MEET ELLE’S 2016 WOMEN IN TECH
May 13, 2016 by Molly Langmuir
“Marcela Sapone, 30, spent spring break of her first year at Harvard Business School in 2013 on “start-up lockdown,” a project she’d thought up that involved her and four other students testing five business ideas over five days. The concept that seemed least feasible, conceived by her classmate Jessica Beck, was a subscription service that allowed busy professionals to outsource household tasks such as grocery shopping and cleaning. “We couldn’t get the economics to work,” Sapone says. But she and Beck knew there had to be a market, particularly after calling high-powered businesswomen (Sapone, who grew up in Copenhagen and Paris, had previously done a two-year stint at consulting firm McKinsey) and discovering almost all had live-in nannies or housekeepers. “But if you’re 26, how can you afford that?” Sapone says. “We wanted to solve the problem for us.'”