She wrote Airbnb’s first paid leave policy. Now this founder gets to launch her own

– Forging a leave policy.  In 2014, a pregnant Sarah Hardy was working on Airbnb’s customer operations team. At the time, the then-six-year-old company had about 1,000 employees, but one thing it didn’t have was a parental leave policy.

“They had nothing in place. Literally nothing,” Hardy remembers. “The subject had never been broached before.” 

So Hardy set out to create the company’s family leave plan. At five months pregnant, she researched comparable industry benefits, presented a comprehensive proposal to Airbnb’s executive team, and, a few months later, enjoyed the fruits of her labor: a four-month paid leave policy that the home rental startup implemented within 30 days of her proposal submission. (Airbnb now offers its workforce 10 weeks of paid parental leave.)

While Hardy says she felt supported professionally at Airbnb, it was nerve-wracking to be the first employee to take advantage of the policy that she almost singlehandedly created. “But I knew I wasn’t going to be the last,” she says now.

Today, Hardy is the COO of Bobbie, an infant formula startup she cofounded in 2019 alongside fellow Airbnb alumna Laura Modi. Despite their smaller employee count, relative to Airbnb’s in 2014, she’s spent the last few months developing the company’s paid leave policy, which it debuted today and shared with Fortune. 

The 50-person startup is offering all employees four months of paid leave, and the option to take an additional eight months unpaid, totaling 12 months. The company wants to counter the narrative that small startups can’t afford to offer competitive paid leave packages. “It’s easier to look at large companies and call on them [to improve paid family leave],” Hardy says. “But [for small businesses], it can be done with a lot of hard work.” 

Bobbie’s return-to-work benefits post-leave are also unusual for a company of its size. Employees spend two weeks reintegrating into the company, working three days a week at full pay (Airbnb also now offers phased return-to-work). Bobbie also employs a full-time “balance coordinator” who helps employees with personal tasks like finding childcare, planning kids’ birthday parties, or ordering groceries. 

Courtesy of Bobbie

These ideas stemmed from Hardy’s experience at Airbnb. Unsurprisingly, as the first employee to take paid family leave at the time, she was also the first to return to the office—and the experience wasn’t easy. “It was a rough transition. I was trying to work every single day, pumping in between meetings,” she recalls. “It was probably one of the most formative [moments] of my career.” 

As an infant formula startup, Bobbie is hyper-focused on caregivers; the company says parents make up about 70% of its workforce and half had a “pandemic baby” in the past two years. The startup hopes that its policy inspires other small businesses to implement parental leave offerings, and it plans to publish a detailed writeup of its leave policy, as well as a toolkit for CEOs, founders, and HR teams to evaluate their own family leave options. 

But a company doesn’t have to be in the business of babies to support working parents. Airbnb’s willingness to quickly enact a parental leave policy signaled the organization would “mature from that point forward,” Hardy says. The founder hopes Bobbie’s parental leave policy will push smaller employers to make that early jump on their own.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

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