Kit Chilvers and Iyrah Williams of Pubity: Five Things I Learned As A Twenty-Something Founder

An Interview With Doug Noll

Doug Noll
Authority Magazine
Published in
9 min readSep 5, 2024

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As a young founder, you need to learn very quickly. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to do something new. It’s exciting but can be scary. But there is nothing like real world knowledge and experience to get you up to speed.

As a part of our series called “My Life as a TwentySomething Founder”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kit Chilvers and Iyrah Williams, the co-founders of Pubity Group. Kit and Iyrah, both 24 years old, have built Pubity to be the largest Gen Z social publisher in the world with more than 130 million followers and a reach of more than 1.6 billion.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! What is your “backstory”?

We grew up together in Worcester, UK, and became friends in school at 11. When we were 14, we started posting to Instagram.

Kit posted on football content and reactive content and Iyrah focused on creating and finding the best memes on the Internet. Eventually, our audience grew so much that it started to attract the attention of brands that wanted to get in front of their fans. These were mainly young people interested in sports, humor and culture. Our growth caught the attention of Ladbible, which wanted to hire us not realizing we were both still in high school. Once we turned 16, we moved to Manchester and worked out an apprenticeship at Ladbible, learning the ins and outs of social media and the importance of brand safety. While there, we helped grow Ladbible’s social media presence from 2 million up to 7.5 million followers in under 18 months.

In 2018, we left Ladbible to focus on growing our own accounts. We realized that fun, positive content was often missing on social media, due to there being a lot of negative press, which would often spark engagement for the wrong reason.

Pubity is today the largest Gen Z social network in the world with more than 130 million followers and a monthly reach of more than 1.6 billion unique people. Pubity Group includes 20 social media pages including Pubity, Memezar, Dadsaysjokes and many other communities focused on wholesome content that is shareable, viral and engaging. We’ve worked with top brands in the US and UK such as Subway, Popeyes, Hinge, CeraVe, Dunkin and many others.

Can you share the funniest or most interesting story that happened to you since you started your company? What lessons or takeaways did you take out of that story?

We’ve been lucky enough to have some amazing stories down the years. It never gets old when a celebrity sends us a DM to tell us how much they like our content and that they are fans of our pages. We’ve heard from The Weeknd, Ryan Reynolds, Gordon Ramsey and many more. It was also an amazing experience getting invited to the White House as part of the White House Social Media Coalition. Pretty cool for a couple of Brits to come to the US and be there the same day that the NHL’s Golden Knights had their own White House visit after winning the Stanley Cup.

On the funny side, since we both got involved with social media very early on when we were still in school, there were many times teachers tried to take our phones away. We were put on report, where we had to hand our phones in at the start of school days so we couldn’t go on them — at those times Kit would get his dad to post while in school, so there was consistent content going out. But other than that, we would have to sneak into the bathroom to use our phones and do our actual work without them seeing. From very early on, we knew that social media could be a big business. We saw making people making money and growing a community on YouTube so we knew that it could be done. We are definitely happy we stuck to it and didn’t let the teachers dissuade us from getting in the way of our dreams.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We’ve been able to find success and grow year after year because we really understand our audience, what they want to see and have been consistent in delivering the type of content and high quality content. In a way, we’ve grown up with our audience. Since we started at just 14, it was natural to be authentic to our audience because we were coming from the same place they were in terms of what they like in sports, culture and humor. But most of all, we wanted to be seen as a positive place to go for all your content, whether it’s the latest animal videos, we have PubityPets, for your daily dose of dad humor we have dad jokes.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

Since we first started what would become Pubity Group when we were both still in school, we did have help and guidance along the way. Most important to our success is Andrew Chilvers, Kit’s father. He’s guided us and steered us in the right direction from day one, believing that Pubity would be a success during the early days. He was there from the start and understood the value in building communities online. Andrew is a journalist himself but started working full time for Pubity in 2020, focusing on publishing and operations and helping to get set up. Today he is focused on the publishing side of Pubity. He is also the inspiration behind our popular page @DadSaysJokes which has more than 8 million followers — and still posts on all the pages every day. He’s still dedicated.

Are you working on any exciting projects now?

Our focus right now is on growing original videos and creating our own shows and series, focused on celebrities and pop culture. We are also looking to expand more into the US. Sixty percent of our audience is from the US so we’d like to be on the ground to work with more US brands and advertisers. On the commercial side, we are working on integrated content campaigns with Popeyes, Meta, Subway, Turkish Airlines and Warner Bros to name a few.

How have you used your success to make a brighter world for many people?

We are really proud of how the Pubity platform has been used for good since we started it. At its core, Pubity is focused on content that is fun, positive and brings a smile to your face. There’s so much negativity on the Internet and social media. We wanted to create and share content that makes you happy when you are scrolling. This has helped develop a tight community of users and fans that want to get involved in causes important to them, feel like their voices are heard and to make the world a better place. All together, we have raised more than $1 million for charitable causes. One of the largest was in support of the Turkey/Syria earthquake efforts which raised $400,000 alone.

Do you have a favorite book that made a deep impact on your life? Can you share a story?

From Iyrah: For fiction, I always loved Life of Pi by Yann Martel. I read it many years ago and recently re-read it. For more of a business read, I recommend Simon Sinek’s Start With Why about finding your purpose and how to inspire.

Kit: One of my favorites is The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene. It’s a fascinating exploration of human behavior, diving into the lives of historical figures to reveal the underlying motivations and psychological principles that drive our actions.

Can you share 5 of the most difficult and most rewarding parts of being a “TwentySomething founder”. Please share an example or story for each.

1 . On the rewarding side, it’s a great feeling to know that you have drive and purpose early on in your life. When most of our friends were heading off to figure out what they wanted to ‘be when they grew up,’ we were well on our way to building a business and learning new things every day.

2 . Being a young company founder also brought a lot of freedom. Definitely financially, but also in terms of how we wanted to work and who we wanted to work with. We had the ability to try new things and meet new people that we probably would not have if we took a different career path.

3 . On the flip side, work/life balance is hard. As a founder, you can never truly switch off work mode and it’s hard to find balance.

4 . It’s very rewarding to be able to build your own team and surround yourself with people you enjoy being with and trust. Which is important because founders don’t have much of a social life, especially in the early days! But being able to work with friends and family makes the days more fun and we are all committed to the same goal.

5 . As a young founder, you need to learn very quickly. Every day brings new challenges and opportunities to do something new. It’s exciting but can be scary. But there is nothing like real world knowledge and experience to get you up to speed.

What are the main takeaways that you would advise a twenty year old who is looking to found a business?

It sounds cliche but find something you enjoy doing or something you are good at and go from there, understanding that you will be working on the project, especially if you start young, for many years. It’s also important to surround yourself with people you can trust and lean on for advice. This doesn’t necessarily need to be people you work with on a daily basis or even at the same company or industry, but it’s helpful to find mentors who have been in similar situations and you can learn from — whether those are real people you know, online or historical.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might see this. :-)

Keeping with the meme theme, I’d have to say Jay Z. But, of course, being able to chat with Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg about their careers and future plans would also be quite interesting, given that we base ourselves on their platforms.

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!

About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and appl

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Authority Magazine
Authority Magazine

Published in Authority Magazine

In-depth Interviews with Authorities in Business, Pop Culture, Wellness, Social Impact, and Tech. We use interviews to draw out stories that are both empowering and actionable.

Doug Noll
Doug Noll

Written by Doug Noll

Award-winning author, teacher, trainer, and now podcaster.

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