unGlue

Post-pitch story

Alon Shwartz pitched unGlue as a smarter way for parents to manage kids' screen time — not just blocking devices, but teaching kids to budget their own time. Parents loved it. The problem was one no startup can outmuscle: in 2018, Apple launched Screen Time, building parental controls directly into the iPhone. Overnight, unGlue's core product became a free feature of the operating system it ran on. The show documented the fight in a follow-up episode aptly titled "David vs. Godzilla" — and Godzilla won. Third-party parental control apps were squeezed by Apple's restrictions as much as by its features, and after raising about $1.5 million in total, unGlue officially ceased operations in July 2021. It's one of the cleanest examples in the show's history of platform risk: build on someone else's platform, and they can absorb you with a software update. Shwartz, for his part, moved on to a very different arena — he's now co-founder and COO of Trellis Law, an AI-powered legal research platform. unGlue lost to Apple, but its founder's next act suggests you should never bet against the person who saw the problem first.