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 make it easier? One year in, the research turned into an experiment: if one of the most common issues holding moms back from finding more flexible part-time roles is the slog of ongoing networking and business development… could I do that work on their behalf? Could I effectively place them into great roles at great companies, with more schedule flexibility? It turned out, yes, because both candidate quality and employer demand are there. That’s been miraculous to see. 

Now, one more year later, we’re launching Groundwork as a formal organization. Our goal is to meaningfully accelerate the momentum we’ve seen to date: nearly 1,500 candidates, 22 matches with great roles at cool companies, and hundreds of conversations with people who have helped us iterate on the ins and outs of this idea. Two important phenomena underpin today’s launch: 

Our observations and thinking on women, family and work, through the lens of history, culture and optimism.

I want to take a step back and explain why, from a societal perspective, I’m obsessed with this problem. 

Today, three out of four US workers are caregivers, raising children, supporting aging parents, or both.³ 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). Nobel Prize winning 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. 

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 it was yearning for a career she’d given up decades before, which could have offered stability as the ground was shifting beneath her. She implored me to always keep working, which became an invaluable fixed point (not to mention, economic necessity) as I navigated the next two decades. When I became a mom, I was, of course, instantly enamored with my son Hank. And like many of us, 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. 

It started to crystallize that the only way to achieve sustainable balance is through control of your time. For our purposes, that means dictating when and where you do paid work, to align with the realities of caregiving. Today, that kind of control is typically accessible through exceptional managers, or unusually 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. 

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 job? That's the exact type of thing I want right now." That's when the bones of Groundwork started to take shape.

Groundwork is built to give candidates the support and resources to confidently pursue a new type of work: leveraging their functional expertise on a part-time, interim or project basis, to further the mission of forward-leaning companies who recognize that having an expert on the team is having an expert on the team, regardless of how many hours/week they’re there. 

And importantly, we’re ready to launch today because of the value candidates have delivered to employers in our placements to date. The signal is really 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.