Dear Rachel,
You’re 25 years old and stuck in an underground reading room in Oxford, finishing your doctoral thesis on Ecuadorian politics. You can’t quite remember why you chose that topic, and you have no desire to keep working on it after you graduate. Meanwhile it’s sunny outside and the world seems to be passing you by.
You’re nervous about the future after you graduate. You’ve got a good job lined up as a management consultant at McKinsey, but you’re unexpectedly single while everyone around you is leaving university coupled up. You find yourself procrastinating by Googling infertility stats and figuring out how many years you have left to have the family you dream of.
In fact, you’re about to meet your future husband – although neither of you will realise it for many years. For the next few years, you’ll appear very career focused and will travel the world, working long hours. Later, you’ll become the CEO of a healthcare company, where you’ll learn how to build teams, how to develop software, and how to scale up operations.
Then you have your first baby (at 35) and everything will change. All of your friends are having babies too and you’ll notice how hard it is for everyone to find reliable childcare, how expensive it is, and how many of your friends will be paying for the privilege of continuing their careers. Friends that work shifts or freelance say it’s virtually impossible to find childcare that works for them. Everyone’s childcare seems to be patched together and fragile to some degree, one phone call away from disaster if the mother-in-law is ill or the nanny is late or the toddler starts vomiting. The burden always seems to fall on the family (usually the mum) to figure it all out.
You’ll contrast this with what you know of healthcare services that feel seamless to patients even though there are lots of other people involved. You’ll think, there must be a better way. Lots of better ways. You’ll come up with ideas for how technology can help bring down the cost of nannies by sharing them between families, and how a much better after-school service could work for school-aged kids.
You won’t be able to get these ideas out of your head. You’ll spend several long drives on holiday talking about them with your husband. Gradually, you’ll realise that you’re more passionate about this than your current job. You’ll look around and try to find other companies, teams and investors who are using technology to build better childcare services, but come up empty-handed. You need to do it yourself. It’s a long way from Ecuadorian politics, but you’ve found your life’s work.
Your husband will come in from a run one day, his eyes shining, and tell you he’s had a great idea. Your new business should be called Koru Kids. In Maori koru means loop, and the spiral shape is based on an unfurling fern. It will constantly be misspelled, and your first employee will register you with HMRC as Korea Kids after an autocorrect fail, but you’ll love the name anyway.
You’ll raise investment from people who believe in you, and you’ll work harder than you ever have before to prove them right. (Yes, harder than during your doctoral research. You’ll find it funny that you thought that was hard work, by the way. Sorry.) Amazingly, you’ll actually enjoy this experience – even though not everyone bought into your idea. But the investors you do find back you really early in the journey, before you have a team; before you barely have a product. You’ll have 1,000 families in London sign up before you even launch, and grow to almost 3,000 very quickly. You now run a team of six, plus five summer interns and your office is bursting at the seams.
You’ll be challenged every day by the insane growth targets you’ve set yourself. But do stop sometimes to celebrate your successes. There will be days when you think you cannot give any more and then you will see your daughter or your husband and find reserves of strength. You’ll be eternally glad you didn’t rush into anything in your 20s before you had their support.
Oh, and you probably won’t go back to Ecuador. You should’ve studied computer science. And bought Apple shares.
Rachel
Rachel Carrell is the founder of Koru Kids.
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