How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson

Care.com is the digital marketplace that connects caregiving professionals with people who need help with kids, seniors, pets, and more. It’s the market leader in an area where the need is constantly growing. Host Jeff Berman talks with CEO Brad Wilson about how companies can create more loyal employees by supporting caregiving, why the future of work needs to be flexible, how he’s leading through transformational technology change at the company, and more. Subscribe to the Masters of Scale weekly newsletter: https://mastersofscale.com/subscribe See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 2:06Speaker 02

  You know, at the end of the day, these people are here to serve and help your family and other families. And we want to make sure that they get the best and most fair pay. It may not be obvious, even for the people who are hiring the caregiver, you do have other care things in the home that you're already likely paying money for. Home care and housekeeping is one. Many people have pets, 70 million people have pets in this country. And so I can assure you, most of those caregivers would love to take some of those duties on because again, it prevents them from having to figure out the scheduling and the calendar Tetris of going to other locations and they can actually earn those wages in the home. So it's actually a way for families in most instances to keep the cost down.

• 2:45Jeff Berman?

  This is Masters of Scale. I'm Jeff Furman, your host. This week on the show, Brad Wilson. Brad is the CEO of Care.com. That's the digital marketplace that connects caregiving professionals with people who need help with kids, seniors, pets, and more. With more than 45 million people on the platform, it is the market leader in an area where the need is constantly growing. We talked with Brad about how companies can create more loyal employees by supporting caregiving, why the future of work needs to be flexible, how he's leading through transformational technology change at the company, and how some very difficult circumstances in his personal life have informed and inspired his commitment to CARE's profound mission.

• 3:36Jeff Berman?

  Brad, welcome to Masters of Scale.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Jeff.

• 3:39Jeff Berman?

  I'm thrilled to have you. I just want to start by acknowledging, on a personal note, I'm so sorry to learn that you lost your wife.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 3:48Jeff Berman?

  And I know that you stepped in to lead CARE when your wife was sick. And I'm just curious, kind of how that came to pass and how your personal and professional lives came together in that moment.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it was an interesting time. You know, we, this was back in 23, in January, when I first started talking about the role with I C and Barry and Joey and company. You know, I'd follow care.com for years. Marketplaces are only so many at scale. And, you know, for me, I'd done 25 years in consumer brands. And so I got a, I have a little bit of pattern recognition on, on what I think ticks. And it's a brand I always loved. And, you know, when I looked at it just professionally, I saw a great brand. I saw a clear market leader with the largest caregiver pool and supply, which is extremely important when you run these companies.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  And, you know, and we're still on this journey today. If we're being honest, it wasn't a great experience. And so when I took a look at things that I thought I could be good at and influence and help improve, this was, this was a great fit. It just so happened at the time too, as I was interviewing, we learned of my wife's diagnosis. And we started to go through it and care became a part of our story too, because I needed that help. And this is a deeply important mission for me personally. I'm living it today. I'm a single parent, I have three wonderful children. I have a great support system, which we all need as well. But I also go through what a lot of parents and communities go through today.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  And I'm trying to stitch together my own care community to make, make our family go and go to all the activities and events and make sure that we can show up for work and do great jobs and serve and be a part of our communities.

• 5:39Jeff Berman?

  A lot of people who are of our generation are very much in the sandwich generation moment. I'm just curious, as you look at the, the trends, both nationally and globally, how you think about the mission of care.com and the problems that you're solving and the scale at which they have to be solved?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  You know, we view our vision as number one, we want to help families find the care they need. Most families have four care occasions in the home. And, you know, whether that's senior care, pet care, child care, home care, even tutoring camps and activities, et cetera. So there's a lot that families are working to stitch together. The other thing is we really believe we have to be a leading advocate for families and caregivers. And, you know, there's a lot that families go through today to, to bring the cost of care down. But the reality is our caregivers aren't making enough either. So that's a very tricky equation. You know, just to give you a little bit of what families are facing, it's, it's a very overwhelming and stressful time. I mean, you know, work is more demanding than ever.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  You have most families, the cost of care, 20% of income goes out to childcare-related expenses. And if you're dealing with senior care and other care pieces, that escalates to about 40%. 90% of people report losing sleep, 89% report feeling burnt out, and they really, really want enterprise and/or some federal support for, by the way, of tax credits to help ease the burden of this cost of care. We enjoy about 700 corporate relationships today, and we're finding more and more that companies are coming to us because their employees need that support. Employers are happy to give it because they

