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Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own. 

It’s essentially an in-home daycare “business in a box”. Customized software saves time for a child care professional spending an average of 56.5 hours per week watching children and reduces churn for WeeCare as they acquire clients for their customers.

“When you look at the history of the internet,” says Jeremy Morris, associate professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, “a lot of the early spaces for communities also became places where people would either trade or barter.”

Millions of families struggle to find high-quality daycare, even though they’re willing to pay high prices: on average, more than $9,500 a year, according to a 2016 report. It’s an opportunity entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have lately picked up on, with the media paying plenty of attention.

But disrupting the daycare system has turned out to be harder than it looked, with several of the startups hitting a basic problem: the platform model that is one of Silicon Valley’s go-to solutions may not work as well in daycare. “This is not your typical tech company where you can kind of fake it and make it,” Selke said. “You’re talking about c... See more