The people
What they build
Open roles via the TechTO Job Board
Working at Kids Wireless
Browse open roles across the community on the TechTO Job Board — Canada’s most connected tech network. Kids Wireless’s roles show up here whenever they post.
Open roles on the TechTO Job Board ↗Or their own careers page: kidswifi.com/careers ↗Jobs live on jobs.techto.org — the only structured source. We link to it rather than scraping career sites, so the board is always the source of truth.
On the TechWaterloo stage
Every talk is searchable — ask the archive about Kids Wireless ↗
About
Kris Braun's idea was an appliance: a Nest-like device parents plug in that just works, giving kids a separate Wi-Fi network with content filtering on it. His account of building it, given on the TechWaterloo stage in March 2017, is a case study in refusing to build. Rather than construct the filtering infrastructure he had planned from his background in computer security research, he bought range extenders, configured them to create a second network with the DNS locked to a filtered service, and shipped that.
The feedback changed the product. What mattered most to parents turned out to be none of the things he expected: reliability came first, because a child's internet going down makes the whole household cranky. The team then bought 5,000 units of an existing device, flashed their own software onto it and put their sticker over the manufacturer's logo — which, Braun said from the stage, shaved months off getting to market and produced not one customer complaint. The one thing they did over-engineer was setup: hundreds of revisions so that a parent felt their kids were protected two minutes out of the box.
By the time of that talk the product was in two markets, selling in retail and expanding internationally, at $129 in Canada. The company's own site now carries a closure notice: "Kids Wireless Inc. (aka KidsWifi) will no longer be able to sustain operations as of December 1, 2020", explaining that the shareholders had made the decision to wind the company down.
Backers
No investors, rounds or amounts are stated on the company's own site, and none were named from the stage. Its closure notice refers to shareholders making the wind-down decision, so it had outside shareholders of some kind, but who they were is not sourced here.
Quick answers
What was KidsWifi?
A plug-in appliance from Kids Wireless Inc. that created a second, content-filtered Wi-Fi network at home for children. Parents set it up in about two minutes; it sold for $129 in Canada.
Is Kids Wireless still operating?
No. Its own site carries a notice that Kids Wireless Inc. could no longer sustain operations as of 1 December 2020, and that the shareholders decided to wind the company down.
Who founded Kids Wireless?
Kris Braun, the Waterloo founder who now runs Plot. He described building it on the TechWaterloo stage in March 2017, in a talk about shipping before you are ready.