The Poetic Design of Getting Babies to Sleep Safely and Saving Lives
Michael Mendenhall: Welcome to PeopleForce Podcast by TriNet. TriNet is a full-service HR solutions company committed to empowering small to medium-size businesses by supporting their growth and enabling their people. We work with amazing small to medium-size businesses and I'm excited to bring their voices here to life. You can catch new episodes of PeopleForce Podcast every month on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Rise.TriNet.com.
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Happiest Baby co-founder and CEO Dr. Harvey Karp. Dr. Harvey Karp is one of America's most trusted pediatricians and child development experts. Known for his innovative techniques in helping parents soothing fussy babies and improving sleep. I could have used some of this. He is the creator of the Happiest Baby on the Block Method, a groundbreaking approach to calming newborns and infants. Dr. Karp's 2002 book, "Happiest Baby on the Block," revolutionized caring for babies. His book has sold millions of copies in dozens of languages and has spent two decades being celebrated on the parenting bestsellers list. He is the assistant professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and a founding board member of Healthy Child Healthy World. Harvey and his wife, Nina Karp, founded Happiest Baby in 2001.
Their focus on helping, solving everyday parenting challenges includes science-based products, content and services that enhance a child's wellbeing. Happiest Baby was named one of Fast Company's, most innovative companies in 2020. Their flagship product and smash success SNOO is the world's first smart sleeper for infants. It reduces a baby's crying, aids their sleep, and most importantly, helps prevent sudden infant death syndrome, saving lives. Dr. Karp's lifelong dedication to improving the lives of children and families has made him a leading authority in the field of pediatric medicine and child development. He has appeared on numerous television shows, including the "Oprah Winfrey" show, "Dr. Phil," "The View," and has been featured in many publications including Time Magazine, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Harvey, thank you for being here.
Dr. Harvey Karp: Thanks Michael. Great to see you again.
Michael: Yes. So we wanna go all the way back because when did you believe you were gonna go in the field of medicine and life sciences? Because did you know that as you were growing up, did somebody influence you or mentor you or you just really took to like science early on?
Dr. Karp: Well, I completely didn't know what I was doing. There were no doctors in my family. My father was an engineer and he worked for himself. And I thought, that is so cool. If you could make your own hours and design your life the way you want it to be, not have to be a cog in a big company. But I didn't really like engineering very much. I liked science, so I thought biology, I could be a doctor. Doctors work for themselves. I had no clue how complex the world of medicine is and how once you're committed as a doctor, you are basically working for thousands of people. You have your own life. You have thousands of bosses that you're responding to. So anyway, it was a good choice, but completely I lucked out completely.
Michael: So you do then probably in high school, hey, this is the path, this is what I'm gonna go do. Once I started college. Yeah. Yeah. And so where did you go and when you got into it, was there ever a moment where you thought, no, this is too much, maybe not so much. Maybe I do something else. Was there ever a hesitation?
Dr. Karp: No, no, no, no. I really loved it. I was a duck, a duck in water or fish in water, whatever they say. I was really loved it. I was constantly challenged by it. So it was a good choice. And And where did you go? University of Buffalo in New York. Buffalo. And did you get your doctorate there? I got my bachelor's there and then I went to medical school at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx in New York City.
Michael: Oh, awesome. So now here you are, you chose the field being a pediatrician. Tell us why and was that easy. And did it become more complicated than you had thought?
Dr. Karp: Well, I would say actually when I went to medical school, I loved everything. I wanted to be a surgeon, I wanted to be a neurologist, I wanted to be an ophthalmologist. I liked everything, all the areas were interesting to me. But what really struck me about pediatrics was that children got healthy, they were strong. It was a very optimistic field. It's very somber where you're working with, at least for me, it was working with the elderly. For some people, they don't like working with children because it can be so shocking and sad when children get ill. And of course that's very much the truth. But for me, working with parents and working with young children, I remember when I was in the Bronx doing rounds on a Saturday morning, and these kids with sickle cell anemia and cancer, they were like bouncing in their cribs to Soul Train, which was on the televisions. And they had such spirit and their parents had such optimism that that really was the area that I wanted to work in.
Michael: Now, I'm going to guess because with children, you also have the parents. So you have the extended family as well. Was that very different for you? You could be a surgeon, working with adults, you're dealing with mainly the adult patient. When you're with children, you're dealing with family. Talk to us about the difference there and did you have to adapt or is that something you sort of love the social piece of working in pediatrics?
