Life
Building products. Raising kids.
Ten years ago, I compared startups to raising children. Then I actually had two.
It’s back-to-school week.
My youngest starts TK this week, and I can’t quite believe it.
The little girl who was once learning to walk is now walking into a classroom with a backpack that’s somehow too big and already too small.
Watching her reach another milestone made me rewind more than a decade — to a time before kids, before diapers, before sleepless nights — when I wrote something that, looking back, feels just as relevant today. Almost prophetic.
Back then, I wrote a mini article called “The Emotional Stages of a Startup” and compared building a startup to starting a family.
At the time, I had spent years building startups. I had experienced the excitement of creating something from nothing, the messy middle, the disagreements, the pivots, the exhaustion, and the strange attachment you develop to something that barely existed a few months—no, weeks—earlier.
So I made a comparison:
Building a startup is a lot like starting a family.
There was just one small problem.
I didn’t have a family yet.
No kids. No firsthand experience of parenthood.
I was basically making an incredibly confident analogy about something I knew absolutely nothing about.
Fast-forward more than a decade.
I’m now a proud mother of two.
I’ve changed diapers, survived sleepless nights, navigated tantrums, worried about every milestone, watched personalities emerge, questioned approximately thousands of parenting decisions, and experienced the strange combination of pride, exhaustion, fear, frustration, and of course, unconditional love that comes with watching something grow.
And surprisingly…
I think younger me was onto something.
In that original article, I wrote:
I’ve also noticed the successful startups have great founders—founders who are resilient, patient, devoted and courageous. They are like amazing parents; they love their child (product), truly respect their spouse (their partners), and are proud of their entire family (team) regardless of the ups and downs. They invest a lot of time in their company, long enough to see it grow and succeed. They don’t give up.
Ten years later, I still believe much of that.
But motherhood has taught me that the parallels go even deeper.
Here are five things raising children has taught me about building things.
1. You will never be completely ready
Before having a baby, you can read the books.
Take the classes.
Ask other parents for advice.
Research the stroller, the crib, the sleep schedule, the feeding schedule, and the 47 things the internet insists you absolutely must have.
And then the baby arrives.
Boom.
And you realize:
Oh. I actually have to do this now.
No amount of preparation completely prepares you for the experience itself.
Building products is remarkably similar.
You can research the market.
Interview users.
Study competitors.
Create beautiful prototypes.
Write the strategy deck.
Run another workshop.
And another.
And another.
At some point, preparation stops producing meaningful new information.
The only way to learn what happens when your product meets the world is to let your product meet the world.
Sometimes you simply have to ship before you feel ready.
Not recklessly.
Not without thought.
But with the humility to understand that reality will teach you things preparation never can.
2. Your baby is going to look a little weird at first
Sure, newborn babies are beautiful.
But if I’m honest, they also kind of look like tiny, slimy aliens.
(Very lovable aliens that smell good.)
Their heads can be oddly shaped.
Their faces are scrunched up.
Their limbs seem disproportionately small.
They’re simply figuring out how to exist outside the womb.
Nobody looks at a newborn and says,
“Hmm… the proportions aren’t quite right. Let’s shut this project down.”
We understand that we’re looking at the beginning of something.
Products—and even individual features—deserve some of that same patience.
The first version might be clunky and even funky.
The onboarding might be awkward.
The UI might not be polished. It might be a bit inconsistent.
The positioning might change three times.
There may be entire features you eventually realize were terrible ideas.
And that’s okay.
Early is supposed to look early.
Your product doesn’t need to look fully grown on day one.
It simply needs to keep learning, adapting, and improving with each iteration.
Too often we compare young products against companies that have had years—or decades—to figure themselves out.
Give yourself a little grace.
Give your baby product a minute.
It’s still growing into its head.
It has time to develop and evolve.
3. You won’t know all the answers
One of the strangest realizations I’ve had as a parent is that my children (now 4 and 6) sometimes look at me as though I know exactly what I’m doing.
Meanwhile, internally:
I have absolutely no idea.
