Recently named one of the Boston Business Journal's "40 under 40," Zenobia Moochhala, '98 is a co-founder and vice president of marketing at Care.com, an Internet-based service that assists in matching families with caregivers, including nannies, housekeepers, tutors, and pet sitters. Founded in 2006, the company now hosts more than seven million members in more than 15 countries worldwide.

Moochhala, a native of India, was attracted to the Lemberg MAief program at Brandeis IBS because of its multidisciplinary approach and cited Professor Ben Gomes-Casseres' classes on strategy as major influences in her entrepreneurial career.

"I look back on those two years as being strong academic grounding and a really good experience meeting a lot of people from different countries," she said.

Moochhala got her foot in the door to the start-up world through Paul Walborsky '88, MA '89, who invited her to join WorldStreet, a technology communications platform for the financial services industry. It was there that Moochhala received her first exposure to working in product management.

"I moved from being on the client-facing side to being in product management and sitting between the business users and the tech team," she said. "[It was] essentially being responsible for determining what the product would look like to satisfy the business needs"

After a three-year tenure at WorldStreet, Moochhala went to work at Upromise, an online service focused on helping families save money for college, where she met the team that would later become the founding partners of Care.com. She attributes that experience as what inspired her to create a start-up that would be mission-driven and centered on human need.

Moochhala is responsible for all consumer marketing activities at Care.com and credits the company's "test-and-learn culture" as an integral component of what makes the business work. In order to gather information about consumer preferences, Moochhala utilizes A/B testing and feedback from focus groups to create an ideal experience for users to meet the caregivers they need. As the mother of a two-year-old, Moochhala says that helping create Care.com reinforced what it meant to be a working mother and the importance of being able to trust the people who care for our children.

"Care is a universal human need and co-founding a business that was solving something as fundamentally important as making sure loved ones are being cared for and raised well - that was always a huge motivator around why Care.com came into being for me," she said.