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It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled. My wife and I both work. So, w

It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled. My wife and I both work. So, we have our kid in daycare. 5:30-8:30 is actually 100% of the time from daycare pickup until she goes to sleep. If she doesn't go to sleep until 9:30, then that means I'm with her until then. On the weekends, I work while she naps or is having one on one time with her mom. My point is that I'm spending as close to 100% of the hours I have with my kid. I grew up in Green Bay, WI (about as non-bubble as you can get) with a dad who worked nights. Once I was in school, I'd see him at dinners only. But he made every soccer game I was in. He had to make choices between his career and his family. And I think he did an excellent job of it. His time with me, though less than my mom's, was always attentive. We have a great relationship. I think he made the right choices for our family. This isn't just a Valley issue...I just happen to be in the Valley. Many parents struggle with how to make the tradeoffs between work and family. My hope in sharing my situation is that others can get another perspective and maybe take away a thing or two to try.

bmj 12y ago
This makes sense. There are plenty of people who do not run or work for start-ups that deal with these very same issues, every day. And many of them don't have the choice to leave the office at 5:00 so they can spend that three hours with their kids. I think your rubber/glass ball story is spot-on: assuming we've invested our lives in more than a single thing, we are constantly involved in balancing acts. Part of life is figuring out how many balls you can have in the air at one time. I know personally I would never be able to do what you're trying, and I'm okay with that. Heck, without kids and wife, I don't think I'd be cut out to be a founder. And I'm okay with that.
jader201 12y ago
> It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled. I think this is kind of the point though. It seems that running a successful startup rarely allows enough time to spend with our family. In other words: - Good work/life balance - Adequate money for current lifestyle - Running your own business - Sustained success Pick three. If you're saying you've got the first three nailed down, it may be too early to tell if the fourth one will pan out, at which point you have to swap one of the other three in order to sustain the success. Not saying it's impossible, but it seems very uncommon (at least, I've not seen too many examples of it). But maybe this is anecdotal. Curious to hear if others know of examples.
- patio11 12y ago
  Consider the possibility that your view of the world is very influenced by your social circles and/or media you consume rather than by facts about the world itself. It is, in fact, not the case that businessmen can't have families. Most do. This is equally true in tech as it is in the rest of the economy. (Also, relatedly, being a startup founder isn't nearly the most all-consuming job available. It isn't even the most all-consuming job available in tech. We're curiously macho about this, as if 14 hour workdays are a unique point of startup pride and not a very common characteristic of systems designed to acculturate young men into professions via hazing.)
  - hawkice 12y ago
    > We're curiously macho about this, as if 14 hour workdays are a unique point of startup pride and not a very common characteristic of systems designed to acculturate young men into professions via hazing. Curious indeed. I've worked at startups where PagerDuty alerts went off in the middle of the night with false alarms every day for two weeks, and wasn't allowed to fix the alerting system because... well, responding to them shows my dedication. It's very important we all suffer together! Just don't let PagerDuty escalate the issue to your frat brothers, initiate.
aepearson 12y ago
Tad, I realize my comment probably came off as incredibly judgemental - which was not my intention... I'm sure you are a good guy and love your family as much as anyone else. I appreciate your positive candor - and, of course, hope all works out well for you. With that said - My opinion is that it's REALLY important to give this balance conversation a lot of thought (I struggle with it myself bigtime...always wanting to do more, earn more, grow more, etc. "for my family and our future"...but that's my story, not necessarily yours). Not in the "how do I pull it off effectively" kinda way (re: your article) - but in a "is this even what matters?" kinda way.
- tadmilbourn 12y ago
  Well...you did call me pretentious. And elitist. And stated I wasn't spending enough time with my family. That was a little judgmental. But I do get your points on the Valley bubble and the implicit values it places on work/life balance. There's a much higher penchant for career than in other parts of the country. That's why I brought up the fact that I grew up in Green Bay. I understand what a different value structure looks like. There's plenty that I like about it and plenty I don't. It's always fair to question "what really matters" and "am I doing the right things."
irremediable 12y ago
