Mike Sabat at Shelfmade.net recently wrote a post on his blog entitled “29 Years Old, Start a Business or Have a Baby?” Mike is a new acquaintance of mine, and I’m very excited about the startup he’s working on. (Go check out Shelfmade – I want him to succeed so I can use his product) Part of starting a startup is generating awareness of your company, and blogs are a great way to do that. One strategy is to write “linkbait” or “Digg-bait”, which is something inflammatory that people will get people talking and have them link to your article, which will lead others to the rest of your site. Well Mike, I took the bait.

I’m a fiercely proud father of a wonderful two year old girl and a husband of four years. I live in a 1,800sf house in the suburbs and I have a good job. Oh, and I’m 27 years old, and beginning to start a startup, so I’m in a similar position as Mike but in an entirely different lifestyle. Let me fill out his scorecard from my perspective:1. Commitment: Yes, you can walk away from a startup, but if you go into it with the idea that you can walk away tomorrow, you\’re probably not determined enough to succeed. (See Paul Graham\’s writings) However, it is a shorter commitment of time. Twenty years ago, startups took a long time to get big, but in the Internet age, you can complete a startup lifecycle in a few years. If you want to continue and be a serial entrepreneur, you can. If you want to build something to sell so you don\’t have to work forever, you can do that in a few years. But being a parent requires at least 18 years of commitment until the child becomes a legal adult, plus 4 (10?) years of school, plus time for them to get on their feet, and that\’s just the financial commitment. The relationship commitment goes on for the rest of your life. If your startup lasts 25+ years, it\’s because it\’s giving you your dream lifestyle and you don\’t want to leave. So the commitment bar is much lower for a startup.

And that\’s assuming you only have one kid!

Edge: Startup

PS – Mike, you think a kid can take care of herself after 7-8 years? You must have grown up really rough!2 & 3. Investment/Return: From an individual financial perspective, there\’s no possible way to argue that children are a good investment. The only sensible argument you can make is that when they get rich or you get old, they\’ll take care of you if you raised them to do that. From a societal perspective, having children is a good investment because it provides fresh labor, funds Social Security, perpetuates a culture, etc. But an individual, kids are bad for your pocketbook.

Who cares about money though? Again referring to Paul Graham, what people really want is wealth, and money is just a convenient proxy for trading wealth. And what\’s the point of wealth? To be happy! To get endorphins flowing! One way to do that is to work, to get money, to buy stuff that you like, so you can be happy. That\’s a very complicated chain of dependencies to get right. What if you work too much that you can\’t enjoy your money? What if you think something will make you happy but it doesn\’t? What if you don\’t even know what makes you happy? What if your work ceases to be valuable and your money runs out (see Hammer, MC and Tyson, Mike)? The important thing is to find something that makes you happy and get it. All the cash in the world doesn\’t help if you don\’t know how to spend it. Kids can make you extremely happy (see #4, Quality of Life) but so can the available time and money that a successful startup can give you.

Edge: Draw (when put in the proper context of how people work)4. Sex: Studies and experience show that sex is easier, more convenient, more satisfying, and more frequent when you\’re married. Kids are proof of that 😉

Edge: Family5. Quality of Life: Mike describes the work associated with being a parent: “small talk, watching Big Brother every Tuesday night and keeping quiet so the baby can sleep”, but he left out the strict schedule, the diapers, the poor sleep for months at a time, wiping snotty noses with your own clothes (not to mention other bodily functions), and much, much more. He also says “I think a better definition for quality of life means experiencing a range of emotions. Is there anything more thrilling, frustrating, exciting and depressing than a startup?” Parenting and children are so ingrained in our physiology, and the experience of doing all those things I listed above greatly magnifies those natural effects, so the whole experience plays directly to our emotions. Mundane things like a first step, a more complex sentence, another ear infection, or a temper tantrum over dinner create a roller coaster of emotions (both good and bad, but mostly good) that are every bit equal to those caused by startup events (closing a VC round, signing your 1,000^th customer, a server crash, your co-founder quitting on you).

