YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Wilson

lines on the record: 37
first: 2026-06-25
most recent: 2026-06-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It prevents them from having to figure out the scheduling and the calendar tetris of going to other locations and they can actually earn those wages in the home. So it's actually a way for families in most instances to keep the cost down if you consider the aggregate of the other care services while also making sure the caregiver is appropriately paid.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think it is truly unique is what I see and what I find. I mean, the other thing I would say too is I go back to the status shared earlier that it may not be obvious, even for the people who are hiring the caregiver, you do have other care things in the home that you're already likely paying money for. And so home care and housekeeping is one. Many people have pets. 70 million people have pets in this country. And so I can assure you, most of those caregivers would love to take some of those duties on because, again, it...”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. Well, I can give you my personal experience too because I've gone through a few of them. So, first off, they're looking for consistency. That sort of one, it may be obvious, but I'm often shocked by the stories I hear around sort of discrepancy and paying. It's usually around the consistency of ours. Leads me to then say make sure there's a bit of, even if informal contracting. Up front around what that looks like because you know, and I went through it myself. I had to learn a couple times too where I thought it was understood what was needed by way of, say, hours and or do they get paid for driving or do they not? Do they get paid for mileage? And so, you know, at the end of the day, these people are here to serve and help your family and other families. And we want to make sure that they get the best and most fair pay.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I mean, New Mexico, yeah, I don't know if you've read, they've got universal childcare, of course. We're all waiting to see what Mr. Momdani does in New York here. But what I would say is there's no one single solution here. It is such a challenge for families. So when we see things like universal childcare, it's really an acknowledgement for us that, yes, this has to be a bit of... And I think the thing that we're most optimistic about is enterprise and companies truly value it as well. So we're not just relying on government. We do have enterprise players that want to play a part and make sure that they're employees which have families of all kinds also have benefit equity.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's not enough childcare in the region, even if it's a densely populated area, or there's just nothing by way of the rural population, you have to have in-home caregivers as an apparatus to really solve this problem. So that's where we come in. We're seven, eight, nine times larger, depending on the week than any other next provider.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we want to really advance that agenda at the federal level. We're also going to take a look at the state level too. And we haven't. Attack that piece just yet. But, you know, one of the big things I think when we think about this is if you think about how the federal governments approach this is they view accessibility and quality only in the form of a center. And a center is something that they could wrap their brain around as I can go check that location. I can validate that they have the right teacher-to-student ratio. I can validate that it's clean, the safety measures are right. But the reality is more than 50% of the country lives in these childcare deserts.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, researchers, or maybe well studied or professors. And so, you know, I think for me that what's attractive having me on board is, you know, we see a lot. We have a lot of data. So we can support, especially across 16 countries as well in Europe. And so we can support a lot of data that they need to help enhance the dialogue around not too dissimilar from what we talk about when we think about solutions. So for us, I think there has to be a technology, player, or players that can help simplify this for caregivers and families. There has to be a policy effectuation that helps subsidize care for families. And enterprise must play a role. And so for them to understand and see the data on why it's compelling and important and actually how hard it is to get the match effectiveness and get people the proper care they need, that's the role we play inside of WEF.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was invited on very graciously by the World Economic Forum. And I was reluctant to join this forum, and in large part because anytime I see these caucuses, I worry about a lot of talk, no action. And it's been a good, healthy start to the dialogue. I think we're bringing a number of different perspectives and solutions to the table. My role inside of that is I'm one of the few, if maybe even only commercial heads. that actually run a business”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time investment from me than anyone else. But we really try to keep people focused on the mission of what we were trying to build.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the other things they asserted were our jobs are truly jobs. And so there was language on the site that essentially called them job posts. They wanted us to change the language around that. There was another piece where they challenged that the rate that caregivers were making was maybe not fully an accurate depiction of that rate. We don't know how they could have claimed that because that was actual real data that we would get off our transactions on the site. And of course, there are people who take those jobs off platform and negotiate their own rates and deals. So, you know, for us, we just felt with all that we had to undertake, as I mentioned earlier, it was better to settle and move on and probably against my better wishes and people suaged me that that was the right path. And it was the right path. We worked with outside council. It was probably more.