How to be a founder with kids

I had little cash left and a kid on the way – but I survived and so can you.

26 May 2025 — 5 min read

Looking for some support? If now is the time to consider coaching (or a CEO peer circle) reach out here.

I was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. It was an early morning in 2011. And I was anxious. I could feel the knot in my stomach as I tried to let the ocean air and music on my car stereo relax me. But there was no relaxing for me that morning.

I was on my way to breakfast with my co-founder and good friend Todd. And I was carrying what at the time felt like heavy and complicated news.

Todd and I had both relocated to Los Angeles only a year or so prior—he from Michigan and me from Paris. We had uprooted our lives, dragging our wives with us, to join our third co-founder and start a company in Los Angeles. And now I needed to tell Todd that my focus and our simple, early-adulthood life structure were feeling at risk.

I had found out the night before that my wife and I were expecting a surprise child.

To his credit, Todd was—and still is—a total mensch. He was gracious and congratulatory. He assured me, while he had at that time never had a baby, that given how much I had enjoyed having a puppy I would surely enjoy having a baby. In hindsight, this is terrible but hilarious guidance. More importantly, he encouraged me that as my best friend in life, and co-founder in the company, he would be there to help me figure it out. Thank the good gods for this man.

At that time, our company was only a few months old. Having each contributed $20,000 to start the business, we probably only had $30,000 or so in our company bank account—which we were supplementing as best we could with SEO consulting on the side. We were each taking home salaries of a couple of thousand dollars per month. Life felt tight.

I was in no place to be raising a baby.

And yet it all worked out.

This experience has been on my mind lately because of a handful of conversations I’ve found myself in recently in my coaching work.

One with a single mother of two who started her company to pay the bills only to find herself at the reins of a surprise empire.

Another CEO navigating the news of her own surprise pregnancy and holding questions of how to keep it all together.

A third with a CEO and father of two who was navigating doubt from his co-founders, who fancied themselves—since they had no children—as likely more committed to the business.

All of these questions have brought to mind the question that seems to be a throughline: how in the fucking world can I navigate simultaneously two things as daunting as a young company and a young child?

Our startup community has propagated a mythical vision of the maniacal founder who eats, sleeps, and breathes her or his company. But that is not how humans work, nor how life works.

Building a successful company—or for that matter, making a significant dent in the world of any kind—takes years, sometimes decades, not weeks or months. As a result, life happens along the way.

Any team building anything of substance is going to navigate together births, deaths, sickness, economic changes, and more. To resist such changes—from ourselves, or co-founders, or our portfolio companies—is to resist the inevitable. We are much better embracing such change and supporting those navigating it.

I was, driving to breakfast with Todd that morning, deeply afraid that I was failing my commitments to my co-founders, my team, and my investors by having this baby. I was also afraid that becoming a young parent was going to doom me to failure as a founder.

On the contrary, my son Marco became a lovely gift—to me through those hard years as an entrepreneur—and to my team and our little LA startup community in the ensuing years.

For me, having a child was the most clarifying and grounding experience I had known up to that time. Life slowed down. I could see more clearly what mattered and what did not. I grew up.

I became more ambitious, not less. And more determined to succeed. But that ambition and desire for success was now rooted in something real—not vain ambition or an unconscious need to please my father, but rather a material need to build a life for my budding family.

There were certainly new constraints to be navigated. I suddenly needed—and wanted—to be home by 5 or 6 PM. There were nights of little sleep in the early days. I had to be more thoughtful about ensuring I found time for rest and recovery on the nights and weekends, as they were no longer mine alone to use as I saw fit.

But I also found ways of supporting this change in my life. Mostly by asking for support—a new muscle I found myself building, especially when my son was 18 months old and I found myself a newly single parent. But life has a way of caring for us when we need help the most. And I found that season to be one of the richest of my life (more here on that full story).

Whether you are:

A young parent thinking of starting a company
A founder considering having kids
Navigating a surprise pregnancy as I was
Or a co-founder to or investor in a founder with kids

…I would invite you to throw away your assumptions. And to examine—and let go of—any stereotypes you carry of how a successful founder or CEO needs to look.

Great founders can see what can be before it exists. They are resourceful and creative. They build teams of people around challenging problems. They turn challenges into opportunities.

These qualities are also true of great parents.

I found being a founder the best training I could have had for being a parent.

And I found being a parent to be the best possible training I could have received for growing the fuck up as a leader.

If you are having a child, accept it as a gift.

If your co-founder or portfolio founder is expecting or raising a child, accept it as a gift.

It is not easy. But none of us got into this business because we were attracted to easy.

It is valuable.

To have kids in our startup community—at our company events, in the office, in our lives. They remind us viscerally what matters about all this anyway.

After all, we are in the craft of creating the future. And the future is theirs.

The key to all of it is support. Especially for those of us building companies in the US, we do not have great access to affordable childcare.

I appreciate that you are here. If you’d like to get these posts in your inbox, you can subscribe here.

If you are navigating company building and parenting, ask for support at every turn. Build a village around yourself and your child. Do not try to navigate this alone. This is a wonderful time to leverage your founder skills to bring more people around the challenges at hand.

If one of your co-founders, employees, or portfolio founders is navigating parenthood, reach out. This idea that we all raise our children alone in our little houses is modern and faulty. Ask how you can help. We are all better off if we build companies whose cultures can support the furtherance of our species. Whether through leave policies, work hours, or other means, it is also a recruiting superpower to assure current or would-be parents that they can do meaningful work in your company while also building a life.