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

Most of us encounter steep learning curves as well as wobbly balancing acts as parents, but in recent decades, parents have been left to face those challenges with heavier career responsibilities and fewer support systems. Families with dual incomes and single-working parents are on the rise, mothers are the fastest growing segment of the workforce... 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.

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

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