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I will state very plainly stand on my head. In fact, the FTC attorneys got to know me quite well. I violently disagree with what they acclaimed. And I will acknowledge one thing. The FTC, particularly under Lena Khan, I think it was a good thing that we should all want to remove what they call dark patterns on the web, where people are being forced or coerced to click down a path maybe to buy something that they didn't want to buy, or it's really hard to cancel. And so one of the three things that the FTC asserted was our site being a subscription or membership service was hard to cancel. Guess what? I agreed with them. And before that claim was even there, we already started to change it. It did change it to the point where they actually said, you guys are far better than ever. So we were already down that path. We were going to fix it.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had to. I mean, almost every answer I got when I came in on why are we doing this? Why aren't we doing this? Well, the tech is outdated. The tech is outdated. We made the right decision. We're not fully through it. I don't think you're ever done. But what's promising is now you're in this world where we're all reading about the same things from vibe coding and generative AI, there's the promise of that it'll eradicate this in short period and actually believe it will. I think we're going to work our way out of it over the next year.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I found that it was a very hard thing and a big thing for the company to do, which motivated the engineers and product people and technical people in ways that probably hadn't been done in quite some time. And even in the last six months, I always tell people this company's had more innovation in the past six or nine months than the prior 18 years combined. And so I think you have to give people these big challenges and big problems to solve together. And I think people have been invited in on the mission, maybe in ways that they hadn't before.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure. And so That was tough. How did you keep Get to Yeah, it's a fantastic question because we do spend a lot of time thinking about culture and how do you motivate people and we want to want this to be a really great place to work and people equally excited about the mission as we all are. And I think what worked for us was a couple of things. One is we're just constantly in front of our teams, whether it's town halls, bi-weekly stand-ups and our weekly operational meetings. It was not unclear what we were marching towards and the vision that we were painting for the future. And so I think that was really motivating and enticing. The other thing I would say is kind of midterm of where we were in this first period. We did take a very bold swing on.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew we were slow. We're still catching up to par, I would say. And the reason for that was the back end infrastructure. This is probably not uncommon from a lot of these technology stories. We just had very outdated code. It was very federated. We made the very hard decision early on. And I said, we're going to pull it all together. We're going to go through what I'm calling the infrastructure error. It's going to be 18 months to 24 months of really hard work. We basically took everything commoditized on the back end from authentication where you recognize users where they are in the experience and you could provide feature benefits to the package they're in, messaging, payments, the entire back end, trust and safety systems completely replaced it. And now we're moving into that true transformation era where we can do fast twitch retailing, merchandising and testing. And so we're kind of just now embarking upon that. But I would say”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I joined, and the number one thing I always talk about in the company is you got to have a great brand, which means you have to deliver to your customers and in our case, both sides of the marketplace, but you have to have speed. And I mean, Dara and Aman at Expedia did this better than anybody ever saw. But to have speed, you really have to have the testing apparatuses in place. You have to very clear mandate on what you're going after. You have to have total transparency in the culture. And you really have to give people permission to break things and move fast.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, this makes no sense The Sales cycle is a bit longer than I anticipated. And, you know, I knew it was long, but I figured it'd be six to 12 months. But what ends up happening is 12 sometimes becomes 18, becomes 24, particularly now because one of the challenges we're seeing in our country and many companies is rising health care and dental costs. And so when that happens, care benefits become, you know, we're kind of a 1B benefit today. because they have to meet meet the needs of those rising costs and companies. Sometimes we get just push maybe another half year to a year. So those sales cycles have been a little bit more challenging. And then the second thing is, and I'm super proud of the team for working through this.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we make these products really work within the lifestyle of what we're trying to do? Again, we want to match first, then we want to be a part of the entire journey and the way we think about that is before, during, and after the hire. And then we want to build kind of an always on platform, which that's a couple years out. I'll save that for a later conversation. And it's really hard. But if we get it right, we're going to do a lot of good in the world. And so that's the fun part about what we're doing every day. And I'm very privileged. We have an incredible team.