Psst! We post less regularly here now. Check out the Reach Capital blog to keep up with the latest news, reports and perspectives!

Work is undergoing rapid transformations. Hybrid and remote environments have pushed traditional notions of where and when we do our jobs. Attitudes towards how, why, and for whom we work are changing as well. Today, more people are choosing to work independently or for themselves. Many are pushing back against the “live to work” mentality, choosing opportunities that bring better life balance, and employers that invest in their wellbeing.

At the same time, the pace of technological change is accelerating faster than ever before. AI and its unrelenting developments are fueling the newest wave of disruption, threatening to displace certain functions while also creating opportunities for new forms of work.

The confluence of these colliding trends will require employers to rethink how they build and support their labor force — and create opportunities for people to develop new skills in new ways that foster healthy relationships to their work and careers.

“As the skills and mindsets that workplaces need are rapidly evolving, and far more quickly than ever before,” says Guillermo Miranda, former Chief Learning Officer at IBM and Boeing, “employers have to reinvent their talent and learning ecosystem to enable employees to learn-unlearn-relearn constantly and much more effortlessly.”

Connecting the dots between educational opportunities to economic mobility underpins many of our investments at Reach Capital, in companies such as Springboard, Stepful and Workwhile. Our latest report, ReimagineWORK, offers a data-rich look at the trends shaping our attitudes towards work, the impact of AI and other technologies, and how businesses are bracing for the future.

See and download the full report here.

The report also goes under the hood of a “skills engine” that we believe is needed to identify the skills people have, understand the skills the workforce needs, and close the delta as quickly as possible. Such an engine will enable key behavioral changes in how we attract and support the future workforce. Thanks to AI and new tech-enabled services, this skills engine is within reach. Already some of the key pieces are being built, and opportunities are ripe for other innovations.

Businesses are ready. Just as schools and classrooms are changing, so too are workplaces retooling their systems and operations to better attract, retain and support workers and — which in turn helps them overall. An overwhelming majority of organizations are planning to upgrade or adopt new workforce development systems next year.

This new future of work — skills-oriented, worker-centered, adaptive, and nimble — holds exciting and enormous opportunities for startups and investors alike. Check out the full report, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you’re building and funding innovative learning solutions!

ReimagineWORK: Our Look at the Future of Work and the Skills Engine Driving It was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Jomayra Herrera

For our latest People Matters interview, we chatted with Maisha Gray-Diggs, VP of Global Talent Acquisition, Inclusion, and Experience at Eventbrite. Before Eventbrite, she was a talent acquisition leader at Twitter and Microsoft, and started her career as a PhD engineer at Procter & Gamble.

In this interview, Maisha discusses how the talent market is still a candidate’s market, what types of technology solutions her team is looking for, and what it takes to retain top talent.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Can you share a bit about your journey into recruiting and talent acquisition?

Most folks know I’m an engineer turned HR professional. And I always tell folks I’m fake HR because I spent so much time trained as an engineer. I have a BS from MIT and a PhD from Northwestern in Material Sciences and Engineering.

As I think about it, I’ve always done recruiting even if I didn’t know it at the time. In high school, for example, I did tours for my predominantly white high school. I always had underrepresented students shadowing me and my job was to convince them that they could come to our high school and feel safe. So when I think about when my recruiting career started, it was probably in trying to increase the representation at my high school.

But really I was trying to get more faces that looked like me in that space. And so that is the thread that defines me as a talent acquisition professional. It’s really about creating equity and access to different spaces.

Read the full post over on Reach Capital.

by Jennifer Carolan

Nearly every day in my job as an edtech investor I’m asked this question: Will AI replace teachers? Will the teaching profession go the way of the scribe, made obsolete by AI?

Generative AI is revolutionary and already having a major impact on how we learn. However, as with most technological advances in education, the answer to how AI will impact education is nuanced.

