Exploring Life & Business with Mel Faxon of Mirza

Today we’d like to introduce you to Mel Faxon.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started? 
So, I graduated from the University of Virginia in 2011 with a French degree, and shocking to say I did not use that in my professional career. I’m your ‘jack-of-all-trades’ founder – I’ve been employee number 6, employee number 200. I’ve spent the bulk of my career in startups across the US and Europe, mostly in hospitality and operations roles. I started out in Brand Activation at Golf Digest Magazine – when I got laid off, I decided it was time to move to Europe. I taught English in France, then I moved to Barcelona and worked building out a new territory with a travel startup there. When I came back to the US, I tried my hand at becoming a restauranteur and worked at a James Beard award-winning restaurant in Boston. It turns out I am not the next Danny Meyer, so after that, I moved to Denver and worked in admissions at a higher education startup that tried to put honors programs at community colleges. From there, I went back into hospitality and worked at a luxury travel organization in roles from product manager to project manager and ended up as a real estate portfolio manager. In 2017 I moved to London to get my MBA from London Business School – I thought it was time to ‘build a career’ for myself, so while there I was part of the Amazon Pathways program on the operation side. However, much to my chagrin, the startup life really is for me, and I ended up cofounding Mirza in February of 2020. 

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
If you ever meet someone who started their own business who has had a smooth road, please point them in my direction. What a great question – it has definitely not been smooth. I think the fun thing about being an entrepreneur is that in the span of a day, you can have the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, which definitely keeps it interesting. Probably one of the biggest hurdles was founding a company in February of 2020 and going into lockdown a month later. I would say, honestly, it was actually a great time and way to start a business because there was nothing else to do, but it definitely meant that my co-founder and I had to get extremely good at virtual communication methods. Ideating and brainstorming over WhatsApp rather than in front of a whiteboard is hard, and we built a fully remote team because of how the world changed. The pros are meeting and hiring an incredibly talented and diverse team from all over the world – cons are that communication, culture, and messaging are HARD! 

Most of our challenges have come from being two non-technical founders trying to co-find a tech business. The ability to understand how much you need to build or how little you actually need to build before you can go out and test concepts, get feedback and really sell into a market has been a skill we learned the hard way. 

We’ve had funding fall through post agreements, have had to lay off team members, come extremely close to missing paydays, but have miraculously been able to pull funding runs together throughout that. I could speak for hours about how I think we could have done things differently, and at the same time, I almost wouldn’t change a thing because of how much we were able to learn from all those bumps and how quickly we’ve been able to adapt to make things happen. 

We’ve been impressed with Mirza, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?
We’re at a point in the US where childcare costs more than state college tuition in every state, and 40% of parents are in debt over childcare. We see 1 in 4 parents (usually the mom) drop out of the workforce every year because of this. 

Mirza makes sense of and activates the fragmented, administratively burdened, and varied childcare markets across America. We help organizations and payers leverage government childcare dollars to bolster their hourly & frontline workforces to make childcare more accessible for everyone. In simple terms, this means we help eligible families get funding of an average of $10,000/child/year in a much more streamlined and digitized way. 

We’re very passionate about equitable childcare access and about closing the gender pay gap. One of the biggest barriers is the extremely high cost of childcare. If we can solve for this, we can move the needle for so many families and women. 

What matters most to you?
Curiosity, for many reasons. Something as simple as learning about a new person, what makes them excited or happy, and what your shared values are. Nothing is worse than someone who doesn’t know how to ask questions in a conversation, and nothing is better than understanding the context of how someone else thinks and is. Problem defining and solving rather than solutionizing. Always learning or discovering something new. Constantly thinking about what a miraculous world we live in and how to make it better. 

Contact Info:

• Website: www.heymirza.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mirzasayshey
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mirzasayshey
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/hey-mirza
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/MirzaSaysHey
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mirza3773