Yondr’s CEO, who makes cellphone pouches for schools and concerts, uses only a flip phone — and stays off social media

Graham Dugoni founded Yondr in 2014 with the idea of making phone-free experiences for concerts and comedy shows.

While the entertainment side of the business is buzzing, Yondr has become best known for its use in schools, where the magnetic pouches lock up students’ phones for the day.

Yondr has scored big deals with school districts (the pouches reportedly cost around $30 per student). Dugoni says the company, which is based in Los Angeles and has around 150 full time employees, is profitable.

As more schools implement bell-to-bell phone bans, Yondr pouches are becoming an ubiquitous part of American teen life. (You can browse TikTok to see plenty of tutorials on how to bust them open.)

New York City’s school district, the largest in the country, welcomed students this week with a full phone ban for the first tier. (It’s up to each school to determine how to implement the ban; some, but not all, opted for Yondr pouches.)

I caught up with Dugoni to ask about the state of the phone-free schools movement, his company’s role in it, and how he sees this changing the lives of young people. Our talk has been edited for length and clarity.

Business Insider: You use a flip phone? Tell me about that.

Graham: I had [a smartphone] briefly after college, and then when I started the business, I went to a flip phone. I’ve never really had social media. For me, it was just so simple. I’ve got a lot of views on technology, obviously, and it’s all bound up in the business and creating boundaries and how I think about it.

When I started Yondr, my hypothesis was that to be a person in the world walking around with a computer in your pocket was going to be a radically different human experience in a lot of ways, especially for the younger generation.

So, for me, as a person, I just prefer to have fewer inputs. It’s that simple. It just simplifies my life. Everything I do is long-form conversation, and that works better.

I’d imagine a CEO would need constant access to email or DocuSign or whatnot. But you really walk the walk, huh?

A funny thing about technology is that the work expands to fill the time allotted. The modern work style — everything being connected everywhere all the time — makes certain things more efficient, but it tends to just bleed out decisions into infinite space.

If you create structure around things, it forces you to make decisions in certain time frames. Once you leave the office, you can’t sign documents.

Technology doesn’t really knock at the door and ask permission to enter. Once you open up the phone or you enter into a medium, you’re playing by the rules of the game that are pre-configured.

Most people seem to think it’s common sense to ban phones, but then I also heard from a mom who said her teen just started school with a phone ban, and there’s been all these problems — there’s so much that’s baked into the school that assumes kids have phones. For example, the theatre club signup requires scanning a QR code. Is Yondr going to be changing how schools are run?

If you go back to 2014, when our team was out knocking on doors and talking about a phone-free school, remember the idea didn’t exist — it was something we had invented.

And at that time, the answer I got from most people was “We’re trying to get more tech into the classroom, not less.” The zeitgeist has changed significantly.

But to your question about the infrastructure and what a school ecosystem looks like, that’s probably the biggest part of what we do as a company. When people think of Yondr, they’ll think of just the pouch. What they don’t always realize is that a big part of what we do is go in, we’re helping get the parents on board with the idea that includes how they interact with their school and communicate throughout the day. We’re actually helping the teachers and unwinding some of those learned behaviors that have kind of built up around that infrastructure.

And then there’s the ongoing support because it’s a cultural and an etiquette change inside of a school. Just introducing a tool is not enough. You have to start to unwind some of the things that are prohibiting schools from being able to create a phone-free environment.

But some of that, the other things you talked about, sign-ins and some of the more tech solutions to things.

They become just so much more complicated and time-consuming than just writing your name on a clipboard. It’s funny to look at those things and go: Are those tools actually that helpful?

How do you protect your business from another company coming along and making pouches that are just 20% cheaper?

We don’t just ship pouches to a school. We have a whole arm of the company that’s all former educators. It helps with the implementation, the rollout, the policy creation, and the planning. So there’s the pre-launch board, the logistics, and the policy. There’s the actual implementation, which we help with on the ground, and then the ongoing support in the evaluation services.

Do you ever run into teenagers who are like, You’re ruining my life. I hate your stupid pouches.

Oh, definitely. I get all sorts of interesting messages.

Are there ever positive ones?

A hundred percent. We sometimes get whole essay-length messages from students saying what the effect of a phone-free school has had on them.

A lot of young people know that they don’t want to be on their phone as much, or have a feeling that maybe being online all the time is not helpful. So our goal is just to be like, Hey, that’s great. Maybe a phone-free space is helpful to you. And as you get older, you can decide what to do with that information.

Do you have any digital indulgences? Like, you’re completely addicted to Strava, or can’t stop watching TikToks about fishing?

I like to watch tennis highlights on YouTube. I’m a big tennis fan, so that’s my thing.

That’s pretty tame. It’s like saying, “My diet weakness is carrot sticks.”

Look, I find social media so fundamentally lame, I just can’t describe it to you. It doesn’t seem like any fun to me, and it doesn’t really tell you much about how people are or what’s really going on.

That’s what I love about a phone-free concert or show when we do them. All these people spend all the time online developing preconceptions and associations with things at this highly amalgamated, weird level. Then, they go to a concert and it’s phone-free and people are bumping into each other and talking at the concession stands, and they’re in the presence of a great artist.

It’s a very humanizing effect on people, and it’s very healthy for civil society. That’s why we do it.

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