Most change is incremental. But occasionally there is a breakthrough invention that results in a new platform that is so meaningfully better that it becomes the new normal. And it happens fast. For example, when Nike released the Vaporfly tech, runners sponsored by other brands painted their shoes black to wear it in secret. So successful was this new shoe technology that Vaporfly has been involved in every major running victory or milestone since 2016. It’s the new platform.

History has taught us that breakthrough technologies that expand access to learning can have an enormous impact by enabling more people to lift themselves out of poverty and live more enriching lives. But these breakthroughs are often met with fear and resistance.

Read the full post on the Reach Capital blog.

An interview with Guillermo Miranda, former Chief Learning Officer at Boeing and IBM

by Jomayra Herrera, Partner at Reach Capital

Learning never stops. At Reach, we actively invest in companies serving adults and the workforce, through services across talent acquisition (Handshake, Workwhile), reskilling and upskilling (Springboard, EdCast), leadership development (Hone) and much more. Talent management and development is an enduring priority for companies and HR leaders know they must evolve their practices as the future of work continues to change. Every company will be an edtech company, as my colleague Esteban Sosnik often says.

As with K-12 and higher ed, our investment approach is informed by experts and practitioners who serve as our ears on the ground. To this end, we are launching a blog series People Matters, which will share what we’re learning from people leaders about how they view the talent development market, the pain points they are facing, and how founders should think about building and connecting solutions for them.

We are excited to launch this series with one of Reach’s advisors, Guillermo Miranda. He was most recently the Chief Learning Officer and VP of Leadership Development at Boeing (a company of ~140K employees), and previously spent 20 years rising up the ranks at IBM to a similar role. Here’s where he sees opportunity for technology to serve people leaders, his biggest pet peeve when it comes to HR, and how he completely revamped the learning experience at two large global companies to improve both engagement and business impact.

How did you get into HR/L&D?

Let me start with a confession. I was trained and worked as a lawyer for the first few years of my professional life. Then I realized that this was not what I wanted to do in the long term. I came to Spain, did my MBA and when I went back into the labor market there was a good job in HR. I became the HR director of the Revenue Service in Peru (SUNAT) and helped to change and modernize many things while I was there.

I like being a person who can bring business sense to impact people initiatives. I always gravitated between a specialist and HR leader roles: talent management, compensation and benefits, delivery operations, et cetera. My first Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) role was in the multilateral financing sector. Then I moved to be the first CHRO for the Digital Business Group at IBM, and eventually the Chief Learning Officer of the entire enterprise.

Can you share a little about the journey to revamp the learning experience at IBM and later at Boeing?

I first had to focus on shifting two different mindsets: 1) the mindset of using learning as entertainment, as a reward, or as a way to justify lack of performance; and 2) the mindset that what we should deliver is an academic style of transmitting knowledge…

Read the full interview on the Reach Capital blog.

and incredibly excited to lead its $10M Series A!

by Tony Wan, Head of Investor Content

Since we first invested in TeachFX in 2017, the team has expanded its reach to teachers in every state across the country, capturing classroom conversations, providing personalized feedback on their instruction, and surfacing opportunities to improve and learn with their peers.

Along the way, the team has conducted rigorous efficacy studies and analyzed hundreds of thousands of hours of classroom audio. Of all the rich analyses and insights TeachFX has surfaced, the most startling finding may be this: the average student spoke just seven seconds per hour of instruction. Perhaps no other stat captures as succinctly the magnitude of the student disengagement crisis.

There’s a flawed, conventional “wisdom” that kids should talk less and listen more. But what research says could not be further from that notion. Decades of studies have shown that speaking is an essential ingredient to learning and understanding. It’s how we express ourselves, engage with others and build our identity.

TeachFX sits at the nexus of improving student engagement and professional development. And we’re proud to lead its $10 million Series A round, and to be joined by others including Osage Venture Partners, Brighteye Ventures, Pearson Ventures and Ulu Ventures.

