Entrepreneurship and Parenthood

Your story is truly inspiring, and especially as a woman, I wanted to ask, how can you manage both being a founder and a mom of 4 kids? What did you learn along the way?

What's, what's the secret to do both? Oh, I love this. I want to give you a big hug. I love this question. I'm so glad you asked. Twist my arm. It's my favorite thing to talk about. So first of all, you learn as you go. Yes, 2 kids came at one time, but then after that, you know, one at a time, you get your sea legs and you slowly expand everything to the new normals, the waves of the new normal. I will say to me, it's, it's harder, I think, in a lot of ways to pursue an entrepreneurial path, but the benefits, the currencies of having autonomy and flexibility, being able to design your own schedule for for many parts of it, absolutely are, are the things that I prefer. I'd rather get paid less just so I can like pay the mortgage, pay for groceries, but like I'd rather— I'm not looking to make millions and millions of dollars or something. I'm looking to be financially responsible. And then the other pieces, the other currencies that I get when I design my work I get to pick up my kids from school every day. That's the best. That's my— that's what else? That's amazing. I get to like kind of stop between 3 and 7 or 8 with bedtime. I get up every day really early. I sometimes hop back on at night, but I get to be present with my kids at all these different seasons and phases. And so I would say, strangely, like even though it's harder in many ways, the benefits of getting to design your own schedule, getting to design your own work, different pace, different pacing. I, I think that's worked really well for me. I will say, you know, it's funny because we're coming off of this data-based question, like, how do you make different decisions? When my twins were, I want to say, 4 months, 5 months, and I was starting to, like, be human again, I made a spreadsheet of all their naps, and they were napping 3 times a day. Which, wait, no, twice a day, which left, they were like, wait, how did this work? No, they must have been napping more than that. There were 21 waking segments, okay? Forget nighttime feedings 'cause they were just like on me and nursing all the time. But like during the day, I had 3 waking segments and I decided I wanted to be there for the majority. So I needed to be there for 11 out of the 21 physically present. And I also decided I didn't mind if I also had, you know, if I— when we could afford to have a babysitter or nanny as well for the twins especially. I was cool with other people being there, but I knew that was my like time budget. I was okay if I was there for the majority. And so I just have to say like at every phase, if you kind of really are honest with yourself about what matters to you, quality time, quantity time, I think they're kind of the same with kids especially. If you sort of budget out in advance, then at least for me, I didn't like lose it every time I had to go out of the house for like a meeting because I always wanted to be with them and like have them on my person. But I gave myself that allowance and I knew that I was like doing the thing that I valued and playing it out in a way that the data like made sense to me. I would be able to look back at my weeks and say, I did it. I achieved the thing that I wanted. I was here the majority of their daytime waking segments. So whatever works for you. But, you know, I think it's so nice to be in as much control as you can be, and you're, you're still going to work really hard, but to have more control has always been preferential to me. So you kind of got to know what matters to you as a parent.