Startup dads [and moms]. Asset or liability?
[Note: the irony of me writing this post is that at this very moment I have a nine month old getting fussy directly into my ear. My partner is starting to give me the stink eye as well. I hope she doesn’t read this.]
I was lucky enough to be invited to FooCamp earlier this year. Imagine a 2.5 day weekend spent with about 200 tech people that are 10x more accomplished and brainiac than you, and that’s FooCamp. Oh, and we sleep in tents and make our session agendas. It was awesomesauce.
I went in fully expecting to be immersed in a world of tech. And that was certainly true. There were two sessions however, completely unrelated to tech, that really stood out for me. One of those was put forth and led by a fellow entrepreneur who was about to become a father for the first time. He was calling for advice from any other fathers attending. For all of us “been there, done that” fathers the advice was nothing new. No one went into what it was like to run a startup at the same time as having a baby, but some general work/life balance was discussed. I’ll save my thoughts on how to [try and] achieve that balance for a future post. My personal take-away was that being a dad is a huge asset to a new company, rather than a limitation.
To be clear, it is not that I felt the opposite before that session, but it certainly helped to verify some of my previous assumptions by having more data points. Whether a correct assertion or not, I’ve always felt that there was a slight stigma in Silicon Valley that you can’t be as effective as a founder if you are a dad. The perception is that you need to be spending all waking hours devoted to the company. Whenever I find myself not doing something startup-related, I envision that scene from “The Social Network” in which Sean Parker yells at Dustin Moskovitz to get back to work after he takes his eyes off of his computer monitor for 5 seconds in the Palo Alto Facebook house. In essence, the perception is that parents are more of a liability than an asset. Is this true though?
It’s true that if I were single then I would definitely be able to devote more time to nothing but work. We could debate whether those extra hours would be as effective (i.e. are there diminishing returns or not). I won’t go there though. Instead, I’ll propose that given a hypothetical of a parent and non-parent working the same number of hours, that the parent will have a greater impact.
[Aside: When I went with my co-founder to pitch investors, I was fully prepared to explain that I was a father and why it wouldn’t be issue. It never came up, but if it had, I know that our own investors would be fully supportive.]
So, back to that hypothetical then. I’ve been a father for eight years now, and without a doubt, it has made me a much more effective manager in the office. Being able to effectively manage projects, competing interests, and people is the number one asset, other than vision, that a startup founder can bring. Indeed, more startups are founded by people in their 30s (more in mid-late 30s), than any other age group [Here’s a list of some of the more well-known startups founded by 30+ year-olds]. I’d also hazard a guess that many of these are also fathers; many I know for a fact who are.
No offense to the non-parents out there, or founders in their early 20s, but effective management only comes with experience. So, unless you’ve been in a managerial role for years, or happen to be a parent, you are going to be less effective in some aspects of your business. What I wish I had known before FooCamp, was that I was not alone. That many startup founders are parents. This is why I felt the urge to write about the topic, so that other parents, who equally feel that stigma, will stop questioning themselves. It’s an asset to be a parent.
There are many other assets besides management that I’ve discovered help me just because of being a parent. Rather than go on though, I’d like to hear from others. So go ahead and make a comment. And if any other startup parents are in London then I’d love to meet up and do some parent hacking together.
Ahhh, and he’s down for a nap finally! Up since 5am on a Sunday :(