• 7:27Speaker 02

  know that if that support is right, they find happier employees, they'll stay longer, they're much more loyal to the company. And so we enjoy both aspects of that equation.

• 7:37Jeff Berman?

  I'm just curious, as you look at your team, especially in the non-technical side, or even the technical side of the prioritization, how is the nature of work changing at Care with these new AI tools?

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd put it maybe in two, if not three buckets. So one is, I'll call it the mundane tasks. Not every engineer likes to debug their own code. So I think AI can do a lot of that for you today. We do get a lot of people call in because we don't always get it right. But all of a sudden now, sifting through the notes and the cases and actually looking through the experience to see what can be, what can we learn that can actually serve that customer better and fix that problem right away. It's not 100% AI, but that's, there's a lot of assistance that helps gather the information and even make a recommendation to the agent. But there's still a lot of research that has to happen behind the scenes at times. So we have this concierge platform as an example, where people

• 8:29Speaker 02

  will call in, and there's hundreds of use cases, but one of which may be How do I think about getting my aging loved one into a facility or an in-home caregiver? How do I pay for it? What happens in the first three weeks? And so we put together these tailored personalized plans. So research for those cases used to be very manual, very hourly intensive. And now a lot of our researchers and master's level social workers, they can rely on AI and reduce days into hours. So that's just one example.

• 8:59Jeff Berman?

  On the point of a two-sided marketplace, and in particular where you have a tension between serving both sides, right? You want to not only provide the highest quality caregiver and care for your family customers at the best price possible, but you want to get the care provider the best job at the best price possible. Right, there's a tension there. How do you balance that tension in particular in this kind of a two-sided marketplace?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I'll take you back two years ago. When I joined, a lot of the new management team joined. You know, you had a product, frankly, that was, it was quite tough when you measured it by any kind of marketplace metric. So I always think about conversions, so meaning what, how many people are actually willing to pay you? And a lot of time that comes through, did you match it? Match them to the right caregiver and home? And that rate, let's just call it, was far lower than you would typically see from marketplaces.

• 9:55Jeff Berman?

  And we were seeing that drop off at the match point? Or were you seeing it earlier in the process?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Well, it's a freemium product, so you're allowed to post for free. And we charge at the point of access to communication. And so, you know, most marketplaces, I always say, convert between 2% and 6%. We were south of the 2% number. The second thing is responsiveness in the messaging. And let's just say that that number was astonishingly low. And then that leads us to kind of a match rate, but all those metrics were substandard. And then to your point on the tension on the caregiver side, you know, when we got it right, they're happy, they're great, but the reality is we weren't getting right a lot. And the piece we really have to solve for, which is tricky is to your point is you gotta,

• 10:41Speaker 02

  you gotta keep the cost low for the family and you gotta get wages higher. And that's a very complex thing to solve. And you really can't do it fully without some, again, I think there needs to be subsidy from the government and/or and mostly enterprise. And that's where we've seen a lot of benefit because enterprise has come in and helped taking care of those costs for families. And some of the recent legislation to with the one big beautiful bill and 45 F have lifted the tax credits for companies and caregiving related expenses. I go back to, most families have four care occasions in the home. They all stitch together things from pet to housekeeping to seniors.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  And if you think about most caregivers and mine's a great example, they'd prefer to do as much as they can because it saves from the driving and going to different jobs, which therefore can lift the wages and the wellbeing and really what you can make in that particular household without having all the stress of going to multiple places. The enterprise side of the business and the consumer side were, and in part because both were scaling, they were a bit separate and federated. So I think what we've tried to do is really say, one brand, one team. We also want to create what we're calling this ubiquitous care platform. So the way we think about that is rather than having separate supply, serving the enterprise side and the consumer side, which it did.

