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How I got into Y Combinator and fathered a child, almost simultaneously
- rgrieselhuber 16y agoThat was awesome.
- runjake 16y agoGetting a woman pregnant and fathering a child are two entirely different things. I hope you have found the perfect balance between being a father and running a startup. Hint: the proper balance is heavily leaning towards the child.
- antongm 16y agoI agree. Indeed they're different things. Trying to do both now. Babies and startups aren't unrelated though actually. Oh, I feel another blog post coming on...
- runjake 16y agoApparently my advice wasn't well-received by other members. Good luck on your journey through fatherhood. I guess I should have just posted "That was awesome", so I could get several upvotes.
- rgrieselhuber 16y agoPeople generally don't like to be preached at.
- danilocampos 16y agoFor what it's worth, that may be because it reads less as advice and more as self-righteous sneering. 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.
- tptacek 16y agoI upvoted you, since I've had the (apparently not so) unique experience of having my first kid at the same time as my first "real" startup, and it was fraught with peril. I agree that the preachiness of your comment is grating, but the tone of the blog post you're commenting on kind of warrants it. 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.
- Alex3917 16y ago"The kid will be fine for the first year or so. They're basically very smelly houseplants until they get to crawling age." 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.)
- tptacek 16y agoWhat I mean is that the kid isn't going to grow up writing emo poems about his neglectful dad if dad's reading commit logs during "quality time" at 2 months. I don't mean that babies do fine if you stick them in a Skinner Box. Yes, talk to the baby. Try reading the commit logs out loud.
- araneae 16y ago>Hint: the proper balance is heavily leaning towards the child. 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.
- philwelch 16y agoYou can't mandate love or wonder, only responsibility. This guy's acted responsibly so far.
- usaar333 16y agoPerhaps he didn't want a kid. It doesn't matter; he got himself in this situation. He has admirably accepted the consequences by giving the best life he can to his child.
- araneae 16y ago>It doesn't matter; he got himself in this situation. 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.
- usaar333 16y agoIf someone fathered a kid and didn't spend time with the child, I would place blame. 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.
- tptacek 16y agoEw. That was... vivid.
- atomical 16y agoVivid? Seems more casual to me.
- theycallmemorty 16y ago"I watched with increasing alarm as red streaks traced bloody spiderwebs across her thighs." Vivid.
- Sukotto 16y agoActually, compared to what I saw at each of my kid's births, that was casual.
- JacobAldridge 16y agoI just finished reading The Time Traveler's Wife and this post gave me flashbacks. Pseudorandomness or unalterable fate? Neither provides guaranteed success, so I wish you much luck with both ventures.
- abstractbill 16y agoI enjoy reading posts like these for the perspective they give me on how differently some people do things. My wife and I by contrast are ridiculously over-prepared. Dated for a year before moving in together, lived together for two more years before deciding to get married, waited another two years to have a kid, and then invested enough time into learning about childbirth that every medical professional we talked to though the whole pregnancy and labor assumed that we were both in the medical field (seriously, I know way more about the anatomy of the female pelvic area than any other part of the human body because of this). She's a month old today (coincidentally also named Zoe).
- sgoraya 16y agoCongratulations - The journey only gets better! 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.
- maxawaytoolong 16y agoI have to comment... 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.
- antongm 16y agoHahahaha... 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.
- dbrannan 16y agoThe most important thing you can do for your child is love their mom.
- araneae 16y agoHow could he possibly do that if he got her pregnant on the first date? 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.
- my_account 16y agoHe doesn't love the woman, you can sense it in the writing. Probably doesn't even like her that much. I picture a scenario where he drifts toward his man-cave aka start-up, when domesticity comes calling. Michael Lewis wrote a book about his domestic situation, but one never doubts he puts wife and kids first. That said, he and the wife were a little more conventinal given their approach.
- antongm 16y agoI won't comment on the love angle, other than to comment that our current notion of love is a 19th century European invention that doesn't really exist in most traditional societies. There's ways of getting along that don't involve long courtship, touching poems, or passionate romance. 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.
- araneae 16y agoOur "current notion" of love may certainly change, but the neurophysiological fact of love does not (at least, not on the same timescale). I don't know what the original commenter was referring to when he said love, but I rather think he meant the emotional connection, not poetry (who think that has anything to do with love nowadays anyway?)
- Nate75Sanders 16y agoSo...2nd encounter leads to a "pornographic scene on her kitchen counter" after you already ran into her with her ex and you make no mention of a paternity test? How do you know it's yours?
- stevederico 16y agoAmazing showing of drive and determination. I admire your focus and level-headedness in a time of great stress. If I can achieve half what you did in those 9 months, in the next year I will be happy. There is no better time than now. Thank you for the inspiration.
- alexophile 16y agoIf you didn't make the jump to the footnotes, I thought this was great: "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."
- create_account 16y agoMy first reaction was: "oh no, not another post from this guy." 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.
- azymnis 16y agoYour comment is priceless... 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...
- leif 16y agoMinor edit: gmail's file limit is not 30GB, and there's no way a 1m 10s video fills up that much space. ;-)
- antongm 16y agoActually, it sure as hell did fill it up. I'm not big into digital media, so I can't quote the real specs, but my machine is a late model MacBook Pro using the stock camera, filmed with iMovie at what are probably default settings. 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.....