Launching Kinside: How we’re making child care more accessible and affordable for working parents.
This is personal.
In the last 18 months, I had a second baby. I joined Y Combinator. And I cofounded my second tech company, Kinside, a child care app for working parents. As of January, we’ll be serving over a thousand employers by connecting their employees to tens of thousands of negotiated and reserved spots at top rated daycares and preschools nationwide.
My cofounders include a dad-of-two and a woman who’s made a very real decision to not have kids due to the demands of her career and the lack of social infrastructure for women who choose to do both.
Nothing about being a working parent in America is easy. Sometimes this means throwing caution to the wind and doing it anyway despite the struggles. Other times it means choosing to forgo parenthood entirely. Or in the case of our founding team, it means starting a company about it.
Where to begin?
We decided to begin where the help typically stops, with child care. 56 percent of parents report difficulty finding care, citing “lack of available slots” as their primary barrier and “cost” as a close second. Those that are lucky enough to secure an open spot find themselves spending 20 percent of their annual income to pay for it.
Knowing that these are the two biggest stressors for parents on their child care journey, we went to work building a network of the best daycares and preschools, finding open spots, developing technology to manage availabilities and pre-negotiating discounts of up to 20 percent on behalf of parents.
We brought on former daycare and preschool directors to inform our practices. Our concierge support team walked beta parents from ten employers — tired of losing great talent to the challenges of working parenthood — through the gauntlet that is finding the right child care.
We fundraised.
We hit a nerve, with the beta parents, with the companies and with the venture community. We raised $3 million in a financing round led by Initialized in less than three weeks. That brought us to $4 million raised in 18 months. Other investors included Precursor Ventures, Kairos, Jane VC, Escondido Ventures and Haystack VC.
Sure it sounds like a brag, and to be clear, it definitely is. But it’s also proof that working parents need help and they don’t have it. It’s evidence that companies feel the pain of the lack of social infrastructure, still designed mostly for single-breadwinner households. Today, two-thirds of households have two working parents. I would guess zero percent of them feel great about the state of family support at work and in the country at large.
We scaled.
We’re here to change that, asking employers to reassess the relationship between work and child care and do something about it. So far, many of them have answered the call and the volume of parents and companies we’ve brought on for 2020 has allowed us to recruit thousands daycares and preschools with phenomenal safety reports. We’ve sought out high quality home-based options, affordable enough for someone just starting their career, and negotiated discounts at fancy Montessoris for the extra discerning executive. We even signed up the most reputable nationwide preschool brands.
The problem.
Once paid parental leave (if you’re lucky enough to have it) is over and you’re back in the office, there’s an expectation that all goes back to normal. Of course, nothing feels normal about dropping a six week old child in the hands of a stranger, paying 20 percent of your annual salary to do it and a good amount of your mental fortitude to withstand it.
This is a lesson I learned first hand when I became pregnant with my first child four years ago. At the time, I was a cofounder and executive leader at HoneyBook, a business management software for freelancers. As one of the early parents on the team, my pregnancy left me responsible for determining many of our company policies.
As I researched options for helping my working parents, I saw that American businesses were losing $12.7 billion annually due to their employees’ child care challenges. In spite of this, there was not a single benefit available that would help the average parent in their search for child care.
I also learned that over 40 percent of women leave the professional workforce after having a baby, and most of them never re-integrate full time. Moreover, when you ask high-potential women why they leave their careers, nearly three-quarters cite lack of decent child care as the number one reason.
Now we launch.
Twelve months after private beta, we’re launching our platform with hundreds of employers, thousands of their working parents and a rich, nationwide network of trusted daycares and preschools.
What’s more, we make every dollar count, as we partner with Flexible Spending Account administrators who help parents save on child care. When Kinside is combined with these pre-tax dollars, parents can save up to 30 percent on their child care, an amount that could very well be the difference between staying in the workforce and leaving it.
With our launch, we’ve taken the first steps to making child care more available and more affordable for working parents. We’ve brought the three child care stake holders — daycares, parents and their employers — together for the first time. We’re working to build a society where great child care is accessible, where finding it is easy and where family building is actively supported by employers instead of systemically discouraged.
