This Serial Entrepreneur Had His Identity Stolen. It Led Him to Build a $1.5 Billion Company That Keeps Families Safe Online. Hari Ravichandran's Aura helps its customers avoid situations like the one he found himself in 10 years ago.

As the father of four Gen Z and Gen Alpha kids, Hari Ravichandran knows firsthand how important it is to protect young people against how addictive and manipulative the Internet can be. "They're all growing up with devices," Ravichandran shares. "My oldest, who's 15, the first time she crawled, she crawled to an iPad. "So that's just all they've known their whole lives."

Ravichandran's very first startup, a web-hosting provider founded in 1997 called Endurance International, grew into a publicly traded company worth $3.5 billion. With his latest company Aura, which was launched in 2017, Ravichandran is attempting to address the wide world of online safety all in one place. While many other offerings tackle just one specific element, customers can handle identity theft and financial fraud protection, parental controls, and access a VPN all from the Aura app.

Though he first had the idea for Aura following his own experience with identity theft, Ravichandran's sensitivity to the needs of the youngest generation and their parents as they navigate digital life has helped the company grow. His understanding of the nuances of digital life as a teenager today, through his own children, has helped him develop a nimble suite of tools that approximately 40% of Aura customers now use to monitor and reward their brood's online behavior. In the past year, Aura has expanded the app's parental controls, held their first Digital Parenthood summit, and they're on track for over 40% growth. Proving the need for what Ravichandran has built, the company is now valued at $1.5 billion. All of this made Ravichandran a finalist on our Entrepreneur of 2024 list of 20 innovative leaders.

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In the past year, Aura has launched a number of additional parental control features. Were you aware from the beginning of the company that family controls would be such an important element?

It's really interesting. We were always thinking about this intersection between security, family and safety: How do they all intertwine together? The parental controls part felt very important, but it was very much around content moderation on kids' devices, setting time limits, helping them actually be really good digital consumers, basically. Like anything else in excess, [the Internet] could end up becoming fairly detrimental for kids, and thinking about that part of the equation has been the embellishment over the last year-plus.

You've been investing in AI and deep learning for the past couple of years. How has that helped you grow the features you're able to offer?

I'll give you a simple example. With my kid, we set up time limits on her device. She texts and says, "Hey, Dad, I need more time." I say, "Well, why? You've been on your phone for, like, four hours. What's going on?" She says, "I've been on Apple Music the whole time while doing my homework, and that shouldn't count against me." So if I took that use case and built the code behind it, that's a whole cycle of stuff. There's going to be hundreds of cases like that where you have to determine and identify [the problem]. But if you have a model doing that, you would train the model and tell it, "Here's the kind of apps that are okay. Here's the kind of apps that are not. Make the assessment when you see the app." That's a one-time setup, and we don't need to keep updating it because the models just get smarter as they get fed more and more information. So in that aspect, a lot of these different avenues that would have taken a lot of heavy lift for us, the AIs made it much more accessible.

In the past year Aura has been listed on Forbes's best startup employers list and Glassdoor's top 50 best places to work. Could you tell me a bit about your approach to keeping employees engaged?

That's one of the benefits of being an older entrepreneur. I started my first company at 20, and you learn a lot of lessons along the way. One of the big things that I've learned is that it really is a handshake between myself and the team. You're expecting really smart, talented people to deliver on certain things, but that comes with accountability for the CEO as well. It's like, "Hey, you do these things, and here's the things that I think I can deliver for you so that you can get more runway." Both sides have to work in the equation. If you end up with it being one-sided, where the team keeps on delivering, but the CEO isn't, or the opposite, it ends up really creating a lot less balance. Taking that accountability very seriously has been very helpful.

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What have your biggest challenges at Aura been?

We started with doing a few acquisitions before we launched because we didn't want to go build everything from the get-go. When I was 20, time was much more available. But when you're starting something later, you're very mindful of time because no matter who you are, it just takes time to build something meaningful. So to shorten that time window, we did some acquisitions, and integrating them was a lot of work. It probably took us a year and a half, two years, to get a lot of these different pieces integrated and structured the right way.

The company is currently pacing at over 40% year-over-year growth. What do you think has been particularly important in pushing the growth of the company this year?

We tried probably three or four go-to-market channels, and then consolidated down to just two, and we said, "Hey, these are the ones we're going to focus on." That took a bunch of trial and error. We have this great product, we have this great team of people, we've just got to connect it in the most efficient way to the end consumer. Once we had the channels figured out, then there's a lot of iterative testing that we had to keep doing. So you keep getting little 1% gains. At some point it compounds enough where you're like, "Wow, that's a lot. Now it's growing really fast."