days that everyone is aspiring to build are for the younger generation, and they are inclusive of that.

Kieran Donovan: It is such a change. So one thing I can say is, we have a huge number of indies and early stage founders in the gaming industry who are building brand new experiences today, who are coming to us out of the gate. Often it's just an idea or a deck, or they've just raised their first bit of pre seed capital. And they're talking to us about, Hey, help me build the best experience for kids because they're, exactly what you're saying, they're looking to do that. And so some of the stuff that we've announced at GDC is exactly around that core value proposition. 

Lizzie Mintus: Can you elaborate? 

Kieran Donovan: So we built the compliance SaaS component, which is what we've been talking about. We then built the parent tooling because parents want to engage with what their kids are doing. And so we've done some really cool stuff there. What we kept getting asked by parents and by kids and by publishers was, either I'm a parent I want to find more stuff in the k-ID ecosystem. I'm a kid and I want to know more of what has this same experience because I love that i'm being led into these games That I previously wasn't this is awesome And then from a publisher perspective, hey, how can I get my title in front of this audience because it's super engaged parents super engaged younger k-IDs or teens. How do I get in front of this audience? 

And so we've announced our discovery portal. And so it shows everything integrated within the k-ID ecosystem. And so you can see all the games and things beyond gaming as well, with some things that are operating in the AI or the content space, but it's all running off exactly the same pipes across the k-ID ecosystem. And so what we want to do is not just provide compliance and make it really easy to open up to the youth audience on the back end, but we want to provide that platform where you're a publisher and you get to be able to find a way to be part of to be in front of that audience and millions of parents out of the gate independent of the actual distribution platform. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. And maybe that's solving a bit of the discoverability challenge, which is one of the biggest challenges in games these days, too.

Kieran Donovan: I think so. I think so. And that's part of what's been motivating it, because we've been really listening to the developers who are integrating k-ID. And people we talk to in the industry and discoverability, user acquisition. And good quality users as well, people who are going to be really engaged and build the community is so important.

And it just so happens, by complete accident, I'm not going to pretend this is by design, that we ended up building the foundations for exactly that, a super engaged, super attentive, sort of very digitally affluent community that was just there. We'd never surfaced it. And now we get to surface it. And so it's an entirely different discovery channel for all game publishers. 

Lizzie Mintus: Cool. I love that. Okay. I would be remiss not to talk about AI on a podcast these days. Can you talk about the impact of AI in children's safety and games? 

Kieran Donovan: Sure. I'm seeing a few different things when it comes to AI in games, especially. Now, everyone's talking about AI as part of game development and agentic frameworks within building out NPCs and continuity in terms of story and plot and things like that. And there's a whole lot of sensitivity around that. If you have younger audiences interacting with any of those technologies, what data is going in, what data is coming out? Do you need to deal with content moderation in ways you hadn't previously dealt with? All of that component is completely nuanced for a youth audience because it's all brand new, in terms of the regulation. So component is very sensitive. 

What I am seeing is a lot of founders building AI for kid type tooling, interfaces, experiences where they're thinking about kids out of the gate. And so we're seeing the development of AI companions in games. And we've already worked with a few that are building things to help younger audiences deal with or manage the community within the particular game or just help them as part of the game as well. We're seeing tooling that enables kids to surface part of their gameplay to parents.

 And so it's being able to take, say for example, an AI summary of the fact that the kid is an amazing member of the community and they're the first to welcome like the new person who's arrived, in the chat room or whatever, to surface that to their mom or dad to say like, see, this is a good place for me to be. And so we're seeing that positive route. Seeing it in terms of content moderation as well and being able to moderate user generated content within gaming platforms. So there's lots of different angles where we're seeing it pop up. 

The most interesting one for me is AI generative games themselves, because what we're seeing in terms of how kids in our research interact with games is very much, which is no surprise to anyone, they love building their own experience. They're less about the more traditional style of gameplay in terms of level based and whatnot. And it's more focused on what they are actually building themselves that they can then share with their friends. And you introduce AI generative gaming to that and the ability to extract things that they've created and share it with their friends. It really does land super well with that younger demographic, certainly based on what we're seeing early on. So I think they're going to be real power users of that next generation of AI AI generative gaming. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, for sure. But it'll definitely pose more challenges, but progress to like you said. 

And then you tease that k-ID is outside of games as well. Can you elaborate on the different areas in which you're serving that are not games? 

