31–40 of 52 posts
But personally, I would not recommend it. Find a job you can spend lots of time at home or otherwise spending quality time with your new family. They're only young once, and this is not time you can get back later.
So I'd say go for it! Best of Luck!
Founder in my 40s here. "1 toddler and another child is coming" - Then you want to work one and a half or maybe two jobs? Unless your wife is Superwoman, sounds like a divorce to me. Wait until your kids are in school and more independent. In the next few years, your wife and kids need you. There are plenty of successful founders in their 40s. In fact the average age of the successful founder is 44. Plenty of time! F…
Best wishes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being an incredible salesman is the most important trait to be a founder. You can easily start a company if you can sell your vision to a technically skilled person and to the angel fund. You can never succeed no matter how technically strong you are or how good the product is, if you cannot sell it. The sheer arrogance of technical people waving off selling as a lesser skill is getting boring even to me and I'm not…
Personally I'd put luck and resiliency at the top but I can't say you're wrong/that I'd disagree that much - WeWork is exactly proof of that, at least in times when money is cheap. But WeWork is also proof that unless there's some substance to go with the selling the story won't end well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being an incredible salesman is the most important trait to be a founder. You can easily start a company if you can sell your vision to a technically skilled person and to the angel fund. You can never succeed no matter how technically strong you are or how good the product is, if you cannot sell it. The sheer arrogance of technical people waving off selling as a lesser skill is getting boring even to me and I'm not…
Personally I'd put luck and resiliency at the top but I can't say you're wrong/that I'd disagree that much - WeWork is exactly proof of that, at least in times when money is cheap. But WeWork is also proof that unless there's some substance to go with the selling the story won't end well.
Founder in my 40s here. "1 toddler and another child is coming" - Then you want to work one and a half or maybe two jobs? Unless your wife is Superwoman, sounds like a divorce to me. Wait until your kids are in school and more independent. In the next few years, your wife and kids need you. There are plenty of successful founders in their 40s. In fact the average age of the successful founder is 44. Plenty of time! F…
Does it have to be a "startup." Is there a business you can start and grow at a reasonable pace?
There is such thing as ministry of presence. It's the value others receive by your simply living life with them in an attentive and caring way. IMO, the typical startup will require so much from you, you won't be able to invest well in your family.
I'd encourage you to make family investment a top priority. I'm 40 and I've done freelancing and now own a dev consulting company. But I deliberately avoided the startup lifestyle or expectations. I prioritized my family and I've not regretted it. I'm not successful by some standards, but I won't lay on my death bed someday regretting not being there for my wife and kids.
I’m a parent of three kids (all under 7), and I’m also the Cofounder of a startup that is doing quite well so far (though we are still early). I would say that it all depends on funding. I have bootstrapped before, and I could never do that now. Perhaps more accurately, I would not want to do that now. Having raised funds for this start up, my salary is a lot lower than it was working in enterprise, but it’s enough t…
I feel that this is very important and makes a huge difference. I think most families still have a "primary" caregiver (by that I mean it's not 50%-50%), even if not stay-at-home. Not only being that parent is incredibly time consuming [1], but it also comes with a draining mental load (raising kids is an endless grind of having to make decisions in the dark).
Grandparents and other community support can also be very beneficial.
[1] At some point during partial lockdowns, I clocked 70+ hours per week spent with my children. Meanwhile my partner was not slacking off averaging 40+ hours. That's with two full-time jobs, only two children, and still some daycare access (child care was prioritized in my area and was shut down only during the direst of the pandemic).
I certainly couldn't do it, and I had a lot of advantages that most people don't (family help nearby, effectively unlimited runway). I tried for a couple years, but I just found I was so much slower as a father. There's no such thing as focus time with young kids in the house, you can't pull all-nighters to bang a feature out in a couple days, and then you lose a lot to context-switching overhead. And it's hard to get high-performers to work with you as a new parent, both because you have so much less time and flexibility to seek them out, and because they also know that your kids will (should?) come before the startup and "Why make someone a priority when you're just an option for them?"
Ended up going back to a big company known for work/life balance and generous paternity leave, where my efforts don't make a material difference to the success of the company. If there's effectively zero chance of success, it's not worth sacrificing time with my family to beat my head against the odds.