Our story

Named for Ruby and Louise.

Two women — a mother and a mother-in-law — who between them raised a family on patience, good books, and long afternoons outdoors.

Ruby, my mom, went to school to become a teacher. Louise — Missy, to everyone who loves her — spent more than thirty years as a librarian and a preschool teacher, and then became the kind of “Mimi” her grandbabies will tell their own children about. Between the two of them: a classroom, a library, and a family. Which is, if you think about it, exactly what a homeschool is. You’ll even find Missy in the product — MissyLou, the keeper of RubyLou’s Library, is named for her.

I should tell you who I am and who I’m not.

I’m not a homeschool veteran with five kids and a decade of co-op Fridays — and I’d never pretend to be.

Since 2019, I’ve spent my career in technology. Over the last 4 years, I’ve focused on supporting families at the most tender moments of their lives — in the fertility and family-building technology space, including building an employer fertility-benefits product that companies use to help their people become parents. That work taught me the two things RubyLou is made of: how to build technology worthy of a family’s trust, and how to work carefully in regulated, sensitive, deeply personal territory where most tech companies fear to tread.

It also gave me my own story. I’m an IVF baby. I exist because my parents had access to medical innovation at exactly the moment they needed it — and I’ve spent my career seeking to deepen that innovation at the places families need it most.

As my husband and I begin building our own family, I started looking closely at how we’d want to educate — and found something that surprised me. Home education is one of the fastest-growing choices in American family life, and it has been almost completely passed over by the innovation wave that transformed health tech, fertility care, and family benefits. Millions of parents doing the most important teaching in the world — supported by boxed curricula, spreadsheets, and Facebook groups.

So I’m doing the thing my career prepared me to do: building the infrastructure this community deserves — with the community, not at it. RubyLou is being built alongside real homeschooling families, on one conviction: the parent is the teacher, and the parent deserves better tools than anyone has bothered to build.

The name is my compass. A teacher and a librarian — the women who shaped our family, and now a platform built to help families flourish.

For Ruby. For Louise. For our future family — and for yours.