Parenthood is kind of a good rehearsal for founding a company: you won't sleep much, you're very emotionally invested, you're on the hook for everything, and boy is it hard without the right partner.
Parenthood also makes founding a company 100 times harder, because you don't have the luxury of throwing yourself into the company 100% and never looking back. You have other responsibilities, and just letting them go to concentrate on your business comes at the cost of not being there for these wonderful little beings that you brought into the world.
And quitting your job to try a startup is fraught with a whole new peril -- you've got a family to feed!
I can imagine starting a part-time lifestyle business and taking it full-time if it ever became successful enough, but never a full-on work-til-you-can't-work-anymore startup. People who can do this after they have kids have my utmost respect, but I genuinely don't know how they can do it.
true! i've done both - had a baby when my startup was 3 years old, and it made parenting much easier to have gone through that whole everything-at-stake emotional roller coaster once before. I had the same partner in both ventures, so it was particularly good practice. amazing how similar startups and babies are! (and Jeff's pain/pleasure pie chart could easily apply to either, imo)
And quitting your job to try a startup is fraught with a whole new peril -- you've got a family to feed!
I can imagine starting a part-time lifestyle business and taking it full-time if it ever became successful enough, but never a full-on work-til-you-can't-work-anymore startup. People who can do this after they have kids have my utmost respect, but I genuinely don't know how they can do it.