In education, there’s plenty of talk about the need to move from “sage on the stage” instruction (where someone is lecturing to a docile audience) to a more interactive, participating and engaging environment. Yet the reality is that teachers talk upwards of 80 percent of class time. Whatever remaining time is left for student talk is often distributed inequitably: TeachFX found that Black and Latino students speak less than half as much as their peers.

Quantifying the imbalance of student-teacher talk, and among student subgroups, is just the tip of the iceberg for TeachFX. Its voice AI goes much deeper to analyze specific styles of questions and dialogue, and offer actionable feedback and reflection prompts, that are rooted in research on effective instructional practices: waiting a little longer after asking a question; building on student responses to reframe or ask follow-up questions, for instance.

And it works. Over the past school year, teachers using TeachFX increased their student talk by an average of 40 percent. A study from Stanford, Harvard and University of Maryland researchers found that teachers who received TeachFX feedback increased their uptake of student ideas, and students reported higher course satisfaction and academic achievement.

By showing teachers the conversational dynamics in their classroom, the specific practices that get students talking, and how that changes as they try new things, TeachFX delivers actionable data that helps teachers improve, create more engaging classrooms, and enjoy their work. It’s changing how teachers get feedback and collaborate. As Anthony Reid, a math teacher Howard High School of Technology shared:

“Using TeachFX has really allowed me to look critically at my own classroom… and also create this network of friends among my colleagues where we can look at our lessons together and have hard conversations around things we can improve on, and also have healthy celebrations together.”

In Detroit Public Schools Community District, where TeachFX helped teachers increase student talk time by three-fold, Felecia Branch says using the app consistently “fosters and ignites classroom conversations with students, their peers at their table groups, elbow partners… and deeper classroom conversations overall. What we want is for students to guide their learning. We want them to guide the discussing. And as teachers, we don’t want to spend all the time talking.”

TeachFX is led by CEO Jamie Poskin, a former teacher whose own classroom experiences seeded the idea behind the app. As a student, he started a website development company that earned him enough to pay his Stanford tuition. His eclectic journey included a stop at an experimental theater company, and back to Stanford for his MBA and MA in education, before he joined us at Reach in 2016, first as an intern and then as an entrepreneur in residence. It has been a joy and privilege to watch as he and his co-founder, Berk Coker, took TeachFX from idea to reality.

Jamie shares his personal story and captures the scope of his work and impact eloquently in this blog post.

If you’re inspired by this mission, TeachFX is hiring across engineering, finance, operations, sales and other positions. You can also help spread the word by asking your local school or district about TeachFX!

Let’s Talk: Why We’re Doubling Down on TeachFX was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Jennifer Wu (Venture Partner) and Jennifer Carolan (General Partner)

Reach was founded on the belief that technology can meaningfully extend access to education and opportunity. It can be a powerful tool for equity but it has its limits, partly because of the social — and serendipitous — nature of learning. This tension has guided our investment approach and led us to carefully identify specific areas where technology can make a difference.

Back in 2015, we developed investment theses in the following areas:

1. family communication (strengthening the connection between the parent, teacher and student)
2. differentiating instruction (facilitating personalized learning)
3. relevant learning experiences (connecting learning to personal interests and the real world)
4. data-driven improvement (bringing data to all level of decision-making)

We made 28 core investments aligned to those theses and worked closely alongside the founders helping them scale their businesses.

Now, after seven years and a ground-shifting global pandemic, we’re taking a step back to reflect on what we got right, what we didn’t expect, and how we can be more effective going forward.

This K-12 Impact Report is our first attempt to examine the collective influence that our portfolio has had on the K-12 education sector. (Forthcoming reports will look at our work in early childhood, higher education and the workforce.) From humble beginnings, many of the tools our founders have built are now beloved brands, widely used in schools and homes across the world.