• 12:06Jeff Berman?

  Oh, wow.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  We're now merging that supply and thinking about other forms of supply like locations. We want one common delivery tech platform, so we're not shipping eight different things. So we want that efficiency.

• 12:18Jeff Berman?

  Because it's complicated. You're selling into HR, you're selling into finance.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:21Jeff Berman?

  Not channels that generally have the budgets for the bigger spends.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:26Jeff Berman?

  So what's working for you there?

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so generally we make money three ways and serve our clients in three ways. One is backup care. So most companies will come in and say, hey, we want all of our employees to have 15 backup care days for when their primary care falls through. I can tell you, I've had a caregiver, a lovely caregiver, she's needed three days off in the past month and we all need it. So it's a great benefit for employees and for those companies. And they do find it as a vessel for, I call it wellbeing, because people are more loyal and they're just, they had the stress relieved of knowing I have a safety net here. So backup care is one way. The other way is through our care concierge. So this is a service where we have master's level social workers.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  And we get people calling in from everything from, I just need parental guidance. How do I think about getting my, my father into a senior assisted living facility? Legal guidance, uh, there's a whole gamut of things. And then the third way is our digital membership. And so you mentioned small businesses as an example. Not every company can, can afford a backup care program. So perhaps we can just give them the digital membership at a reduced or wholesale rate and help them find that caregiver.

• 13:42Jeff Berman?

  And are the enterprise customers, I mean, I have to imagine that they on some level can understand that if their team members have better support for the care that they need to provide or they need help providing, they're going to be better team members. They're going to be more engaged.

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Better team members. I mean, we have a lot of data that they're more loyal, they'll stay longer. And in fact, when they, when they don't have the benefit, uh, our future benefits report, uh, we see that there's often a very high burnout factor and there's a little bit of disdain for the company they're working for.

• 14:15Jeff Berman?

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• 16:02Jeff Berman?

  25-ish years in consumer, largely in tech, largely in marketplaces. What drew you to the space to begin with?

• 16:11Speaker 02

  Business school in, gosh, 99, 2001. Now we're really dating ourselves. And it just so happened this thing called the internet was burgeoning. And I was, I was just super interested in the technology. And, you know, I was in Dallas, Texas. I graduated from the Cox School of Business at SMU. And everyone was doing oil and gas or going to their investment banking jobs. And I just said, yeah, I'm very interested in that. I want to, want to get into that. And lo and behold, I got, I was lucky enough to get into Match.com, which was an IC company at the time in Dallas, Texas. And so you very quickly learn internet economics. I mean, at the time to, you know, you learn consumer behavior very fast. Unlike we'd ever learned it before.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  I was very fortunate to, to learn and study from great leaders. And so at the time, you know, we had Tim Sullivan, our CEO, I felt was a great leader. Over time, I got, got to Expedia and, you know, was fairly close to the Darhkha's of Shahi. I really worked under Aman Bhutani, who was just a fabulous CEO at GoDaddy. And then ultimately through, through HBO Max and Warner Media, Jason Kyler and 84 Cell, just incredible men and leaders. But at the end of the day, you know, I always, this is what I tell our team is, You have to deliver delight, something I took away from all those leaders. Deliver delight, constantly innovate what should drive direct to your products and brands.

• 17:32Jeff Berman?

  Yeah, you mentioned Jason Kyler. I don't know if he coined the term. I always give him credit for it because he's the first person I heard it from, which is this term automatically. Where like it feels like magic and it's just happening in the background and it delights you.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  I've heard him say that.

• 17:47Jeff Berman?

