A lot of people are saying "no, it's possible", but as far as I can tell none have already built a successful company (by Silicon Valley standards) while raising a baby; they are all "in-progress".
Has anyone actually done it and care to share their experiences?
I have three kids (ages 4, 6, and 10) and built examprofessor.com which launched in 2006. The company is profitable, but not wildly successful by Silicon Valley standards.
I am not the sole founder, but I venture to say I have done (and continue to do) my fair share of the work. I work on the design, sales, the user interface, programming, support, server maintenance, maintenance, accounting - nearly everything.
The key to success? I try to make the product a little better each day, even if the changes are tiny (code comments, etc.). I am not able to sit down and bang out code all day due to family obligations, but persistence, focus, and making smart, calculated changes, over a longer period of time can make for a pretty fantastic product.
Also, doing your own support + programming puts you in a unique position to listen, work on, and fix issues that cause the most problems.
I think those of us saying it's possible mean that it isn't impacting what we do in such a negative way that we feel it is altering our chances. I don't think my journey would be drastically different without kids.
If you want a concrete example though, I know both the founders of Omniture had kids on the way to their IPO and eventual $1.6 billion acquisition.
In my personal opinion, true success is when you've achieved a level of success your happy with while also maintaining perhaps even strengthening your family relationship.
Was going to throw in "while keeping your sanity", but there are a few people who's loved ones already knew they were crazy to begin with ha-ha.
Jeff Vogel's been building computer games for 16 years, and his kids are younger than that. He runs his own company, but it's probably different than the companies people around here imagine themselves making. Anyways, http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/ . He has a bunch of baby stories (which are quite hilarious) http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html .
Has anyone actually done it and care to share their experiences?