Why I Built A Puppy to Save My Sanity

We were three weeks from closing the biggest deal of our careers, and I was Googling “what time does lacrosse practice start” for the fourth time that day.

My husband and I had spent the better part of a decade building Veda, a healthcare AI company. We’d raised venture funding, landed on the Inc. 500 list, won awards I’d dreamed about, and built a team of people I genuinely loved working with. We were in the final stretch of a major transition—the kind of milestone founders work years toward—and my brain was supposed to be locked in on term sheets and timelines.

Instead, I was standing in a school parking lot, fifteen minutes late for pickup, refreshing my inbox to figure out whether the field trip permission slip I vaguely remembered seeing was due today or tomorrow. (It was yesterday.)

Here’s what you need to know about our family: we’re a beautiful, chaotic, blended crew. I have two kids from my first marriage—a sixteen-year-old daughter who is smarter than me and not shy about proving it, and a thirteen-year-old boy whose entire personality is whatever sport is currently in season. My husband has two girls, twelve and ten, and between the four of them, three play sports, one is a burgeoning social justice activist who will absolutely stage a protest over an unfair bedtime, and all of them attend different schools with different calendars, different email lists, and different ideas about what constitutes “enough notice” for a bake sale.

Oh, and we have a cat named Louis. He is elderly, unbothered, and very much the one actually running the household.

During those final weeks of the Veda exit, our family was operating on pure adrenaline and hope. My husband was deep in code. I was deep in contracts. The kids were deep in their own worlds—and those worlds had a lot of logistics. Between the four of them, we were getting roughly sixty emails a week from schools, coaches, and activity organizers. Some were important. Most were not. And all of them looked exactly the same in my inbox: subject line “Weekly Update!” with the one critical deadline buried in paragraph five.

We missed a parent-teacher conference. Not because we didn’t care—because the reminder came in during a board call and got buried under seventeen other emails about spirit week and lunch menus. We sent one kid on a field trip without a packed lunch because the email said “optional sack lunch” and neither of us could remember if that meant we were supposed to send one or not. (We were.) Our thirteen-year-old showed up to practice in the wrong uniform because the schedule had changed and the update was in a group text thread with forty-seven other parents that neither of us had read.

One night, after the kids were finally asleep and Louis had claimed his spot on the couch between us, I said it out loud: “We literally build AI for a living. Why can’t we build something that just reads all of this and tells us what actually matters?”

My husband looked up from his laptop and said, “…We could.”

So we did. At first it was just for us. A scrappy little tool that connected to our school email accounts, parsed the messages, pulled out dates and deadlines, and texted us reminders before things fell through the cracks. Nothing fancy. Just functional.

But here’s the thing that made it different from every other calendar app or family organizer we’d tried (and abandoned): we built it with the same obsession about data privacy that we’d brought to healthcare. At Veda, we’d spent years building AI systems that handled sensitive data responsibly—because in healthcare, you don’t get to be careless with people’s information. And when it came to our own kids? We felt even more strongly about it.

I didn’t want some app scraping my children’s school emails and selling that data to advertisers. I didn’t want an AI tool that knew my daughter’s class schedule being “optimized” by a company whose business model depends on keeping me scrolling. We’d seen how the sausage gets made in big tech, and we wanted something different for our family.

So we built Pomnie with privacy baked in from day one—not bolted on as an afterthought, and not buried in a forty-page terms of service nobody reads. Your family’s data is yours. Period.

We called it Pomnie because we’d always joked about needing a puppy that could actually be useful. A little companion that learns your family’s routine, fetches the information you need, and never judges you for forgetting picture day. (We named the cat Louis because he acts French and aloof. The puppy needed to be the opposite.)

Within a week, I stopped panic-scrolling my inbox at red lights. Within a month, we hadn’t missed a single deadline. The permission slips were signed. The uniforms were correct. And for the first time in what felt like years, I wasn’t carrying the entire family’s schedule in my head like some kind of overloaded hard drive.

I’ve spent my career helping organizations use AI to solve big problems. Turns out the biggest problem I needed to solve was in my own kitchen, buried under a pile of backpacks and unsigned forms.

I built Pomnie because I needed it. And if you’ve ever sat in your car after drop-off wondering what you forgot today—I think you might need it too.

Welcome to Pomnie. Let’s keep it all together.

(The parent-teacher conference? We rescheduled. The teacher was very understanding. Louis, for the record, had no comment.)