  Yeah, back in the Hulu days. That's where I heard him say it. What lessons did you learn from that era that you're applying to an era where? Google is really being meaningfully displaced by. By AI search effectively or agentic searches. It feels like what's coming. How are you preparing for that future, given what you learned in that time?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Everyone in our company, we're measured on delight, literally. I mean, it is. We try to drive it through the organization. We're not perfect. We're far from where we need to be. But we want to build experiences where people know us, they can trust us, and they're going to come to us directly. But I think first and foremost is how we go to market. And for care.com in the past, it was a lot of the old traditional ways is you would put some things on TV. You would play in the Google space. But with AI being, having a huge disruptive effect in search. We're really trying to make sure that we are playing and meeting audiences where they're at. Publishing a lot of authoritative, educational and entertaining content.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Whether it's distributed through social media and or through our own influencers in the company. Or through anyone else who might find that content interesting, pardon. And that's, that's the way the game's got to be played now. Everything is so fragmented. Second part of that is we reshaped our brand. We got a fantastic brand leader, May Ling Tan, who reshaped our brand. We really want to go to market that speak to care beyond childcare. And care holistically is an emotional ally for our families and our caregivers. But I would just say we've completely revamped go to market. I think the second thing is. We have to make sure the product is really delivering and works. And in fact, we want to build AI in the product.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And then the, um, the last thing I would, I would say is if you think about care on the consumer side, where it was for 18 years, really, it was a mostly, it's a transaction experience failed in subscription. And why do you need a subscription after you find, find your match?

• 19:58Jeff Berman?

  Right.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  And so we, we've really thought about how do we make these products really work within the lifestyle of what we're trying to do? Again, we want to match first, then we want to be a part of the entire journey. And the way we think about that is before, during and after the hire. And then we want to build a kind of an always on platform, which that's a couple of years out. I'll save that for, for, for a later conversation and it's really hard. But if we get it right, we're going to do a lot of good in the world. And so that's, that's the fun part of about what we're doing every day. And, and I'm very privileged. We have an incredible team.

• 20:30Jeff Berman?

  When you take a new role and particularly take a role leading organ, an organization as a GM, as a CEO, you know, you, you kind of think you know what you're getting into. And then you get in there and it's a covered dish and you take that top off and you're like, why is there cilantro in here? Like this makes no sense.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:45Jeff Berman?

  What, what surprised you coming into the role?

• 20:47Speaker 02

  The sales cycle is a bit longer than I anticipated. And, and you know, I, I knew it was long, but I figured it'd be that's six to 12 months. But what ends up happening is 12, sometimes it becomes 18, becomes 24, particularly now because one of the challenge we're seeing in our country and many companies is rising healthcare and dental costs. And so when that happens, care benefits become, you know, we're kind of a one B benefit today. And because they have to meet, meet the needs of those rising costs in companies, sometimes we get just pushed maybe another half year to a year. So that those sales cycles have been a little bit more challenging.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  And then the second thing is, is, and I'm super proud of the team for working through this, but when I joined and the, the number one thing I always talk about in the company is you gotta have a great brand, which means you have to deliver to your customers. And in our case, both sides of the marketplace, but you have to have speed. And I mean, Dara and Aman at Expedia did this better than anybody ever saw. And but to have speed, you really have to have the testing apparatuses in place. You have to very clear mandate on what you're going after. You have to have total transparency in the culture and you really have to give people permission to break things and move fast. I knew we were slow. We were, we were, we're still catching up to par, I would say.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  And the reason for that was the backend infrastructure, this probably not uncommon from a lot of these, these technology stories. We just had very outdated code. It was very federated. We made the very hard decision early on. And I said, we're, we're gonna, we're gonna pull it all together. We're gonna go through the, what I'm calling the infrastructure error. It's gonna be 18 months to 24 months of really hard work. We basically took everything commoditized in the backend from authentication, where you recognize users where they are in the experience and you could provide feature benefits to the package they're in, messaging, payments, the entire backend, trust and safety systems completely replaced it. And now we're moving into that true transformation era where we can do fast twitch, retailing,

• 22:54Speaker 02

  merchandising and testing. And so we're kind of just now embarking upon that. But I would say that was a little more complex than I originally anticipated.

