Of course, it's an entirely reasonable thing to think.
A good parent spends more time with their children than anything else.
And I've dropped the ball on work stuff when I had more important life stuff to handle.
And I'd skip using some contracting firm (or anyone/thing else) if I thought they'd take off for greener pastures as soon as they found a better client.
Combine those things and nobody reasonable will enter into a critical deal with a new/upcoming parent where that person is in the critical path. It's not PC to say this, but you'd be a fool to discount it. And If that person doesn't prioritize their children you probably don't want to deal with them simply because of that.
fwiw, the same logic applies to anyone with any non-business focus that outweighs their business focus. From cancer to marathon running. This is your life too and blowing your chances on misguided charity doesn't let you take the time to raise your children or nurture your sick spouse.
I'm in no way implying that taking care of your children is less important than your career. I think it is great what he is talking about doing and is a great investment to make in his child.
Leaving the workforce to take care of family and not doing anything to keep yourself marketable is "checking out" when it comes to your career. You are going to have to be proactive in making sure that you are doing things each week that will put you in a good place to return to the workforce IF that is what you eventually want to do.
Personally, when I hear that a woman (or man) with kids is running a startup, I think "that kid isn't going to have the full attention of that parent..."
Especially when I read stuff like:
> I pressured myself into proving that I was as dedicated to PlanGrid as I always have been.
I interpret that phrase as "...at the expense of dedication to my kid". I personally think it's okay to "be less dedicated" to work in order to spend more time with kids (for both mothers and fathers).
Kids (esp. little kids) demand a lot of time, and they are only little once. Time is finite. Startups are time black holes. You have to sacrifice time somewhere...
Former founder and current parent here. My startup died because my kids were born.
I certainly couldn't do it, and I had a lot of advantages that most people don't (family help nearby, effectively unlimited runway). I tried for a couple years, but I just found I was so much slower as a father. There's no such thing as focus time with young kids in the house, you can't pull all-nighters to bang a feature out in a couple days, and then you lose a lot to context-switching overhead. And it's hard to get high-performers to work with you as a new parent, both because you have so much less time and flexibility to seek them out, and because they also know that your kids will (should?) come before the startup and "Why make someone a priority when you're just an option for them?"
Ended up going back to a big company known for work/life balance and generous paternity leave, where my efforts don't make a material difference to the success of the company. If there's effectively zero chance of success, it's not worth sacrificing time with my family to beat my head against the odds.
Believe me, I've considered it. For now, I'm content to take over parenting for a good chunk of the weekend, which gives the working mama a break and chance to prep for the next week. I'm banking on a big enough exit imminent before the baby hits 4 years old so that I never have to work again if I don't want to.
Failing that rough time frame, it's off to a big firm or government where hours are tightly defined. As you're alluding to, time is too precious a resource to squander. I joined this last company not long ago and I'm very enthusiastic about it, but this is the last start-up I can see myself doing. Unless someone is independently wealthy, I don't see how the commitment it takes is an acceptable sacrifice for a full and satisfying life once kids come into the picture.
Having family as priority compared to work is more than fine, it makes you (potentially, not necessarily) a good human being, a good parent or husband. This world needs that 10'000x more than another code ninja optimizing some corporation by nanofraction of a percentile.
The opposite is extremely valid too (to not leave any room for misunderstanding - folks prioritizing work over their kids are shitbags, no exception, and every single one I've met in their later years deeply regret that... apart from outright sociopaths and similar careless crowd).
Focus on career if thats your calling and spent whole live in it if you want, but then please don't have kids. Every kid with missing/bad father figure I've ever met later in their lives was a mess in one of myriad ways, endlessly compensating for this and never actually coming over it, permanently. If you know what to look for, you can start seeing it around you quite easily. It breaks my heart a little every time I see it. These folks often repeat same mistakes of their parents too.
Given the choice of either focusing on your career or your children, yes. If you'd want to focus on your career and maximize your income, would you take off a few years to take care of your children? Certainly not.
I certainly agree that children are a big responsibility, and take a lot of time... From what I've seen, though, of small businesses? Experience matters even more. I know a bunch of Entrepreneurs who are also parents. I don't personally understand how, I don't think I could handle being a parent even with an easy office job, but many entrepreneurs seem to be able to be a parent and run a business at the same time. I can't tell you how many of the informal meetings that are also dinner parties had children underfoot, but it's a reasonably large percentage.