This report is an evolution of our impact reporting efforts. It builds on earlier work to understand what populations our portfolio serves and the impact that individual companies have. It also applies our impact framework and metrics we use to screen prospective companies seeking funding, and to support them post-investment. It provides an inside look at how Reach thinks about impact, how we do our work, and how we share learnings across the portfolio.

See the report below, or download it here.

Reflecting on Our Impact on K-12 Since 2015 was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Esteban Sosnik (Partner)

Uncertainty is perhaps the only certainty in the current economic climate. We do not know how long it will take for inflation to return to normal levels, or what interest rates will be by then. We don’t know how long the public markets will continue on their bear run. And we do not know how the American consumer will react to seeing their investments as well as their cash depreciate in value.

What we know from the past, though, is that the education sector will weather this crisis well and help rebuild the economy. The question: Where will people seek it?

Usually, in times of economic downturn where jobs are scarce but labor is plentiful, people go back to school to learn new skills and make themselves more competitive in the market. We saw this during the last recession, when undergraduate enrollment increased by almost 2.5 million, or nearly 16 percent, to 18.1 million students from 2007 to 2010.

This time however, the situation is flipped. The labor market is tight, with low unemployment rates and employers eager to hire. There are many openings but few available or qualified workers to fill them. At the end of last year, there were nearly two job vacancies for every unemployed worker, and unemployment rates remain low today. What’s also different is that college isn’t the go-to source for upskilling and reskilling as it once was. Spring 2022 enrollment dropped 4.1 percent, extending a trend that started pre-pandemic. As a result, employers are investing more in education offerings to upskill their internal talent and attract others.

Education is resilient. It is a powerful lever for upward social mobility, and whether it is offered through traditional environments or elsewhere, people will seek out opportunities.

At Reach we are seeing this play out in the first half of 2022 with all our portfolio companies focused on skill training for professionals reaching record numbers of students served. For example, Springboard and Coderhouse, which both provide digital skill training to early and mid-career professionals, have had record enrollment rates. Coderhouse has doubled student enrollments in the first eight months of 2022, to almost 60,000. Similarly, Springboard’s most recent cohort starting in September reflects an 80% year-over-year growth rate and a 10,000 annual enrollment run rate.

Historically, the one education sector that has suffered during a recession is corporate training and development for employees. These programs have been primarily focused on compliance and mandatory training (often HR related), but this is quickly changing. With the emergence of automation and digitized operations, companies have been investing in reskilling their workforce. Taking a step further, many large enterprises have started to offer education as a benefit for employee retention and engagement. As a result, learning and development is unlikely to see a slowdown with blue- and white-collar workforce still in high demand.

We have seen companies like Amazon launch the Amazon Career Choice program to help employees, particularly warehouse staff and other hourly workers, pursue their studies and get the degree and skills they need to advance in their career — either within the company or beyond. Guild is doing something similar with partners like Walmart, Disney and Pepsi. These programs are free for workers; the employer foots the bill. As labor continues being tight, even in this market, these initiatives will become even more widespread.

Education enrollment, particularly in skilled training (mostly online) schools will continue to grow as students look for flexible options to reskill. As covered in our 2021 ReimaginED report, 74% of higher-ed students are nontraditional and want flexible learning options. Companies are also investing in their employees.

In turbulent times, education is a steady market. Most importantly, it can contribute to building the fabric that will make the workforce stronger once we emerge from this period of slower economic activity.

The Resiliency of Education was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Tony Wan, Head of Investor Content

Art brings math to life, and vice versa. Of the thousands of stories I’ve filed as a former journalist, one of the most delightful has been Desmos’ student art contest. The creativity and complexity of the submissions — with every line, curve, shade and highlight represented by an equation — is testament to the brilliance of students, empowered by top-notch technology.

It underscores how math can embody and exude joy, a feeling that is shared across the many tools, activities and vibrant user communities that Desmos has built since its start in 2011. Along the way, the company has consistently pushed the boundaries of what a graphing calculator can do, of what math is, and how it can be taught, experienced and enjoyed.