Kieran Donovan: Yes. So we are integrated into some social platforms. You can Google around and find those. It's not hard. We are in our first AI products now. serving exactly the same function, but on the AI side and in content as well. And so I think what we're seeing is that lots and lots of developers, publishers, outside of gaming are very interested in engaging with the youth audience. And in order to engage with the audience, you need to build all the pipes that obviously we provide. And so it means that we can support go-to-market for lots more outside of gaming.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, and I would think that gaming would probably be one of the most complex things you could support. So it would be a lot more simple just to support some more basic social platform, right? 

Kieran Donovan: You have hit the nail on the head. Gaming is the hardest by an order of magnitude. The degree of difficulty to integrate into an area of the internet, which is like multi platform, very vocal communities when you're integrating into things, you're dealing with, loot boxes and advertising and you're dealing with content and you're dealing with, you know, parents and all the different components of that. Gaming is far and away the most complex. We found the AI and the content integrations, even the social stuff, so much faster. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. People who work in games sure love it because it's a whole lot harder. 

Can you share a success story, like the most touching, heartwarming success story you've had since you started the company? What's the most meaningful to you? 

Kieran Donovan: Okay, so there's two. One's very personal and one is more in terms of the community. So we receive a lot of customer support type requests or requests just generally. And the most touching was the very, very first time a parent emailed in and said, Hey, can you help me find more of what k-ID is integrated into? And that evolved into what I told you about earlier, but that was a real special moment because it felt like it was resonating. They'd written about how it was a better experience. Their child felt that the age adapted experience that they got was exactly what they were looking for. And so there wasn't this need to go and get mom or dad to unlock tons more. So the parent was almost the digital ambassador of their child to us. So that was really, really personal. That was really touching. 

The second one is that I've got a nine year old and he tried one of our experiences for the first time and it was in VR and there's a new game that hasn't come out yet. And he was trying it and he was sort of playing for probably half an hour And then he took off the headset and he said, Hey dad. So what's the experience if i'm not a kid because it didn't feel like he was missing out on anything. He was still chatting. He was still, you know, everything that was happening. That to me was the biggest compliment because if it genuinely feels like the experience was made for you at your age in where you are, that to me is the marker of success of what we're doing. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's the best. I love that. And you have your own beta tester. Hopefully he thinks you're cool.

Kieran Donovan: Well, it's flipped where he will now send me screenshots where he'll be playing games and he'll like circle things and he'll say like, Oh, like they should have done this. They should have done that because I do get into a pint on our UX. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes sense. Dad, this is broken. My kids are so little, they just say, Dada, fix it. But it's more like my toy broke. 

I have one last question. Before I ask, I want to point people to your website, k-ID.com. The last question, you kind of teased on it, but what is the future for k-ID. What do we have to look forward to from you? We have this discoverability platform outside of games. Anything else to tease us with? 

Kieran Donovan: Yeah, so we want to bridge the digital divide between parents and kids. Up until recently, and now that I'm building these experiences, I didn't know what my nine year old was up to online. I knew sort of fundamentally what he was playing. I didn't know who his friends were that he was playing with. I just didn't have that visibility. And you get the request, Oh, Hey, can you approve this purchase? Can you approve this download? Can you do this? But I don't actually know what's going on. And so to me it's being able to bridge that digital divide and there's a whole cascade of things that are part of that One's discoverability.

One is just building tools that are awesome Because typically parent tooling is such an afterthought for every platform. That is where we started and so everything is user driven, research driven, understanding what parents want, understanding what kids want as players, and building the tooling to just remove as much friction and open as much up as possible. And so I'm really excited about all the tooling we're building there. 

I'm also very, very excited about discoverability. I think no one has really cracked that and that's something we hear a lot from game publishers, is, Hey, I just can't get listed on the front page of this platform, or I'm really struggling. I'm one of like 10,000 in this bucket or whatever it might be. So how can I help? And I think if the reward of doing things right and building for a youth audience is that there's an entirely new channel opened up to engage with not just kids as players, but also their parents, which in my mind is, you know, the player that's just waiting there like that. I want to play these games with my son. And so I can be brought into the experience as a parent and I'm now a player, and I'm part of the game and the experience that's just such a triple win. And so that's where we're focusing a lot of our energy right now. 

Lizzie Mintus: I'm excited for you. We've been talking to Kieran Donovan, the co-founder and CEO at k-ID. Kieran, where can people go to start working with you, or work for you, or learn more about you? 

Kieran Donovan: So if you're a publisher and you'd love to get featured or you'd love to work with us, then k-ID.com is the place to go to. You'll see the link there. If you're a parent and you want to learn more about the games that we're renegading into and be part of this movement and it's, family.k-ID.Com. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. 

Kieran Donovan: Thank you so much.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.