In Conversation with Helen Mayer
Boston, Massachusetts. Helen Mayer is the solo founder of Otter, which matches parents who need childcare with stay-at-home parents who can care for their kids, and balances that with being a mother to twins. She previously founded Forward F1rst, a company focused on helping first-generation college students succeed, and has also done three years of clinical surgery research. Saffron Huang, on Interact Communications, caught up with Helen in January.
Hey Helen, how would you describe yourself?
Professionally, I am the founder of Otter, which matches families who need childcare with stay-at-home parents who can take care of more kids.
As a person, I care a lot about making the implicit explicit, and my work with Otter is very aligned with that. To elaborate, I was the first in my family to go to college, and I did a lot of work on first generation student success. After graduating I started a company called Forward F1rst, also focused on first generation student success. First generation students don’t have a cultural understanding of the hidden curriculum of college; much of my work was just making that implicit hidden curriculum really explicit. Pretty much anything you can think of in life involves a lot of implicit norms, e.g. Silicon Valley, parenting. I love making the implicit explicit, so people can make decisions with more complete and accessible information.
How did you transition from founding a company for first-generation college students to founding Otter, a childcare company?
I started Forward F1rst back in January 2018. In September 2018 I closed a partnership with a foundation to do a randomized control trial of a new intervention for first generation students with 50 institutions. I was really excited about the partnership.
That same day, I went to my doctor’s office, and I found out that I was six and a half months pregnant with twins. That really changed the entire course of my life, from every angle.
I ended up negotiating away a lot of the operational control that I had over the company to get maternity leave. Then I spent a good year floundering professionally while I tried to figure out how to step into my role as a parent, given that it happened sort of unexpectedly. Then Forward F1rst fell apart because of the pandemic; students who were going through the two-year pilot trial fell off and stopped using it. That was a reckoning for me about what I wanted to do next. I felt a lot of self-doubt around having stepped back from the company to figure out my role as a parent, and around having put all my eggs in one basket, the research study.
At the same time as I was trying to decide what to do professionally, daycares around the country were closing down, and my partner and I were juggling childcare and work. I was thinking about what the world would look like after COVID, especially for childcare in the U.S. I put out a survey to figure out how parents were thinking about childcare in the pandemic, and ended up starting Otter from those insights.
That’s an incredible journey. If you don’t mind, what was it like finding out that you were pregnant?
It shuffled everything about how I thought about the world. I went into a doctor’s office, having taken a pregnancy test and been positive. I was thinking, this will just be a formality. I am also a three-time cervical cancer survivor; I was told I would never be able to carry a pregnancy to term. I thought this was just going to be a blip on the radar of my life. Learning that I was six and a half months pregnant and, what’s more, pregnant with twins, was really life-altering.
Creating space for parenthood at a very young age, unexpectedly, completely transformed the way that I think about the world. I’m a parent first, and a founder second. I don’t see that changing.
By the way, are you a solo founder?
Yeah, I’m still a team of one.
Tell us a bit more about starting Otter solo in the middle of a pandemic?
Like most parents, I think about childcare a lot. I paid a lot of attention to how people were talking about access, or lack thereof, to childcare and education in COVID. I surveyed some Facebook parenting groups about childcare in the pandemic, and got about 1000 responses within a week. There was a real appetite for solutions. A key finding was that parents trusted another parent to take care of their kids just as much as their own relatives. This was by far the most trustworthy childcare option.
I started having people put time in my calendar to talk about childcare and offered to coordinate pandemic-safe options for childcare for parents, tailored to each family’s circumstances and preferences. I started facilitating childcare swaps, arrangements where parents get together and take turns caring for their shared set of children at different times of the week. I found that the swaps involving a stay-at-home parent looking after the kids was most satisfying to everyone.
I grew up with a stay-at-home mom who didn’t go to college and dropped out of the workforce because my parents couldn’t afford childcare. We lost her income and because she didn’t have a college degree she couldn’t enter the workforce when I got older. Through Otter, I want to bring economic opportunities to stay-at-home parents doing work of immense value.
What are some ways in which parenting has influenced the way that you run your company, or vice versa?
I think of Otter as a series of rigorous weekly experiments, and it’s about 25 weeks old now. That’s what it was like to raise twins early on; the shape of their skills and their needs was changing regularly. But at a certain point you can think longer-term about what you’re doing; I’ve reached that point in some ways with parenting my kids but I haven’t reached that at all with Otter. The company goes through a phase of infancy, and eventually you understand more about the shapes of your customers’ needs, and the business’s organisational and capital needs. But it takes a while to get there. It takes patience and groundedness.