As Desmos CEO and co-founder Eli Luberoff said at the time: “We believe that the line between math, arts and humanities is a lot blurrier than what most people make it out to be. Math isn’t just the regurgitation of formulas. It can be about expression and creativity, and we want to give students every opportunity to create things using math.”

The company began with a simple, equitable premise: to eliminate the need for students to fork out hundreds of dollars for graphing calculators. That was the genesis of the calculator, now a universally accessible tool reaching tens of millions of students. It’s been translated into over 30 languages, works with screen readers and braille displays, and is embedded in content from over 75 leading education publishers and test makers including The College Board and ​​The International Baccalaureate.

To that objective, sales of graphing calculators are reportedly on the decline, on order of 15% annually.

But Desmos’ vision extends far beyond displacing graphing calculators. Its mission is to help everyone love learning math, and to do that, it is changing how math is taught. That means encouraging inquiry, experimentation and reflection, instead of rote drilling and abstract problems solving for x. With a team of instructional designers and educators, including Chief Academic Officer Dan Meyer, a renowned math researcher and former teacher, Desmos created a library of fun, interactive activities and lesson plans that leveraged its calculator as a creative canvas. (Turtle Crossing and Marbleslides are among my favorites.)

In 2018, that effort evolved into a more ambitious undertaking: to remake the math curriculum. It’s not a business for the faint of heart. But the company has fused its technology, design and pedagogy into a core, middle-school math curriculum currently used by more than 300,000 students across 46 states and 14 countries.

Its growth comes at a time when digital instructional materials have convincingly overtaken print (finally). And to take its curriculum to the next level, Desmos is joining forces with an emerging leader in the K-12 edtech industry.

Today, Desmos is announcing the sale of its curriculum and instructional technology to Amplify, a partner it has known well over the years through the integration of Desmos’s calculators and lesson technology. Together, they will continue to build immersive, impactful math curricula, supported by resources to make them accessible to many more teachers and students across the U.S. Under Amplify CEO Larry Berger, one of the most respected voices and experienced leaders in edtech, many exciting opportunities lie ahead to leverage Desmos’ technology not just to other math grades, but also to science, literacy and many other subjects.

Throughout Desmos’ growth and expansion, what has never wavered is its uncompromising dedication to rigor and quality. That is ingrained in the DNA of a humble team that truly loves and geeks out on math, and celebrates educators and students who, in turn, are its biggest champions. It’s not uncommon to see artwork created on Desmos appear on TikTok feeds or the front page of Reddit.

Desmos is an exemplar of growth driven by product and community; the headlines and capital later followed. At Reach, we consider ourselves incredibly fortunate to be their largest investor, and to have had the pleasure of working closely with Eli, Eric and the team. Jim Lobdell and Jennifer Carolan served on the Board. Meetings were held in their office atop a motorcycle shop in San Francisco. Between cycles of revving engines, we spent much of our time discussing the curriculum build-out: how to make the development process more efficient while still meeting exacting quality standards; how to position it in the market; and how to make an inquiry-based, conceptual approach to teaching math welcoming to teachers.

Along the way, we saw how each person at Desmos was deeply committed to building tools and curriculum the world has never seen before — ones that would allow students not only to understand math, but love learning about it. This commitment can be seen in the elegance and versatility of its graphing calculator, the magic of the playful animations that hook students to care about otherwise abstract math concepts, and the careful lengths to which the Desmos team goes to support teachers.

The Desmos calculator will remain as an independent Public Benefit Corporation — Desmos Studio — and continue to be led by Eli. All of the Desmos resources that are free today — graphing calculators, lesson-building tools, and lessons — will remain free, whether owned by Amplify or Desmos Studio, and more free tools and features will be added. More details about the curriculum and calculator are available in this blog post from Desmos.

