Ben Drury is CEO and Co-founder of Yoto, a screen-free audio platform for children. He founded the business in 2015 with friend and fellow parent Filip Denker, driven by a shared concern about children’s screen time. Using physical audio cards, Yoto puts children in control of their listening in a safe, ad-free environment. Named one of TIME Magazine’s best inventions of 2020, Yoto now reaches over a million families across the UK, France, North America and Australia.
Before founding Yoto, Ben established music website dotmusic.com, which he later sold to Yahoo!, and co-founded media marketplace 7digital in 2004. He led 7digital until it went public in 2014, building experience across digital music, technology and entrepreneurship. Alongside his role at Yoto, he is a non-executive director at Pimoroni and an angel investor in businesses including Permutive and Causaly.
A father of two, Ben is passionate about encouraging children’s independence and draws inspiration from Montessori principles of child development. He leads Yoto’s growth with the ambition of bringing screen-free learning and play to more children around the world. He enjoys creating stories with his family using Yoto’s Make Your Own cards and hearing how its products support children’s confidence, imagination and learning.
Highlights
I think I'm a good problem solver, and if I don't have problems to solve, I'm bored you know, I'm always looking for problems to solve.
There's always something going on, but that's part of the fun and I'm a really strong believer in resilience.
Share the problem, get everyone involved, get your investors involved, get your board involved, get your team involved.
And we also now have a developer programme, so people are writing code and I think this is always my dream, to have this kind of open platform approach.
Every single day we get someone write in to say how Yoto has transformed their sleep routine, or it's really helped their kid who's a reluctant reader getting into books.