Dr. Karp: Well, it was, for me, it was wonderful. Of course, in any field when you're working with a patient, you gotta work with their family as well, but never as intimately as in pediatrics. But I love teaching and mentoring is really part of being a pediatrician. I like to joke that my job is half being a doctor and half being a grandmother. Because a lot of the things that parents needed to know, weren't really medical per se. They were good common sense and ancient wisdom, things that were carried on. But many parents today are separated from their extended family. They don't have the richness of that support that every other generation of human beings had until maybe a 100 years ago. And so the pediatrician's role is really one of support and common sense and kind of passing on grandparenting like tips in addition to medical advice.
Michael: So did you become a professor before you founded your company or was it the opposite?
Dr. Karp: No, I was an assistant professor for many, many years at UCLA and then USC in Los Angeles. So that was really at the same exact time as I started in practice. So I did that for about 20 years, teaching in the hospitals, et cetera. And actually being in the office in my business, I don't have the time to be teaching the way I used to.
Michael: So I want to now enter Nina, your wife. Where did you meet her? And then you wound up getting married and you have a company together. So I want to talk about where she entered the picture and then how you developed a company as husband and wife. 'Cause sometimes that can be tricky 'cause what we do know is that most small businesses failed due to co-founder, right, issues. And so talk to us about where she came in and when you decided to form the company.
Dr. Karp: Well, we met 30 years ago at a party. She was coming down the stairs. I was coming up the stairs and just started a conversation and it was magical. You know what's the extraordinary thing is sometimes in your life you meet people and you just remember that moment forever. You won't remember what you ate for lunch two days ago, but you remember this moment in time, that's when you know it's special. So that was quite a while ago and we've had many, many enterprises together since then. So we've learned how to work together. The joke in in our family is, divorced, never murder, maybe. You know what I mean? We both have passions and we have very strong opinions. But what is perfect in our dynamic is that I really have an expertise in the science and she has an expertise in everything. I mean, she raised our funds and hired our executive team and found our factories in China and India and designed our offices and built an office in Europe, our second office there. She's just extraordinary. She knows no fear. She has incredible capabilities. And that common sense that leads you, because you're always in a business there're options, there are decisions you have to make. And sometimes you can get lost in all of those decisions. And if you have an inner sense of what's right, it really helps to guide you. And she is brilliant in that way.
Michael: Well, let's go then to Happiest Baby where you're both working, you're both executives there. Talk to me about why you formed it, what the mission and purpose is of the company and its intent long term?
Dr. Karp: Well, we like to joke, we're not a company with a mission. We're a mission with a company because we were already retired when we started this company. And we're not roboticists, we're not startup MBAs from Harvard who always wanted to have a startup. It was really because of the deaths in the United States that motivated us. Well, I was giving a lecture about SIDS or infant sleep death saying that 3,500 babies die every year in the United States, healthy babies, babies who shouldn't die and no change in the last 20 years. Every year, 3,500, 3,500. And I said, if another country were killing 3,500 of our babies, we would go to war. I mean, there's nothing we would stop at to prevent that from happening. Why weren't we doing more? And I went back to the hotel room that night and I said to Nina, "I think we can do something about this. Would you do it with me?" She said, "How long do you think it'll take?" I said, "A year, year and a half. How hard could this be?"
This was 11 years ago. And she had just made a documentary on healing from breast cancer. It was brilliant, actually, I think it's one of the best documentaries on illness that I've ever seen called "The Path of Wellness in Healing." And I said, "Listen, I just helped you with that project, will you help me with this project?" And she said, "Sure." And so we started out, raise some funds and started building prototypes. And actually, my first business partner in this was a professor at MIT Media Lab. A super bright and experienced roboticist. And so together we started pulling the team together and the goal was really as odd as this sounds to put me in every baby's bedroom in the country, so what would I do in terms of calming a baby if I were there to be able to pick up the baby? And how could we build that into a machine that didn't look like a machine? That's a beautiful poetic design, but that nevertheless had the functionality of a caregiver because this was really the nut of it, Michael.