Edge: Draw6. Parental Pride: Who said your startup isn\’t your baby? At least make some kind of argument in your favor, Mike! Although this one is a blowout (kind of like ROI was a blowout for the startup), the reason why parenting is so rewarding is because you invest so much of your time and emotions into your child, that every success they have, every milestone they hit, is a validation of and reward for your parenting. And the good news is, at least while they\’re young, these keep coming and coming. Sitting up, crawling, jumping, sleeping through the night, saying words, saying simple sentences, saying big sentences, throwing a ball, going to school, learning to add numbers, etc. Everything that an adult is expected to do effortlessly, a child has to learn, and you get to share each of those triumphs! The other day my daughter said “I was playing at the playground with Daddy.” It\’s a simple eight word sentence, but the fact that she put it together, said it clearly, and it was grammatically correct meant that it was a reason to celebrate. And while rolling out a new feature or fixing a tough bug in a program is satisfying, with kids you have a decades long checklist of accomplishments waiting for you!

Edge: Baby7. Pain: Mike says “If you\’re a guy it is definitely more painful to start a business. If you\’re a girl it is probably more painful to start a business.” I don\’t even know how to respond to this. Do you mean physical pain? In that case, you\’ve got to be kidding. Neither process is physically painful for a man. And we all know that it\’s the most physically demanding thing most women will ever do (and that\’s just pregnancy and delivery). Do you mean more exhausting? Maybe I\’ll give you that one. Startup work is so intense and focused, while parenting is a never-ending litany of duties, few of which are all that difficult by themselves, but put together are draining. It\’s kind of like the difference between driving in a race (focused, intense, exhausting) versus driving an hour long commute in traffic (takes enough of your attention to occupy you but not enough to challenge you mentally).

Edge: Baby8. Legacy: This depends on how you want to be viewed. While major, world changing companies do become known to history (East India Trading Company, Carnegie Steel, General Motors, Microsoft), they also lose the luster and excitement they had when they were contemporary. Today, who would want to start a shipping company, a steel company, a car company, or an OS company? Also, these are among the foremost companies in history – the runners-up will never get this kind of love. Take WordPerfect, a company that was hugely successful (more than most of us will ever be), growing fast, dominating the world and minting money. Well, the ended up losing the war and now they\’re a footnote in technology history that nobody born in the 90s or later will ever even hear of. Paul Graham\’s Viaweb was another successful startup, but the only reason anyone knows about it today is because of Paul\’s writings. Let\’s say that 100 years from now, Paul Graham is still famous. If that\’s the case, it will probably be because of (in descending order): YCombinator (changing the way startups work), his essays, stopping spam, his role in furthering Lisp, Arc, or his association with other people (Morris, Blackwell, Livingston, Norvig, etc) who may also be famous in the future. No one will care about his company; it was a means to the end of creating a real legacy.

But because of all that stuff that Paul Graham did to become famous, his parents can say “We raised Paul Graham.” The Brins and the Pages can say “We raised Sergei and Larry”. Don\’t forget, everybody has parents.

Edge: Draw

PS Wait, what does everyone do when they get old? Brag about their kids! It\’s a legacy that everyone can have and be proud of, even if they\’re not famous.

Edge: Baby9. Timing: “What has a greater likelihood? Starting a company at 30, selling it at 36 and then starting a family. OR Having a child at 30 raising it for 6-15 years and then deciding to start a business.” Clearly this was written by a man ;). I think if you start much later than 30, you\’re better of having the family and trying to squeeze in the startup (especially if you\’re a woman), although it\’s much easier for a man to marry a younger woman. If you\’re in your 20s, especially early 20s and still in college, it\’s much more skewed to the startup. But as we covered in point #1, the kid is indeed a bigger time commitment.

Having said that, there\’s something to be said for having kids when you\’re younger. It\’s easier to have multiple kids, you have more energy for the duties required, and it\’s a pretty stable element in a time when most people have a lot of turbulence. But it can\’t be undone.

Edge: Startup

So for those keeping score, Mike went 6-1-1 (startup-baby-draw), while I went 2-4-2. I guess that our bias is expressed by the choices we have made to get where we are. I think it\’s easy to pick the startup because the experiences can be more easily related to someone else, while parenting sounds like a whole lot of work and you have to take someone else\’s word that “Babies make you happy.” But the important lesson is to find something that makes you happy and feed it.

So best of luck to Mike and Ken at Shelfmade and thanks for giving me a reason to start blogging again!