A few days ago my friend and fellow dad-to-an-infant Jareau posed the below to me on Twitter:
We had a brief exchange on the question of what’s harder, having a startup or having a baby. Given my new found perspective as a dad and comparing that to my experience both building and investing in startups, the notion of whether comparing a startup to raising a child is appropriate warranted further inspection.
“My startup is my baby.” The comparison between building a company and raising a child is made often, and for good reason. The commonalities between the two can be striking — exhilarating, sleep depriving journeys that demand patience, perseverance and a bit of good luck. Emotional rollercoasters with thrilling highs and demoralizing lows, often in the same day. Life changing experiences that forge lifelong bonds.
Despite the similarities, there are no two ways about it:
Your startup is not your baby.
Building a startup is an entirely different experience from raising a child. There isn’t a pre-seed or seed round for the baby to help get you off the ground, despite the fact the product has been built already and there are over 7 billion examples of product-market fit. Yes, you can hire people to help care for the baby but you’re not going to be able to bring on hundreds (or thousands) of talented, capable and experienced people, aligned on the mission and vision, working together with a shared sense of purpose, to help take care of the infant. Incidents in the middle of the night are always a shitshow, and there isn’t a diaper-ops team in India around to take care of it. On top of daily stand-ups there are lie-downs, tummy time and crawl arounds. One on ones are impromptu, with unclear agendas. Conversations are one sided instead of collaborative, and most of the time you wonder if the other side understands what you’re saying in the first place. And bored meetings are more mind-numbing than you’d expect.
Humor aside, the true difference between growing a company and raising a child is decision making. With a baby there is no quit. That option doesn’t exist. There is no pivot. You won’t find an experienced CEO to take over. There aren’t bankers to help run a sales process or lawyers to help liquidate assets. There is no post-mortem on Medium followed by time off to catch your breath, reflect and figure out what’s next. You’re in it with the baby every step of the way, no matter how bad the release. That affects the way you will make decisions.
Similarities exist between child rearing and startup building, that’s without question. But startups brings with it support, structure and exit optionality that having a baby do not afford. Your startup is not so special, so incredible, that you can’t choose to kill it. The level of attachment to a startup should never match that to a child — critical to remember, particularly when faced with trying times and difficult decisions. The ability to think strategically, objectively and unemotionally exist at a startup. Less so with your baby. So no, your startup is not your baby. It is an amazing achievement, but at the end of the day it is a business. Remember to think of it as such: a single chapter in your life’s story, not to a persistent character throughout.
Credit: Paul Inkles via flickr