#StartupsEverywhere profile: Yasmin Mattox, Founder and CEO, Arkatecht
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Giving Working Parents the Tools They Need for Professional Success
Arkatecht is a startup that creates professional development tools to help working parents advance and succeed in their careers. The company’s Atlast learning platform is specifically designed for parents working in human services fields—such as mental health and social work—to help them maintain a sound work-life balance. We recently spoke with Arkatecht’s Founder and CEO, Yasmin Mattox, to learn more about the startup’s focus on supporting working parents, what it’s like to be a woman founder, and why it’s important for policymakers to engage with the startup community.
What in your background led you to launch Arkatecht?
My varied educational, personal, and professional experiences contributed to me launching Arkatecht. Having grown up in New York City, and being the daughter of a psychologist-turned-litigator mother, I grew up believing that I could truly do anything I set my mind to. But after making a career pivot in my early twenties, much to my shock, I found that my professional development and career advancement took a hit right when I became a parent. It became uniquely challenging to balance these experiences as a parent with a growing family, compared to before I was a mother. I found that so much of what bogged me—and other parents—down was the constant management involved with navigating one’s career and professional development. These are tasks that tend to become more difficult to manage as you’re also simultaneously learning to manage a litany of other duties as a parent.
Manually navigating these tasks proved exhausting and ineffective, and I recognized that technology—specifically software—could lessen the load. It could help working parents more easily identify best-fit professional development opportunities, leading to greater professional satisfaction, advancement, and enduring careers. Ultimately, with Arkatecht, I sought to help parents take control of their professional destiny rather than having the challenges of parenthood needlessly limit what they could accomplish in their careers.
Tell us more about Arkatecht and how you’re helping working parents better balance and improve their work-life outcomes.
More than creating software, Arkatecht exists to ensure that parents are able to achieve their greatest potential in careers that they are fiercely passionate about and love. And we want them to do so in a manner that respects their family needs. There are often unique considerations relating to when you can attend professional development opportunities and how you can advocate for yourself in the workplace in order to meet your professional goals. We seek to guide parents along their professional development and advancement journey throughout their careers, rather than just during their years as parents of young children.
For us, professional development and career advancement are clearly matters of work-life balance. They are fundamental to supporting individuals with the planning, designing, and building of the lives they truly want to lead.
Tell us about Atlast. How do users interact with the professional development opportunity platform, and what kind of steps do you take to make sure people are using it correctly?
Atlast is a community-centered learning platform for those working in human services fields, such as mental health and social work. These are fields in which the work is in-demand, rewarding, and notoriously mentally taxing. Atlast provides community through mastermind groups, workplace advocacy training, webinars and classes, and customized professional development opportunities. Users are able to be a part of intimate communities and discuss issues affecting their work, in addition to problem-solving for common issues within their work. Mental health and social work professionals spend their careers supporting others and helping clients or patients more conscientiously and successfully address their own issues. There has long been a dire need for these professionals to have their own spaces to find support and the help needed to improve outcomes for those they serve. This is especially the case when considering the added complexities these professionals deal with by virtue of navigating their own life stressors as parents and professionals.
Users are also able to attend webinars and classes on an array of topics related to workplace advocacy, so they can better lead and bring about gains for themselves professionally. More formal and informal professional development opportunities are focused on a strengthening of a user’s interdisciplinary skills and knowledge to ensure that today’s mental health professionals have the mental fortitude, assertive nature, and knowledge-base to endure in careers that are increasingly in demand, with millions more Americans needing their services each year. We work to ensure that through Atlast, we carry the weight of the logistics, and the organization and facilitation of these inter-related professional development activities, so users can focus on positively changing the world.
The child care functionality of the platform is limited to those within one’s personal circle, such as family, friends, and current child care providers. Whenever a user selects a professional development opportunity they’d like to attend—such as a mastermind group, workplace advocacy webinar or class, or formal or informal learning event—they have the option of having Atlast automate the scheduling of child care among their circle. In terms of how it works, we liken it to how you’d secure transportation through Uber or Lyft. In our case, an email goes out to those you’ve pre-selected, and whomever can provide the care gets scheduled to do so, with the needed information and reminders for all parties being provided on the user’s dashboard. Because we limit the child care scheduling feature to those a user already knows, we don’t have to vet providers.
How has Arkatecht been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, and how have you adapted your services in response?
The pandemic forced us to think fast on our feet. Atlast was initially focused on more industries, including law and management consulting. As the pandemic arrived, however, we quickly found that many of the working parents we engaged with were focusing exclusively on their new identities—however temporary—as educators, while still working from home. I worked on Arkatecht from home when the pandemic started, and as a result, I was sequestered with my three young daughters. I wanted to quit working for the first couple of months because it was high stress, but I knew Arkatecht had to push through. And we did, becoming more resilient in the process. Nevertheless, I understood at the time that I had limited capacity to do my own professional development and focus on business matters. I still needed to do mandated professional development for my relief job in mental health, and that sparked our change of focus to those working in mental health—a field in which I’ve worked, in both full-time and part-time capacities, over the last 13+ years.
What are some of the challenges you’ve had to overcome as a woman founder, and what can the startup community and policymakers do to better address common barriers to entry? Have these experiences helped highlight what is lacking in the policy space?
The greatest challenges I’ve experienced as a woman founder have revolved around a lack of relatability by many men in the startup and policy spaces as to the problem we’re addressing. So much of what we do involves workplace issues and dynamics that can be viewed as gendered, based on the demographics of the workforce being primarily women and overwhelmingly mothers. Those without a background in mental health and related human services fields, or those who do not know someone like the professionals we serve, often find it difficult to initially relate. While mental health is increasingly at the forefront of our national discourse, we argue that you can’t serve anyone or help anyone with these services if you don’t have enough mental health professionals to provide the needed support. The focus should be on the professionals who heed the call to do this work, so adequate support can be provided to those who most need them.
Members of the startup community, including policymakers, ought to conduct more outreach on topics such as mental health and the need for more targeted, outcome-oriented human services in a way that directly builds on the experiences and strengths of those in the trenches. The lessons policymakers need to learn largely come from those doing the work, especially the direct care professionals who routinely see what works and what fails from a ground level perspective. It is precisely these professionals who have not been included in these conversations, but who must be included to make real progress.
What are some of the startup-related policy issues and concerns that you believe should receive more attention from local, state, and federal policymakers?
Policymakers need to ensure there is a systematic method for involving startup executives and leaders with the framing of policies that are relevant to their respective spaces. There is a constant disconnect between what legislative and bureaucratic bodies are proposing, passing, and implementing, and what is actually needed.
By systematically bringing startup leaders and policymakers together—at all levels of government—we can reduce a lot of redundancies and incomplete, asymmetric information which often leads to avoidable problems for all involved. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel to get started either. This can include public campaigns targeting mental health professionals, especially those in direct care, with advocacy through public commenting periods through the Federal Register, for instance. Startups already have tools we can use; we just need to be more deliberate about using them.
What is your goal for Arkatecht moving forward?
We want to increase our footprint and improve the career advancement outcomes of human services professionals. We do this by focusing on mental health and social work professionals first, and then expanding to other areas. And we also want to improve the retention rate of professionals within organizations which routinely experience voluntary turnover with rates as high as 47 percent—a disaster at a time when we’re staring down a projected 25 percent industry growth rate for these professionals over the decade. So we’re on a relatively tight schedule to help right the course in a way that our communities and society deserve. We seek to do this collaboratively, with the help of other mission-aligned organizations and, most certainly, policymakers.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email edward@engine.is.
