At The First, we speak to hundreds of founders, and the origin stories behind their ventures continue to fascinate us. These narratives reveal the unique blend of frustration, insight, and determination that drives innovation. In this article, three founders share the genesis of their startups— the pain points they encountered firsthand, and the curiosity that led them to develop solutions where others saw only obstacles.

What binds these three stories together is something more profound than industry or business model—it's the shared emotional and intellectual journey that propels true innovation. Kieran, Carla, and Simon each traveled a path marked by three distinct phases: the identification of a genuine problem, the curiosity to explore solutions, and the resilience to persevere through inevitable challenges.

 Protecting Kids Online Without Teaching Them to Lie

Kieran Donovan, co-founder and CEO of k-ID

One of the first things kids today learn when they go online is how to lie," says Kieran Donovan. His voice carries equal parts concern and conviction when he explains how this reality sparked k-ID — a global compliance engine that makes it easy for game developers and parents to ensure the safety and privacy of kids online across more than 200 markets.

The problem crystallized when Kieran observed his five-year-old son navigating the web.

"His first interaction was seeing a pop-up that says, 'I confirm I'm over 13.' He says no and gets denied access to a kid's experience. What happens three seconds later when he goes onto the next app? He says he's over 13."

This simple observation revealed a fundamental flaw in how we protect young people online — a system that inadvertently teaches deception rather than offering age-appropriate experiences.

Before starting k-ID, Kieran was a partner at a law firm working with tech companies on global product launches. He had a front-row seat to the mounting regulatory pressures in the industry. "The headwinds were getting more complex. On one side, there was significant enforcement action —those $100 million fines you read about. On the other, new regulations around content moderation were emerging."

Caught in the middle were millions of young users navigating an internet that either excluded them entirely or forced them to misrepresent their age. Kieran saw that every platform would eventually face this dilemma: build individual compliance solutions, exclude youth audiences completely, or rely on a simple checkbox that everyone knows doesn't work.

"But there's a third option," Kieran says, his eyes lighting up. "Building infrastructure to unlock the problem for everyone who wanted to solve it."

‍The idea became too compelling to ignore, leading Kieran to dedicate his after-hours to the concept for a year before committing full-time.

As both a father and a professional, the problem felt increasingly pressing as he received 10-15 requests a day for approvals in applications which his son was using. “I want my kids to have a really enriching, empowered experience online. But the challenge is that there seems to be this gap from school, a very protected environment, and then the Internet. There’s a middle ground that doesn’t exist.”

Kieran believes the current trajectory will lead to what he calls "the cookie banner of the decade" — an endless loop of tick boxes, consents, and verifications every time a child goes online. "How can that be the solution?"

“Everyone building online worlds will come to the same challenge and build whatever infrastructure is relevant for their platform and ecosystem,” he said. “Multiply that by hundreds of thousands of companies - I’m compelled to solve this.”

Kieran's journey illustrates how personal frustration –watching his own child being taught to lie online – can evolve into a mission with far-reaching implications. In creating k-ID, he isn't just building a compliance tool – he's reimagining how the digital world can properly accommodate its youngest citizen and fundamentally transforming how young people experience digital spaces. By recognizing that the current approach to youth online safety forces inauthentic behavior from day one, he's challenging an assumption the entire industry has operated under for years.

Kieran’s story reminds us that sometimes the most significant innovations come from questioning systems so familiar they've become invisible to most observers. His vision for k-ID is clear: " In five to ten years from now, if we deliver on what we’re promising, that pop-up either won’t appear when kids or teens are interacting with the Internet, or it’s going to be an experience that respects them for who they are.”

Watch Episode 3 of TheFirst Podcast featuring Kieran below:

From Internal Tool to Industry Solution

Carla Penn-Kahn, co-founder of Profit Peak

At the time, Carla was the managing director of Australia’s leading online kitchenware retailer. She found herself in a team meeting, staring at blank faces when she asked for basic profitability data. “How can you not tell me my most profitable product after being advertised? That’s the most basic financial question for a retailer; we should know this in 5 seconds,” she said.

“It became clear to us that we were doing something that other people weren’t thinking of yet, and so we needed to solve it ourselves.”

This information gap coincided with significant shifts in the retail landscape: post-COVID sales slowdowns, increased margin pressures, and evolving customer journeys. "Customers were no longer using one touchpoint to make a purchase," Carla explains. "They were shopping across multiple channels. You could no longer place a random creative on Meta and get a return on your investment."

