As a mother, I often find it hard to believe how time flies.
Our youngest son, Adam, is 17 now. On the college visits that have commandeered so many of our weekends lately, I’ll look at him and swell with pride at the lacrosse-playing, baritone-singing young adult he’s becoming. Then wistfully, I’ll find myself asking my husband if he too feels like it was just yesterday that Adam was a smiley-faced soprano in elementary school. Where does the time go?
Ten years is a long time. A lot can change over the course of a decade. Our sons Adam and Ryan today are almost unrecognizable compared to 10 years ago. But when we look at the two young men they’ve become, it’s clear that the qualities that define them, that make them who they are, mature with age but they don’t go away.
This month marks 10 years since we launched Care.com. As it turns out, time flies when you’re scaling a business, too.
We’ve grown, expanded and matured over the course of the decade, but what defines us and drives us—you, the families and caregivers who connect through Care.com—have guided our every step. Our mission and values don’t go away.
Growing Up … and Getting Better With Age
We founded Care.com based on a simple premise: there had to be a better way for families to find care and caregivers to find meaningful work.
My husband Ron and I became part of the Sandwich Generation when I was 29. We had begged my parents to come to the United States from the Philippines to help take care of our two young sons. But then my dad had a heart attack and fell down the stairs holding Adam, who was just a baby at the time. We were working at a tech startup, but relying on the phone book to find care. I knew there had to be a better way, so we decided to build it.
In May 2007, we launched Care.com as a digital marketplace offering child care, adult and senior care, pet care and tutoring. A year later we added housekeeping and special needs care. Today, we’re the world’s largest online destination for finding and managing family care, with 24 million members across more than 20 countries.
As we’ve grown, you, our members, have given us strength and crystalized our vision: to improve the lives of families and caregivers by improving access to care. You remind us, every day, that care is both a personal need and a universal experience. You’ve driven our innovations and initiatives, pushed us to become so much more than a babysitting site.
In 2010, for example, a company came to us looking for an enterprise solution; they said that their employees needed care to work, and so many of them had used Care.com. We launched the service now known as Care For Business. Today, more than 1.1 million families have access to family care benefits, like backup care, through their employers.
We had always known that there was more we could do for our families and caregivers than helping them find one another. In 2012, we acquired a company we now call HomePay, a household tax and payroll service to help the families who hire nannies and household help navigate their employment obligations.
With millions of caregivers globally using Care.com to find work, we’re deeply invested in professionalizing caregiver jobs. Over the years, we’ve teamed up with the National Domestic Workers Alliance on several fronts, including supporting domestic workers bills of rights in a number of states and the Fair Care Pledge, through which families commit to fair pay, clear expectations and paid time off for the caregivers who work in their homes. Then, in 2016, we launched Care.com Benefits, a first-of-its-kind platform that provides caregivers access to health and dental and pooled, portable benefits through employer contributions.
This is just the beginning. Tackling global care infrastructure issues is a big challenge. And we’re the ones to do it. Together.
What’s Next?
In another 10 years, what will we look like? What will the world look like? Here are 10 things we’d like to imagine:
- Dramatic growth in the care profession, driven by the millennial baby boom and rapidly aging population.
- Advances in supports for caregivers and professionalization of their roles, including career development, fair working conditions and benefits for caregivers as a matter of course.
- Smart innovations leveraging disruptive technologies to improve quality of care throughout the lifecycle.
- More easy-to-use, full-service apps like SPOT, our new pet care app that offers easy cashless payments, photo and GPS updates.
- More companies offering family-friendly benefits, leading to more women in the workforce and in leadership positions.
- Thriving exchanges of information and ideas among families and caregivers in communities like ours.
- A growing library of data and real stories, illustrating the need for investments in the care infrastructure.
- Policies that truly support all families like paid family leave and sick time for all workers.
- Better access to quality, affordable care for all families.
- Economic growth driven by care.
Our vision for these next 10 years is to improve the lives of families and caregivers by building a global care infrastructure that helps companies and economies grow. This is our journey … all of ours.
Here’s to the next 10 years.
