Chris is one of our founders. He also leads the data effort at Glow. It's his algortihms that tell you when your next period will be. He pretty much rocks. 

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My wife and I decided to try to start our family sometime in the spring of 2012. At the time, we had been married for 4 years. We’d spent our early married years blissfully ignoring advice from relatives like this gem from my father: “There’s never a good time to have kids, so it’s always a good time to have kids.” We finally decided that 2012 was the year. Like most women of her age, my wife had been taking oral contraceptives for years, so she went to the doctor and asked “We’re going to get pregnant, anything we should know?” The answer: “No, finish your pack of pills and then have some fun.”

Like most couples, we kept it a secret. It was nice to keep it just between us. We didn’t tell my family (despite continued abuse from my father), her family, or our friends. We were both 28 at the time; both young enough to remember hearing that “a woman could get pregnant at any time” in high school sexual education class. Assuming that was true, we proceeded to “have fun.”

After the first couple of months of trying, with no success, I started to get worried. I didn’t know if I should be worried or not, but I knew that I was. I had a vague sense that some days are more “fertile” than others, but I genuinely believed that we could get pregnant on any day. What I really needed was to ask someone, but I didn’t want to betray our secret. I wanted to look online, but that felt like admitting that we might have a problem, so I dismissed my fear and continued on.

After a few more months of trying, without a positive pregnancy test, I started to wonder if my fear was justified. Now I really needed some knowledge from someone who’d been here before, but the doctor I knew the best was my father (see above problems with talking to him). To answer this question I needed to do research. Being relatively well educated and a tech entrepreneur, I went to a trusted medical source, Google. What if I was infertile… or had low sperm count… or what if my wife was not ovulating… or we were incompatible…?

The stress I had felt after just 6 short months was nothing compared to what people who have been trying for 3 or 6 years must feel, but it was very real to me. We started Glow to take the guesswork out of baby making by learning from patterns and driving insights back to our users. We believe that it not only takes a village to raise a child, it sometimes takes a village to make a child. Our app brings the wisdom of the village to a couple while allowing them to maintain their privacy. Glow-First allows similarly situated users to anonymously offer each other even more financial and emotional support.

I co-founded Glow to redesign health care in a data-driven way. We’re using our skills to make peoples lives a little bit easier, a little less scary, and a little more affordable. Luckily for us, after a few more months and some ovulation timing education, my wife and I got pregnant. We are now expecting our first child in a few weeks. I couldn’t be more proud or excited about working on a product that helps other couples join us as parents.