What startup founders should think about before having kids

I know a couple of people running small organizations in EA who are considering whether / when to have kids. Here are some thoughts, mostly collated from other people since I’ve never been in this position.

The advice probably jumbles together people talking about pretty different kinds and stages of startups. It’s also typically about the for-profit world, and a research or community organization in its early years might have different pressures. A lot of this probably applies to other early startup employees, not just founders.

I assume there’s selection bias in what’s written publicly about this because it feels better to say “Yeah, you can do it!” than the reverse. People don’t want to look like jerks (especially sexist jerks). Parents don’t want their kids to read them saying “This was a mistake.” And more people are going to write a blog post about how they made it all work than about how it all fell apart.

Some famous (male) startup founders have a surprising number of kids. Jaan Tallinn has 5 and Elon Musk has 7, including a set of twins and a set of triplets. I assume they also have a lot of paid help and wives who do the bulk of the work. On the more typical side, Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston had two kids starting four years into Y Combinator (despite Paul’s warning against cofounding with a woman who’s likely to have kids soon).

Division of passion

A number of people talk about how having two major commitments in your life divides not just your time, but your drive and passion. 

“You just don’t care as much about the company as you do your child. And that’s the change no one is prepared for until they have one of their own. Sure, everyone understands this concept intellectually, but you can’t know how powerful a feeling it is until you feel it for yourself. But caring less is particularly dangerous when you’re working on a startup.” – Female Founder Secrets 

“Having kids may make one less ambitious. . . . The fact is, once you have kids, you’re probably going to care more about them than you do about yourself. And attention is a zero-sum game. Only one idea at a time can be the top idea in your mind. Once you have kids, it will often be your kids, and that means it will less often be some project you’re working on.” – Paul Graham

Productivity

Some people will claim that having kids made them more productive. Maybe this is true on a per-hour basis, but overall I find it very unlikely. You also could tie one hand behind your back and I’m sure that would teach you some interesting things, but it’s not what anyone would recommend to be more productive at work.

Paul Graham: “They definitely make you less productive. I know having kids makes some people get their act together, but if your act was already together, you’re going to have less time to do it in.”

The plus side

“Everyone knows kids consume your time. But what people without kids may not realize is the extent to which people with kids want their time to be consumed by them.” – Female Founder Secrets

“Now when people have babies I congratulate them enthusiastically and I mean it. Especially the first one. I feel like they just got the best gift in the world. What changed, of course, is that I had kids. Something I dreaded turned out to be wonderful.” – Paul Graham

Whether / when to do it

Many opinions from Hacker News. This is one of the few spaces where people said something about what it was like for their partner or what their partner’s role was, which is a hidden variable in a lot of these narratives.

“Start a startup before you have kids” from an anonymous female founder. “It’s possible to run a startup while having babies, of course, and there are some examples of women who do it brilliantly. But since they are not the norm, I think it’s important to understand what changes for female founders when they have kids.”

A variety of people talking about how they’d be less likely to fund or cofound with a woman who’s likely to have children soon.

Steve Blank on the advice he’d have given himself as a new graduate: 

• “Don’t have kids.” 
• “It took me four companies and many years to finally get to the point where I could afford to have some family life”

Fertility

There’s a whole world of advice out here, and I’m just dipping a toe in.

“Because startups can cause you to neglect much of your own life, women founders need to be really proactive about their fertility.” – Female Founder Secrets

Laura Vanderkam argues that for most professional women there’s a false dichotomy between parenting and career, and that with good time management you don’t have to delay childbearing. But I don’t think she’s talking about the most intense careers. And career aside, you may want to wait until you have a supportive partner.

A great practical writeup on egg freezing here. Dives into fertility by age and egg freezing at Expecting Science.

Emily Oster on paternal age, fertility, and chance of various problems.

Practical advice

Female Founder Secrets: Running a startup while you have kids 

Marie Outtier on the early years with her AI company and daughter

Elizabeth Yin’s advice for mothers in startups 

• Why women in startups don’t talk about their kids (it’s a liability)
• Practical tips on how she saves time

Startup Parent (originally Startup Pregnant, still seems to be focused on women) is a podcast and blog. The earlier episodes look more useful to me than the recent episodes.

Maternity leave

The newborn period is one of the the most intense parts of your parenting life, but it’s not that long in calendar time. The timing might matter a lot more in startups than in other work, though.

If you’re the birth parent, how much can you work during maternity leave? So much of this varies by what straw you draw. If things go smoothly and you have good support, maybe you’ll be doing a fair bit of work during your leave. Examples, another example.

If you have a medically difficult birth, a lot of physical recovery to do, a baby in the NICU, feeding troubles, and/or postpartum depression, you’re unlikely to have much (if any) capacity for work. 

Roxanne Petraeus on writing the leave policy for herself as the CEO and first parent at the company 

• “I’m all for unconditional love and support, but at work, pretending like we don’t have constraints puts colleagues in a worse situation than just accepting upfront that we have to consider business needs too.”
• “to be candid, my personal maternity leave plan sucks. I’ll be taking a month away from the company, then plan to ramp back up slowly over the course of the next month starting with daily check-ins.”

More from Petraeus on how this worked out:
“Alone on the triage bed, I scanned my inbox for an email from DocuSign. Our lead investors had sent a term sheet for ~$2 million in additional capital the night before, and I needed to sign it before I was too far along in labor to care.”

Leslie Feinzaig on taking maternity leave as a CEO: 

• “I feel guilty that I didn’t take a real maternity leave like good mothers do. And I feel guilty that I didn’t go back to work full force after one week like good CEOs do.”
• “I am really, really tired, my body still needs to heal, and even though I’ve had help, my baby needs me. . .  I’ve spent most of the past two months with a baby in my arms, working when I can and where I can, usually one-handed. Sometimes it’s not much. Sometimes it’s too much.”

What’s it like for the kids?

Some of the writing on this topic treats it as unfair to children to parent while very busy. Steve Blank describes it as “cruel” to have children and then spend little time with them. But the population ethics gets a little confused here. I doubt many children of busy parents would say they’d rather not have been born because of this. Is it also cruel to have children as a single parent, or if a parent is deployed in the military, or in a working-class family where both parents need to work long hours to feed the family?

There was a while when I was reluctant to have a third child because of how difficult work trips were with my second. I didn’t want to travel without her because I wanted to keep breastfeeding. But I thought my potential third child would have an overall positive life, and if travel was the thing that tipped the balance I certainly thought it was better for a baby to be born, drink formula, and be separated from me during work trips than to not be born at all.

On the other hand, once you have the child it may be hard to set your standards low; knowing that your child has a net positive life may be cold comfort to both of you when you’re making a decision in the moment. So don’t trust you’ll behave that differently. For example, I’ve missed a couple of trips for my third child so far, because I thought I’d be sad and bitter if I took too much risk with her wellbeing.