MBA Alumni Nurture Company In Its Infancy
By Kate McCann
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Clockwise from left: Aruni
Gunasegaram, MBA '98; Erin Defosse, MBA '98; their 3-year-old
son Shehan Defosse; and 1-year old daughter Ariana Defosse.
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From arranging the nursery to installing child
car seats, a whole new world of activities occupies the minds of
expectant parents. Most spend this nine-month period of anticipation
carefully researching proper methods of basic child care as they
prepare for the big day. But once the baby is born, after the
initial excitement ebbs and reality sets in, parents often discovery
aren’t as well equipped as they had planned to be.
To help new parents avoid this predicament, Erin Defosse, MBA ’98,
and Aruni Gunasegaram, MBA ’98, owners of Babble Soft (www.babblesoft.com),
developed a software application to help ease the transition into
parenthood.
Baby Manager 1.0 collects the records of feeding and changing times
into consolidated reports. Although feeding and changing a baby may
not seem complicated, many doctors recommend recording how often a
baby is breastfed or bottle-fed, how many ounces the child consumes,
how many times the diaper is changed, whether the diaper is wet or
soiled and the color of everything that goes in and out of the
infant—especially for premature babies or twins. “
Doctors and parents want to know if everything is progressing
normally,” says Gunasegaram, a former adjunct lecturer at McCombs
and member of the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship. “Those
early weeks are extremely important for the health of a newborn.
Catching or avoiding common problems like jaundice quickly provides
a great deal of peace of mind in an often stressful time.”
The easy-to-use interface allows parents to keep track of
breastfeeding times, pumping times and amounts, diaper changes, and
bottle feedings and amounts. Reports bring the information together
in an on-screen or printed format.
“Certain types of people like using data to make decisions,”
Gunasegaram says. “When you have a child, you lose a lot of sleep.
Because of sleep deprivation, you often can’t think clearly enough
even to add up the number of feeding times—let alone discern
patterns on a daily or weekly basis.”
Drawing on firsthand experience, Defosse, the acting director of the
Austin Technology Incubator, and Gunasegaram conceived the idea for
Babble Soft after the birth of their son three years ago. The couple
now also has a 1-year-old daughter.
But Babble Soft isn’t their first joint venture. Together they
launched a company called Isochron through the MOOT CORP® business
plan competition in 1997 while completing their MBAs. They raised
millions of dollars in equity financing and grew the company to more
than 40 people before Gunasegaram left in 2001 and Defosse left in
2003. The company was sold in 2002 and is still operating today.
Gunasegaram and Defosse are applying what they learned at Isochron
to make Babble Soft a success.
“The business idea that led to the creation of Isochron while we
were getting our MBAs came to us from customers that were
experiencing problems and wanted a solution,” Defosse explains. “In
the case of Babble Soft, we experienced a pain that we wanted
resolved and nobody could give us the tools to help. So we decided
to develop our own.”
Defosse and Gunasegaram are in the process of developing additional
software applications to aid parents in other areas of child
rearing. —Kate McCann
