

Founders with Kids - rohin
http://priceonomics.com/founders-with-kids/?

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tptacek
Having a baby is _not_ like having an intravenous drip of love pleasantly
coursing through your veins all the time, unless that intravenous drip
periodically freaks out and harfs all over you before making you take it for a
pleasant night in the ER waiting room.

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.

~~~
rayiner
My daughter was born the same month I was working a major internal
investigation. The company was under threat of getting delisted, and we were
told that if we were awake, we had to be working. I didn't sleep for a couple
of months, but we're all alive. You make it work.

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jseliger
_If startups require intense amounts of time and focus to succeed, how do
founders with kids make it work? Children, no matter how lovable and cute,
take up a lot of these scarce resources._

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.

------
rsobers
I think it's even harder when both parents work full-time.

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.).

