Funding What Matters: Ethical Tech and Youth Well-Being
Juliette Blake, Founder & CEO, Moxies
On this episode of Ethical Exits, Hannah sits down with Juliette Blake, Founder and CEO of Moxies, a next-generation platform designed to give Gen Alpha girls a safe, creative space for self-expression and community.
Juliette has spent more than 20 years building youth-focused digital media. She started her first company, Miss O and Friends, in high school after seeing the pressures her younger sister and her friends were already facing around body image, belonging, and growing up too fast. Today, as a mother of three Gen Alpha children, she is building Moxies around a different set of incentives: safety, creativity, confidence, digital literacy, and well-being.
This conversation begins with youth technology, but it quickly becomes a much bigger conversation about capital, growth, ownership, and stewardship.
Most social platforms are designed around attention: more time spent, more clicks, more notifications, more return visits. Moxies is built around a different premise. If kids are spending endless hours on the platform, something may be wrong.
So what happens when a company’s purpose does not fit neatly into the metrics investors are used to measuring?
Hannah and Juliette talk about the true cost of “free” platforms, why parent trust is central to Moxies’ business model, how Juliette thinks about raising aligned capital, and what founders should consider when thinking about future buyers long before they are ready to sell.
Juliette also shares a powerful story from her first company, when what looked like a dream acquisition fell through and later turned out to be the outcome that may have saved the company from disappearing inside a larger corporate reorganization.
Because in M&A, the question is never only, “Can someone buy this?”
The better question is, “What happens to the company, the people, and the purpose after they do?”
About Juliette Blake
Juliette Blake is the Founder and CEO of Moxies, a platform designed to give Gen Alpha girls a safe, creative space for self-expression and community.
She previously founded Miss O and Friends, which she started in high school and grew into a leading digital destination for tween girls. Her work has been featured in Business Insider, Inc., Shape, and Self-Made Magazine, and she has been recognized as one of Inc.’s Coolest College Startups, named to Self-Made Magazine’s Top 50 Women Who Inspire Us, and selected as a TEDx Bay Area speaker.
At Moxies, Juliette brings together research-driven insight, creative vision, lived experience as a mother of three Gen Alpha children, and a deep commitment to helping girls safely express themselves online. What motivates her most is hearing from girls about how Moxies makes them feel confident, supported, empowered, and seen.
👉 To learn more about Juliette’s work, connect with her on LinkedIn or visit Moxies.
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At Ethical Exits, we champion profit-for-purpose capitalism, leveraging business as a force for scaling philanthropy and meaningful change.
In each episode, we ask guests to highlight a cause close to their heart. Juliette highlights Groove With Me, a nonprofit in East Harlem that provides girls with safe physical spaces for dance, creative self-expression, movement, summer programming, and community.
Groove With Me’s work mirrors many of the themes in this episode: giving girls places to feel safe, creative, confident, supported, and fully themselves.
🔗 Learn more or support their work:
https://www.groovewithme.org/
