She lost three months trying to enroll one kid in gymnastics. So she built the search engine for childhood.
Most parents lose an afternoon to it. Tabs open, calendars cross-referenced, a friend texted for the name of that one good art teacher. Peggy Chang lost three months. She wanted to put her daughter Kaitlyn in gymnastics and could not find a clear way to do it. An MIT engineer does not stay stuck for long. She built the thing that should have existed.
That thing is ActivityHero, the Palo Alto marketplace where parents find, compare and book summer camps, after-school classes, workshops and kids' nights out. Today it connects more than four million families with over ten thousand activity providers. Chang has been its co-founder and CEO since 2012, and she still runs it from the same town where the idea was born.
What she is working on has not really changed in over a decade: take the messiest, most fragmented corner of family life and make it bookable in a few clicks. Newer pieces keep arriving. Partnerships with Jumbula and HopSkipDrive in 2024, then UrbanSitter in 2026, fold scheduling, rides and sitters into the same orbit. The mission underneath is bigger than convenience, and she says so plainly: when childcare has a gap, a mother is usually the one who fills it, and her career pays for it.
"Find good providers faster, so kids can pursue their interests right away."
Read her resume backwards and it looks like a dare. Before camps, there was QuickBooks. Before QuickBooks, the brokerage screens at Charles Schwab. Before Schwab, the dot-com fever of Excite@Home and the early new-media desk at the Los Angeles Times. And at the very start, a young engineer at Walt Disney Imagineering, the lab that builds the magic the rest of us only ride.
Fifteen-plus years of shipping consumer software taught her a particular trick: take something people find baffling - filing taxes, trading stocks - and make it feel obvious. ActivityHero is that trick pointed at the school-break calendar. She did not arrive at it cold, either. She had already co-founded SignUpforCamp, a summer-camp search and scheduling tool, which merged into ActivityHero to become its camp-search backbone.
Nobody enjoys the hunt for the right class. Chang treats that universal annoyance as the whole product - one search box where a scattered, word-of-mouth process becomes a list you can sort.
Her sharpest argument is economic: when coverage falls through, mothers usually step back from work. Easier booking, plus scholarships, is a quiet lever on who gets to stay in the workforce.
The founding team described itself as engineers AND mothers taking a "scientific approach" to after-school life. The sidekick to the Mom hero, built with spreadsheets and, once, LEGOs.
ActivityHero's scale, in the round figures the company publishes. Bars are relative, for feel, not finance.
The story she tells is small and exact, which is why it sticks. Her daughter Kaitlyn wanted gymnastics. Chang did not know where to go, who was good, or when classes ran. It took three months to sort out. For an engineer who had shipped products used by millions, that gap was almost insulting.
So the fix had a clear specification: make it fast, make it comparable, make it bookable. The founders - all engineers, all mothers - approached the after-school puzzle the way they would approach a system design. One co-founder built the early financial model out of LEGOs. The company's own tagline calls it the sidekick to the Mom hero, which is the rare slogan that doubles as a product spec.
Kaitlyn, for the record, got her gymnastics. The two of them later posed in front of a London backdrop at the Gymnastics Olympic Trial Finals in San Jose - medals on, ActivityHero shirt on - in the photo that became Chang's most recognizable image. The kid who started it all, standing next to the company she started.
Chang's proudest credential, she has said, is not the MIT degrees or the Stanford MBA. It is her two kids, both of them enrolled in a wide variety of camps and classes - booked, naturally, on ActivityHero.
"Most proud of her two kids - enrolled in everything, booked on her own site."
She started out as an engineer at Walt Disney Imagineering - the people who build theme-park magic.
Before ActivityHero she co-founded SignUpforCamp, which merged in to become the camp-scheduling engine.
Her own children are the platform's power users. The CEO eats her own cooking.
The founders bill the company as "the sidekick to the Mom hero."
She helped build the Los Angeles Times' early new-media arm back when "online" was the frontier.
Sources: ActivityHero press kit & founder bios, company blog, Crunchbase, The Org, LinkedIn, PR Newswire. Figures are as published by the company. Story details verified from public sources; where the record is quiet, this page stays quiet too.
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