Meet Patrick Matos, a co-founder of D.C. startup CareLuLu, which helps parents find a daycare or preschool that fits their family's needs. The idea for CareLuLu emerged after Patrick and his wife struggled to find a child care center for their daughters May and Eva, who are 2 and 4 years old respectively. What they expected was much easier than what they found: massive directories with no help or ratings system at all for a $47 billion childcare industry. Patrick and his wife Evgeniya decided to start a company that collects all the data parents need and verifies that child care providers are licensed. Instead of spending hours on the phone or searching the web, parents can now do a personalized daycare search and find all the information in one place, including photos, cost, and verified parent reviews.
Here's how Patrick works:
Morning
I don’t set an alarm to wake up. No, it’s not because I’m “my own boss” and can set my own schedule (one of the fallacies of entrepreneurship.) It’s just because I have a 2 year-old and a 4 year-old who make sure I wake up at 6am, or 7am when I’m lucky (yes, even on weekends!) Just like you’d expect from any parent with young kids, mornings are usually rushed and routines involve a bit of “Come on girls, time to get dressed”, some “Come brush your teeth!”, and a lot of “We’re late… let’s go, go, go!!!”
After I drop off my daughters at their child care center and preschool, I go to work. My startup CareLuLu is a member at 1776 in DC, but I live in Centreville, VA (impossible to afford a place in DC with kids and a Great Dane!) That means the commute is horrible so I only go 2-3 days a week to DC, and work from my home-office the rest of the time. Working from home saves me 2-4 hours (yes, traffic is that bad) so I can take a bit of extra time to walk my dog Junon, a.k.a. “The Beast”! Don’t ask about her nickname… too long of a story to get into ;)
Day
A typical workday starts around 8am, after I down a huge cup of coffee (yes, I have one of those huge cups that says “#1 Dad” and I love it!) I check emails, work on product development with my team, and usually have at least one meeting with potential partners or customers. We’re a team of four: two here in Washington DC (my wife/co-founder Evgeniya Usmanova, and myself), and two in Brazil (my co-founder CTO Gabriel Marques, and Igor Barroso, developer.) With our distributed team, we work via Google chat & hangout. Time difference is just 1 hour so it works well and allows us to work from home and save precious cash in the early days of our company.
At CareLuLu, we keep things simple: we don’t have a fancy office, don’t take ourselves too seriously, and we like to have fun. We’re a multicultural team (Brazil, France-Portugal, Tajikistan-Russia) so we often joke about the clichés of our home countries (soccer and Caipirinhas in Brazil, wine and stinky cheese in France, vodka in Russia!) Often though, we do fulfill those clichés and share drinks via Google hangout (like recently, when we found out CareLuLu was a finalist at the Women 2.0 startup pitch competition.)
Despite the relaxed environment, we work hard, as you may expect of a startup that launched less than 3 months ago. Gabriel recently gave up a position at an investment bank and both my wife and I quit our corporate jobs to start CareLuLu. As parents of young children with all their eggs in one basket, I like to quote Eminem (and Mark Suster, here): “Success is my only motherfucking option, failure’s not.”
Evening
On a typical day, if there’s no night meeting/event, my wife and I pick up our daughters from daycare around 6pm. We usually don’t have time to cook home-made meals (though it does happen) but we have dinner as a family. We then have our evening routine: bath time, story time, and bed time, which helps us take a little break. Not for long though: my wife and I resume work after the kids go to sleep around 9pm. My wife is my co-founder and together we eat, breath, and dream CareLuLu. While being married co-founders has its challenges, it’s probably easier than having to explain why you work till 2am every day if your spouse has a 9-5 job (not to mention that you’ll never find someone you can trust and rely on more than your spouse.)
Since our startup is in the family/parenting space, being spouse co-founders gives us an edge: not only do we understand our customers (we *are* our customers), but it also gives us credibility. Who would believe you’re a child care expert if you didn’t have kids?! Our users and customers can also relate to our personal story, which is helpful (helps with the press too!) On the rare nights that we do take off, we like to watch TV shows (Breaking Bad & The Walking Dead, anyone?) and have our own little wine & cheese party. Except that my wife prefers beer. I’m French, so I stick with the (stinky) cheese. Oh well, I guess there’s some truth in those clichés!
Know someone with a peculiar or interesting work life? Feel free to recommend them (or yourself, if it's you) to be featured in a future "How I Work."