Rather than accepting these limitations, Carla and her team built an internal solution.

"Profit Peak happened by mistake," she admits with a smile. "We built the software for ourselves."

‍The validation came when she began sharing their approach with other Australian e-commerce leaders. Their response was immediate and enthusiastic: "I would pay for that. When can I get it?"

With retail headwinds intensifying, Carla recognized that the tool they'd created to solve their own problems could become something much bigger. "That's when we said that the best option now is to focus on Profit Peak, not take a break, and not breathe." What began as an internal solution to a frustrating data gap had revealed itself as a market opportunity.

What makes Carla's journey compelling is how she transformed a frustrating data gap into an industry solution. While many businesses might work around their limitations or accept them as inevitable, Carla's refusal to operate in the dark led her team to create something valuable not just for themselves, but for the entire e-commerce ecosystem.

The best founders often don't set out to disrupt an industry—they simply refuse to accept the inefficiencies that others have normalized.

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Watch Episode 3 of TheFirst Podcast featuring Carla below:

Finding Purpose in Brick-and-Mortar's Blind Spots

Simon Molnar, founder of Flagship

Simon Molnar's entrepreneurial journey began with a realization about himself: "There are two types of people — those who suit working in a startup, and those who don't." After fintech giant Afterpay (where he was an early employee) was acquired by Block in 2022, Simon found himself facing a stark choice.

He went from being one of 30 employees to one of 1,000, a position he already struggled with. After the acquisition, Simon realized that he would be one of 13,000.

"No one was going to have the same level of impact they once had, and I wasn't prepared to be a cog in a machine. I needed to see the results of my work."

This self-awareness sent Simon searching for his next challenge. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs and having helped in his parents' jewelry store since childhood, retail was in his blood. His experiences had taken him from traditional retail to Australia's largest online-only jewelry retailer, and then into the data-rich world of fintech at Afterpay.

"I've always wanted to start my own business," Simon explains. Each role he took became an opportunity to acquire different skills — software development, technical operations, data analysis, digital marketing — pieces of a puzzle he was assembling for an eventual entrepreneurial leap.

The missing piece fell into place during a consulting role with a premium fashion brand. After years in e-commerce's data-saturated environment, Simon was struck by a glaring contrast: brick-and-mortar retail's relative blindness. His curiosity kicked in: "I started asking them questions about their physical stores so I could make better decisions from an e-commerce perspective, and they couldn't answer any of my questions.”

His first attempt to bridge the data gap — a hardware solution in the form of a smart coat hanger that transformed into a data collection device — consumed 12 months of work before hitting a dead end. An investor's advice to pivot to software-only became the most significant and challenging pivot of his journey.

Simon found himself at a critical juncture—with seven employees on payroll and mounting pressure to deliver results quickly. The breakthrough came unexpectedly when his product manager showed him a prototype in Figma that enabled visual merchandising without requiring hardware.

"We went from an 'aha' moment all the way through to 'holy shit' and back again. It’s been a pretty wild journey to get from A to B," Simon reflects.

Today, Flagship provides software that helps brands and retailers communicate product placement instructions to stores — replacing PDF documents with an interactive platform that creates heat maps showing revenue generation throughout the store.

Retailers have been facing this problem for the past 50 years, each one creating a process that has worked for them. "I speak to a lot of people, and they say, why hasn't this been done before?" Simon notes. The answer lies in the peculiar blindness that often affects long-standing industries, where problems become so normalized they're no longer seen as problems.

"Looking back, the hardest part of the journey was going from hardware to software," he says. "After getting through it, there's nothing I believe we cannot overcome."

[Stay tuned for our podcast episode with Simon Molnar of Flagship]

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The Real Engine of Innovation

These founder stories illuminate an essential truth about entrepreneurship: the most powerful innovations don't emerge from abstract market analysis or opportunistic trend-chasing. They come from founders who have lived with problems long enough to care deeply about solving them, whose curiosity drives them to explore where others haven't looked, and whose determination carries them through inevitable setbacks and pivots.

As we continue to work with founders across industries at The First, we're consistently reminded that behind every pitch deck and business plan is a human story of frustration transformed into purpose. That's the true engine of innovation: not just identifying gaps in markets, but feeling the pain of those gaps personally, and caring enough to fill them.

These three founders remind us that entrepreneurship, at its core, isn't just about building businesses—it's about making the world work better for everyone.