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to make sure the product is really delivering and works. And in fact, we want to build AI in the product. And then the last thing I would say is if you think about care on the consumer side where it was for 18 years really, it was a mostly, it's a transaction experience veiled in subscription. And why do you need a subscription after you find your match? Right. And so we've really thought about”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But with AI having a huge disruptive effect in search, we're really trying to make sure that we are playing and meeting audiences where they're at, publishing a lot of authoritative, educational and entertaining content, whether it's distributed through social media and or through our own influencers in the company or through anyone else who might find that content interesting pardon. And that's the way the game's got to be played now. Everything is so fragmented. Second part of that is we reshaped our brand. We got a fantastic brand leader, Mailing Tan, who reshaped our brand. We really want to go to market that's speak to Caribbean Childcare and care holistically as an emotional ally for our families and our caregivers. But I would just say we've completely revamped go to market. I think the second thing is.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or authentic searches Everyone in our company were measured on delight, literally. I mean, it is, we try to drive it through the organization. We're not perfect. We're far from where we need to be, but we want to build experiences where people know us. They can trust us and they're going to come to us directly. But I think first and foremost is how we go to market. And for care.com in the past, it was a lot of the old traditional ways, as you would put some things on TV, you would play in the Google space.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so at the time, you know, we had Tim Sullivan, our CEO, I felt was a great leader. Over time, I got to Expedia and, you know, was fairly close to Dark Hazer Shahi. I really worked under Raman Bhutani, who was just a fabulous CEO at GoDaddy. And then ultimately through HBO Max and Warner Media, Jason Kyler in 84 Cell, just incredible men and leaders. But at the end of the day, you know, I always, this is what I tell our team is, you have to deliver delight, something I took away from all those leaders, deliver delight, constantly innovate what should drive direct to your products and brands. Yeah.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business school in gosh, 99 2001. Now we're really dating ourselves. And just so happened this thing called the internet was burgeoning and I was just super interested in the technology. And, you know, I was in Dallas, Texas. I graduated from the Cox School Business at SMU and everyone was doing oil and gas or going to their... Study from great leaders”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Better team. We have a lot of data that they're more loyal. They'll stay longer. And in fact, when they don't have the benefit, our future of benefits report, we see that there's often a very high burnout factor and there's a little bit of disdain for the company they're working for.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other way is through our care concierge. So, this is a service where we have master's level social workers. And we get people calling in from everything from, I just need parental guidance. How do I think about getting my father into a senior assistant living facility? legal guidance there's a whole gamut of things and then the third way is our digital membership and so you mentioned small businesses as an example not every company can afford a backup care program so perhaps we can just give them the digital membership at a reduced or a wholesale rate and help them find that caregiver”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There. Yeah. So generally, we make money three ways and serve our clients in three ways. One is backup care. So most companies will come in and say, hey, we want all of our employees to have 15 backup care days for when their primary care falls through. I can tell you I've had a caregiver, a lovely caregiver. She's needed three days off in the past month and we all need it. So it's a great benefit for employees and for those companies. And they do find it as a vessel for, I call it well-being because people are more loyal and they just, they have the stress relieved of knowing I have a safety net here. So back up here is one way.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also want to create what we're calling this ubiquitous care platform so the way we think about that is rather than having separate supply serving the enterprise side and the consumer side, which it did. We're now merging that supply and thinking about other forms of supply like locations. We want one common delivery platform so we're not shipping eight different things. So we want that efficiency.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's where we've seen a lot of benefit because enterprises come in and help taking care of those costs for families and some of the recent legislation too with the One Big Beautiful Bill and 45F have lifted the tax credits for companies and caregiving related expenses. I go back to most families have four care occasions in the home. They all stitch together things from pet to housekeeping to seniors. And if you think about most caregivers, and mine's a great example, they'd prefer to do as much as they can because it saves from the driving and going to different jobs, which therefore can lift the wages and the well-being and really what you can make in that particular household without having all the stress of going to multiple places. The enterprise side of the business and the consumer side were, and in part because both were scaling, they were a bit separate and federated. So I think what we've tried to do is really say one brand, one team.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's a freemium product, so you're allowed to post for free And we charge at the point of access to communication. And so, you know, most marketplaces, I would say, convert between 2% and 6%. We were south of the 2% number. The second thing is responsiveness in the messaging. And let's just say that that number was astonishingly low. And then that leads us to kind of a match rate. But all those metrics were substandard. And then to your point on the tension, on the caregiver side, when we got it right, they're happy, they're great, but the reality is we weren't getting right a lot. And the piece we really have to solve for, which is tricky, is to your point is you got to keep the cost low for the family and you got to get wages higher. And that's a very complex thing to solve. And you really can't do it fully without some, again, I think there needs to be subsidy from the government and or mostly enterprise.