# Ben Drury: Yoto co-founder on audio, imagination, and screen-free design

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582/ben-drury-yoto-co-founder-on-audio-imagination-and-screen-free-design
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582/ben-drury-yoto-co-founder-on-audio-imagination-and-screen-free-design.md
Podcast: [Design Better](https://stenobird.com/podcast/design-better-58582)
Published: 2026-08-13T11:58:00+00:00
Episode link: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ben-drury
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/p.podderapp.com/1794982497/chrt.fm/track/1C4248/prfx.byspotify.com/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/211/traffic.megaphone.fm/MLALE3388090879.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/design-better-58582/episodes/ben-drury-yoto-co-founder-on-audio-imagination-and-screen-free-design
Duration seconds: 3033

## Resource

Like a lot of parents, Eli struggled over the years to get his kids more into reading and away from screens. He wasn’t necessarily on the search for a technological solution, but then an interesting device came our way: the Yoto Player, a screen-free audio player for kids. Eli’s 10-year old son has been loving to read along to the Harry Potter books (and he often finds him after he falls asleep, and the player is still going). Visit our Substack for bonus content and more: https://designbetterpodcast.com/p/ben-drury The story behind Yoto is from a similar moment of parental struggle. About a decade ago, Ben Drury was shopping for a stroller in a London department store and found one with an iPad mount built in. For a newborn. He remembers the reaction being physical — this is just wrong. But if you’re expecting an anti-screen crusade, that’s not quite what happened . The line Ben uses is: we don’t say screens are bad, we say audio is good. Listening is good for creativity and imagination — and there’s research going back to the 1980s to back that up. Ben is the co-founder and CEO of Yoto, makers of a kids’ audio player that works by dropping a physical card into a small speaker. Before Yoto Ben spent about a decade building a B2B digital music platform called 7digital which he took public. What he learned from that experience proved helpful as he and his co-founder started Yoto. Ben and his co-founder became parents at roughly the same time, and wanted a way for their kids to connect with music and books like they did in childhood. So they started hacking on Raspberry Pis with no hardware experience whatsoever. How hard could it be, right? The 3rd Gen Yoto Player Turns out, it’s pretty hard. They took a restrained approach. Yoto is a cube, because it was the simplest s…

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