WeeCare, Carebnb’s, and the US Child Care Epidemic

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.

For me, at least in this space, even from the beginning, I knew that parts of it were against the odds, and so, what I mean by that, is if you know the category that I’m working within is childcare, it’s already an inherently margin challenged kind of category. What I mean by that, what parents are willing and able to pay for this kind of work, and... See more

Welcome to the $648 billion care economy—the money we spend to care for our loved ones, from their first breath to their last. There are four dynamic areas of growth in the sector: (1) Child care. It’s a $136 billion market that’s desperate for supply and ripe for disruption and innovation. (2) Workplace. Forty-two percent of employers plan to add ... See more

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

“Child care is a textbook example of a broken market,” said Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, a mother herself. She pointed out that families spend, on average, 13 percent of their income on child care for young kids, yet day-care workers earn so little they rank in the bottom 2 percent of all professions.

The sector of the American economy devoted to care—of children and the elderly and people with disabilities—is valued at $648 billion. That’s larger than the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. And yet most individual caregivers are criminally underpaid. That’s because caregiving is viewed either as a “labor of love,” in which case it can never be priced... See more