Even if you do think that having a child will slow you down, being older doesn't automatically mean you will become a parent... the technology in that field is pretty good at this point.
It just seems wrong to have three kids under 6 and a wife pregnant and still try your luck on creating a new company. I think before anything else, you need to be responsible with the ones that depends on you.
Agreed 100%. My little girl is almost 2 and I while I can't say I've been there for every moment, she has been my priority #1. There are too many precious moments and missing just one of them is an awful feeling.
To each their own, but I would never sacrifice a moment with my daughter unless is was absolutely necessary. As contrary as it might seem to people in the startup bubble, the importance placed on most day-to-day work is an illusion.
Pop the bubble and hug your kids. In the long run, that relationship will mean much, much more to you.
A good friend of mine once told me: "You can be a great mother or a great career woman. You can't be great at both." She's now a SVP at a well-known company, but got there by making a conscious decision to forgo raising a family of her own. You seem like a very busy person, so I have to ask: are you prepared to give it all up? Or are you just looking to check off a box of life's accomplishments, like a project manager sifting through the backlog in a frantic panic? Because if you're out of story points to assign you can't do it all.
Are you prepared to be the young lady I saw in the grocery store this evening - holding an infant in one arm and pushing the shopping carriage with the other, with a sweaty look of defeat on her face? If the answer is no, then don't have children. Sadly I think you have bought into the myth that you can have your cake and eat it too. I'm sure someone will reply with countless examples of how it is possible, but I ask are those examples of great parents, or are they examples of people who own children? Having a child and raising a family is a lifelong commitment. You need to give it your all. If you're doing it for the wrong reasons, bragging rights, because it was a life 'goal' etc.; the child, and by extension society, will suffer for it. You can still have a very fulfilling life.
My personal opinion - outsourcing your child's rearing to a full time nanny or dumping them off to childcare as many busy people do - is harmful to the child's development. Anecdotally speaking, some of the most successful people I know also have some of the most f--ked up kids I've ever seen. It's because they're never around to raise and discipline them properly.
Certainly if you're going to enter into this sort of venture when you're married with a young family, it's a decision you need to make as a family rather than make yourself and try to impose on them.
Other than the capacity for risk and relative poverty elements, two other things I'd throw out there as factors are:
1) Exhaustion: I've two young children and the first few years of their lives I was exhausted most of the time and I know that I wasn't at my best professionally (lack of sleep makes you stupid and forgetful). It really isn't the best state to be risking everything on your own abilities.
2) Balancing work and life: If you're going to have kids you probably want (that's genuinely want rather than feel obliged) to spend time with them. It's different to a lot of other things you might want to do with your time in that there are things you can't say "I'll do later in life". They grow up incredibly quickly in those early years and it's not something you get a second shot at experiencing - you can't go back and see your infant child five years down the line when your business is settled.
And that's before the practicalities of child care and everything else that goes with it...
As someone who has started a company (one in YC at that) with a 9 month old, I do think it is a false choice. But the real choice is pretty clear:
- don't spend time with your kids
- don't spend as much time as you could at your company
I did the latter, or tried at least. So the time you take out from your company is serious, but manageable. Kids are very focusing; the time to spend with them came from other things most people do: tv, video games, socializing, etc.
My biggest concern with having kids (now a 4 year old and 1 year old) is the impression I'll leave on employees when I'll be home for dinner but still probably working later where they can't see. Setting the right tone will be harder than balancing my schedule for sure. I hope at my next company I'll be able to create a healthy, family-friendly environment full of people that are smart and get things done.
What I didn't do was milk being a parent to get press for my startup. I thought that would be cheap. It would have been trivial considering my cofounder was also my wife. The story writes itself, but I'm happy I didn't pursue it.
> Everyone knows kids consume your time. But what people without kids may not realize is the extent to which people with kids want their time to be consumed by them.
This is one of the hardest parts of parenthood to communicate to non-parents: Yes, children demand a lot of time and attention. However, as a parent you actually enjoy spending that time with your children.