The American family and families all around the world now, are really suffering and struggling because of a certain disintegration of the extended family. Of course, a number one concern is parents are exhausted when they have a baby. It's really a struggle for them. But underlying that concern is the fact that they don't have their mother, their sister, their grandmother, their next-door neighbors, older daughter, constantly in the house with them helping them because that's the way it used to be. And so parents are struggling without that help and they don't even think they deserve it. They think, oh, a normal mom and dad or parents just do it on their own. And so what we're trying to do is give an underpinning, a support for the family, extra sleep for the baby, reduce the crying, sleep train the baby, most importantly, keep the baby secured so they cannot roll to an unsafe position. 'Cause that's when so many of the deaths occur. And we're thrilled. We actually, on top of all the work we've done, and we've measured 500 million hours of infant sleep to prove our points. We're now in 160 hospitals supporting the nursing staff and supporting parents in the hospital. But we just got FDA approval as the very first bed in the world that is proven safe and effective for keeping babies in that safe position. So it's been a very busy.
Michael: Oh, big congratulations on that because that's not easy.
Dr. Karp: Thanks. That was a real challenge.
Michael: Yeah. Let's go back to the funding piece. In the businesses that you and Nina have produced and made and taken to market, how many of those did you struggle getting funding? People were like, you're doing what and how's this gonna work? And you need so much capital up front to do this and you're not going to have the supply chain that you talked about earlier where you're in China, you're here, you're there where you can mass produce things at a reasonable cost. What was that like?
Dr. Karp: Well, in prior enterprises we funded everything. It was always bootstrapped. So this was a first experience to work with VCs and really have a board of directors and things that you don't have to have when you have a normal small business. And it's just a husband-and-wife team, or I had a small pediatric practice with a few partners, so that that funding side of it never entered into it. Again, pick the right partner. My wife has great abilities of persuasion and she's extremely charismatic and our idea made sense. Listen, no one even thought that you could accomplish what we've, no one thought that babies could sleep longer. We say, "Yeah, no, that babies, I have to wake up." Some babies just cry a lot.
And yet there's this magical thing that doctors tell families when they're really struggling, which is that, you know what? There is a way to immediately help babies sleep longer and cry less. Drive them all night in the car. And when you go, well that works, right? I mean, have you fallen asleep in trains and planes? So we knew that there was a way and my work, 'cause I wrote a book 20 years ago that described a new approach to giving parents the skills called "Happiest Baby on the Block." Give parents the skills to be much more competent that taking care of their babies. Anyone can learn these skills and be the best baby comer who ever lived with some very simple techniques.
And then I wrote "Happiest Toddler on the Block." So how do you raise a toddler with, again, very simple techniques that are counterintuitive but can immediately change the dynamic and help you be more competent by doing the tricks that preschool teachers and pediatricians learn along the way. So then we decided to do this. We had to raise funds and bring on an extended team and bring on experts in fields of operations and manufacturing and product development and industrial design and legal and all of the other areas, marketing, that are really required to build a team that's gonna allow you to be successful. Because our goal wasn't just could we make a little baby bed that we could sell and people would like it. Our goal is to completely restructure the sociological underpinnings of our society and the societies around the world, to be able to support all families and support them for free. And we'll get to that in a minute. And to go into hospitals and to be able to support nursing staffs in hospitals globally, all around the world.
Michael: Well, so let's talk about that. You brought up the free piece. You've had major bestselling books and it's not just about the sudden infant death syndrome, but it's really about the caring of children behaviorally as well. Talk to us about those books because you have 'em in multiple languages all around the world. Number one, still best-selling a book for child rearing. Talk to us about that 'cause there's lots of pieces in that that you can probably obtain free.
Dr. Karp: Oh yeah, absolutely. And we have millions of people who come to our website every month just for free information. We've got tons and tons of information about babies and toddlers.
Michael: Can you to interrupt, give us the URL right now so that people know where to go to actually access that info?
Dr. Karp: Yeah, you bet. Anyone can come to happiestbaby.com. Of course we're on Instagram as well and Twitter and Facebook. But we have this treasury of knowledge for anyone to come and take advantage of at happiestbaby.com. So everyone's welcome to come and join videos that help to explain things as well because again, we're in the education business and there's something about commerce, Michael, and I'm sure you've seen this before and you're a world's expert in marketing yourself. Commerce today is about relationships. It's about authority and authenticity and about showing that you care about your customers, not just because you wanna sell them things, but because you want to be part of their lives. And that's really something I know that you do at TriNet. It's important not just to be selling a product, but that's the whole purpose of this podcast is to share. And I'm so appreciative of TriNet for wanting to share these stories with others to hopefully inspire and educate and that's what we do as well.
