✔︎ See the kids during daylight hours

A year ago I left a well-paid tech job to turn a side-project into a business. I’ve started and grown several businesses, with some success, some failure and a lot of learning in between. This time, though, I’m taking a very different approach.

Makelight, the learning community we’ve set up, is a collaboration with my wife, Emily. We’re a family of six. We’re working from home. We’re not doing this with any investment behind us (yet!) and a few of our priorities are very different to what I was trying to achieve with previous ventures.

Last year, a week or so after going “all in” with Emily, I tweeted:

A tweet by @stef

Amazingly, a year on and these things are holding true. It’s been hard, but we’ve stuck to the plan and managed to build an exciting business that we’re also able to make a living from working on.

As you get older and have kids, your priorities shift. Somewhere in the haze of pre- and early-parent life I recall times where I’d work solidly from morning into the early hours of the next morning on repeat. I’d clock up hundred hour work-weeks and just keep on going. I’ve written about work heroism in the past, and I’m pretty determined not to end up back in that situation.

Don’t be absent

This week I saw a Tweet that really made me pause and shake my head. Here it is (note it’s since been shown not to be this man’s quote).

A tweet by @TaylorLorenz

This is an ad by Apple. Or rather, it’s just someone on a team in Apple who’s able to make adverts and is looking for something striking to promote.

Before you send a grumpy tweet about this, Andrew Kemendo has already said that he didn’t say this or agree to appear in the ad, which was subsequently pulled.

“Not something to brag about” is how I feel about this too. There’s a pervading view that I’ve encountered and been part of in the past that encourages this kind of work heroism.

If you recall, Google famously set up one of the principles of their company and how they wanted to conduct themselves using a simple phrase “Don’t be evil”. I quite like the idea that in building Makelight we‘ll be making “Don’t be absent” a big part of out mission.

You can do a startup and have kids

I get the impression that a lot of folks think doing a startup with kids just isn’t possible. Certainly the format of the various “startup accelerator” programmes seem to share the view that the only way to get on in the world is to relocate somewhere for a three month period, work all the hours available to you at a desk and avoid all distractions. Great, but kids don’t fit into that.

At some point as a parent working in the world of “tech” (which is pretty much any industry now) you might face a choice about a next step in your career. Depending on what matters to you and how much risk you can stomach, you might choose one of these:

• Should you take a safe job with a guaranteed monthly salary that might pay less in the short term, but won’t suddenly change or stop?
• Or perhaps you should join one of these high-risk startups, again on a salary, but with a big potential upside if the company were to do well and sell for a lot money?
• Or perhaps be a freelancer or consultant, charging by the project and running a tiny one-person company, with lots of flexibility, but a high risk of cashflow being choppy?
• Or even start your own high-risk business and build something awesome that might just guarantee a strong future for you and the family?

I’ve done all of these at one point or another over the last ten years, and each time we’ve shifted up what I’m doing with my time and what we’re doing as a family, something has had to give. For a while, “do a startup” just didn’t seem possible. So I did consulting for a while instead. You might have to hold back on that burning idea for a bit too. Our breakthrough was all about how we were spending our evenings to chip away at a side-project without risking house and home in the first instance.

The thing is, it is possible to do what we’re doing with Makelight —set up a passion business, bootstrapped without starting with loads of cash in the bank, working from home, building something with big potential that fits around family life with four kids and that pays the bills. And that ticks a good few of those things off the list.

It’s super hard, but it’s possible. It’s just that often many of us don’t have the knowledge of how to to it. Through the Makelight membership community, we’re helping people in a similar situation with knowledge, tools and support. It’s one of the big things we’re about — helping folks build their own resilient micro-business, develop their side-project, build their online following and lots more. All of these things lead to more optionality and potential good outcomes for the folk in the community.

Acceptable risk

But what about the risk? Even small risks gets magnified as a parent, because any disruption to family life is also magnified.

Just because you have kids though, surely these risks shouldn’t stop you entirely from trying to achieve your life goals?

