Dr. Mona Hovaizi

My parents each left Iran as teenagers, alone. A leap almost no one around them was making. Years later they met in the new country where they were building their lives from the ground up. What they carried with them was the thing they valued most: a belief that education matters, not for the degree on the wall, but for the love of knowledge itself, and for learning how to think deeply about the world. In our home, curiosity was the highest virtue. You didn’t accept an idea because everyone repeated it. You asked why.

That belief shaped everything I’ve done. It’s why I became a dentist: I wanted a profession where I could work with people directly and affect their lives, one person at a time, in a field built on evidence, where what’s proven matters more than what’s popular. It’s why I later helped build education programs in healthcare and watched clear teaching change the direction of people’s lives. And it’s why I’ve spent my life traveling: seven continents, more than 52 countries, always curious about how other people live. I didn’t stop when I became a mother. My first child visited 24 countries by age two; my second is on the same path. Everywhere I went, I found the same thing: people are more alike than different, and there are a thousand good ways to raise a child.

When I became a parent, I noticed how rarely parents are treated as thinkers. Information has never been more abundant. What’s scarce is judgment: knowing what the evidence actually says, what matters at each stage, and what you can confidently let go. Parents deserve that clarity, and the respect to decide for themselves what’s right for their family.

That’s why we built Gaux. It’s the education my parents believed in, applied to the years that shape a family, whether parents find it on their own or through an employer that treats early parenthood as something worth investing in. And it’s a promise: you don’t have to disappear into parenthood. You get to stay curious, keep thinking, and remain yourself. The whole time.