The False Choice Between Babies And Startups
blogs.forbes.com
blogs.forbes.com
Honestly, I would hesitate to start a startup with anyone about to have their first child, man or woman, because they cannot possibly know what a cratering impact it is going to have on every aspect of their lives.
Now, a woman who is already at home with her children and has a couple of years of experience with it, her I'd trust to juggle. But starting a startup is already a gigantic change in lifestyle, and so is child care. Starting both at once is probably not a good idea. My own two bits as work-at-home father of two.
I started my second company five years ago. I also have a second daughter who is five years old, Julia. This company was a much more serious venture. I was appointed CEO, we were four founders and raised 1M€. We all worked long hours and had a great time from the start. Now we are ten employees and I'm still the CEO.
Here are the immediate effects I have seen from starting a new company simultaneously with getting a kid, twice:
- You focus on the business model and sales, sales, sales rather than just cool tech, which is beneficial for everybody involved. However, there is always room for cool tech as well.
- You have to push yourself to get to work, and do good stuff everyday. Because your family depends on it. You don't settle for mediocrity.
- You get a counter-balance that keeps you in check. Especially when you are successful with doing something fun it is very easy to burn out. Out of four founders, two of us have kids while the other two didn't at the time. I'm sorry to say that those two burned out and left the company, while me and my other child-bearing co-founder remained.
- You raise kids that get an entrepreneurial outlook on life. They think it is natural to have your own company, to be the boss of your own life.
- If you are blessed with healthy kids, having them is hardest work in the beginning. Everything gets easier and easier from day one. At least so far.
All in all, I don't regret for a second my choices the past years. Because what are the alternatives? Not having these awesome kids that now rock my world? Not having started these awesome companies that have defined a lot of who I am today? No way.
If you get the opportunity to start a family with someone you love and who supports you, don't hesitate for a second. If you get the opportunity to start a company with people you'd love to work with, don't hesitate for a second.
If those two happen to you at the same time? Wow, you are truly blessed with good fortune! Go kick some major ass!
I have to agree strongly with:
"You have to push yourself to get to work, and do good stuff everyday. Because your family depends on it. You don't settle for mediocrity.
- You get a counter-balance that keeps you in check. Especially when you are successful with doing something fun it is very easy to burn out. "
and
"You raise kids that get an entrepreneurial outlook on life. They think it is natural to have your own company, to be the boss of your own life"
made me smile. My daughter, now 5, was trying to sell me her drawings the other day.
My children are my counterbalance and my drive - there is nothing better than kicking back and talking nonsense with them or getting involved in their stuff. There is nothing more important than making sure they are fed and have a secure future (in which to make their own choices)
I noticed in a recent interview that when Tony Blair was the british PM his wife expected him to get up in the night to feed the baby still.
One of my girlfriends relatives says "if you want something doing ask a busy person." and I reckon that is spot on
I was the mom who coded while breastfeeding and had her son at his first LUG meeting before he was two months old. Being a mom and being a hacker have always melded pretty well for me, despite the fact that I'm now a single mom: my now-8yo likes tech conferences and has even spoken at one, he comes home from school and does his homework in my office while I do my work, he's even made dinner on one or two evenings when I was really swamped (okay, it was chicken nuggets and macaroni or reheated leftovers -- but I didn't have to cook it!). He's my mini-hacker, and he says he wants to grow up to be an inventor.
I highly doubt I'd have pulled all that off if I were like a "normal" first-time mom. Luckily, I grew up in the sort of family where older cousins look after younger cousins -- as a teen I even moved in with relatives to be nanny to their kids for a while when their work schedules had them away from home too much.
Juggling a start-up and a young child is quite possible, but it helps to have some experience under your belt, and to include your kid in your working life a bit. Instead of having two lives competing for your energy, you get a kid who understands what you are doing and why, and feels part of it rather than left out.
I still wouldn't want to bet on that...
I've got a four week old daughter at home (and another two year old daughter) and on top of my regular (non-demanding) working day, commute and all the stuff around the house, last night I managed to skim read about two thirds of a graphic novel (while feeding my youngest).
That was the sum total of my achievements above and beyond the basics.
Right now I'm only enjoying the better parts of being a dad - as our mother-in-law is staying with us and helping my wife a lot with taking care of it. Besides routine chores around the house and taking my kid for long walks in the park (which I greatly enjoy), I don't have much to worry about and can concentrate on my work.
Besides the extra responsibilities, you know what else a child gives you? Strength and the motivation to carry on. Nothing motivates you better when you're at your lowest.