• 23:03Jeff Berman?

  And did paying off and down that technical debt limit your ability to launch new features?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Oh, certainly, sure.

• 23:10Jeff Berman?

  And so, yeah, I mean, that's gotta be, people wanna build, people wanna do cool things. Like, how did you keep the team motivated and focused around driving toward that to get to a place where you could launch the new things?

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I did. It's a fantastic question, because, you know, we, we, we do spend a lot of time thinking about culture and how do you motivate people? And we want, we want this to be a really great place to work and people equally excited about the mission as, as, as we all are. And I think, I think what worked for us was a couple of things. One is, we're just constantly in front of our teams, whether it's town halls, bi-weekly standups and our weekly operational meetings. It was not unclear what we were marching towards and the vision that we were painting for the future. And so I think that was really motivating and enticing. The other thing I would say is kind of mid turn of where we were in this first period, we did take a very bold swing on a new go to market. And, uh, you know, so we, we kind of unchiseled that subscription.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  We had an access pricing. I will tell you, it didn't work particularly well, but I, but I found that it was a very hard thing and a big thing for the company to do, which motivated the, the engineers and product people and technical people in ways that, that probably hadn't been done in quite some time. And even in the last six months, I always tell people this company's had more innovation in the past six to nine months than the prior 18 years combined. And so I think you have to give people these big challenges and big problems to solve together. And I think people have been invited in on the mission, maybe in ways that they hadn't before.

• 24:40Jeff Berman?

  Yeah. And sometimes it's paradoxical that it may seem you have to slow down to be able to go fast.

• 24:44Speaker 02

  We, we, we had to. I mean, almost every answer I got when I came in on, well, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we doing this? Well, the tech is outdated. The tech is outdated. So we, we made the right decision. Uh, we're, we're not fully through it. I don't think you're ever done, but you know, what's promising is now you're in this world where we're all reading about the same things from vibe coding and generative AI. There's the promise of that, yeah, it'll eradicate this in short period and actually believe it will. I think we're going to work our way out of it over the next year.

• 25:12Jeff Berman?

  One of the things you inherited coming to the company was, uh, an FTC investigation that you all settled. I know it happened before you came in and settlement happened on your watch. Could you just frame up what, what happened there and how you led through that?

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Yes. And I'll, I will state very plainly, stand on my head. In fact, the, the FTC attorneys got to know me quite well. I, I violently disagree with, with what they acclaimed. And, um, I will, I will acknowledge one thing, you know, that the FTC, particularly under Lina Khan, I, I think it was a good thing that we should all want to remove what they called dark patterns on the web where people are being forced or coerced to click down a path, maybe to buy something that they didn't want to buy, or it's really hard to cancel. And so one of the three things that the FTC asserted was our site being a subscription or membership service is hard to cancel. Guess what? I agreed with them.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  And before they, that, that claim was even there, we already started to change it. It did change it to the point where they actually said, you guys are far better than, than everyone else. So we were already down that path. We were going to fix it. You know, the other, the other things they asserted were we, our jobs are truly jobs. And so there was language on the site that essentially called them job posts. They wanted us to, to change the language around that. There was another piece where they challenged that the rate that caregivers were making were maybe not fully an accurate depiction of that rate. We don't know how they could have claimed that because that was actual real data that we would get off our transactions on the site.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  And of course, there are people who take those jobs off platform and negotiate their own, own rates and deals. So, you know, for us, we just felt with all that we had to undertake, as I mentioned earlier, it was better, better to settle and, and move on. And probably against my, my better wishes and people swayed me that that was the right path and, and it was the right path. We, we worked at the outside council. It was probably more time, time investment for me than anyone else, but you know, we really tried to keep people focused on the mission of what we were trying to build.

• 27:23Jeff Berman?

