It was on a flight to Cleveland from San Francisco a couple of years back that I had the idea for my startup.
My two-year-old daughter was running up and down the aisle — raising hell as kids often do — and my wife and I looked at each other and knew: it was iPad time.
Flicking through the various options on Netflix, I stopped on a popular kids cartoon that you’ve heard of but that I’m not going to throw shade at here.
As I watched my daughter watching these characters bounce around the screen, it was the pace that bothered me: fast cuts, constant scene changes, another burst of action before the last one had settled. I wanted her to have room to wonder what might happen next, and a chance to decide.
I’m in my 40s, so I grew up in a world of Sesame Street, Mister Rogers, Bob Ross reruns — and when we weren’t glued to these shows we were reading Choose Your Own Adventure books like Journey Under the Sea. The ’80s weren’t perfect, but it was a golden age for kids’ TV.
But this?
What bothers me about YouTube Shorts is the habit it encourages: the moment something loses your attention, swipe to something else. We worry about our children’s ability to concentrate, then give them feeds that offer an escape from every moment of boredom. My own doomscrolling is on me. Choosing that experience for my daughters is on me, too. I want their screen time to give them reasons to stay with an idea, ask another question and see what they can make of it.
A 2025 Common Sense Media report found that 58% of American 4-year-olds have their own tablet, rising to 68% of 8-year-olds. Children ages 5 to 8 average nearly three and a half hours of screen time a day. What happens during those hours deserves as much scrutiny as how many hours we allow.
Before Giant, I founded Apartment List, which now accounts for 3% of U.S. rental moves. Becoming a father gave me a different problem to work on. My co-founder, David Silverman, and I started Giant to let children create characters, explore ideas and shape stories as they unfold.
We hike around the Bay Area, ride bikes and scooters, play sports, go to ballet and hip-hop classes, and sing and dance in the living room. We’ve been camping a dozen times. I’m an Eagle Scout, so yes, I’m the dad who considers sleeping on the ground a vacation. After all that, I’m perfectly happy letting my daughters spend some time on an iPad. I’d just rather they bring their own ideas to life than passively watch someone else’s.
I loved Choose Your Own Adventure books because my decisions changed the story. Generative AI can take that further: children can invent a character, introduce an idea or take the adventure somewhere its creators never anticipated. It doesn’t have to be an algorithm that decides what you watch next. Children shouldn’t have to be passive consumers of content, they should be active creators of it.
Rejecting AI in entertainment hands another advantage to the giants that can already afford to make it. For a startup, AI makes it possible to compete. For the audience, it makes something entirely new possible: a show or movie that unfolds in real time, driven by your imagination. You create the characters, shape the world and decide what happens next. That’s worth the price of admission.
I approach this as a father first. Giant is COPPA certified, but privacy is only part of keeping children safe. We’ve built systems that flag unsuitable content and give parents visibility into everything their children create. We also think carefully about what our characters say, what they generate and how they respond to a child. And we have no ads. Parents deserve that visibility without an advertiser competing for their child’s attention.
On that flight to Cleveland, I wanted something better to put in front of my daughter. Today, I can see what that could look like: a dragon from her sketchbook, a journey to the moon, a story that changes because she has an idea. We still set limits on screen time. Within those limits, I want her imagination and curiosity to have somewhere to go.
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