Molly Morse Built Recess to Fix Childcare Gaps for Parents

Molly Morse is the co-founder and COO of Recess, a marketplace that helps parents find and book enrichment programs, camps, and care on the days school is out and PTO runs short. She spent more than 10 years overseeing operations and expansion for high-growth, venture-backed startups before this, with consumer service marketplaces as her area of expertise. A member of the Entreprenista League, she launched Recess just one month after her co-founder Amy gave birth to her first child, then raised venture capital shortly after. She calls it a wild ride.

"I hadn't found that thing that was the intersection of my skills, my interests, and an actual problem that needed solving," Molly says of the years before Recess.

Here is how a personal scramble for childcare became a company growing at national speed.

A problem she could finally build for

Molly had always wanted to start her own business. She knew it early, so early that in her twenties she put on her dating profile that she would be the breadwinner. What she did not have, for years, was the right problem.

Recess was the one. The gap parents face is real and persistent: school is out far more days than most parents have paid time off, and outside of summer those gaps are hard to fill. Molly had spent her career building and scaling marketplaces, starting in consumer insights and data science at NBC. When she hit the wraparound-care problem herself, the skills, the interest, and the need finally lined up.

The partnership that made it possible

Molly and Amy did not go into business as strangers. They had spent two years managing international expansion for a unicorn startup during the pandemic, often working 100 hours a week together in a high-pressure environment.

"Quickest way to bond is to spend 100 hours per week together in a high-pressure situation," Molly says. They went in knowing each other's best and worst qualities, how they worked together, and where the gaps were. She describes it as an ideal partnership.

What the numbers say

Recess hit a $3 million run rate in its first year. The platform went from unknown to a fundamental part of providers' businesses in less than 12 months, with some providers now earning $4,000 to $6,000 a week through it.

The metric Molly returns to is not financial. It is the parents who tell her they finally found a program that filled a gap they had been struggling with for years. "It's really encouraging to hear from parents that we've finally made this easy," she says.

Building on trust, on the ground

Recess works in a high-trust space, and Molly treats it that way. The company partners with local school districts and does a great deal of work on the ground to connect directly with parents and businesses, building a strong foundation in every community it enters before moving on to the next.

That patience extends to how she runs the operation. Her approach to productivity is one or two north-star metrics at most, then ruthless prioritization. If a process is rough but does not move those metrics, she lets it lie. The hard trade-offs are the point.

A mamaprenista who stopped chasing balance

Molly is a mother, and she has made peace with what that means for a founder. Balance, in her words, is a myth. The real work is a day-by-day search for rhythm, building a system, tearing it down, and building another.

She integrates work and life all day, every day, and a decade of early-stage startups has given her a high ceiling for the overwhelm that comes with it. When she needs to clear her head she turns video calls into walk-and-talks. Time with her daughter resets her completely.

What is next is straightforward: national expansion. Molly also points new founders toward the network that helped her raise, where warm introductions made the difference and friendships, not transactions, carried the round. You can follow Molly on LinkedIn and explore Recess at hello-recess.com.

If Molly's approach to solving the childcare gap for working parents resonates, the Entreprenista League is a community of women founders who value connection, shared experience, and practical business insight as they grow. Learn more about the Entreprenista League right here.