  Speaking of mission, you're involved with the World Economic Forum and the future of care globally. How did that come to pass and what's, what's the mission there?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so I was, I was invited on very graciously by the World Economic Forum and I was reluctant to join this forum. And in large part because anytime I, I, I see these caucuses, I worry about a lot of talk, no action. And, you know, it's, it's, it's been a good, healthy start to the dialogue. I think we're bringing a number of different perspectives and solutions to the table. My role inside of that is I'm one of the few, if maybe even only, commercial heads that actually run a business. So.

• 28:04Jeff Berman?

  Because everyone else is philosopher?

• 28:07Speaker 02

  Well, researchers or, you know, maybe, maybe well-studied or professors. And so, you know, I think for me that what's attractive of having me aboard is, you know, we, we see a lot. We have a lot of data, so we can support, especially when we're across 16 countries as well in Europe. And so we can support a lot of data they need to help enhance the dialogue around not too dissimilar from what we talk about when we think about solutions. For us, I think there has to be a technology player or players that can help simplify this for caregivers and families. There has to be a policy effectuation that helps subsidize care for families and enterprise must play a role.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  And so for them to understand and see the data on why it's compelling and important and actually how hard it is to get the match effectiveness and get people the proper care they need, that's the role we play inside of WEF.

• 29:01Jeff Berman?

  And just focusing in on the US where we seem hopelessly gridlocked on almost everything. We can't even agree like is the sky blue or not today.

• 29:13Jeff Berman?

  The need for quality care across the four vectors that you mentioned. It doesn't matter if you are far left, far right, somewhere in the middle or completely off the spectrum on this.

• 29:27Jeff Berman?

  Most, I spent four years on Capitol Hill. Most people who work with companies who might engage with Capitol Hill will tell you basically stay away until you absolutely have to.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:39Jeff Berman?

  But it does seem like there's a real opportunity for care to play a significant role at both the federal and state level in making care more accessible, more affordable, higher quality. Is that part of the strategy here to proactively engage government and try to make things better for both sides of your marketplace?

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, we want to really advance that agenda at the federal level. We're also, we're also going to take a look at the state level too. And we haven't fully attacked that piece just yet, but you know, we, one of the big things I think when we think about this is if you think about how the federal governments approach this is they view accessibility and quality only in the form of a center. And a center is something that they could, they can wrap their brain around as I can go check that location. I can validate that they have the right teacher to student ratio. I can validate that it's clean, the safety measures are right. But the reality is more than 50% of the country lives in these childcare deserts.

• 30:39Jeff Berman?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  And there's not enough childcare in the region, even if it's a dense densely populated area, or there's just nothing by way of the rural population you have to have in-home caregivers as an apparatus to really solve this problem. So that's where we come in. We're seven, eight, nine times larger, depending on the week, than any other next provider.

• 30:58Jeff Berman?

  Yeah. Is there, is there anything happening at the state level that is potentially a model for other states or for, for federal where there's been a real, real innovation in regulation or legislation?

• 31:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I mean, if New Mexico, I don't know if you've, you've read, they've, they've got, you know, universal childcare. Of course, we're all waiting to see what, what Mr. Mumdani does, does in New York here. But, you know, what I would say is like, there's no one single solution here. It's, it is such a challenge for families. So when we, when we see things like universal childcare, it's really an acknowledgement for us that yes, this has to be a bit of infrastructure and education. And, you know, it's going to take a lot of different solutions and technology does have to play a part of that. And I think the thing that we're most optimistic about is enterprise and companies truly value it as well. So we're not just relying on government. We do have enterprise players that want to

• 31:50Speaker 02

  play a part and make sure that their employees, which have families of all kinds, also have benefit equity.

• 31:56Jeff Berman?

  Brett, from, from the data that you have, both qualitative and quantitative, what's sort of a non-obvious piece of advice for a family who's hiring a caregiver, is engaged a caregiver to create the best relationship and the best experience there possible?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, I can give you my personal experience too.

• 32:13Jeff Berman?

