Ex-Uber executive launches company to help workers babysit their kids
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When I worked at Uber, it was obvious that too many of our employees had to quit to raise children. I started a childcare insurance company to solve this problem.
As a Partner Support Manager at Uber, she has witnessed the struggles of working parents.
She says her mission is to help companies stop losing workers who can't afford child care.
This is a narrated essay based on an interview with Siran Cao, co-founder of Mirza. It has been edited for length and clarity.
When I was eight, my family moved from Singapore to the United States—Pittsburgh, to be exact.
We set out to find better job opportunities for my father, a nuclear engineer.
Three years later, he left us.
Responsibility for our two-person household fell to my mother. She studied biochemistry in China, but her Chinese degree was not recognized in America.
So she started an evening retraining to become an accountant with a day job. And I became a turnkey guy.
I never even realized how little money we had because somehow I always had enough to pay for school lunch. My mother could do magic that way.
A few years later, I ended up at Harvard, specializing in gender studies. (By the way, my immigrant mother didn't like it.) I had a vision to work to improve the financial health of women. I thought about working in public policy or running a non-profit organization. I wanted to impress.
But life happens, plans change, and I finally opted for Uber. It was in 2015, a few years after the company launched in New York. I was tasked with building a network of drivers in the city.
My job was to onboard tens of thousands of drivers, quickly. I interviewed, hired, and hired the first hundred people on my team. I ended up leading a team of 200 people doing this job.
A critical part of my team was the frontline support staff. These were hourly workers who helped onboard new Uber drivers. Nearly 80% were women, many of whom were single mothers and women of color.
But, even at a well-funded tech company like Uber, I've been struck by how childcare has become a daily operational disruption.
Our ability to grow our driver offering depends on support staff. But, we often had employees who had to cancel a shift or couldn't take an extra shift because they didn't have adequate childcare.
Many of these women joined Uber hoping to ride its initial wave of hyper-growth, but not all of them were able to grow with the company. We have tried to schedule shifts around pick-up and return-to-school times to accommodate this.
Still, many feared the increase would mean the loss of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. Others would take out loans to pay for childcare. Some left the labor market because they couldn't make ends meet.
The growth of the company and the growth of its employees has been limited by the nursing department.
It was the "A-ha" moment for me when I realized we needed a technology-driven childcare solution. As an employer, I saw a clear incentive not to lose revenue by not hiring a driver.
As a person, I didn't want women to default on their loans or give up their jobs altogether.
Data shows that women who take annual vacations earn 39% less than women who don't.
I'm trying to change that with Mirza, a company I co-founded. It is a software platform for employer-sponsored childcare and caregiver insurance.
The platform aims to help frontline workers — baristas, nurses, teachers, retail workers — anyone for whom working isn't an option.
But our objective is twofold. First, we try to show frontline workers why staying in the workforce, even if there is an initial period of pain, will pay off in the long run.
Second, we help employers provide childcare subsidies to their employees and obtain tax credits.
Our platform calculates personalized childcare allowances based on the employee's income, location, and the specific financial needs of the employer.
For employees, we contextualize the value of this subsidy by comparing the cost of time spent out of the labor market with how the subsidy helps them stay on the job.
Third, we have partnered with childcare services that employees can use. We make payments for any existing childcare structure and also provide administrative work for tax efficiency.
Over the years, I have come to realize that nursing has long been considered worthwhile work. because it often falls on the shoulders of women.
Although women continue to do most of this work, I don't believe this is just a women's issue.
My mission is to bring real economic meaning, monetary value and dignity to the work of educating the next generation.
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