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Kids are startups

rondam.blogspot.com

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Re: Kids are startups

#11

Post by aneesh »

lisper wrote: post #3
arn wrote: post #2

I don't think you read the answer properly. The response was "it's impossible to plan for" and your answer again is "you should plan ahead". And I actually do think the fact that you don't have kids does mean you don't know how hard it is. (It's like me saying I know the physical act of childbirth is hard, but I think it's certainly not the same as me going through it.)

Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." My point is that it is NOT impossible to plan for. Many aspects of having kids are quite predictable, including all the issues that the OP was asking about. I've tweaked the blog post a bit to hopefully make this clearer. P.S. And maybe I don't really know how hard it is to raise kids. It may well be even harder than I imagine. But t…

He never said he waited two months to plan. He just said that he was still facing those issues two months after the kid was born.

He seems like a smart and responsible guy. The logical conclusion that most of us would come to is that raising kids is almost always harder than one expects. Instead you somehow are convinced he should've rationally planned more. And you are so confident of this without knowing anything about how he planned.

Re: Kids are startups

#12

Post by izaidi »

aneesh wrote: post #10
lisper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law: raising kids is harder than you think even when you take into account nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law. :-) > Kids are not startups. Of course they are. They aren't startup companies , they are startup humans , but they are definitely startups.

I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies. It really seems like you're trying to force the analogy here. +1 for the corollary though :-)

The most important thing to tell your kids is, "Just don't die."

Re: Kids are startups

#15

Post by wallflower »

Startups are kids because I've heard that once the your startup company is grown up and self sufficient (e.g. stable and profitable), the founding parents of the startup may tend to romanticize, overgeneralize, and/or forget (amnesia) how hard it was to raise their child during infancy and early years and beyond (when talking to other prospective parents)

Re: Kids are startups

#16

Post by iron_ball »

aneesh wrote: post #10
lisper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law: raising kids is harder than you think even when you take into account nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law. :-) > Kids are not startups. Of course they are. They aren't startup companies , they are startup humans , but they are definitely startups.

I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies. It really seems like you're trying to force the analogy here. +1 for the corollary though :-)

Well, if you map living a decent but unexceptional life to "failure", and becoming a world-changing figure to Google-like success, then yes, the rates are about the same, or even worse for humans.

Re: Kids are startups

#17

Post by steveplace »

1) Everyone is a good parent until they become one.

2) You can't sell your equity stake

3) Firing your cofounder is expensive

4) You have negative cashflow for 20+ years with no realized return (if you can quantify love and affection into cash or equity, I'd like to hear the rationale)

Re: Kids are startups

#18

Post by roadtripgeek »

lisper wrote: post #3
arn wrote: post #2

I don't think you read the answer properly. The response was "it's impossible to plan for" and your answer again is "you should plan ahead". And I actually do think the fact that you don't have kids does mean you don't know how hard it is. (It's like me saying I know the physical act of childbirth is hard, but I think it's certainly not the same as me going through it.)

Dwight Eisenhower famously said, "Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable." My point is that it is NOT impossible to plan for. Many aspects of having kids are quite predictable, including all the issues that the OP was asking about. I've tweaked the blog post a bit to hopefully make this clearer. P.S. And maybe I don't really know how hard it is to raise kids. It may well be even harder than I imagine. But t…

Sometimes things happen that you have no way of predicting and making a contingency plan for. I had the world's least annoying pregnancy (no morning sickness, gestational diabetes, or pre-eclampsia worries). I stayed within the recommended range for weight gain and exercised throughout my pregnancy. I turned 24 shortly before my due date, so complications from advanced maternal age weren't a worry. I was told I'd probably have a boring (in the medical sense) delivery.

Turns out that it was anything but boring. I went into labor on Christmas Eve and almost didn't see Christmas morning. It got to the point where they rushed my husband out of the room and me into the OR. A half an hour later they told him they were doing everything they could, but he might not be bringing anyone home from the hospital. Thankfully, that turned out not to be the case.

However, those complications ended up changing our childcare plans. Without getting into private details, the daycare we had selected during my first trimester wasn't qualified to handle my son's health issues. Most daycares weren't, and the few we found that were ran in the $2k+ a month range. But they also had huge wait lists. Since I had a decent network and could work from home, we decided that was our best option.

Fortunately, my birth experience is atypical. However, a lot can happen in a year (conception to the end of a 12 week maternity leave). Most of the people who are scrambling to find daycare a month before maternity leave is over usually had something come up during the last month or so of pregnancy. Daycare wait lists are ridiculously long where I live, so if something changes your daycare plans, you may have to get a nanny or stay home for a year until a place opens up.

Re: Kids are startups

#19

Post by lisper »

aneesh wrote: post #10
lisper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law: raising kids is harder than you think even when you take into account nreece's corollary to Hofstadter's law. :-) > Kids are not startups. Of course they are. They aren't startup companies , they are startup humans , but they are definitely startups.

I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies. It really seems like you're trying to force the analogy here. +1 for the corollary though :-)

> I hope you're not implying that kids have the same failure rates as startup companies.

Of course not. We've been making startup humans for a lot longer than we've been making startup companies. So it's no surprise that we're better at it. (Still room for improvement though IMHO.)

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