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Hi! We're Chloe and Ramesh. We're both parents of young children, as well as technology veterans. And we both wanted to answer the same question: why does parenting feel so hard?

Hi! We're Chloe and Ramesh. We're both parents of young children, as well as technology veterans. And we both wanted to answer the same question: why does parenting feel so hard?

We've helped build and grow influential technology products, from Twitter to Google Maps.

As full-time working parents and as start-up founders, we both wanted to answer the same question: why does parenting feel so hard? Has something fundamentally shifted? (Spoiler alert: yes!)

In our research we confirmed a key insight: the secret to making parenting joyful is to do it with friends. Everything gets easier and more fun with another family to share the load.

But neither of us was getting meaningful co-parenting support from family friends. Why?

Because the logistics of shared parenting can be overwhelming: finding families to partner with, figuring out the schedule, wading through texts — not to mention remembering the extra car seats!

Our answer: Honeycomb, an app that makes collaborative parenting across families magically easy. We started with chat designed for parents (hello topic-based threads!), and have been adding simple tools that unlock shared parenting ever since.

We’re on a mission to bring the joy of shared parenting to families. Join us!

Get Honeycomb

Has parenting gotten harder, or is it just me?

It's not you! For human history, parenting has been social –– designed to be shared across families. But over the past few generations, parenting has become measurably harder: parents have doubled the hours they spend parenting, despite families having drastically fewer hours available (well over 70% of families do not have a stay-at-home parent).

Intensive parenting –– combined with a lack of tools and loss of community –– has resulted in parenting becoming friction-filled, logistically challenging, and isolating. We believe that sharing parenting across families is one of the most important ways to make modern parenting joyful again.

See Chloe’s LinkedIn post for the story of how this all started.

What is shared or collaborative parenting?

From carpooling, to splitting the logistics of afterschool activities, to swapping after-school care, shared parenting means sharing the mental load as well as sometimes being responsible another child in addition to your own. Hurdles to shared parenting include manageable ways to communicate complex logistics, coordinating with the entire family (not just one parent), coordinating schedules and remembering who is on point for what. But Honeycomb will take care of all that!

Chloe Sladden

Kevin, Chloe, Vesper, Poppy and Cypress during one of many covid Facetimes in 2020

Chloe Sladden

Prior to starting Honeycomb, Chloe was among the first 40 employees at Twitter, where she built the media strategy from the ground up as VP of Media.

She’s a founding partner of the angel investment collective #Angels, which seeks to increase the representation of women investing in technology start-ups, and has held various Fortune 1000 and non-profit board roles, including Paid Leave for the US. Chloe has three young daughters (ages 6, 7 and 9) and is based in Northern California.

Ramesh Balakrishnan

Rumi, Shradha, Mira and Ramesh (check out the covid curls!) at their first big multi family gathering after vaccinations

Ramesh Balakrishnan

Ramesh joined Dropbox when it was 50 people strong and became of one its first Directors of Engineering. Along the way, he helped lay the foundation for Machine Learning at Dropbox and led the engineering teams for the core apps, serving 100M users.

Prior to Dropbox, Ramesh started his career as one of the early engineers on Google Maps where he helped build the search infrastructure. His most challenging and rewarding role came in early 2017, when he left Dropbox to become a stay-at-home dad with his 6-month old daughter. Now 7 years old, she and her younger brother continue to keep him and his wife, Shradha, on their toes.