Q&A with tendercare founder and CEO Shauna Sweeney

Shauna Sweeney was an executive at Meta, leading global industry intelligence and marketing programs, when her dad was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s some 3,000 miles away. Suddenly, she found herself as part of the sandwich generation — a term given to those who are raising their own families while caring for aging parents at the same time.

Managing care and helping her dad stay in his home as per his wishes presented some challenges. This led to the creation of tendercare, an “AI-powered app that transforms caregiving from a crisis-driven, never-ending, too-late scramble into a supported, manageable part of anyone’s day,” Sweeney says.

Since founding the company in 2022 at her kitchen table, Sweeney has left Meta to run tendercare full-time and has also expanded her family, all the time chasing that ever-elusive balance for working parents everywhere. (Already a mom and stepmom, Sweeney has another child on the way.)

Working moms are often celebrated for being able to “do it all.” But there’s so much more to the story of building a business while raising kids at the same time. We caught up with tendercare founder and CEO Shauna Sweeney over email about scaling her company, protecting her time, and the mental load of working moms.

Tell us about tendercare, the business you founded.

tendercare is the lifeline I wish I had when I first started caring for my dad. The app allows caregivers to securely keep and retrieve all important information required to care for Mom and Dad during those moments [they] need it most — at the doctor’s office, in the ER, in moments of transition or change — and share it with the rest of the family and care team. It’s the everyday tools that family caregivers desperately need to lighten the load, plus a way to quickly discover what trusted services exist in your or your loved ones’ community. 

The goal is to ease the burden on families while giving them confidence to make the best calls for their unique situation, save precious time, and priceless peace of mind. 

What is the secret sauce to scaling a business while also juggling motherhood? 

There’s a mythology to being a founder that’s often built on a more narrow set of responsibilities and an incomplete picture of what home life looks like for many of us, especially women. One of the best realizations I’ve had is that my unique pain points of balancing being a mom and an adult daughter put me in a position to build solutions with empathy and understanding for others. That being said, I still believe in focus, focus, focus. I’m ruthless with my time, so I can be 100 percent focused on work or my family when I plan to be, not pulled in a million directions trying to juggle it simultaneously. Both work and family time are defended across all seven days with equal vigor. 

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Scaling a business means living by the philosophy of, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.” We’re moving fast and there will always be another thing after the thing you’re working on. The secret isn’t about working more hours; it’s staying anchored in your purpose and understanding what takes priority at any given time. 

Is there anything about being a mom that has helped you with your career? Or vice versa? 

Tons. Having kids makes you figure out everything that matters for leading a team, building a company (which is like having another kid), or simply navigating life. Being a good mom is built on mutual trust, and the same is true for having a high-performance team. 

Listening, showing up no matter how tired, not simply reacting to a crisis or big emotion, being flexible, setting the example, encouraging, and mentoring — all of those things are transferable skills between motherhood and executive leadership. So is learning to run off less sleep. 

What do you wish more people understood about working moms? 

We are always operating with an invisible load. The logistics you see are just the surface; typically, there’s so much more going on. There’s a mental and emotional bandwidth we’re constantly managing. Rather than a lack of ambition, it’s more of a surplus of responsibility. 

Working moms are not just multitasking, we’re multi-living. The mental overhead is immense. As the saying goes, if you want to get something done, ask a busy person. It should actually be “ask a mom.”

What advice do you have for other moms looking to launch their own business? 

Don’t wait for permission because you won’t get it. Your lived experience is your market insight. Build something that solves a pain point you deeply understand, and then validate it. And remember, success doesn’t have to look like scale; it can look like sustainability. Start small, test constantly, and don’t underestimate the value of momentum over perfection. 

Any final words of wisdom?

It’s up to us to build the world we want to live in, and the world we want our kids to live in. If you see something that could be better, it probably could be. It’s a problem that’s been waiting just for you to come by and fix it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Topics
Family & Parenting