How Wonderschool is Transforming Childcare by Building a Company as Diverse as their Customers
Our interview with CEO Chris Bennet and VP of Eng Javier Lopez, discussing how Wonderschool supports a diverse network of employees, educators, and families
“I’ve always wanted to create an environment where someone from any gender, any race, even any political views feels like they can be themselves at Wonderschool for the betterment of their careers and the betterment of the company.”
In honor of Hispanic Heritage month, new Growth by Design team member Linda Ruiz David, founder and leader of Pinterest’s Latinx community, sat down with Chris Bennett, Wonderschool’s Co-founder and CEO, and Javier Lopez, Wonderschool’s VP of Engineering, to talk with them about the company’s culture, mission, and how their life experiences have shaped Wonderschool and the ways they approach their respective roles.
Wonderschool helps parents find in-home child care programs near them that fit the needs of their lifestyle and child’s development — a much-needed platform as more and more parents are grappling with the realities of the pandemic, childcare, and working from home. Wonderschool also helps individuals start and operate their programs.
Chris hails from an entrepreneurial family, the child of Honduran immigrants who had moved to the US in search of better opportunities. He was the first in his family to graduate from college, from University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and is one of the few Afro-Latino Founders in Silicon Valley. Javier grew up in Mexico, where close ties to his nuclear family have influenced him as a leader and a people manager. He has managed engineering teams for Patreon and GuideSpark and now leads all of engineering for Wonderschool.
Wonderschool is our ideal client — mission driven, with a product that has a positive impact on the world and a deep commitment to creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace. We’ve heard repeatedly from Wonderschool employees how great the leadership team is to work with, and we’re excited to share more of their stories and perspectives here.
Linda: Hispanic Heritage Month is supposedly one month — September 15th to October 15th — but I like to think of it as a year-round commitment and celebration. So I’m really excited to chat with both of you. Can you share a bit about your personal backgrounds and what drew you to Wonderschool?
Chris: My parents are immigrants from Honduras and I grew up in Miami. I’m one of 31 first cousins, and I spent a lot of summers with my family in Honduras. Be it on farms or in the city, I got exposed to these different ways of life and exposed to my family and the depth of my culture. It was really important. My parents came to the US because they wanted to make sure that I got access to the right education. They put me in this awesome childcare program that a lot of my cousins didn’t have access to. In middle school and high school, I was always a good student. I give a lot of credit for this to my parents of course, but I also credit my early childhood education experience. Years later, I was hearing from all my friends that they were having a hard time finding childcare and I was able to connect the dots. Childcare is so important. And if my friends were having a hard time finding childcare, then I realized that could be a big problem for a lot of people.
Javier: I’m from Mexico. I was born in a city called Morelia Michoacán, but I never actually lived there. My family moved around, so I lived most of the time in both Mexico City and a city called Orizaba in the state of Veracruz. I’ve always been attracted to the risk of startups. Back when I was working for these big companies in Mexico, people used to tell me, you’re going to make a career there, you are going to be in that company for the rest of your life. That was something that wasn’t attractive to me. I was looking for new challenges, different ways to do things, and to learn more.
Chris: In my neighborhood in Miami, both my sister and I went to in-home childcare programs. So, I started asking folks, “Why don’t your children just go to in-home programs?” Parents kept saying that a lot of the programs aren’t great. There are a lot of downsides to them. I realized, “Hey, what if we can help people start high-quality childcare programs, like the programs that I experienced as a kid?” That sort of was the genesis of this idea. High quality programs are ones with a great environment for early childhood development and a strong early childhood educator.
Javier: When I came to the US with my family, my son was two and a half years old. So we were looking for childcare for him. I didn’t realize that there wasn’t such a thing as a public childcare options for kids in the United States, and we went through a lot of time without finding any childcare for my son, and I became very familiar with this problem. After a former colleague told me about a company — Wonderschool — that’s working on this problem, he recommended I talk with the CEO and see if I can help. This was when they were just starting to get the engineering team running, and after a series of conversations, I joined Wonderschool.
Linda: I love the mission of Wonderschool — can you share that in your own words?
Javier: Our mission is basically to provide as much access as possible to childcare for children in America so they can realize their potential. We fundamentally believe that the more access you give children to education in early stages of their life, they can develop their potential better. So we’re providing as much access as we can to childcare.
Linda: I’m curious about how you think about the Latino roots of Wonderschool, as well as the strong Latinx employee base. How does this translate into the work that Wonderschool does?