But if a potential co-founder said, "I have a hobby I can't give up. It can cause me to lose sleep for days or weeks on end (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.htm...), cause marital stress, costs a ton of money (about a million bucks over 21 years), is intermittently really loud, and will likely require frequent trips to the doctor", would you be at all reluctant to team up with that person? I would. There are all sorts of things that could cause me to want to pair up with them anyways (lots of money, stay-at-home spouse or in-law, etc), but the bar would be higher.
A baby isn't startup insta-death-- there are plenty of examples of where it has worked out just fine. But it's heaping difficulty, stress, and expense on an already difficult, stressful and expensive exercise.
- don't spend time with your kids
- don't spend as much time as you could at your company
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.
I would like engineers to work those hours with enthusiasm. My concern is that this wouldn't happen with a founder that is absent in the middle of their work day. The solution is to have a cofounder that works those hours, I suppose :)
Anyone who thinks kids getting less time with their parents is as good or can somehow be made as good as kids getting a lot of time with their parents is delusional.
Its a very real choice.
Nowhere in the post do we see any statistics or hard facts on how many entrepreneurs succeeded in launching a company and making it successful while being pregnant or while having young kids.
Given that there are fewer women entrepreneurs than men entrepreneurs it would be a safe assumption that the number of pregnant women entrepreneurs or women entrepreneurs with young kids would be pretty low.
Besides you can get into evolutionary psychology and then it becomes pretty obvious that men have a much higher impetus to take big risks than women.
This whole movement towards political correctness has become ridiculous.
How come men don't get to bitch about not being able to have kids? Are we supposed to pretend that being biologically built to bear kids doesn't in some way make women predisposed to favor kids over startups?
The choice is very real and it's between raising great kids who get enough attention from their parents and raising a great company that gets enough attention from its founders.
Without hard data pointing out how many women started great companies while also raising kids who didn't turn out to be nutcases the girl's argument is just wishful thinking.
My son is 8.
His playroom and my office are really one big room, with some furniture dividing it into separate spaces.
He comes home from school and does his homework at a small table next to my desk. I help him with it and he "checks up on" my work.
He sometimes tests websites I'm designing to make sure the UI is easy to understand.
He's done data entry for extra allowance.
He sometimes goes with me to tech conferences, and has even spoken at one.
I work while he's at school, during homework time, and after he's asleep. We play after homework is done and/or after dinner.
Sometimes he just visits with me while I work, or sets his laptop down next to mine and we have a mother-son hackfest.
Chores are easier and faster because we do them as a team.
I do enjoy the occasional break when he is at his grandparents' place for a while, but for the most part we do things together. I'm a single mother, so there's no one to pick up the slack when I'm "too busy". Also, I've noticed that I'm more productive when I make time for what's important -- being a mom.
I can be having an awful day full of interruptions and some seemingly unfixable bug, then I walk my son home from school and it all changes. For twenty minutes I turn off my phone, get outside, and walk. By the time I reach his school I've calmed down. Then we walk home and talk about his day, or the squirrels, or my neighbor's new flower bed. By the time we get back home I am surprisingly refreshed. I usually fix the bug in a flash, and have more patience with nagging clients.
You can talk about evolutionary psychology and your desire for hard data all you want -- but neither will predict the behavior of an individual, and most entrepreneurs are outliers in some way or another already. I'd never suggest that anybody can juggle building a business and child-rearing without dropping either ball, but clearly I can, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that someone else can, too.
Oops now she would be a criminal for doing that.
The reality is that it is possible to start a company based on a 5 day a week 40 hour work week and I've seen people do it. Yes, they're probably not the largest and most aggressive companies but I've seen people build good teams, good products and go on to make good money while still having plenty of time with their family.
I don't know anyone who founded a Google or Facebook following this model but frankly that's not where 99.9999% of start ups are heading regardless of the founders commitment to them.
I can understand why an investor might be wary about putting money into a company being founded by someone for whom it wasn't their number one priority and as an investor you're concern is primarily around getting a return on your investment but that doesn't start ups can't be done and done well by people taking a more balanced approach.
I generally agree that women can be overachievers to the point that it would overcome the necessary commitment of birthing and raising a very young child. But that's not a very relevant argument. And it's not backed up by the article. One data point? C'mon.
I think the author is actually taking issue with the potential "handicap" of pregnancy as something uniquely ascribed to women. "Don't call me weak because I'm a woman and I can get pregnant!"