Well said. People are eager to complain about startup working conditions, but a lot of other jobs have similarly challenging conditions for parents and their children. I don't know why some people have taken your post so badly. Good luck!
zak_mc_kracken 12y ago
> It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled You're not spending enough time on your start up AND you're not spending enough time with your family. You're losing on both counts but you will only realize this in ten years. What's the rush? Couldn't you have accepted a job at a big company for a few years while you plan a start up once your kids are a bit older?
- ryandrake 12y ago
  Accepting a job at [big company] is often not a cure for work/life imbalance, especially in tech. It's going to be better balanced than running a start-up, but it's not like you're going to all of a sudden have all your nights and weekends back.
  - mwfunk 12y ago
    Sure it is. Stay away from jobs that require you to be on call or work nights and weekends. They not only exist, they're the rule, not the exception. Every tech job I've ever had has had occasional spurts of crunch time, but they were relatively few and far between.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  FWIW, there are ample counterexamples of startup founders who have had young children and done very well on both fronts. For example: All but one of the Fairchild Eight had young children while founding Fairchild (and the modern Silicon Valley). Jan Koum had two young children while founding WhatsApp. The Zenter founders both had young children during YCombinator, and ended up getting bought by Google. It can be done. I doubt anyone would consider it easy, but the data certainly doesn't a blanket claim of "You're not spending enough time on your start up AND you're not spending enough time with your family."
  - avalaunch 12y ago
    You didn't list any counterexamples, or at least we have no way of knowing if they are counterexamples. You've listed a number of examples where the startup founders had young children while successfully growing their companies but we have no way of knowing whether they were equally successful on the parenting front. Perhaps they sacrificed their parental responsibilities to achieve their business success.
laughfactory 12y ago
I get what you're both saying and appreciate both perspectives. To me aepearson is hitting on an systemic flaw in our current culture: we're obsessed with work. Our priorities go something like 1) work, 2) money, 3) work, 4) more money, 5) our kids, 6) marriage, 7) work and money... We're completely out of whack according to a certain system of values which it sounds like I and aepearson share. For people like me, my priorities go as follows: 1) marriage, 2) kids, 3) work only as much as necessary to pay bills, save for retirement and rainy days. For someone with my priorities, your life sounds like hell--though I give you props for making the choices you are consciously--and there's literally no amount of money which would make rearranging my priorities make sense to me. Like you I will start a business someday, but when I do it will be a slower burn operating within the constraints of my personal priorities. It's challenging, but I also apply my same set of priorities in my work life. I don't pursue or accept jobs which will require missing dinner time, which will wipe out my weekends, which will consume me and my life. Life is about so much more than work. It's about time spent with the people you love, doing meaningful things. Someday we'll all die, and I don't want to look back and see just a whole shit load of hours worked (on my own businesses or for others). I don't fault you for how you're living though. As long as it works for you, your wife, and your family, keep at it. Everyone's different, and has different ideas of what makes a "good life." I will say that I personally find it frustrating how much pressure there is out there these days to work more for less. I ascribe it to too many people being willing to let work consume them and making it harder on the rest of us who would rather maintain a strict separation of work from home life, working hard for the amount of time we've agreed to work, but otherwise being free to spend the rest of our time as we see fit.
koonsolo 12y ago
> On the weekends, I work while she naps or is having one on one time with her mom. Do you share household chores with your wife, or does she do mostly all of that work? Kooking, cleaning, changing diapers, feeding the children, cleaning the kitchen table 5 times a day (children are really messy eating snacks), doing the dishes, bathing them, getting up at night when the kids are sick, ... . That's the reality of having kids when you are taking care of them. There is a HUGE difference between "spending time with your kids" and "taking care of your kids". Believe me, I have 3 small children and both my wife and I have fulltime jobs, where my wife is abroad 20% of her time. Taking care of kids can drain a lot, I mean a lot of energy. Don't take this as a personal attack. If you and your wife feel happy in this situation, I'm happy for you. But these kind of articles make it seem as though having kids just means "spending time with them", because it isn't. Someone needs to take care of them 24/7. So to make it more realistic, just mention how much of that 24/7 it's your duty.