There’s also a lot of guilt associated with having to be very engaged with my work. As a founder there’s a lot riding on my work, but I also want to create boundaries, which many founders struggle with. My boundaries are influenced by my kids’ bathtimes, bedtimes and nap-times. They’re very set, and I have to show up intentionally.
The best advice I can give to other founders and in general is, you need to have something regular in your life where it doesn’t matter how well or how poorly you are doing as a founder. I feel lucky in many ways that I have my kids. Kids don’t care about KPIs, they just want you to read them a book or two.
What is the best thing about parenthood?
I think it’s fun. It’s really hard but it’s also just really fun, especially as kids get older. I know lots of people like babies, and I enjoyed my kids as babies, but I like that they’re now more interactive and can tell me jokes, and laugh and read with me.
I get to watch kids grow into people. And it’s a constant reminder that everybody is always growing into the next version of themselves.
You were pre-med in college and did a bunch of clinical research. Could you say a little about how that’s influenced or inspired you?
My high school biology teacher set me up to shadow a horse veterinarian, saying I could be a really great doctor. But I thought, I hate blood and guts, so I don’t think she’s right. My mom was like, no, go shadow this horse vet and find out and also, no doctors are born loving blood and guts. So we’d drive up to rural farms in New Hampshire and I held farm hoses up horses’ butts for colonoscopies. I really didn’t like it. Until one day a horse came in with a facial laceration, and I watched it get emergency surgery, and I thought, surgery is kind of interesting.
I then wanted to shadow a surgeon but didn’t know any doctors. I cold-called my way through a list of about 50 different surgeons; the 23rd person I called said yeah sure you can come in. My first shadowing experience was that paediatric surgeon who ended up becoming a mentor and he’s still a mentor today. Then in college, I did research with a colorectal surgeon. People don’t want to hear more about that! I will say, she was generous enough to let me publish our research together as a first author, and I got to present it at national surgical conferences. It was a very formative experience at that age to be trusted by somebody to present our work together.
Sophomore year of college I worked with a population health outcomes researcher which was very different, and took me away from the operating room. I was introduced to the idea that you can have an impact on an entire system of care, an entire population in the millions, with a single policy intervention. And given my experience working with surgeons, I understood that every data point was actually a person. I started wanting to be a surgeon and something else, someone who can impact whole systems. I deferred admission to medical school and started Forward F1rst to try to answer that question. What does it look like to create interventions that can be scaled and can be delivered to many people with high fidelity to your intent?
Taking a step back: where are you from, and where are you based right now?
I was born in Paris, moved to Boston when I was 10 months old and moved back to France — first to a tiny village in the south of France, then Lyon — when I was seven. Then back to Boston, and to college out in western Massachusetts.
I’ve been back in Boston for more than three years now, but I’m moving to New York City this weekend. That’s where most of my company’s customers are, and my partner’s also from the area, so we’ve been wanting to go back.
What are you looking forward to in 2021?
Firstly, moving to New York this weekend. Also, I’m bringing on my first team member towards the end of this month, so I’m really excited about that. More generally, I’m really hoping for lots of progress in terms of vaccination and public health. Oh, and I’m also getting married this year — the date is TBD based on all the public health concerns.
Wow, congratulations! How are your wedding plans shaping up with those uncertainties in mind?
Specific plans are not yet set. We’ve been social-distancing heavily since the beginning of the pandemic and we don’t want to change our practices for a celebration of our relationship. It feels reckless to endanger other people for that. It’s tricky; we want to have a celebration that honors our commitment to one another, and includes the people we love who’ve supported us throughout our journey as partners and as parents, but we also want to be mindful of the implications of our choices.
What inspired you to apply to Interact?
I didn’t know anyone in Interact, but saw people talking on Twitter about it as a great community for people interested in technology, civic engagement and civic impact. And I was interested in all those things, but then I looked at people’s bios and got very intimidated; I’d been feeling a lot of imposter syndrome in general. Then I found a tweet by Logan Graham (an Interacter), who was offering to have conversations with people who were outsiders to Silicon Valley, or weren’t sure about applying. So I had a 30 minute call with him where I was very transparent with him about being a parent and my uncertainties, and he was really affirming and encouraging. So I applied.
This year I extended that same offer to other people and it’s been really meaningful to tell other people about how great Interact is. I started Otter concurrently with joining the Interact Founder Focus group, which introduced me to my first series of investors, and then eventually to my seed investor. It’s also provided this very rigorous framework for me to think about growing Otter sustainably to find a value proposition that feels meaningful. A lot of startup accelerators just want to see numbers growing, and don’t really care about seeing your thinking grow; Interact is a community where you can see others grow their thinking, and others are receptive to you growing your own thinking. And that’s really beautiful.
___
Interact is a community of mission-driven technologists. Applications for the 2021 Fellowship are now open at joininteract.com.
