Sheila Marcelo

Care.com & NEA, Founder & Venture Partner

Sheila Lirio Marcelo is a Venture Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Prior to NEA, she founded Care.com in 2006 and served as Chairwoman and CEO until early 2020. With Sheila’s leadership since founding, the company had year-over-year growth of over a hundred percent prior to going public in early 2014 and was sold to IAC in early 2020. Today, Care.com is the world’s largest online destination for finding and managing family care—serving more than 35 million people across 20 countries.

Marcelo founded the company when faced with the challenge of balancing a career with child and senior care responsibilities—spotlighting for her both the massive care needs of families everywhere and the untapped opportunity to provide solutions for those challenges.

Sheila started Care.com with a conviction that technology and innovation can address real world social challenges, and created the largest marketplace for care, consisting of a matching service for families and providers, a payroll and tax platform, and an enterprise solution for companies to support workers with their family care needs. Through both organic growth and numerous acquisitions, the company also offered everything from household tax and payroll services and customized corporate benefits packages covering the care needs of working families, to innovating new ways for caregivers to be paid and obtain professional benefits.

Prior to founding Care.com, Marcelo’s growing appreciation for the power of technology to help solve real problems for people led her to mission-driven companies like Upromise, where she was VP of Product Management and Marketing for the service which helped families save for college. Following Upromise, she was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Matrix Partners where she developed the plan for Care.com.

Over the course of Care.com’s growth, Marcelo has also been honored with numerous accolades, including one of the “Top 10 Women Entrepreneurs” at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit and Fortune Magazine. She is a Henry Crown Fellow with the Aspen Institute, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, was awarded a Marshall Memorial Fellowship, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Marcelo graduated from Mount Holyoke College, which also conferred upon her an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2015. She received her J.D. and M.B.A. degrees with honors from Harvard University and, in 2014, was the youngest recipient of the Harvard Business School Alumni Achievement Award.