Mom Techies Make the Best Parenting Apps - a podcast by Penn Wharton Entrepreneurship

What happens when two women with amazing tech skills and experience have kids? They create Winnie, a companion app for modern parents.

Sara Mauskopf and Anne Halsall, founders of Winnie, have some seriously impressive tech cred. Anne was a Webmaster at Google during its early days, then quit to build iPhone apps as soon as soon as Apple released the iOS software development kit, because, as she explained to her horrified parents, “that is the future, I am going to work on that.” After a stint at a startup called Inkling, she was an early employee at Quora, before going to Postmates, where she met Sara, who had prior stints at Google, YouTube, and Twitter.

Sara returned to work shortly after having her daughter, and quickly realized that there was a lot she needed to know—but she wasn’t sure how to find it. “I was a working mom, and I was busy, and so I turned to Anne and I said, where do people get all of this information? I don’t have time to dig, and look at the bulletin board at my local library for activities. And she said, there really isn’t anything. You have to spend time, and you have to network, and you have to meet other parents, and that’s how you get your information. It’s really you can’t just put in a Google search, you have to find the right groups to really get the high quality information.” That was the lightbulb moment, when the two of them realized, “This was a problem we could solve with technology. We could take these vast amounts of data that’s right now in parent’s minds, or offline, bring it online and make it searchable and accessible and personalized.”

Winnie was born.

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