bmj 12y ago

This makes sense. There are plenty of people who do not run or work for start-ups that deal with these very same issues, every day. And many of them don't have the choice to leave the office at 5:00 so they can spend that three hours with their kids. I think your rubber/glass ball story is spot-on: assuming we've invested our lives in more than a single thing, we are constantly involved in balancing acts. Part of life is figuring out how many balls you can have in the air at one time. I know personally I would never be able to do what you're trying, and I'm okay with that. Heck, without kids and wife, I don't think I'd be cut out to be a founder. And I'm okay with that.

jader201 12y ago

> It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled. I think this is kind of the point though. It seems that running a successful startup rarely allows enough time to spend with our family. In other words: - Good work/life balance - Adequate money for current lifestyle - Running your own business - Sustained success Pick three. If you're saying you've got the first three nailed down, it may be too early to tell if the fourth one will pan out, at which point you have to swap one of the other three in order to sustain the success. Not saying it's impossible, but it seems very uncommon (at least, I've not seen too many examples of it). But maybe this is anecdotal. Curious to hear if others know of examples.

patio11 12y ago
Consider the possibility that your view of the world is very influenced by your social circles and/or media you consume rather than by facts about the world itself. It is, in fact, not the case that businessmen can't have families. Most do. This is equally true in tech as it is in the rest of the economy. (Also, relatedly, being a startup founder isn't nearly the most all-consuming job available. It isn't even the most all-consuming job available in tech. We're curiously macho about this, as if 14 hour workdays are a unique point of startup pride and not a very common characteristic of systems designed to acculturate young men into professions via hazing.)
- hawkice 12y ago
  > We're curiously macho about this, as if 14 hour workdays are a unique point of startup pride and not a very common characteristic of systems designed to acculturate young men into professions via hazing. Curious indeed. I've worked at startups where PagerDuty alerts went off in the middle of the night with false alarms every day for two weeks, and wasn't allowed to fix the alerting system because... well, responding to them shows my dedication. It's very important we all suffer together! Just don't let PagerDuty escalate the issue to your frat brothers, initiate.

aepearson 12y ago

Tad, I realize my comment probably came off as incredibly judgemental - which was not my intention... I'm sure you are a good guy and love your family as much as anyone else. I appreciate your positive candor - and, of course, hope all works out well for you. With that said - My opinion is that it's REALLY important to give this balance conversation a lot of thought (I struggle with it myself bigtime...always wanting to do more, earn more, grow more, etc. "for my family and our future"...but that's my story, not necessarily yours). Not in the "how do I pull it off effectively" kinda way (re: your article) - but in a "is this even what matters?" kinda way.

tadmilbourn 12y ago
Well...you did call me pretentious. And elitist. And stated I wasn't spending enough time with my family. That was a little judgmental. But I do get your points on the Valley bubble and the implicit values it places on work/life balance. There's a much higher penchant for career than in other parts of the country. That's why I brought up the fact that I grew up in Green Bay. I understand what a different value structure looks like. There's plenty that I like about it and plenty I don't. It's always fair to question "what really matters" and "am I doing the right things."

irremediable 12y ago

Well said. People are eager to complain about startup working conditions, but a lot of other jobs have similarly challenging conditions for parents and their children. I don't know why some people have taken your post so badly. Good luck!

zak_mc_kracken 12y ago

> It's interesting that others in the thread have implied that I'm not spending enough time on my startup and will be out-hustled You're not spending enough time on your start up AND you're not spending enough time with your family. You're losing on both counts but you will only realize this in ten years. What's the rush? Couldn't you have accepted a job at a big company for a few years while you plan a start up once your kids are a bit older?

