

Ask HN: Entrepreneurs/hackers with children  - l33tbro

How does having a family affect your value structure?<p>Does it replace your other baby (start-up, open source project) or just inspire you to do better?
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tptacek
There isn't a high-pressure career you can choose that is friendlier to
families than startup entrepreneurship, at least in the common case. I'd like
to do what I can to end the myth that families and startups are incompatible.

Consider:

Biglaw is full of men and women associates who are having their first child.
Compare the work for a biglaw associate and a startup:

* The associate might have up to 50% travel, which is rigidly scheduled

* Both the associate and the entrepreneur expect to work more than 60 hours a week.

* But the associate is _formally required_ to work 60+ hour weeks, and the entrepreneur merely _averages_ 60+ hour weeks.

* The associate spends the majority of their working time at a prescribed office working in person with other associates and partners. The tech entrepreneur not only expects to be able to work from home often, but their team might not even be colocated with them at all.

* The associate's day is spent in face-to-face meetings, often with clients, which can't be scheduled at their convenience.

The same is true of Big 4 accountants, management consultants, don't get me
started on investment bankers, and I'd imagine the bullets for medical
residents would shoot all the way down the page.

I'm not even convinced that startup entrepreneurship is the hardest job on
families in _tech_. For instance: thousands of people in the tech industry
work as pre-sales engineers, and have 30-50% travel burdens.

~~~
patio11
I see your pre-sales engineer and raise you an entire office full of _Japanese
salarymen_. M-san once came up to me at 7 PM and apologized profusely for
having to leave early. "It's my little boy's birthday and, you know, we've
been in crunch for the last 4 months and I only see him on Sundays [+], so I
really wanted to make it this year."

Seriously. Actually happened.

[+] Edit for clarity: No, this is not because M-san and his wife are divorced.
This is because M-san was routinely working during substantially all of his
son's waking hours Monday through Saturday.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Sorry to pick up the thread so late, but isn't this horrifically damaging to
family structure in Japan? If the general idea that absent father hurt /
damage kids is right is to this just creating generation(s) of damage? isn't
there pushback?

~~~
patio11
_isn 't this horrifically damaging to family structure in Japan?_

Yes!

~~~
lifeisstillgood
oh ...

I have for a while been working 20 mins from my house, for a university in
Texas and other clients. The effect on my relationship with my wife and
children was dramatic compared to the slogging commute and long hours (but
naught compared to the salaryman stories I hear).

We lose sooo much with long commutes and long hours - and yet the gain for
companies is trivial especially compared to gains that simple management
improvements can make.

I spent last year holidaying on the Greek island of Kefalonia - and realised
that if I stayed there and worked, I would be six hours out from Texas instead
of five. And the holiday "campus" I stayed in was idyllic - and there was very
little in my imagination stopping me and 25 other families from parking up
there and living and working - I strongly suspect that an ideal arrangement is
small clusters of live / work / school environments coming into being.

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jasonkester
It's tough, but doable.

Kids take up a lot more time. Partially because they need looking after, but
mostly because they're so much fun. You want to spend all your time playing
with them, teaching them things, or even just staring at them. It's a big (but
very good) time sink.

And your outlook on money changes. I remember the month way back when, when my
SaaS profit first hit $600/month. "I can _live_ off this!" Sure, you have to
live kinda cheaply but a fella can scrape by on not much money, particularly
if you're travelling in a cheap country.

But not now. My kids are not going to scrape by on ramen and crash on couches
with me. We need houses, savings, and other grown-up things. And, sadly, that
costs money. For that, you either need to 10X the old dirtbag revenues or take
a contract gig.

You can see how it might spiral out of control if you're not careful. Take a
job to supplement the business revenue, end up starving the business for time,
while still not seeing the kids as much as you want. It takes some balancing.

But it's all doable. And the hard bit is transient. Once your business is
ticking away well enough to not require a side-gig or take up 40 hours of your
time each week, you'll find yourself chasing the kids around the lawn on a
sunny Tuesday afternoon, knowing that you don't have to head back to "the
office" at all that day if you don't feel like it.

Definitely worth it in the end. Good luck!

~~~
dennisgorelik
Kids are fun ... in moderation.

After all kids are inexperienced, don't know much, making mistakes ...

> My kids are not going to scrape by on ramen

Why not? The less they have, the more they value work.

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dennisgorelik
Children + business is quite doable, but it usually means there is not that
much outside of these two activities in life.

Which is totally fine.

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sharmi
An explorer on the entrepreneurship road, it is my children who gave form to
what was just an abstract idea. The desire to be there for my kids deems
necessary that I be my own master. Plus I love the freedom to generally work
on what I love. Of course, this is not possible without the support of my
spouse and his job :)

Also, time will always be a constraint. You need to be very focused and
prioritize well. Distractions have greater penalties. Currently the kids are
toddlers and I basically get only 2 hours of solid work a day. But there is so
much one can accomplish if one stays focused.

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gregcohn
The essence of doing a startup efficiently is learning how to get leverage on
your time. Having a family makes that non-optional from a company point of
view, and you have to learn to find the ways to get similar leverage on a
family front. Maybe you want to be there for bedtimes but don't mind a nanny
doing the driving to school, for example.

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wilsonfiifi
I think it depends on how young your 'babies' are. They will both require a
lot of your time so if you are trying to be that super star dad, husband,
entrepreneur, you'll burn yourself out quite quickly. You just have to
prioritize and live with your choices IMHO.