A constant consideration that’s part of every major decision once you become a parent is “What if it goes wrong? What would that mean for the kids?”

The thing is, new businesses more often than not, don’t work. Anyone can draw out a financial model with all the numbers going up and to the right, but the entropy you’ll face just getting your idea to work and grow can be so high that in the end, you just need to stop.

Thinking back, I’ve made decisions that I just wouldn’t be able to now as a father. Because of one particular past failure I ended up having to sell my flat and since then we’ve been renting. Basically, doing a startup threw us off the property ladder, and once you’re off good luck with trying to get back on! One day, we’ll be able to own a place again, I’m sure, and actually that’s a motivator for getting up every day and building the business.

I think though, that having experienced pretty tough times, it makes you resilient, and yet rather than being overly cautious we have a heightened awareness of risk. To us, doing a startup, making our own way in the world, building something that helps a *lot* of people, well that doesn’t seem like too much of a risk.

The bigger risk I think could be the other way around — that if we weren’t to be following this mashed together family/home/startup life it’d be a little like giving up on a dream, and neither of us want to be the kind of person whose default mode is “shoulda coulda woulda”.

Merging home life and startup life

This Summer we’re doubling down on the idea that it’s possible to run a family-friendly tech business. By rejecting the standard way that people think about “startup” culture — “tech bros”, “what’s your elevator pitch”, “fail fast”, “go big or go home” — we’re hoping to show that there is another way. One that’s all about living and working sustainably, being present with your kids, doing meaningful work and making a positive difference to the world, whilst making money doing it.

Yesterday, we moved into a lovely new place where we’re going to live and Emily and I can be on our laptops and shooting videos. I’m literally writing this whilst taking a break from unpacking surrounded by cardboard boxes! We cancelled the rent on our separate office space, we’ve set up a little spot to work from in the basement and we’re pretty much throwing away the idea of “work/life balance” and putting it all together in one place.

I wouldn’t want to criticise those folks who have to do the late night, long commute thing, but it’s not the path we want to take — setting up at home for this makes everything more efficient. No dragging kit from A to B and forgetting that one crucial piece of kit. Not having to abort the day’s work to get back in time for school. Being able to jump on Facebook Live at a time that suits our West Coast US or Australian users. Lots of upsides, and sure, there are downsides about possibly being disconnected, but we’re working on that too by looking at organising our own events — face to face or live online.

We all have the internet now. And tools that make remote, flexible working possible. We can build businesses around what we think is important that enable us to work flexibly. And by businesses, I mean anything from a side project that brings in a little extra income to the likes of Automattic, who with Wordpress are responsible for tech that’s running about a quarter of websites.

Is family-friendly investor-unfriendly?

A big risk that remains untested though, is getting backing for this. We’ve had feedback that being married and having kids are both red flags for tech investors. Yeah, I had shook my head too.

To grow what we’re doing, we’ll obviously need investment, but we’re not going to shy away from what we care about. We’ll bake this story about family + passion + tech into how we talk about what we’re doing.

I think we can do a little do disprove the whole idea that startups and family life are somehow mutually exclusive. If everything’s on the line for us in doing this then I think that we stand a good chance of pushing through those months where it gets hard and just not giving up.

Investable businesses shouldn’t be robotic, inflexible, burn-out-inducing, and let’s face it, unfriendly to women. We can and should be doing better than that. And I think we can!

I’m hearing more and more folk that I respect talking about doing startups in a better way, whilst still building world-changing stuff. I’m an optimist, and I can feel that there’s change afoot here.

So I’ll keep writing about our progress with Makelight, and maybe it’ll inspire others that maybe their idea is a little more possible than they thought it was!

Right, I must go. I’m just walking my daughter to the swimming pool.

—

If you’ve enjoyed this, tap the ♡ heart icon for a little accelerated serendipity and follow for more occasional articles like this.

If you’re doing something similar to us, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. What are the struggles? And if you’d like to hear when we’re approaching investors add your email and I’ll be in touch!