Friday, March 13, 2020. I remember that day and the one after it more clearly than almost any other in my life.
For about forty-eight hours, parents thought their kids were coming home for a slightly long spring break and then heading right back to school. By March 14, the whole world was looking for something, anything, to keep children connected to the people they loved and could no longer see. We had built exactly that. On March 14, 2020, Caribu grew tenfold overnight. Every metric, ten times bigger than it had been the day before.
People looked at that and said, "Wow, you got so lucky." I understand why. But I want to push back on the word "lucky" because it does real damage to founders who hear it.
Luck is preparation meeting opportunity.
We did not cause the pandemic, obviously. What we controlled was being ready when it arrived. We were the low-latency platform that did not fall over under ten times the load, which, if you have ever scaled anything overnight, you know is not a given. We already had a huge library of well-known books. We were already global, already had books in multiple languages, already had built marketing ready to ramp up. The opportunity was not ours to choose. The preparation was entirely ours. If we had been sloppy, the wave would have washed right over us, and we would have nothing to show for it but a crash report.
So when something looks like a lucky break, look closer. Underneath it is almost always years of unglamorous readiness that nobody clapped for at the time.
But the thing I am proudest of is not the growth. It is what we refused to do to get it.
Around 2022, Facebook decided to launch a competitor to us. They made two mistakes. They launched hardware, which is expensive and slow. And they forgot they were Facebook. Nobody wanted another Facebook device sitting in their kid's room, listening to them. The one thing they could not buy or copy was trust, and in children's technology, trust is the entire game.
We had built that trust by making decisions that genuinely cost us. We were COPPA compliant to the letter, always. And there was a moment that still defines it for me. Around that time, a lot of apps were doing the thing where you'd sign up, and they'd immediately ask for your whole address book so they could add everyone you know, under the guise of making your experience better. That is a growth rocket. It is also terrifying when your users are children, because you have no idea who is in that address book. Exes, estranged relatives, people who should be nowhere near a kid. We could have added enormous numbers of users overnight by turning that on. We refused, every single time.
That refusal showed up on no growth chart anywhere. It is also exactly why Mattel could trust what they were buying, and exactly why our community trusted us in a category where one breach ends you.
So here is what I will leave you with, after all of it. Prepare relentlessly for the opportunity you cannot predict, because preparation is the only part you actually control. And protect the trust of the people you serve like it is the asset it really is, even when it costs you something on the way up. Especially then.
That is the whole job, honestly. Be ready, and be worth trusting.
If any of this hit a nerve, that is usually the sign there is real work to do. The kind of thing I dig into with leaders one-on-one at Dark Horse Ops. If you want to talk it through, my door is open.
A note on how this got written: I used AI to help me write this. The stories, the opinions, and the scars are all mine. I just have a very good robot assistant who helps me get them out of my head and onto the page. Which is more or less the whole point of what I do now.