As a young married man in a startup, I'm scared of my wife becoming pregnant... I really do want to be a father, but I don't think she and I could remain fully committed to our current career arcs should we become parents at this time.
The problem isn't women getting pregnant. The problem is a newborn takes over part of your life. And that part might be too big for you to also maintain a commitment to your startup.
> Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. - http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html
If we need to fly to New York or spend a week prepping a deck or taking care of some emergency, I need to know they can do it on a moment's notice.
Now, maybe this isn't true for some startups, especially if you have a lot of co-founders, but certainly in 1-3 person startups, there is more work than there is time in the day and I just don't see how someone who is getting little to no sleep every night can possibly keep up with it.
There are some issues though - not every startup founder has the ability to pay for the costs of having a baby and watching it grow up. Nanny's aren't cheap.
Women carry babies for a 9-month term, during which time they are - in most cases - 100% able to work and 'contribute'. Labor takes ~36 hours; it can take just a few hours for scheduled c-sections. After labor, the baby comes home to Mom AND Dad.
For the average couple, there's a window of about 2 days in which the woman is out of commission. (Yes, that's simplifying things.)
A woman is only out of commission if her partner is not able or willing to help her with the responsibilities of being a parent. That's the only scenario in which she'd have to choose to be a mom before being a 'career woman'. So simply help your wives/girlfriends with the baby duties, and no choice will be required. :)
And ye gods, would I ever not care to combine the traditional startup stress and a colicky baby.
Baby care and startups really don't go together very well, and it's not really a gender thing at all. In fact, the reason I'm on HN right this second, rather than working on my pet Haskell HTML normalization library (or, in other words, "quality time I could be working on a startup"), is that I am literally typing this paragraph one-handed as I have a bottle in the other. Even when he's snoozing while I've got him, I am virtually incapable of Zone when my brain knows that at any minute, a piercing scream that I must drop everything to service may emerge. There may be some set of people who can work through that without short-changing the kids, no sarcasm intended (not all kids take the same level of care, either, this one has been much needier than his older brother), but I can't say it's unfair to consider a baby to be a negative indicator for a near-term startup effort, regardless of the gender of who is having the baby.
(I mean, do you even want to get startup-married to someone who would short-change a baby for your startup? There's commitment, then there's just plain bad priority decision making. Babies, pets, and startups: If you're not willing to commit to what it takes, it's better just to not.)
I vehemently disagree. Actually, I think it is an utter load of crap.
I've had the good fortune of seeing many of women in my friends and family have children. To an individual, these are unbelievably talented women: savvy, smart, driven, and focussed. Ivy League and MIT degrees all around: undergrad and graduate.
The reality that I've seen is that a pregnancy and childbirth slows them down -- temporarily -- both physically and mentally. It can be difficult to keep focussed when you're spending your first trimester getting sick every day.
A lot of them talk about "pregnancy brain" somewhere during their third trimester. Keep in mind that these are women that slice and dice differential equations and have been quoted by the Supreme Court.
Afterwards, the constant interruption of a newborn every 2-3 hours is debilitating for both parents. I know this because of how I watched my own productivity and focus redouble when my youngest started sleeping through the night. That can take a while. If you're a wuss, like me, over a year.
I'm not saying you can't juggle having babies or children while starting a company -- I've done it, twice -- but pretending that there is no impact is ludicrous.
So - sorry, once labor is over the mother's role can not just end and in many ways it increases dramatically as she will for many weeks be getting extremely broken sleep (up several times during the night to feed for 30 mins at a time each at least).
Having said that, I hate it when anybody tells anyone else they can't do something. As a startup you're going up against huge odds in the first place and doing something nearly impossible almost by definition. If you're the kind of person who just gives up when someone tells you something is a bad idea then you probably ARE the wrong person to do a startup, but it's got nothing to do with babies.
I used to sleep while breastfeeding at night -- plunk the baby on the bed, stick a nipple in their mouth and doze. When baby grabs at the other one, switch sides.
During the day, I coded while breastfeeding, or read, or whatever. Hmm... I wonder if that's why my little guy is such a geek? :P
Just 2c.
So in all seriousness, there are biological factors at play, and our parenting choices DO impact our availability. You certainly can make different parenting choices than we do, but every parent I know puts kids before work.
As an employee, I'd be very reluctant to work for a young startup where a founder wanted to have a baby before the organization grew quite a bit.
edit: it's not just a partner helping; it's being damn near a single parent. One of the founders of my company did just have a second child and let's not kid: his wife, even with the nanny, is practically a single mother.