Chris: Because of my upbringing, I really understand our customers. So many of our early education program directors are from Latin America, and often just moved here. They’re from Honduras, El Salvador — I’m meeting women, frankly, who could be my aunts. I’m in their houses, and I’m like, “This feels like I’m in my family’s home.”
Javier: The majority of our customer base is from a very diverse background. That includes a lot of Latin families and a lot of Latinx directors that are running these programs. We have several members of the team who speak Spanish, so we are regularly talking with the directors in Spanish. They can pick up the phone and the person at Wonderschool can understand what they are trying to say and the problems they have. It’s very important to us to be close to those communities and who better to do that than somebody — like our CEO, myself, and other team members — whose families have those roots?
Chris: We have engineers in Colombia and Mexico, and a leadership team that’s pretty diverse. We all sort of have a chip on our shoulder — we want to prove that we can build something big and valuable. And I feel that approach aligns with a lot of what we see with our directors as well, who are very diverse and whose lives we are impacting. Personally, I’ve always assumed I would be an entrepreneur — my parents both started their own businesses. A lot of people in my family — especially because they’re black and because they’ve experienced structural and systemic racism within the workplace — taught me early on that for people like us to realize our full potential, we likely need to start our own things.
Linda: Tell us about how you’ve approached building out Wonderschool’s culture and the founding team. It’s a great, diverse group of folks — is there anything that you knew early on that you wanted to do differently as a founder?
Chris: Javier knows this so well — hiring diverse talent isn’t enough. It’s making sure that your team feels safe at work and supporting your talent when they get into the company. In my first job, I worked at a company that was 0.5% black. I needed mentorship, and someone to talk to me about race and how it shows up in the workplace in an unconscious manner. I wanted to make sure everyone felt psychologically safe at work. I’ve always wanted to create an environment where someone from any gender, any race, even any political views feels like they can be themselves at Wonderschool for the betterment of their careers and the betterment of the company.
There are a lot of ways we reinforce that, including giving credit where credit’s due, giving feedback to folks whenever it seems like something is socially off and could influence someone feeling safe at work, and then hiring a diverse team. So folks see people like themselves when they are applying and when they join Wonderschool. We still have work to do, but it’s something that I think about a lot.
Another big part of our culture is having a growth mindset. That’s one of our values, because I want to help people become who they want to become. One of the things we ask candidates in interviews is, “What’s your motivation? Where do you want to end up?” There are people who joined Wonderschool — both employees and our directors — in completely different functions and have taken on other functions when the opportunities have presented themselves, based on their career aspirations.
Linda: Tell us more about the company culture at Wonderschool.
Javier: We try to be very open and transparent with everybody, including candidates for positions and people who are referred to us. We try to speak like we regularly speak at the company. We share things like: What are the expectations of the role? What are the opportunities that we have? We don’t have a particular framework but what has helped build this culture is being completely honest and bringing your whole self to work. That’s helped us attract people who have a similar mindset. When I have a conversation with one of my direct reports, we talk about free time, compensation, all the things that are related to how we work. My style is very trusting. If you need to do something, do it. If you want to start working at a certain time during the day, go for it.
Linda: Javier, what do you see is missing in tech from the conversation around diversity, equity and inclusion?
Javier: I think it depends. Because when we talk about Silicon Valley, we talk about different industries. One of the things that we need to have is different points of view. One of the major wins with having a diverse employee population is that they can provide a different point of view to all the problems that the tech industry is trying to solve. And the more points of view that you have as a company on a particular problem, the better solutions that you can create.
Linda: I love that. And finally, Chris, how do you deal with the challenges of being a CEO?
Chris: Being a CEO is super hard. I deal with a lot of emotions when running the company. But one time, I went to visit a director at her home. For her whole career, she had cleaned homes in the Bay Area. As a Wonderschool director, she had made more in two months than she was making after a whole year of cleaning people’s homes. She had Wonderschool painted on her wall, and she had gotten me a gift. After the visit, I cried. In the midst of the challenges, I needed a reminder of the value that we’re providing to people, especially Wonderschool’s directors. Being able to see how we’re changing people’s lives in what always centers me on the work that we’re doing.
Special thanks to Janet Frishberg and Linda Ruiz David for their help in putting this post together.
Growth by Design Talent is a talent advisory firm that helps early & mid-stage high growth companies design talent strategies to help them scale quickly and thoughtfully.
