Introducing Groundwork

Today we launch Groundwork, a service connecting moms, dads and other talented candidates with part-time, interim and project-based roles at ambitious companies. I started this work two years ago as a research project, with the goal to understand: why is it so hard to simultaneously mother¹ and work in the US and what can we do to fix it? One year in, the research turned into an experiment: could I start placing candidates into part-time roles? Unequivocally, yes. The demand is there on both sides. That’s been miraculous. 

Now, one more year later, we’re launching Groundwork as a formal business. Our goal is to meaningfully accelerate the momentum we’ve seen to date: nearly 1,500 candidates, 22 placements, and hundreds of conversations on both sides of the market. Two important phenomena underpin today’s launch: 

For Candidates:

For Employers:

For Subscribers to the Groundwork Newsletter:

Observations on women, family and work, through the lens of history, culture and optimism.

Our mission is to rebuild how we work and that takes big, collective action. We’re excited to do this work alongside you.

Today, three out of four US workers are caregivers,³ raising children, supporting aging parents, or both. Caregiving inherently requires time, yet our labor market is oriented almost exclusively around uninterrupted, full-time availability. And herein, the rub: a pervasive disconnect between how families live at home and how individuals are expected to earn money.  

This disconnect means caregivers, most often women, at the peak of their earning and creative potential, are leaving the workforce in droves.⁴ Often, this is not because they want to, but because there’s no middle ground, exacerbated by the cost of childcare outpacing overall inflation, making work ironically cost-prohibitive.⁵ If your childcare costs $25k annually, and you make $100k pre-tax, the math gets gnarly fast, even before accounting for the value of that time spent with your kid yourself.

Stepping out of the workforce carries both short and long-term risk. For the first time ever, we’re seeing two consecutive years of the gender wage gap widening - women now make 81 cents on the dollar versus men (the previous rate was 84 cents). Economist Claudia Goldin’s research shows that women’s earning trajectories, which closely mirror men’s early in their careers, begin to diverge sharply with the arrival of children: wage growth slows, career momentum stalls, and full parity is rarely regained, even after children are older.⁶ Couple this with women outpacing men in college attendance by 20%,⁷ and we’re left with a perplexing, self-defeating system of economic waste and dysfunction. We can do better. 

For employers, replacing a departed manager or executive costs, on average, 2x their salary.⁸ Companies are paying that premium to backfill roles vacated by talented people who simply couldn't find a workable middle ground.

The market, however, is shifting. AI is enabling companies to operate leaner. Fundraising has tightened. Hiring is more deliberate. The result will be an increasing appetite for high-impact, part-time people - those who are functional experts and can operate on an hourly, retainer or project basis. This, versus an army of full-time talent, starts to look really appealing in 2026. And it feels like for the first time, what caregivers need and what employers need is genuinely aligned.

When I was a teenager, I saw my mom go through a really hard time. Part of her struggle was yearning for a career she’d given up decades before, that now could have provided stability in a difficult period. She implored me to always keep working, no matter what, which became an invaluable fixed point as I navigated the next two decades. I was, of course, besotted with my son Hank as soon as he arrived, and I found myself asking a lot of new questions. Among them were, “What should I work on that will let me keep a twinkle in my eye?” and “What should I work on that will make Hank proud of me?” By that point, I was already obsessed with the problem at the root of Groundwork, and from there, the die was largely cast: I decided to research this question and figure out what we could do to make it easier to work, parent and be joyful. 

While I was in the midst of this research, a friend referred me to an off-market, part-time Head of Marketing role at a Seed-stage company. As I engaged in hundreds of research interviews and conversations with women, trying to understand the caregiver-work tension, I repeatedly got the question: "Well how did you get that part-time Head of Marketing job? That's the exact type of thing I want right now." That's when the bones of Groundwork started to take shape.

The only way to achieve balance is through control of your time. For our purposes, that means dictating when and where you do paid work, so it aligns with the realities of caregiving. Today, that kind of control is typically accessible through exceptional managers, or unusually flexible and accommodating roles. But there are very few repeatable, reliable formulas for finding those roles, especially if you want to stay in the industry you’ve already built a career in. 

Many caregivers attempt to carve out their own in-between. While this can offer control, the burden sits entirely on the individual to figure it out: to stay within your same industry and freelance (and then how to source and price engagements), or to pivot into something entirely new but potentially more flexible. 

Groundwork is a talent service designed to support caregivers as they access a new type of work. Specifically, support means sourcing opportunities, tailored introductions to employers, positioning and negotiation support and ongoing resources to think about all of this. These services are free for candidates.

Importantly, we’re ready to launch today because of the value candidates have delivered to employers in our placements to date. Employers are blown away by the caliber of talent, dedication and rigor these candidates bring to their teams. In turn, they have told their investors and founder friends and a very healthy referral cycle has started to take shape. The signal is unequivocally encouraging.

Life can be both satisfying and depleting, frantic and boring, busy and lonely, nurturing and exhausting. It seems as if the paradoxical nature of these dimensions hits a fever pitch sometime after having kids. We want to be there, and we want to be ourselves. We have a deep awareness that we need to make this phase last, and there’s that persnickety human inability to lasso time. We oscillate between the extremes as we navigate each new phase, finding our footing, stabilizing, losing our balance, repeat. 

75% of our workforce are caregivers. It seems worthwhile to build configurations that help our majority do their best work. A broad-reaching alternative to the all-in / all-out binary is a valuable option that can make the day-to-day extremes feel a bit less strenuous, and in turn, make it all a bit more joyful. 

We need to rebuild how we work, and we can do just that, together.