Kids are startups | Hacker News Reader

Kids are startups

rondam.blogspot.com

13 pointslisper16 comments

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.

>> 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.

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.

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 :-)

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

Well, if you map living a decent but unexceptional life to "failure", and becoming a world-changing figure to Google-like success, then yes, the rates are about the same, or even worse for humans.

> I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies.

Of course not. We've been making startup humans for a lot longer than we've been making startup companies. So it's no surprise that we're better at it. (Still room for improvement though IMHO.)

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)

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!

Someone is wrong on the internet?

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.)

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.

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.

Sometimes things happen that you have no way of predicting and making a contingency plan for. I had the world's least annoying pregnancy (no morning sickness, gestational diabetes, or pre-eclampsia worries). I stayed within the recommended range for weight gain and exercised throughout my pregnancy. I turned 24 shortly before my due date, so complications from advanced maternal age weren't a worry. I was told I'd probably have a boring (in the medical sense) delivery.

Turns out that it was anything but boring. I went into labor on Christmas Eve and almost didn't see Christmas morning. It got to the point where they rushed my husband out of the room and me into the OR. A half an hour later they told him they were doing everything they could, but he might not be bringing anyone home from the hospital. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case.

However, those complications ended up changing our childcare plans. Without getting into private details, the daycare we had selected during my first trimester wasn't qualified to handle my son's health issues. Most daycares weren't, and the few we found that were ran in the $2k+ a month range. But they also had huge wait lists. Since I had a decent network and could work from home, we decided that was our best option.

Fortunately, my birth experience is atypical. However, a lot can happen in a year (conception to the end of a 12 week maternity leave). Most of the people who are scrambling to find daycare a month before maternity leave is over usually had something come up during the last month or so of pregnancy. Daycare wait lists are ridiculously long where I live, so if something changes your daycare plans, you may have to get a nanny or stay home for a year until a place opens up.

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)

Startups are kids.

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