Michael: Yeah, well, we at TriNet really are a part of your company. We'll talk about how you assemble a team, keep them there, retain them, keep them energized and focused on actually doing your business. And we look at it as we're a part of your success. Your success is ours and your stories are our stories and we impact that in a major way. So why don't we pivot to that. You were talking about a key person from MIT Media Labs, but you were talking about manufacturing, you're talking about product design, legal, et cetera. How did you begin to assemble a team and did you look for people who had the same passion around your ideas and what you wanted to do really for society relative to infants and children?
Dr. Karp: You know, one of the things, when you work with people to build a culture, you have to have a shared value system. And what's wonderful in our type of a business is that people get the idea of saving baby's lives. It's an easy one to say, "Oh my God, I can work in a company that saves baby's lives." That's our hope and goal. We're working on that. That's what the FDA approval is about to keep babies on the back is what we got medical device approval for because we know that if they stay on the back they'll be safer. But sure people who engineers that could have worked for any large company and worked for large companies in the past said, "You know what? This is a little company, I'm taking a chance, but it feels right and it feels like something that I can be proud of. I can share with my family and my friends and say, this is what I'm doing in the world besides the challenges of engineering and the challenges of operations and the challenges of marketing, I feel like I am doing something to make the world a better place." So that's been a fun part of team building.
Michael: For sure. And you're building a legacy and these people in your organization are part of that legacy. So let's now, we're gonna cut to sort of the future. So you've done this. One thing that people don't know is that you also lobby, you have impacted laws, bills relative to children's wellbeing. Talk about that piece 'cause that's a piece people may not know about that you actually do as well.
Dr. Karp: Well, an interesting thing about pediatricians is we deal with the social welfare. It starts with a family. It starts with a child and then a family. But it's those Russian dolls that have a doll within a doll within a doll. That's the world we live in. And pediatricians just characteristically go into areas of public health and broader community health because that's the way we're trained. And so I've always been involved in environmental health and I've been lucky enough to be a participant and influencer in terms of some laws and some policies that help to protect children's environmental health. And now larger, I'm very interested in issues of postpartum depression, of course SIDS and infant death. But more to the point about strengthening parenting and strengthening the American family. I've been very lucky to even though I've protested more wars than I can tell you during my time, I'm incredibly appreciative of the dedication and the sacrifice of our military folks. And I've been lucky enough to travel to about a dozen military bases across the world and work with the families there and the professionals to give support to families that are doing so much to protect us by working with inner city families and free clinics. That's always been a part of my background and that's why I said our goal is that everyone gets this incredible robotic device, this incredible responsive baby bed that's gonna sleep train their babies and protect them for free. So thousands of people already get a free six month rental through their employer, through JP Morgan and Snapchat and Under Armor and Activision Blizzard. And we just signed up the National Air Traffic Controllers Union because you don't want air traffic controllers being tired on the job. But truckers and teachers and all sorts of individuals are getting this for free now. And insurance companies will come on board and then ultimately the government will sponsor this.
Michael: That's where I was gonna go. Do the carriers such as like the Aetna's, UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross, Blue Shield, et cetera, are they going to bring this in and cover a piece of this relative to the insurance they provide?
Dr. Karp: I think so because we now have about over 20 medical studies underway to demonstrate to the insurance companies that not only can they improve care, which they wanna do, but they can reduce their costs by keeping people healthy. So much of healthcare is about wellness now about prevention and SNOO is 1000% about prevention, strengthening families, but preventing bad things. So we're now at the beginning of working with the state of Virginia and we'll be working with other state government as well to try to improve care, not just for the well to do, but for everybody in our society rich and poor, inner city, rural, everybody needs help and they're struggling with young kids. So that's a big part of the process and we're very optimistic that we are going to get this as a covered benefit, not dissimilar to breast pumps. So that's a big part. But Michael, I want to tell you about a second part that we're excited about, which is using SNOO in the hospital and what we just published our first study showing that each bed reduces nurse labor four to five hours per day. So it helps the nurses taking care of the babies because you've probably read about these nursing shortages that we have and so we need to have innovative alternatives.
Michael: Oh that's fantastic. That that's awesome. Are you gonna have another book? Is there any books coming out?
Dr. Karp: I have book ideas but we have our hands full with every to accomplish right now. I figured, I was like, oh, there's probably gonna be another book in all of that. 'Cause that seems like another whole topic, some of that behavioral work that you're doing. Well listen, this is a seven day a week, 16-hour day job. I mean it's very, very, very, very ingressing.
Michael: Yeah, no, that's awesome you brought that up about adults still. I have to tell you, when I get on a plane and the engines start to go, I immediately fall asleep. That technique still works.
