Startup Spotlight #134: Mirza

Mirza believes in the potential for anyone to be a great parent and have a great career.

Jun 17, 2021

Author’s Note: Sorry for the delay in today’s latest Startup Spotlight. Also, I will be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, so the Startup Spotlights will resume come June 28th. During that time, I will be rethinking and revamping the backend newsletters to ensure more consistent publishing going forward. Thank you for all of your support so far.

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I got the chance to speak with Siran Cao, co-founder and CEO of Mirza, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Siran Cao is the co-founder and CEO of Mirza. Women's financial empowerment is her North Star. She was raised by a single mom, and it's a blend of her personal experience growing up, navigating her complex relationship with family and career goals, that drives her to solve this problem. Cao’s background is in Gender Studies at Harvard, and landed in tech, where she built Uber’s driver support team from ground up in NYC.

Cao and her co-founder met after we both did our Master’s, and it was in a rant about the gender wage gap that the two decided to start Mirza together. The two co-founders are trying to tackle the "motherhood penalty," which accounts for 80% of the pay gap. Mirza democratizes financial planning, the way it should be done: helping employees explore long term financial and family goals, with the compounding impact of years out of the workforce in mind. Paired with the ability to make bespoke investing, saving, and spending decisions through Mirza and employer stipends to support the cost of care, we’re designing a future that actually supports parents and caregivers.

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Startup Spotlight: Mirza

Problem: We start families at the same time that our careers can start to take off, but the fact that infant care is more expensive than college in over half of the country often forces a parent - women as a default - out of the workforce. This kicks off the motherhood penalty for caregivers and high costs of churn for employers.

Market: There are 37 million US families with kids under 18, and we’re spending 10% of family incomes on childcare alone; bring in education, clothes, food, diapers - really, family is one of the biggest parts of our budget and takes so much mental energy to handle. With costs so high, it’s no wonder than 43% of high qualified women leave their jobs after having a baby.

Solution: We're starting with the tradeoffs that parents make in taking time off to avoid care costs. Our tech brings together individual financial planning and contributions across employer benefits and tax-benefitted accounts, and a single payment platform that takes out all the research and cognitive labor when drawing the right expenses from the right tax-benefited accounts.

Team: My co-founder, Mel Faxon, is a UVA grad, LBS MBA, ex-Amazon, and she’s driven by having lost incredible female mentors for whom balancing care and work felt impossible.

Recent Success:

Cao: We’ve been able to build an incredible team and culture, despite time zone differences, and all remote work during COVID. We’ve had 5 freelancers ask us at this point to join the team full time, and we want so badly to hire them with our raise! One had told us that he had a toxic work environment that led him to leave the industry for food and beverage, but we’ve made him love “office work” again. It’s really wonderful to know this, because culture matters from the very start. We started the company mid pandemic, so we’ve been very deliberate on how we build trust and safety and empowerment. But at the same time, it’s definitely some pressure on our fundraising and to keep up this kind of culture.

Recent Struggle:

Cao: When first starting out, we had a hard time sussing out tech agencies and understanding how to evaluate proposals, how to sniff out issues. We’re so fortunate now to have our amazing tech employees now, but our initial build was delayed by several months with an agency. Honestly, we went off price when we made the decision for our beta build. The other agency, who’d done our prototype, even set up a warning call with us to suggest the pricing and timeline proposed made no sense. They were very right!

Founder Advice:

Cao: Ask for help and talk about what you’re doing! There’s this fear we sometimes have that someone will steal the idea, so we keep our cards close to our chests. But for us, the most helpful people in our networks have come out of asking for help and sharing what we’re doing for feedback. Some incredible partnerships have emerged out of talking to adjacent people. You really never know where the best ideas may come from, and conversations with other people in your space often can spark those ideas.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Cao: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Dana Levin-Robinson, Co-Founder of Upfront: Dana and Shefali, her co-founder, and bringing price transparency and availability transparency to childcare - it’s much needed!
Jordan Taylor, Co-Founder of Medley: Medley makes incredible group coaching and personal, professional development.
Jen Henderson, Founder of TiLT: TiLT makes managing leave seamless for employers and employees.

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