As a preschool teacher in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, Lai observed systemic problems that stood in the way of accessible early learning.
“I realized the childcare system is really broken in this country,” he says, describing the root cause as market failure with four interlocking parts. “First of all, it’s too expensive for families. On top of that, you have the issue of access because wait lists are one to two years long in cities, even for upper-middle class families.” Third, preschool teachers can make half as much as kindergarten teachers, and fourth, daycare quality is inconsistent across the board.
He spent two years researching the market, pinpointing unmet
Childcare's Four-Pronged Puzzle
childcare needs and brainstorming business plans before settling on an approach to tackle the system’s shortcomings: Start small.
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In 2018, Lai secured a venture-backed investment of $1 million and founded Tinycare to “rebuild the childcare system from the ground up.”
His microcenter model—launching mini daycares in residential areas throughout the city to serve working
Grassroots Solutions
families with infants to preschoolers—was designed to enable swift location openings and affordable learning in intimate, bilingual classrooms. By offering a competitive salary and benefits package for teachers, he added top talent to the mix.
After the fledgling company’s fast progress in 2019, panic spread across Tinycare when Covid-19 hit. “There was so much uncertainty, fear and confusion,” Lai says.
Thinking ahead, staff devised several strategies based on different projections of the
pandemic’s potential impact. Determined to avoid layoffs, Lai cut salaries for positions across the board—from teachers to executives—while transitioning to virtual care, lowering tuition costs and recruiting new investors.
Tinycare’s microcenters are designed to elevate early childhood learning with a “warm, intentional setting” in classrooms of four to six students.
a “founding family” can select two to five other families to join their small daycare pod. From there, Tinycare handles all the launch logistics, from hiring teachers to securing real estate in the requested community.
While that creative pivot helped the company expand significantly, staff still experienced its fair share of pandemic stress, particularly when it came to stocking up on necessities to protect staff and students. “In the early days when everybody was having supply chain problems, we had difficulty getting masks and gloves. These are critical for us to make sure
Pivoting To Pods
When in-person care reopened, Lai’s microcenter model provided the flexibility to adapt to families’ evolving needs during the pandemic.
“We quickly saw that about 20% of families were moving out of cities within the first two months,” he says.
To expand location options while mitigating Covid-19 risk, staff recently implemented Tinycare’s pod system, in which
we’re preventing surface transmission.”
After a recent donation of essential items like eco-conscious disinfectant wipes and paper towels from Office Depot, Lai emphasized just how crucial those simple products are when providing care in physical spaces. “Those things sound very basic, but in a small childcare center, one of the biggest things for health and safety is making sure the environment is clean [and] safe for children.”
Lai plans to open microcenters and pods in new cities this year, including Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin.
And while he knows that his model doesn’t solve all early education issues—many Americans still can’t afford care at all—he’s considering scholarships and mixed-income spots for students while also advocating for universal childcare and paid family leave as longer-term answers. “The only way to actually solve [these problems] is policy change,” he says. “That's what's going to allow this model to scale entirely to all families in this country.”
His Vision Beyond Tinycare
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