School Is Closed 46% of the Year. Molly Morse Finally Built the Solution.

School is out 46% of the year. After you subtract PTO and federal holidays, working parents are left covering 99 days with no formal childcare — and no amount of workplace flexibility closes that gap. Molly Morse isn't just naming the problem. She built the solution.

Molly Morse is the co-founder of Recess, a marketplace that connects parents to afterschool programs, camps, and kids' classes - with real-time availability, actual filters, and no glorified Craigslist energy. She spent a decade building consumer marketplaces before becoming a mother and experiencing firsthand how broken the search-and-booking experience was. That rage-plus-inspiration moment became a company.

In this episode, Molly breaks down the data most people feel but haven't quantified, why ethical appeals to corporations will never move the needle on childcare, what AI is doing to marketplaces (and why it's actually a tailwind for Recess), and how she and her husband structured their household so she could build without burning everything down.

What you'll take from this conversation:

- Why 1.3 million people miss work every month because of childcare breakdowns — and 90% of them are women - How to make a business case for childcare benefits that corporations will actually act on (hint: it's ROI, not ethics) - The marketplace dynamics that explain why parents feel like everything is full while providers can't fill seats - How Recess is building the real-time inventory layer that makes AI search actually useful for families - The "systems are temporary" framework Molly uses at work and at home — and why fixing things at the wrong time is its own kind of problem

Find Recess at hello-recess.com and on Instagram @hello_recess. Molly is active on LinkedIn.

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