This essay is based on a conversation with Elena Brandt. BesampleIt has been edited for length and clarity.
I never dreamed of a big family, maybe two kids, but my husband, Mikhail, and I realized we love having kids. We have four children now, ages 8, 5, 3 and 6 months, and we’re thinking about having a fifth.
Being on the front lines of motherhood hasn’t hindered my career: I’m pursuing a PhD in Psychology at the University of Florida and am also the co-founder of Besample, a behavioral research startup that helps researchers collect data from outside the US.
The reason I’m so passionate about this company is because it solves a long-standing problem: the vast majority of scientific research is based on input from US students, while ignoring the other 95% of the world’s population. This creates a significant gap in research that my co-founders and I want to address.
I took my baby to the accelerator when he was 3 weeks old.
The personal and professional support allowed me to continue thriving in my career even as my family grew. When I was eight months pregnant, I found out that Besample had been accepted into Techstars, a three-month in-person accelerator. My husband said he could take care of our three older children while I was with the baby.
So I showed up with my son, Darwin, who was just 3 weeks old. Techstars was totally supportive, asking if I needed a space to feed Darwin and let him nap. At Demo Night at the end of the accelerator, we celebrated Darwin as the youngest resident in Techstars history.
It was through Techstars that I got tickets to the Y Combinator female founders conference. Y Combinator is big in the startup world and I wanted to be inspired by other female founders. I posted that I thought this was a once in a lifetime opportunity, and in the same post, I wondered if Darwin would have a baby friend. I expected that the baby would not only be welcomed, but celebrated.
That was not the case for me.
I was asked to leave while talking about growing a company while raising a baby.
I quickly realized there were no other babies. Then I listened to mother and founder Tracy Young talk about her experience raising a child when starting her business. She talked about pumping before investment meetings and the other intense physical and biological challenges of being a founder with an infant.
Darwin was in his stroller and I was rocking him back and forth to get him to sleep. He started babbling so I moved to the back of the room, and someone came up to me and said, “Do you want to take the baby for a walk outside? We want you to experience what this conference is all about.”
I later found out she was one of the partners at Y Combinator.
There is tension in the business world over whether there is space for families
I mention this woman not because I think the problem is bigger than me or her, but because there are tensions in the business world right now. For many people, including me, the pandemic has shown that it’s possible to be a parenting mom or a parenting business partner. Others want to maintain the status quo, keeping business and babies completely separate.
To me, that’s ridiculous. It was shocking to be asked to take my quietly giggling baby away in the middle of a talk where I was articulating the challenges of being a mother and founder. It was then that I realized the spectre of institutional barriers to mother-entrepreneurs was bigger than I’d ever thought.
I want to see meaningful change for the founder who is a mother
I received a personal apology email from the woman who confronted me, but I haven’t heard anything from Y Combinator, which to me shows just how exclusive the incubator is: they do the perfunctory things like hosting female founder conferences, but they don’t provide any meaningful support for mothers.
I’m not asking for much, just don’t tell me to leave. If my child is really bothering anyone, I will leave.
If you really want to make a difference for parents, provide childcare at work. Change your view of kids as a nuisance. Instead, see them as the next generation that will take care of us when we grow up.
Imagine the innovators of the future hanging out together in a Y Combinator daycare center. That would be a real game-changer and meaningful change for women entrepreneurs.
Editor’s note: Y Combinator did not immediately respond to BI’s request for comment.