And I certainly don’t have all the answers to their “why?” questions.
Parenthood is essentially making hundreds of decisions with incomplete information.
Why is she crying? Is her diaper wet? Is she hungry? Is she tired?
Is this a phase?
Should I intervene?
Should I let them figure it out?
Is this normal?
Am I doing too much?
Am I doing too little?
There is rarely a giant flashing sign saying: CORRECT PARENTING DECISION : THIS WAY →
Building is the same.
Founders don’t know everything.
Designers don’t know everything.
Product leaders don’t know everything.
We are all making decisions with some combination of data, experience, intuition, and imperfect information.
The goal isn’t to eliminate uncertainty.
The goal is to become comfortable operating within it.
Make the best decision you can.
Pay attention to what happens.
Adjust.
Because everything is figure-out-able.
And sometimes the obsession with making the perfect decision prevents us from making the decision that would actually teach us something.
4. Your job isn’t to control what it becomes
This might be the biggest thing motherhood changed for me.
You might have even strategically planned their birth year or birth month because you had ideas about who your children might become. (Guilty.)
Then they arrive with personalities entirely their own.
They like things you didn’t expect them to like.
They’re good at things you never taught them.
They struggle with things you assumed would come easily.
Eventually you realize your job isn’t to manufacture a particular person. (Though you can certainly try. Good luck.)
Your job is to pay attention to the person who is already emerging.
Products have a funny way of doing this too.
You might launch something believing people will use Feature A.
Then realize wait! Your users are obsessed with Feature C.
You might position your product for one audience and discover another audience desperately needs it.
You might build an elegant workflow only to watch customers invent a completely different one.
Our instinct as builders is sometimes to say:
No, no. You’re using it wrong.
But your users might be telling you what the product actually wants to become.
The best builders I’ve worked with have strong opinions.
But they also know when to loosen their grip.
Have a vision. But stay curious about what emerges. Adapt accordingly.
5. Growth happens so gradually that you can miss it while you’re living it
When you’re raising children, most days don’t feel transformational.
Wake up.
Breakfast.
Shoes.
School.
Dinner.
Bath.
Book.
Bed.
Repeat.
Then one day your child says something they couldn’t have said six months ago.
Or reads a sentence.
Or swims across the pool.
Or walks into school without holding your hand or giving you a hug goodbye.
And suddenly you realize:
When did you become this person? When did you grow up?
Building something can feel exactly like that.
Most progress isn’t a giant launch.
It’s the little things.
It’s fixing the confusing onboarding screen.
Removing the feature nobody uses.
Improving conversion by 2%.
Writing better documentation.
Answering another support ticket.
Making one slightly better decision than yesterday.
Improving a process that had a gap.
Individually, these things don’t feel particularly heroic.
But all together, over weeks, months, and years, something remarkable happens.
That awkward little product you started with begins to grow up.
And sometimes you’re so close to it that you don’t notice how far it has come.
Ten years ago, I thought building a startup was like starting a family because both required resilience, patience, devotion, and courage.
I still believe that.
But now I’d add something else.
Both require accepting that you are helping something grow without ever having complete control over how it will grow.
You prepare.
You make decisions.
You get some of them wrong.
You learn.
You adjust.
You celebrate tiny milestones nobody else notices.
You worry more than necessary.
You occasionally wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into.
And then you wake up one day and realize that the messy little thing you started has become something you couldn’t have fully imagined at the beginning.
Maybe that’s the real work of building.
Not having all the answers.
Not getting everything right the first time.
But caring enough to keep paying attention.
To keep learning.
To keep showing up.
And to give something enough time, patience, and space to become what it was capable of becoming all along.
This week, I’ll watch my youngest walk into school with a backpack that’s almost as big as she is.
And somewhere between wondering where the time went and feeling excited for everything that’s ahead, I’ll probably think back to that article I wrote more than a decade ago.
Turns out, building products and raising kids isn’t quite as different.
Messy beginnings. Growing pains. Unexpected turns. And the quiet joy of watching something become more than you imagined — one backpack at a time.