Founders with Kids

I'm glad to see startup founders confirming that it's possible to run a company with a kid, but a little rueful that this would be surprising enough to be the lede of a story.

The reality is that adults in high-pressure professions --- like partner-track biglaw and medicine --- routinely have kids. They take a couple weeks off, make child care arrangements, and then get right back on the horse.

And, sorry, but I don't believe it's true that starting a tech startup is the highest-pressure career track you can pick. When you break down the day-to-day hour-to-hour of an early stage tech startup, 70 hour week or otherwise, there's a whole lot of flex built in that isn't there for a partner-track Big 4 consultant or a hospital resident. You can often fix that critical bug in prod from home; you can usually miss today's stand-up dev meeting if you need to take the kid to the pediatrician; the evening you expected to spend sipping beer and writing Cucumber tests can get pushed to tomorrow if a family event comes up.

It's not just professionals either. Throughout the middle and lower economic classes, it's the norm to have families with two working parents. When you're living paycheck to paycheck and barely covering food, rent, and health care, there's even more pressure not to miss an hour of work, and people get by doing this.

I started a company the same year my son was born, and my daughter was born right at the end of the company. It was stressful (though, more stressful for my wife), but manageable.

I can't speak to startups specifically, but my parents founded Seliger + Associates, the grant writing firm I'm now part of, when my siblings and I were kids. They and especially my Dad spent absurd hours getting the business started, but that's because they absolutely had to. If they didn't, the outcomes would be very bad—like not having a place to live, or food to eat. Desperation motivates. Look at what people who used to live on farms had to do: backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, often for ten or twelve hours a day.

They did it, and they did it with their kids, because they had no viable alternative, at least until manufacturing came along and sucked much of the workforce out of farming.

In the case of my parents, they worked from home (which meant my siblings and I could entertain ourselves, as long as no one was dying or actively bleeding).

I think the real answer is that you can think of your life as having three possible properties (there are more of course, but I'm going to reduce them for the sake of simplicity): startup, kids, social / relaxation life. Choose two. Sometimes life chooses for you.

EDIT: I've now read through the other stories, and I'm struck by the fact that I don't think any of the people profiled have startups that have been tremendous successes—ones that, say, are valued north of $100 million. By now pretty much everyone understands that startups follow power-laws, and the biggest returns are concentrated in a small number of huge winners. It would be interesting to see how startups in general compare to huge-winner startups.

When your spouse doesn't work, you can often pull off late nights knowing your kids and house are under control. But when both parents have high-stakes jobs it's super hard because you're almost always subject to a hard stop.

It's also a mindset thing--keeping your startup's problems in your head and trying to think and plan for the family (who has practice this weekend? is the preschool application in? who's meeting the plumber today? etc.).