Bringing Data to An Emotional Decision

In fall 2025, Diana Clemons, MBA ’23 (XP-92), a senior director at investment research firm Morningstar, moved from Chicago to Seattle with her family after her husband accepted a job there. The couple suddenly needed to find childcare for their nine-month-old son.

“It was sort of terrifying because there wasn’t much to go on beyond mom groups on Facebook and a few listing sites,” she says.

What was missing was actual data, she thought—the kind that is customarily buried in public records and other sources, and which can take time and a certain amount of expertise to excavate. She and her husband found childcare, but only after spending “countless hours calling places, requesting information, and visiting.”

The experience inspired Clemons to create Shortlist, a website that compiles every licensed childcare provider in a city directly from state records, and then adds what a parent needs in order to compare them—basic information but also a provider’s complaint history and a portal where providers can share supplemental information, such as whether tuition covers meals and diapers.

Childcare is most families’ second-largest expense after housing, running between 8.9 and 16 percent of median family income for one child, according to the US Department of Labor. It is also the most emotionally loaded purchase a family makes. “You’re handing the most important person in your life to people you’ve known for an hour, on a waitlist deadline,” Clemons says. “Of course it’s emotional. But emotion is a poor research method, and right now it’s the only one most parents have.”

The site, shortlist.guide, is home to 12,567 licensed providers and is live in Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle, as well as in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Kansas City, Missouri, with more cities coming online soon. It carries no advertising and no sponsored placement and is free to use.

Clemons credits two sources as primary influences on her decision to create the site: Morningstar and Chicago Booth.

“I admire how Joe Mansueto basically democratized investing by collecting and analyzing prospectuses so that people could compare apples to apples and make their own decisions about where to invest,” she says. And Booth—in particular, Professor Eric Budish’s Competitive Strategy course—expanded her sense of her own capabilities and gave her an appreciation for how small startups can eventually outperform much larger players by focusing intensely on key issues.

Joseph D. Mansueto, AB ’78, MBA ’80, is the founder and executive chairman of Morningstar. Eric Budish is the Paul G. McDermott Professor of Economics and Entrepreneurship and the Centel Foundation/Robert P. Reuss Faculty Scholar.