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How SuperAwesome Built the World’s Biggest Kid Tech Platform with Co-founder Lee Veitch

·43 min·2 clips
Lee says SuperAwesome built its own “kid tech” so no data gets collected when a child sees or clicks an ad.
Lee Veitch starts by thanking the hosts and grounding the conversation in SuperAwesome's mission. He describes the company as the world's biggest kid tech and marketing platform, built over 13 years to help brands, content creators, and other companies reach young audiences without losing sight of safety. Then he gets into the origin story. His background in media and advertising kept running into the same problem: kids were being tracked and retargeted in ways that felt wrong, so the company chose to build its own ad tech from the ground up. That system has a name. SuperAwesome calls it kid tech, and Lee explains the important choice was to stop data collection when an ad is seen or clicked, so that data does not get passed along and turn into a problem later. He makes the risk feel concrete with a plain example. If a child is targeted with the wrong product or followed across sites, that is not just awkward marketing; it is a privacy failure the company tries to stop before it starts. The conversation keeps coming back to that design choice. Lee argues that preventing the data grab at the source is better than trying to clean up the mess afterward, which is why the product was considered unusual at the time. The category has changed. What once looked pioneering is now closer to table stakes, with many companies in the kid space adopting safer practices as they build. That shift matters to Lee personally. He says the moment feels different now that he is a father, because the abstract idea of safer digital experiences for children has become immediate and ordinary at home. The hosts and Lee also talk about the company's broader influence. SuperAwesome uses its brand and reputation to push for better practices at the policy level, and Lee says team members regularly show up in Washington to share their views on what should and should not happen online. The episode also gives room to the long arc of building the business. Lee reflects on the investors who said no early on and on the satisfaction of seeing the market catch up to a model that once looked ahead of its time. The tone stays upbeat, but not glossy. By the end, Lee is revisiting the company's history, the hard decisions behind it, and the way a mission-led product can turn into infrastructure the industry now treats as normal.

As heard by us

A founder story about kid-safe ad tech and the shift from being early and questioned to becoming table stakes.

Lee Veitch's Super Awesome story centers on building kid-safe ad tech and a safer internet for children before the category had much language for it.

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Why you'd press play

Hear how kid-safe ad tech became a category before the rest of the market caught up.

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