A family business.
In that order.
Hi, we’re Tom & Stevie, co-brothers and co-founders. 👋 For us, family comes first. This is the 3rd business we’re building together. 🙏 This time, we’re doing it for families everywhere. 💪
Our story
We’re the Clifton brothers, Tom and Stevie.
We come from a big family of 6 kids. As we are the tech-savvy of the bunch, our siblings have come to us for years with questions about how to protect their kids from the negative impacts of smart devices.
But apart from limiting screen time, we didn’t have any good answers for them.
Then when we had our own kids, we found ourselves confronting the same question: how do we raise tech-healthy kids in an era of addictive apps and devices?
We’ve been technologists and entrepreneurs our whole lives. The last company we founded together was a way for families to share their lives through video. It did pretty well, with about $30 million in funding and 100 employees.
Through that process, not only did we become deeply aware of how tech companies work, we became opinionated about the role we wanted tech to play in our kids’ lives.
So we decided to build it – for our 6 kids, for our 16 nieces and nephews, and for all of your kids as well. Thanks for being part of this journey with us.
About the founders
Tom Clifton
Tom is an ex-Googler and four-time startup founder. Over three decades he has worked to build humane, human-centered tech, most recently at Google Nest where he wrestled with the complex tech-human relationships in the home. He holds a masters in music history and is an avid reader on parenting and spirituality (some favorite books are listed below). Tom lives in Seattle with his wife Scarlet and their three young kids.
From Tom 👋: I love knowing what people read, so here are some of mine! God Human Animal Machine by Meghan O’Gieblyn, Good Inside by Dr Becky Kennedy, Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, Endurance by Alfred Lansing, Falling Upward by Richard Rohr, Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer, The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck. Send more my way :)
Stevie Clifton
Stevie is a three-time startup founder, starting all the way back when he was 16 in the early days of the ‘Net. :) Most recently he was Chief Technology and Product Officers at the ~100-person startup he founded in Manhattan. Before that, Stevie worked in documentary filmmaking, and he has long been involved in local charities and social justice work. He lives in Leavenworth, WA, with his wife Hannah and their three boys.
From Stevie 👋: I'll keep this brief, partly because I'm a man of few words, but also because I'm constantly behind on feature requests from Tom! Keeping with the theme, here are some book favs: Seveneves by Neal Stephenson, The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, any of the Cadfael Chronicles by Edith Pargeter, and Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene.
Our contributors
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Hannah Kwon, Ph.D., M.L.I.S
Hannah leads the research team at Screenable. As a former SAHM with a Ph.D. in Library and Information Sciences, she has a keen sense for interpreting the research from both the parenting and digital literacy perspectives. She is locally famous for running a book club for a lovable bunch of rowdy fifth graders. Hannah lives in Leavenworth, WA, with her husband Stevie and their three boys.
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Jennifer Miller, M.Ed., Founder
Jennifer shapes Screenable’s conversation guides for kids. For nearly thirty years, she has worked with educators and families to help them become more effective with children through social and emotional learning (SEL). She is an author and blogger, and has served as a regular expert contributor to NBC’s TODAY Parenting, PBS WNET and Parent Magazine. Jennifer lives with her husband and teenage son in Columbus, Ohio.
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Know someone? You?
We are looking for great folks to help us get Screenable off the ground. If you know anyone (or yourself!) who might be able to help, we’d love it if you’d introduce us. We’re especially interested in authors, bloggers, educators, child developmental psychologists, and others who specialize in technology and children. Thank you in advance.