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's a tension there. Take you back two years ago. When I joined a lot of the new management team joined, you had a product, frankly, that was quite tough when you measured it by any kind of marketplace metric. So I always think about conversion, so meaning how many people are actually willing to pay you. And a lot of times that comes through, did you match it to the right caregiver and home? And that rate, let's just call it, was far lower than you would typically see from marketplaces.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What happens in the first three weeks? And so we put together these tailored personalized plans. So research for those cases used to be very manual, very hourly intensive. And now a lot of our researchers and master's level social workers, they can rely on AI and reduce days into hours. So that's just one example.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These new AI tools. Yeah, I'd put it maybe in two, if not three buckets. So one is, I'll call it the mundane tasks. Not every engineer likes to debug their own code. So I think AI can do a lot of that for you today. We do get a lot of people call in because we don't always get it right. But all of a sudden now sifting through the notes and the cases and actually looking through the experience to see what can be, what can we learn that can actually serve that customer better and fix that problem right away? It's not 100% AI, but there's a lot of That helps gather the information and even make a recommendation to the agent. But there's still a lot of research that has to happen behind the scenes at times. So we have this concierge platform as an example where people call in and there's hundreds of use cases, but one of which may be”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're dealing with senior care and other care pieces, that escalates to about 40%, 90% of people report losing sleep, 89% report feeling burnt out, and they really, really want enterprise and or some federal support for, you know, by the way of tax credits to help ease the burden of this cost of care. We enjoy about 700 corporate relationships today, and we're finding more and more that companies are coming to us because their employees need that support. Employers are happy to give it because they know that if that support is right, they find happier employees. They'll stay longer. They're much more loyal to the company. And so we enjoy both aspects of that equation.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We view our vision as number one. We want to help families find the care they need. Most families have four care occasions in the home. And whether that's senior care, pet care, childcare, home care, even tutoring camps and activities, et cetera. So there's a lot that families are working to stitch together. The other thing is we really believe we have to be a leading advocate for families and caregivers. And there's a lot that families go through today to bring the cost of care down. But the reality is our caregivers aren't making it up either. So that's a very tricky equation, you know, just to give you a little bit of what families are facing. It's a very overwhelming and stressful time. I mean, you know, work is more demanding than ever. You have most families, the cost of care, 20% of income goes out to childcare related expenses.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Help improve. This was a great fit. It just so happened at the time, too, as I was interviewing, we learned of my wife's diagnosis. And we started to go through it. And care became a part of our story too because I needed that help. Is a deeply important mission for me personally. I'm living it today. I'm a single parent. I have three wonderful children. I have a great support system, which we all need as well. But I also go through what a lot of parents and communities go through today, and I'm trying to stitch together my own care community to make our family go and go to all the activities and events and make sure that we can show up for work and do great jobs and serve and be a part of our communities.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. Thank you. And yeah, it was an interesting time. You know, we, this was back in 23, in January when I first started talking about the role with IC and Barry and Joey and Company. And, you know, I'd follow care.com for years, marketplaces are only so many at scale. And, you know, for me, I'd done 25 years in consumer brands. And so I got a, I have a little bit of pattern recognition on what I think ticks. And it's a brand I always loved. And when I looked at it just professionally, I saw a great brand. I saw a clear market leader with the largest caregiver pool and supply, which is extremely important when you run these companies. And we're still on this journey today if we're being honest. It wasn't a great experience. And so when I took a look at things that I thought I could be good at and influence and”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end of the day, these people are here to serve and help your family and other families, and we want to make sure that they get the best and most fair pay. It may not be obvious, even for the people who are hiring the caregiver, you do have other care things in the home that you're already likely paying money for. Home care and housekeeping is one. Many people have pets, 70 million people have pets in this country. And so I can assure you, most of those caregivers would love to take some of those duties on because, again, it prevents them from having to figure out the scheduling and the calendar tetris of going to other locations and they can actually earn those wages in the home. So it's actually a way for families in most instances to keep the cost down.”
2026-06-25 · Masters of Scale · How to balance a two-sided marketplace, with Care.com CEO Brad Wilson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT