How I got into Y Combinator and fathered a child, almost simultaneously
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She's a month old today (coincidentally also named Zoe).
I've got a 8 month baby boy and wonderful wife that are the center of my universe right now.
I got a chuckle about the time invested into the childbirth process; my wife teased me about knowing more about having a baby than she did ;)
That said, I am spending less time on my business - whereas in the past after coming home from the office I would take a break for dinner, the gym, then get back to my desk at home and work into the night. That schedule has changed drastically - I would rather spend the evening playing with my son and hanging out with my wife than working. After the little one goes to sleep though, I try to put in a couple hours of highly focused work.
Overall, I think I'm almost as productive (after the first 4 months) - when you have a child, the need to maximize time and effort are amplified.
Hint: the proper balance is heavily leaning towards the child.
Trying to do both now. Babies and startups aren't unrelated though actually. Oh, I feel another blog post coming on...
I guess I should have just posted "That was awesome", so I could get several upvotes.
My mom, a single mother, started her own business while she raised me. The result was a higher standard of living than I ever could have enjoyed had she played it safe and stayed yoked to a crappy job that made her miserable. I also got to spend more time with her, since she was her own boss and could decide that, yeah, her son is welcome at work and can hang out there quietly instead of being in daycare forever.
To the author, I say hat's off to you. You bit off a lot to chew but keep at it and you'll have a better relationship with your child than if your time was not more under your control. Definitely a better deal than if you stayed at Goldman Sachs.
The guy who got my mom pregnant didn't stick around, didn't cut the cord, and sure as hell didn't pen a blog post about how excited he was starting a business and raising me, too. (edit: And, let's be clear, guy was a dirtbag so this is entirely the best outcome) So, speaking from experience, Antonio is all right with me.
That said, the real risk in this scenario isn't to the child; the risk is that you'll demolish your relationship with the other parent. The kid will be fine for the first year or so. They're basically very smelly houseplants until they get to crawling age. You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget.
The major exception is that they lose the ability to learn the phonemes of other languages after the first year. There are other potential abilities that are lost after the first year too, but nothing as difficult and time consuming as this. (Because for whatever reason playing a CD/DVD doesn't work so you actually need to find someone to speak to your child in person, which usually means doing some sort of baby exchange for a few hours a week.)
Try reading the commit logs out loud.
"You're constantly terrified that they're going to randomly die on you, but the rules for preventing that outcome are straightforward and hard to forget."
Amen, brother. Right again.
Changing the recommendation from sleeping face-down to sleeping on the back has reduced the rate of SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or something like that) in Sweden by roughly 80% since 1992. There was a peak at 1.1 per 1000 live births in 1991, and it's now at 0.25 or less (in 2008 it was down to 0.13)[1].
Some babies sleep better face down, but I prefer somewhat uneasy sleep for six to nine months (until they can turn over by themselves) to a tenfold higher risk of death.
[1]: (Swedish) http://www.internetmedicin.se/dyn_main.asp?page=1466
The point being, even the stuff we fear in the western world is really pretty unlikely. Feed them, don't drop them and you are pretty much good. (for the first year)
I almost feel irresponsible mentioning this, so let me say that one should always listen to their doctors.
There's a bunch of research on the subject, and the resulting recommendation is that sleeping on the back is preferred. I haven't read the actual studies, but a bunch are mentioned in the article I linked to:
Alm B, Lagercrantz H, Wennergren G. Stop SIDS - sleeping solitary supine, sucking soother, stopping smoking substitutes. Acta Paediatr. 2006 Mar;95(3):260-2.
Swedish Medical Research Council State of the Art Conference on the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Proceedings. Gothenburg, 3-5 June 1992. Acta Paediatr Suppl 1993;389(1):1-129.
Alm B, Milerad J, Wennergren G, Skjaerven R, Øyen N, Norvenius G, et al. A case-control study of smoking and sudden infant death syndrome in the Scandinavian countries, 1992 to 1995. The Nordic Epidemiological SIDS Study. Arch Dis Child 1998;78(4):329-34.
Alm B, Norvenius SG, Wennergren G, Skjaerven R, Oyen N, Milerad J, et al. Changes in the epidemiology of sudden infant death syndrome in Sweden 1973-1996. Arch Dis Child 2001;84(1):24-30.
Alm B, Möllborg P, Erdes L, Pettersson R, Aberg N, Norvenius G, Wennergren G. SIDS risk factors and factors associated with prone sleeping in Sweden. Arch Dis Child. 2006;91:915-9.
Wennergren G. Prevention of sudden infant death syndrome. Pediatr Pulmonol 2004;37 Suppl 26:110-1.
Carpenter RG, Irgens LM, Blair PS, England PD, Fleming P, Huber J, et al. Sudden unexplained infant death in 20 regions in Europe: case control study. Lancet 2004;363(9404):185-91.
American Academy of Pediatrics, Task Force on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Policy Statement. The changing concept of sudden infant death syndrome: diagnostic coding shifts, controversies regarding the sleeping environment, and new variables to consider in reducing risk. Pediatrics 2005;116:1245-55.
[edit: google the names of the studies and you'll find abstracts or more]
As I mentioned elsewhere, my understanding is that it's merely a recommendation based on statistics with no direct correlation.
My babies went on their backs, because even a %.001 difference is enough for me to play the game, seeing as I don't know what I'd do if one of them passed away.
"a recommendation based on statistics" usually means there is a correlation. I think you mean that it may not imply causation, which is true of course.
This recommendation apparently comes due to raw statistics until some better data can be gathered.
That said, I'm not a gambler and my kids when on their backs. Then they wanted to sleep face down, now they sleep on their backs again (I have infant triplets).
I wish there was more solid data on SIDS, but it's apparently proven a difficult area of study.
Maybe some kids are like that. Others can be quite challenging from the get go (such as a kid with a serious medical condition or other handicap, very high IQ, or all of the above).
YMMV. Mine certainly did.
Only if you want it to be. I don't know how the father felt about the whole situation, but it's possible that he never wanted a child or this child.
To be honest, his description of the whole affair was very detached. He nowhere uses the world "love" in describing any of it.
In describing the process of child birth, he uses mostly negative adj., i.e. "perverse," "bloody," and "screaming," and there's no hint of "miracle" anywhere.
For all we know he desperately wanted this woman to get an abortion, and she refused.
They both got themselves into the situation, but only one had the option to get out of it.
My point is that for him, the kid may not be number one priority, and I wouldn't blame him for that. It's one thing if you really want the child and then you turn around and spend all your time at your start-up, another if you didn't want the kid to begin with.
I suspect we might just have different values here. I was taught at an early age that if you have a kid, you absolutely must take responsibility. If you cannot handle having a kid, simply do not impregnate.
Birth control is not 100% reliable, and abstinence is an undue burden to place on anyone. Your values are from a time when women didn't work and there was no social welfare; a fatherless child would often die or be destitute. Abortion was illegal, and children would languish in orphanages.
Now, poor women often abort, and white babies are in high demand by potential adopters. This women works on Wall Street, so she can undoubtedly afford to raise the child on her own. It's hardly a similar situation.
1) Yes, these values were created long ago The question is if they still apply.
2) While being a single-mother isn't nearly as destructive these days, there do seem to be significant benefits to the child from having two parents. (how strongly is up for debate -- admittedly there are conflating variables here).
3) The father not taking care of the kid also has deleterious effects on the mother's career.
4) Even from a selfish perspective, following such advise reduces economic burden from child support. And social burden since society generally has such a value (rightly or wrongly).
5) Birth control is reliable enough compared to other risks in life. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_birth_control_met.... Pick 2 independent methods and use correctly. 10 year failure rate is on the order of 1 in 300 (only triple that of dying in a car accident). Add a third and odds drop to 1 in 10000 (car accident death order of magnitude higher).
"She cut me open yet?"
"Yup, you're pretty much gutted like a fish, she's sticking in a retractor now. Can't you effing feel that?"
"Nope, not a thing."
"Aand, here comes a head. Kinda gross looking."
"Why's he so quiet?"
"Dunno, she's cleaning out his mouth with her finger."
[Loud, piercing screams] "Yup, lungs work, I guess."
"Dad, would you like to cut the cord now?"
It was really an odd combo of detachment and magical amazement.
"One of the Y Combinator questions asked you to name one non-computer system that you’d hacked in some interesting way. My answer concerned a man-in-the-middle attack I once did on Craigslist personals. I placed an ad as a woman seeking a man, and as a man seeking a woman, and then simply crossed the email streams by forwarding mail from one to the other, and vice versa. Most Craigslist personals didn’t even have photos back then, so the switch went undetected, even after the couples had met. I handed off the relationship by telling one that the other’s email address had changed, from my fake one to the real one, and likewise vice versa. For all I know, those couples are still together and having kids. They probably don’t know to this day what happened or what brought them together."
One interesting aspect of dating in the bay area is that the woman's ex-boyfriend always happens to be on the set of the first date, every time. Every single time.
Really? I haven't had that happen, other than this one time. And this time it was weird, because both ex and I were sailors, and our boats happened to be next to each other in the yard...total fluke. And then of course Girlfriend showed up in the middle of it, making it even more comical.
Anyhow, didn't know it was a local trend.
And the file limit was certainly 30GB, or in the neighborhood. Trust me. I was shitting bricks when it happened....waiting to upload a file, watch it bounce because it's too big...rinse, repeat.....
95% of the people I have gone on first dates with would have made disastrous life partners. It's kind of a lot to ask of him.
And it's funny you mention Lewis. The mother gave me that book as a present last March. Great book. I should note, he didn't particularly love his children at all at first...until the child was stricken ill and he had to care for him.
Vivid.
Pseudorandomness or unalterable fate? Neither provides guaranteed success, so I wish you much luck with both ventures.
It was better than his earlier stuff, and makes him seem less of a jerk.
Still, his is the only YC company I'm not really rooting for to succeed; an IPO or acquisition would turn him into an insufferable lout.
What I find really interesting is that you actually sat down and read the whole post despite it being "from that guy".
I don't understand trolls...