Dr. Karp: It certainly does. And a lot of adults sleep with white noise now or they've used heavy blankets or things like that, which all imitate the womb experience. That's what I wrote about 20 years ago in the "Happiest Baby on the Block." And now you can see how that's really entered into common adult usage in terms of trying to promote sleep.
Michael: Well and adults lack that in a major way right now. So Harvey, we talked about investors and we've talked about VCs and finding the capital. You had several celebrities come on board who actually invested in the company. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Dr. Karp: Yeah, when I worked as a pediatrician in Los Angeles, so there's so many celebrities here, you certainly have the opportunities to meet many of them on an intimate level and take care of their babies. So lots of really, really interesting folks from Madonna to Michelle Pfeiffer and Pierce Brosnan and they're all wonderful people and they become friends. But in building the company, when you can have celebrity attached to what you're doing, it raises awareness. It just helps people pay attention. And so when we start the business, we reached out but we said, listen, we want you to be affiliated, but we also want you to put money in. It's not like we're just gonna give you free shares. We want you to be committed and have skin in the game. And so we were incredibly lucky to have folks like Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel and Scarlett Johansson and Gwyneth Paltrow and...
Michael: Well that's a lot already.
Dr. Karp: Who else can I mention? I know some folks like their names mention don't like their names mentioned.
Michael: But yeah. Well, the interesting thing is that they actually bought in, believed in it and invested in it.
Dr. Karp: They did.
Michael: And not just endorsed it. And that says a lot about your product.
Dr. Karp: They did. Actually, Zoe Soldana another one, she's incredibly socially minded, has worked with the United Nations for children's welfare and we're so proud to have her as well as a part Jessica Chastain now as well as a member of our investor team. And what's useful about that is that listen you gotta get people's attention to be able to give them a message. And of course celebrity really helps us do that. So we're deeply appreciative for all those folks who have helped us.
Michael: So you were talking about big companies like JP Morgan, et cetera, who have incorporated this into a benefit. Talk to us about how that works.
Dr. Karp: I think one of the things that the pandemic taught us is that you gotta take care of your families. We're a lot of young people in the workforce are having children and they need support to be able to come back to work and maintain the workforce. It's super tough on especially in a small company, but really any company if young parents end up leaving the workforce, McKinsey did a survey saying 34% of women who have new babies don't return for at least a year. And that means you're losing productivity, you have to recruit and retrain. It's really challenging for corporations and corporations wanna support people so that they come back and they're loyal. And so we provide SNOO as a benefit for literally the cost of a Starbucks for a 24 hour caregiver or helper for the family. So it helps the baby sleep an hour more, it rocks and shushes babies to reduce crying and it sleep trains babies in addition to keeping them on the back. So all of that has been very beneficial for companies. As I mentioned, even hospitals now, Children's Hospital of New Orleans provides this for all of their nurses, doctors and technicians because they wanna retain their good workforce. And so we're very excited about that as the first step in getting these wonderful beds to be free for parents. The next step, as I mentioned, is insurance plans and then getting the government to subsidize these so everyone has the opportunity to get them for free.
Michael: It definitely certainly improves work-life balance when you think about you're having a child, how long will you be away from work? Will you come back to work?
Dr. Karp: And these first six months can be pivotal for much longer because if you develop postpartum depression, that can be a lifetime predisposition that you have, or marital stress can lead to a divorce because you're so stressed or you can't lose your baby weight and that becomes problematic for your body or a stress injury or an illness that turns into a long-term problem. So these first six months, if you play it right, you can build wellness and health that extends well beyond six months. And if you don't play it right, you can get problems that extend well beyond that period.
Michael: So you know what, Dr. Karp, it has been really awesome having you here. We are so pleased that you're a TriNet customer, that we can participate in your success, participate in your story, and continue to have you expand and grow. I mean, you're already global. Sounds like you have a lot of new ideas that you're gonna bring to market, which is very exciting. And I just want to thank you for taking the time. I know you're incredibly busy, inspiring.
Dr. Karp: Your very kind. Thank you so much, Michael.
Michael: I want to remind everybody that our PeopleForce Podcast by TriNet is committed to helping small and medium-size businesses and their leaders with timely and relevant business content. The PeopleForce Podcast drops new episodes every month and we hope you continue catching our new episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and Rise.TriNet.com. To get relevant SMB news and info, make sure you subscribe to our podcast and to our newsletter at TriNet.com/insights.
