Raising a Child and Building a Company: The Intersection of Fatherhood and Entrepreneurship

Building a company is a lot like raising a child. This is especially true when you get a strong pull from the market. It seems like just yesterday we were in beta testing, and now we have global production deployments. The sentiment of “they grow up so quickly” never seemed more apt.

Just like a child in its infancy, you can see the

kernel of a company’s personality starting to form. Most of the day-to-day work involves taking small steps that can seem daunting. Like changing diapers, midnight feedings, and temper tantrums, a company accrues technical debt, experiences the scrambles to make it work, and feels the growing pains of doubling in size every few months. Just like with parenting, you make lots of mistakes, gain experience, and hopefully learn how to navigate the world. As a startup CEO, the key at each stage is to figure out the right focus to have based on your phase of development, and to transition to the next stage as quickly and with as few problems as possible.

In many ways, companies mature in much the same way children do early on. The life

of a startup can be measured in development or event fundraising stages. You even follow the ABCs; there’s the seed stage of identifying and proving out the opportunity, the A stage of building the initial version of the product, the B stage of developing a scalable go to market, the C stage of scaling, and beyond. Although each phase has its own challenges, understanding best practices and knowing what to expect at each phase is crucial to achieving success.

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