Amy Kiska and Molly Morse bring a combined 30 years of experience in high-growth and unicorn startups to their company, Recess. Amy was an early employee at Christian Louboutin, helping scale it into the billion-dollar brand it is today, bringing deep expertise in global expansion. Molly started her career in data science then moved into the start-up world, building and scaling marketplaces from the ground up. Molly and Amy worked together at a rapid-growth, unicorn startup in the heart of the pandemic, and quickly found there was nothing they couldn't conquer as a team. As mothers themselves, they felt the problem Recess is solving firsthand: hours lost searching for kids' activities with no way to see real availability, pricing, or fit.
← All profilesDrop us anywhere, and we'd figure it out together.
Amy Kiska & Molly Morse, Recess
Read it the way it ran in print.
Their exclusive interview runs in the August 2026 issue, starting page 38. Below is the actual spread, page for page, exactly as it appears in print.
Every parent has a moment where they realize the way things work right now simply isn't good enough. Take us back to the moment each of you hit that wall with finding and booking activities for your kids. What made you both decide the answer was to build something rather than just figure it out the way everyone else does?
Molly: My daughter had been begging to take classes. I was searching for gymnastics programs in Austin and got to page 6 of Google search results and had only found three programs. It was several hours of research just to find out none of the programs worked for us. I called Amy that night. I said, "This is it. This is so painful. This is so overlooked. We could have a genuinely positive impact fixing this." We started the company while Amy was 6 months pregnant and spent all our savings getting it off the ground.
Amy: I was six months pregnant when we started building Recess, so I hit this wall before my daughter was even born. Nobody had built the infrastructure to solve the chaos of finding and booking kids' activities. We realized we'd spent our careers at high-growth startups, standing up new markets from scratch, and the problem every parent was drowning in was the exact problem we knew we could solve. So we did.
You hope your daughters understand why you chose to do this, and what you were willing to bet on. What do you each hope they take away?
Amy: We hope to be examples to our daughters that when you want something, you dive in and go after it fearlessly. When Molly and I got started, we knew the stats: female-founded startups raise less than 2% of all VC dollars. Our daughters were there for all of it, and someday I hope they understand: we saw the odds and jumped anyway.
Read the full feature in the August 2026 issue.
Open the issue