Amplifying the Joy of Math: Desmos’ Next Chapter was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Chian Gong (Partner)

Personal connections unlock professional opportunities, and career paths are shaped just as much by networks as knowledge. Yet too often, connections happen by circumstance. Julia Freeland Fisher, Director of Education Research at the Christensen Institute, has written at length about the need to intentionally weave social capital-building into our learning environments, to help students forge new connections and find mentors beyond their immediate networks.

Fittingly, in 2016, we received a cold inbound LinkedIn message from Adam Saven. The subject line was catchy — “Trailer Park Startup approaching $15K MRR” — and a closer look outlined a vision to demystify mentorship and equip all learners with the tools they need to build relationships that lead to new opportunities.

Adam and his co-founder, Reilly Davis, were deeply passionate about unlocking access to social capital through structured mentoring. They felt fortunate to have had mentors who made a transformative impact on their careers — in investment banking and Google at the time — and wanted to pay it forward, to help others make impactful connections that can change lives.

They quit their jobs and worked out of a trailer park as they iterated on their initial product in search of product-market fit. They were guided by an important partner: Farouk Day, who was Dean of Career & Experiential Education & Associate Vice Provost at Stanford at the time. Together they reimagined how students can learn about and access social capital on campus.

Fast forward to today: PeopleGrove has become the leading mentorship platform in higher education, serving over 1.7 million students across 500 partners, including over 60 of the top 100 universities in the nation. These include Stanford, Georgetown, Arizona State University, University of Pennsylvania, and University of Michigan.

In working with Adam and Reilly, here are some lessons we learned about what it takes to build a high-growth, mission-driven organization:

1. Mission First

From the start, Adam and Reilly were committed to their mission:

To ensure all learners, regardless of their background or experience, have access to the network and support necessary to achieve their goals.

Especially in the early, messy, period of finding product-market fit, having clarity on what you’re working towards is a powerful internal compass for a rapidly evolving organization. We tested different business models, customer profiles (high schools, nonprofits, universities, companies) and product offerings. Along with analyzing the usual measures of traction, we also considered how each experiment would further the core mission of PeopleGrove.

For example, PeopleGrove initially found traction with the career service offices of universities, but recognized quickly that engaging alumni offices greatly expanded the pool of mentors available to students. As they worked more closely with alumni offices, they uncovered challenges with the logistics of fundraising. While this was an important problem, they used the litmus test of mission alignment to help them prioritize product development that would deepen learner and mentor engagement, rather than fundraising back office needs.

2. Power of Community

Rather appropriately, PeopleGrove used their own platform to build a community for their partner customers. This was valuable both in dogfooding their own product and in surfacing best practices and learnings across institutions. In 2018, this culminated in the creation of an annual user summit: Innovators Summits. These offered incredible opportunities to cross-pollinate best practices and introduce new potential partners to the power of PeopleGrove. Customers from Stanford Graduate School of Business shared best practices on student and mentor engagement; those from the University of Maryland University College shared how PeopleGrove helped them scale 1:1 student support at one of the largest state institutions in the country.

3. Staying Close to Customers

One of the challenges to building a powerful, flexible platform is keeping up with divergent use cases and understanding how to prioritize across your product roadmap. PeopleGrove built advisory boards and kept in constant contact with their customers to understand how their product was being used and how to increase student and mentor engagement. They worked closely with power users to learn how they managed their programs and then incorporate best practices into product development.

For example, Wellesley had outstanding student and alumnae engagement and exceeded their goals at launch with PeopleGrove. So the team at PeopleGrove worked collaboratively to learn what worked and embedded these strategies into their partner success launch playbook. These led to important changes including improving PeopleGrove’s user onboarding flow, which doubled the rate of mentee outreach at registration.

The team’s focus on mission and customers has been key to PeopleGrove’s success. It has sparked nearly one million mentorship connections across PeopleGrove’s network of over 500 partner organizations. And these connections are changing trajectories: In user surveys, 46% of students say “Connecting with one or more community members opened doors for me and helped me find employment.”

