

Kids are startups - lisper
http://rondam.blogspot.com/2008/07/kids-are-startups.html

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sutro
James Hong from "Founders at Work":

"And nothing ever goes according to plan. You can’t dwell on the fact that
your plan didn’t work. In our case, we didn’t even have a plan, but it would
have been worthless to have one anyway, since we just kept moving as fast as
we could. You have to hustle; you can’t just have a plan and cakewalk it. You
just have to know what direction you’re going in and run around like a rat in
a maze trying to get out."

Had James posted a question in a forum like this seeking advice at that early,
clueless stage in his company's history, you probably would have chided him
for his lack of sufficient up-front planning. Yet his story is indicative of
many of the other founders profiled in the book, and many other founders that
I admire. The reason these founders are successful is not because they are
master planners, it's because they are master improvisers, a quality shared, I
believe, by good parents.

Yes, kids are like startups, but pre-birth plans will change, and they are not
what will make you successful as a founder or a parent. And if you haven't had
kids or started a company, then your advice in those realms doesn't carry much
weight.

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nreece
>> I am in my mid-forties, married, with no kids. But that does not mean that
I do not know how hard it is to raise kids.

You _really_ don't know how hard it is to raise kids. And with all due
respect, just so you know, kids _are not_ startups.

~~~
lisper
Nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law: raising kids is harder than you think
even when you take into account nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law. :-)

> Kids are not startups.

Of course they are. They aren't startup _companies_ , they are startup
_humans_ , but they are definitely startups.

~~~
aneesh
I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup
companies. It really seems like you're trying to force the analogy here.

+1 for the corollary though :-)

~~~
izaidi
The most important thing to tell your kids is, "Just don't die."

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steveplace
1) Everyone is a good parent until they become one.

2) You can't sell your equity stake

3) Firing your cofounder is expensive

4) You have negative cashflow for 20+ years with no realized return (if you
can quantify love and affection into cash or equity, I'd like to hear the
rationale)

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papa
I enjoyed this post. For what it's worth, I often think of my startup as a kid
(the analogy works both ways). Once the startup website went "live", it
reminded me a lot of dealing with an infant. Site goes down any hour of the
night, needs constant attention and tlc and doesn't give you much satisfaction
for the first few months of its existence.

And I have 2 kids along with the startup, so I'd like to think I speak from
experience. My personal feeling is that if you can handle raising a kid, you
may be surprised at how prepared you are to handle a startup!

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Tichy
Someone is wrong on the internet?

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arn
I don't think you read the answer properly. The response was "it's impossible
to plan for" and your answer again is "you should plan ahead".

And I actually do think the fact that you don't have kids does mean you don't
know how hard it is. (It's like me saying I know the physical act of
childbirth is hard, but I think it's certainly not the same as me going
through it.)

~~~
lisper
Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "Plans are useless, but planning is
indispensable."

My point is that it is NOT impossible to plan for. Many aspects of having kids
are quite predictable, including all the issues that the OP was asking about.
I've tweaked the blog post a bit to hopefully make this clearer.

P.S. And maybe I don't really know how hard it is to raise kids. It may well
be even harder than I imagine. But that doesn't change the fact that anyone
who waits until two months after the kid is born to figure out who is going to
take care of it has not planned ahead adequately.

~~~
aneesh
He never said he _waited_ two months to plan. He just said that he was still
facing those issues two months after the kid was born.

He seems like a smart and responsible guy. The logical conclusion that most of
us would come to is that raising kids is almost always harder than one
expects. Instead you somehow are convinced he should've rationally planned
more. And you are so confident of this without knowing anything about how he
planned.

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wallflower
Startups are kids because I've heard that once the your startup company is
grown up and self sufficient (e.g. stable and profitable), the founding
parents of the startup may tend to romanticize, overgeneralize, and/or forget
(amnesia) how hard it was to raise their child during infancy and early years
and beyond (when talking to other prospective parents)

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ntoshev
Startups are kids.