ryandrake 12y ago
Accepting a job at [big company] is often not a cure for work/life imbalance, especially in tech. It's going to be better balanced than running a start-up, but it's not like you're going to all of a sudden have all your nights and weekends back.
- mwfunk 12y ago
  Sure it is. Stay away from jobs that require you to be on call or work nights and weekends. They not only exist, they're the rule, not the exception. Every tech job I've ever had has had occasional spurts of crunch time, but they were relatively few and far between.
nostrademons 12y ago
FWIW, there are ample counterexamples of startup founders who have had young children and done very well on both fronts. For example: All but one of the Fairchild Eight had young children while founding Fairchild (and the modern Silicon Valley). Jan Koum had two young children while founding WhatsApp. The Zenter founders both had young children during YCombinator, and ended up getting bought by Google. It can be done. I doubt anyone would consider it easy, but the data certainly doesn't a blanket claim of "You're not spending enough time on your start up AND you're not spending enough time with your family."
- avalaunch 12y ago
  You didn't list any counterexamples, or at least we have no way of knowing if they are counterexamples. You've listed a number of examples where the startup founders had young children while successfully growing their companies but we have no way of knowing whether they were equally successful on the parenting front. Perhaps they sacrificed their parental responsibilities to achieve their business success.

laughfactory 12y ago

I get what you're both saying and appreciate both perspectives. To me aepearson is hitting on an systemic flaw in our current culture: we're obsessed with work. Our priorities go something like 1) work, 2) money, 3) work, 4) more money, 5) our kids, 6) marriage, 7) work and money... We're completely out of whack according to a certain system of values which it sounds like I and aepearson share. For people like me, my priorities go as follows: 1) marriage, 2) kids, 3) work only as much as necessary to pay bills, save for retirement and rainy days. For someone with my priorities, your life sounds like hell--though I give you props for making the choices you are consciously--and there's literally no amount of money which would make rearranging my priorities make sense to me. Like you I will start a business someday, but when I do it will be a slower burn operating within the constraints of my personal priorities. It's challenging, but I also apply my same set of priorities in my work life. I don't pursue or accept jobs which will require missing dinner time, which will wipe out my weekends, which will consume me and my life. Life is about so much more than work. It's about time spent with the people you love, doing meaningful things. Someday we'll all die, and I don't want to look back and see just a whole shit load of hours worked (on my own businesses or for others). I don't fault you for how you're living though. As long as it works for you, your wife, and your family, keep at it. Everyone's different, and has different ideas of what makes a "good life." I will say that I personally find it frustrating how much pressure there is out there these days to work more for less. I ascribe it to too many people being willing to let work consume them and making it harder on the rest of us who would rather maintain a strict separation of work from home life, working hard for the amount of time we've agreed to work, but otherwise being free to spend the rest of our time as we see fit.

koonsolo 12y ago

> On the weekends, I work while she naps or is having one on one time with her mom. Do you share household chores with your wife, or does she do mostly all of that work? Kooking, cleaning, changing diapers, feeding the children, cleaning the kitchen table 5 times a day (children are really messy eating snacks), doing the dishes, bathing them, getting up at night when the kids are sick, ... . That's the reality of having kids when you are taking care of them. There is a HUGE difference between "spending time with your kids" and "taking care of your kids". Believe me, I have 3 small children and both my wife and I have fulltime jobs, where my wife is abroad 20% of her time. Taking care of kids can drain a lot, I mean a lot of energy. Don't take this as a personal attack. If you and your wife feel happy in this situation, I'm happy for you. But these kind of articles make it seem as though having kids just means "spending time with them", because it isn't. Someone needs to take care of them 24/7. So to make it more realistic, just mention how much of that 24/7 it's your duty.