We are incredibly proud to have been a part of the PeopleGrove journey to date. They’ve made great strides towards increasing access to opportunity through social capital. To accelerate its growth, PeopleGrove has attracted significant support from Riverside for its next chapter. Riverside has a history of helping mission-driven education companies grow to the next level, such as ModernCampus and n2y. We’re excited for this fresh backing and opportunity to further expand PeopleGrove’s reach and impact!

Democratizing Access to Social Capital: A Look Back on Our Journey with PeopleGrove was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Christine Hernandez, Content Specialist, Winnie

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust childcare and early education into the spotlight. When most industries shifted to operating remotely, the childcare industry remained open and in-person to care for and educate our youngest and most vulnerable. We saw first-hand how essential child care really is to so many families, and the importance of early education for children’s growth and development.

Innovation in the early childhood industry is overdue, and founders who are solving problems for today’s parents are in a unique position to drive change. At the 2022 ASU GSV Summit, Reach Capital Investment Associate Enzo Cavalie Guillen sat down with Sara Mauskopf (CEO of Winnie), Rod Morris (President of Lovevery), Chris Bennett (CEO of Wonderschool), and Eric Berger (CEO of Common Sense Networks) to discuss the issues parents and providers are facing in this new era of education.

Why is early childhood so underfunded? What stops investors from funding early childhood?

The panelists agreed that some investors without young children may be too far removed from the early childhood industry to feel the weight of the impact it has on working parents. It’s easy to dismiss childcare as a problem unique to parents,, but as we have seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, access to childcare is an economic issue that has huge implications, particularly for working mothers.

There is also the fact that the childcare and early education industry is staffed primarily of women, particularly women of color and it is work that has largely been invisible. As Mauskopf said, “we haven’t assigned a value to this work because we don’t value women’s labor.”

It can be hard for an investor to put themselves in the shoes of a childcare provider. But this is a $136 billion dollar market, and it’s been a huge missed opportunity for venture capitalists.

What are the challenges that new and existing providers are currently facing?

One common refrain throughout the panel was that early educators are not paid enough. The low wages — around $13 per hour — is a major contributing factor to the staffing crisis currently plaguing the industry. However, both Winnie and Wondershool may be positioned to help tackle this issue. “I’ve seen home-based child care programs be sort of an incubator for pretty significant growth within communities in solving the supply issues,” Bennett shared. Helping people start in-home childcare programs may be one of the ways to solve the staffing crisis while earning sustainable wages, and increase the supply of available childcare options for families.

With the rise of remote work, families have been leaving urban centers for the suburbs. Childcare programs have traditionally been clustered around workplaces, but providers will need to be innovative to meet families where they are. Additionally, parents are searching for care outside the traditional 9–5 working day and many providers do not operate during the evenings or weekends.

What is the role of technology in early childhood?

Berger, of Common Sense Media, spoke about ensuring that the time children spend on screens is quality time. Many media platforms, especially those with user-generated content are not always kid-friendly or appropriate, and their time could be better spent elsewhere.

Technology plays an important role in supporting families, but all panelists agreed that it is more suitable for parents than for children. Our earliest learners learn best in a play-based environment with other children. Mauskopf added, “The pandemic was just a huge testament to the power of this industry. It is truly essential. When everything else could move online, we could not move early education online. That had to continue happening in person.”

How are you adapting to meet the needs of Millennial parents, who often want to know and find the best of everything?

Today’s parents are overwhelmed. With so much information at their fingertips, it is often hard to find quality resources on caring for their children. “Some content just makes parents feel worse, increases their stress, and makes them feel judged,” Morris shared.

There was a common thread of “meeting families where they are.” That refers to everything from helping parents engage with their children at home, or pointing them in the direction of high-quality local childcare. At Winnie, we believe the way we can make an impact is through improving access to and affordability of child care and early education.

The Edge of Early Childhood Education was originally published in Reach Capital on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.