  Great.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  A few of them. So, so first off, they're looking for consistency. That, that's sort of one, it may be obvious, but I, I'm often shocked by the stories I hear around sort of discrepancy in pay, and it's usually around the consistency of hours. Which leads me to then say, make sure there's a bit of, even if informal, contracting upfront around what that looks like. Because, you know, I went through it myself. I had to learn a couple of times too, where I thought it was understood what was needed by way of, say, hours and/or do they get paid for driving or do they not? Do they get paid for mileage? And so, you know, at the end of the day, these people are here to serve and help your family and other families. And we want to make sure that they get the best and most fair pay.

• 32:57Jeff Berman?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a really interesting relationship, right? Because it's one of the more intimate employer employee relationships you'll ever have. Maybe the most they're in your home. If you're lucky enough to be able to afford that kind of help. They're in your kids' lives, they're in your lives. They know intimate details of your life. You may know intimate details of theirs, but it's still a business relationship.

• 33:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 33:19Jeff Berman?

  And so is there, is there counsel on, on how to set those healthy boundaries in, in those dynamics beyond getting, getting things contracted upfront?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's, it is truly unique is what I see and what I find. I mean, the other thing I would say too, is I go back to the stat I shared earlier that it may not be obvious, even for the people who are hiring the caregiver, you do have other care things in the home that you're already likely paying money for. And so, home care and housekeeping is one. Many people have pets, 70 million people have pets in this country. And so, I can assure you, most of those caregivers would love to take some of those duties on. Because again, it, it prevents them from having to figure out the scheduling and the calendar Tetris of going to other locations. And they can actually earn those wages in the home. So it's, it's actually a way for families in most instances to keep the cost down. If you, if you consider the aggregate of the other care services,

• 34:14Speaker 02

  while also making sure the caregiver is appropriately paid.

• 34:16Jeff Berman?

  Right, it's a way, it's a way to actually spend less as a family while the caregiver can make more and have a more simple schedule and life.

• 34:23Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 34:23Jeff Berman?

  That's a great note. I love that. Brad, such a pleasure. Thanks for being here.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, I appreciate it.

• 34:28Jeff Berman?

  Thanks again to Brad Wilson for joining us. As our needs for caregiving continue to grow, it is essential to have compassionate leaders like Brad tackling this incredibly important issue. I'm so grateful he's taken on this challenge and I'm so eager to see what Care.com does next. I'm Jeff Berman. Thank you for listening.

• 34:49Jeff Berman?

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• 35:30Jeff Berman?

  Before we get to the rest of our conversation today, I want to spend a moment sharing with you about Masters of Scale Summit, which returns to San Francisco this October 20th to 22nd. So many of us feel overwhelmed right now. It feels like so much of the world is careening, and we don't have power. We don't have agency. That's the thing about the Masters of Scale Summit. It's really designed to remind us that we do have agency, agency to lead, agency to design, to build the relationships and the partnerships that empower us and to make the change that we want to see. We program a stage, we curate an audience, we set a schedule that builds in time for these relationships to be made and to grow so that by the time you leave summit,

• 36:15Jeff Berman?

  you are fired out of a cannon, ready to run through walls to do better in the world with the agency that you actually have. I hope to see you there. Visit mastersofscale.com/summit.

• 36:33Speaker 03

  Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  There's going to be two types of companies. Those are great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  How do we build a future that is human-centered?

• 36:46Speaker 06

  I'm Rana Elkhayubi. And on my podcast, Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future, and we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find Pioneers of AI wherever you tune in.

• 37:16Jeff Berman?

  Masters of Scale is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Senior supervising producer is Tricia Bobita. Associate producer is Masha Makatzenina. Video editor is Noah Walstein. Senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by the audio boys, Aaron Bastinelli and Brian Pugh. Original music by the legendary Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Lee Tal Malad. Visit mastersofscale.com to find the transcript for this episode and to subscribe to our newsletter and be sure to check out our YouTube channel.

• 38:11Speaker 07

  Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely, from Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from the devil wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find. Just search Rapid Response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.