To the author's point: Different people will want different balances between time spent working and time spent with kids, and that's fine as long as it remains a balance. There are different ways to divide up time and attention that don't require sacrificing everything for the children. It took me a while to learn that having both parents available on demand 100% of the time isn't necessarily great for the child's development as they grow up. Dropping your kid off at daycare is hard the first few times, but watching my child have fun and develop relationship skills with other kids and people was eye-opening. There are many ways to split the load between parents that are fine in the end.
It also helps to remember that "they grow up so fast" is cliche, but it's true. The most demanding early years of child raising fly by quickly. I don't mean to downplay the effort involved, but the situation continues to change as they grow up and become more independent, eventually spending more time at school, on independent activities, with their friends, and so on.
It's very difficult for anyone trying to balance demanding startup needs with demanding infant needs, but I also know many people in the startup world who simply had young kids and did startups at different stages in their career rather than overlapping the two. There's nothing wrong with working for a relaxed, big company while your kids are young and need attention, then switching gears to startup mode after they're more independent.
It really depends on what ones priorities are. If someone is really in the middle of starting up or even immensely enjoying the current work that she ends up spending most of the time in office, why the hell would you want kids?
Raising decent kids requires proper planning and you need time to observe them and change those plans accordingly if required. Only when you have decided to chill down on work and consider yourself ready for another interesting venture should you go ahead and have kids. Think about your priorities, period.
I share this sentiment. The author needs to consider which thing will cause him more regret in the long term--working a more normal schedule and potentially missing out on whatever rewards living the startup life may give him, or definitely missing out on his daughter's childhood.
For me it would be (and is--I have two sons) a no-brainer. I actually am working at a start-up, but it's one that places a high value on work-life balance so I never feel that I have to work outside of 9-5. I have cracked open the laptop on the occasional evening just because I enjoy what I'm working on, but I definitely wouldn't want to miss this period of my kids' lives for anything. They're only this young once.
I think this will be an unpopular opinion to some; but I have a pretty firm belief that when you do the family thing and decide to have kids and the like; you’d better have established, or at least started / somewhat put in motion your goals as an individual.
As soon as you’ve crossed that line and had said kid, you have just made a conscious choice to significantly reduced your own time, finances; and flexibility available to chase after personal goals.
Before anyone immediately @‘s me; this is not always the case…but usually the people who can do both are 1) the exception to the rule, not the average; and/or 2) were relatively wealthy. maybe you can afford a caretaker for your child.
But that begs the question - so you had said kid, and want to give said kid the best life they can. Cool. We need people.
Probably adopting is the more sensible option; since there are tons of kids in awful, hopeless situations that can use your help, and we also have an overpopulation issue; but honestly, some people just want to have the experience of having kids. Okay, cool.
So…Does starting your own business right now, rather than investing into your kid’s development, really make sense?
By having a kid; did you not agree to set aside a lot of your personal time and finances to them?
Shouldn’t you do this sort of thing before you have a kid or after they move out? What if it takes off and your kid loses a parent being present because the career took over? :/
Asking from the perspective of a 33-year-old woman who sees having kids in your early 30’s; or, God forbid, your 20’s, as suicide of independence.
The equivocation I'm making is although it's unusual, it's far from unprecedented for a parent to make career choices that don't maximise time spent raising their children.
If you don't like those examples, consider a family with two busy working parents sending their child to boarding school. If they can afford a boarding school, they've got plenty of income. One or both of them could simply switch to a normal 9-5 job.
toomuchtodo would not be the first person to hand their child off for others to deal with, even if the decision to do so is hard for most people to understand :)
A good parent spends more time with their children than anything else.
And I've dropped the ball on work stuff when I had more important life stuff to handle.
And I'd skip using some contracting firm (or anyone/thing else) if I thought they'd take off for greener pastures as soon as they found a better client.
Combine those things and nobody reasonable will enter into a critical deal with a new/upcoming parent where that person is in the critical path. It's not PC to say this, but you'd be a fool to discount it. And If that person doesn't prioritize their children you probably don't want to deal with them simply because of that.
fwiw, the same logic applies to anyone with any non-business focus that outweighs their business focus. From cancer to marathon running. This is your life too and blowing your chances on misguided charity doesn't let you take the time to raise your children or nurture your sick spouse.
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