"Should I have kids or focus on my career?"
That was the question Kari Clark, founder of Uplift, faced as she advanced professionally.
She had to consider the implication of the answer dead-on at the time of her first pregnancy, when she was working as a product manager at Google’s New York City office. When she gave birth to her daughter, Chloe, in 2013, Clark realized that she needed to make sure she had an enriching, challenging career if working meant leaving her daughter for eight hours every day.
Transferring to product management was the answer for Clark, where she felt she received the stimulation she craved.
"Working moms feel isolated, so we’ve set those on the program with a small cohort of other moms who are in similar stages."
“For me, kids brought clarity, and my priorities were shifted,” Clark said. “I became much better at my job.”
And that wasn't all. With each new child, she also adopted new life habits. The birth of her first baby helped her adopt meditation and gratitude practices, while the second caused her to declutter her house and lose 45 pounds.
She realized she wasn't the only mother facing the same results, considering the stories she heard mentoring other women professionals during her eight years at Google and beyond. They too were who pondering how to balance the same concepts of motherhood and career.
Clark added more empirical evidence to her suspicions by interviewing top-level women executives, like the CTO of Nest and the CMO of Hulu. Their perspectives echoed her own, in that they all said they got better at their jobs when they became parents. From there, she gleaned that there were plenty of different ways to approach parenting.
It was the lightbulb moment that inspired her next venture: Uplift, a coaching platform that helps working moms thrive.
With Uplift, she hopes the coaching platform will help make being a working mom easier. While the platform has yet to be released to the public, there is an "alpha class" who are going through the inaugural run.
The program has three specific parts. The first is a coaching relationship that could function digitally or over the phone. An assigned coach works with a particular woman, providing daily reflection questions and a short check-in, with the focus on proper mindset and developing good habits.
The second part of the program is more content-oriented. Clark said it's focused around different issues the specific participant is having, from creating boundaries to learning how to say no.
"The content piece is designed to fit into different parts of your day, and move along key parts of the program."
The third pillar of the program focuses on community.
"Working moms feel isolated, so we’ve set those on the program with a small cohort of other moms who are in similar stages," Clark said. "This group will support you in a variety of ways."
The beta edition will kick off in a couple of weeks. Long term, Clark said she's looking at a more scaled version across the company, possibly selling into companies as an incentive package for top performers, or a benefit in general.
"One thing I’d love to figure out is, how can we take a data-driven approach to building the platform?" She said. "What kind of data can we mine out of these daily check-ins?"
In addition to the forthcoming coaching program, Clark has set up a weekday email list designed to be read under a minute, focused on topics to help make life easier for working moms. The newsletter is already underway.
So far, the initial edition of the platform has received positive testimonials, with women discussing changes in their general mindset, learning how to structure their day and figuring out how to be more intentional with activities in their life. She’s seen the most positive impact from platform affect women who are pregnant with their second child.
It's just the beginning. While Clark has freely heaped praise on the D.C. startup community and the great group of female founders she’s come into contact with, she knows the key to success with Uplift is figuring out a way to make it fit into working women’s lives.
"It’s all about making time for it [the platform]," she said. "Otherwise, they won’t see the results."
