What nobody says about startup moms • Hacker News Board

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#171

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

dexterdog wrote: post #160

causality0 wrote: post #145

We can’t expect more women to succeed in the startup world until we’re able to talk honestly about how much harder startups are for those who want to spend a lot of time with their kids. I think the expectation of being able to do both is quite unfair, at least the expectation of being able to do both well. There are many things that aren't compatible with being a cofounder. For example, you're not going to start a s…

Part of that is because we hear so many successful business people portrayed as also being great parents. I have seen so many of those that I knew first-hand to be fabrications that I just assume them to be false now.

Or they have a spouse doing all the heavy lifting at home.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#172

Post by jonny_eh » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:41 PM UTC

mike1o1 wrote: post #70

silicon2401 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It also helps to remember that "they grow up so fast" is cliche, but it's true. The most demanding early years of child raising fly by quickly. It blew my mind when I heard someone say "kids are only toddlers for a couple of years". As a kid you feel like childhood lasts an eternity, and their developmental stages are so significant, but in comparison they spend less time at each phase (infant, toddler, little kid,…

The phrase "the days are long, but the years are short" has taken on a new meaning for me after having a child.

Some days are quite long indeed.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#173

Post by c22 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

causality0 wrote: post #145

We can’t expect more women to succeed in the startup world until we’re able to talk honestly about how much harder startups are for those who want to spend a lot of time with their kids. I think the expectation of being able to do both is quite unfair, at least the expectation of being able to do both well. There are many things that aren't compatible with being a cofounder. For example, you're not going to start a s…

Can you be an EMT and spend a lot of time with your kids though? Startup founder is a particularly hairy role to solve this for, since it is self-directed, but in general this is a real problem that exists across our whole society. Jobs should be flexible enough for people to spend a lot of time with their kids--even high availability/stress jobs--because it is a huge benefit to society when kids are able to spend a lot of time with their parents. Especially at the beginning.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#174

Post by vmception » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

> I have to remind myself that it’s not that I’m an underachiever, but that I have different priorities

But you also might be, which is very important to add to all of these motivational quips

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#175

Post by globular-toast » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

alex_young wrote: post #21

Here’s the thing - you shouldn’t have to choose between a career and having children. In the US we’ve created a set of incentives which work to put women at a disadvantage in the workplace if they become parents. Men, not so much, and largely because of this imbalance, even progressive couples fall into this paradigm. In the EU they mandate equal paid leave for both parents and require holding a job for them when the…

> Here’s the thing - you shouldn’t have to choose between a career and having children.

Having children is a career. Of course you have to choose which career to take.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#176

Post by hellbannedguy » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #158

causality0 wrote: post #145

We can’t expect more women to succeed in the startup world until we’re able to talk honestly about how much harder startups are for those who want to spend a lot of time with their kids. I think the expectation of being able to do both is quite unfair, at least the expectation of being able to do both well. There are many things that aren't compatible with being a cofounder. For example, you're not going to start a s…

You can be a Marine rifleman, NFL quarterback or EMT _and then be_ a successful startup founder. You can also be a parent _and then_ start a startup. There's no age limit and kids eventually grow up and move out. Unless we're relegating/gatekeeping 50+ year olds from starting startups? Especially during retirement, there's still a lot of time to do stuff.

I don't think you can join the armed forces after a certain age. (I don't think any field should have an age limit, especially if you can pass tests.)

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#177

Post by kelnos » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #133

hvaoc wrote: post #54

One of the biggest issue with all this is "We lost the community in the pursuit of individuality". It takes a village to raise a child. I grew up in kind a commune. Most of the days kids would be on the streets playing, eat / sleep in their neighbours house. Moms were able to manage house as stay at home moms (hardest yet under-appreciated job) relatively better because of this community care provided for children. E…

>>Cities dwellers lose out on such things. I think this is true only in certain Western countries. I was born and raised in Turkey, and was an apartment dweller until I moved to the US for college. Growing up, I knew all the neighbors in our four or five story apartment complexes, and I knew their kids. So did my parents. And the community aspect was pretty strong — when my parents both had to work late, I just heade…

That (sterile and cold) tracks with my experience in the US as well. I rented in various buildings for 16+ years and never knew even one of my neighbors.

But a year ago I moved into a 4-unit condo building (with the small owner's association covering both my building and the building next door), and I already know everyone in both buildings. Not particularly well because of the pandemic, but I expect things to improve once things go back to normal.

I grew up in suburbia, and things were a bit better then. The houses in our development up until I was 12 were close enough to each other, and there were enough kids, that we'd hang out all the time and ride bikes between houses more or less unsupervised. I didn't know it at the time, but I bet my (stay-at-home) mom appreciated the break when my sister and I would randomly wander out and hang out at a friend's place for a while. (And vice versa with the friends' parents.) But even then, it was limited to two or three other households. After we moved to another state during my teenage years, we knew the neighbors, but weren't all that friendly with them; I think in the six years I lived there before college I went into one of their houses once.

I don't know what the solution is... in the US there is a lot of emphasis put on individuality and independence, and about parents providing for and bettering the lives of their nuclear family members. While that does have some positive effects, I think you end up with a lot less communal child-rearing, which IMO is definitely a negative.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#178

Post by clairity » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

InitialLastName wrote: post #114

clairity wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

socioeconomically, children should theoretically incur debt during childhood (paid mainly to women as principal caretakers). as children grow up, they'd work to pay back that debt. while this framing may seem distasteful, it does roughly model, from an economic perspective, the natural, informal system of value exchange between generations that's kept our species going for millenia. but more importantly, it illustrat…

The expansion of our society since industrialization has been characterized by the gradual, but systematic, replacement of implicit social capital with explicit economic capital. It's been great for a subset of people (the economic capitalists and those who, for one reason or another, are unable to build social capital) but it's hard to pretend there haven't been costs for everyone.

yah, i like to think of it as the esteem economy, something that's even more intimately tied with human societies and our evolutionary survival. polico-economic systems are simply models on top of this underlying esteem economy, and over history, we've jumped from one polico-economic theory to the next, without earnestly acknowledging and perhaps even venerating this simple connection.

how social networks could potentially better model the esteem economy is what most interests me about them, but so far, likes and follows don't seem to do a good enough job in general at revealing the truly estimable from the randomly popularized background meme.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#179

Post by pm24601 » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:49 PM UTC

Every woman cofounder needs to be able to demand that their partner step-up. Period.

Every man who has kids needs to be there for the kids even if their spouse is a stay-at-home parent.

I say this as a dad.

I do my damnest to split parenting duties without her having to ask.

Re: What nobody says about startup moms

#180

Post by vmception » Mon, May 03, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

giantg2 wrote: post #113

Honestly, the real question in all of this is, Why have kids if you're not going to spend time with them and raise them while they're growing up? We already have too many people on the planet, yet it seems there are people who would rather hire nannies, to watch the kids while they both parents are workaholics. I guess I don't see the point.

The point is so people stop asking why you don’t have kids yet