Babies, Startups, Space-Guns, and Gratitude

I am the CEO of a cool and hard-driving aerospace hardware startup. I also do a lot of childcare. Among startup people, the analogy of the company as an infant is frequently made, and it is, in fact, quite apt. I'd like to take a moment to brag about how awesome my life is and marvel at what can be done when you love what you're doing.

On Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, I arrive at home no later than 6:30 PM after an hour's drive to my Santa Clara home from our Oakland facility. From 7 PM to 9 PM, I am with Altea, the adorable 18-month-old child of one of my longtime housemates, for dinner, bath, and bedtime. Sometimes I'm on my own, and sometimes it's with my wife or Altea's mom. At 9 PM, I pass off responsibility to the baby monitor, usually my wife.

On the mornings of Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, I am also with Altea from 7:30 AM for wake up, changing, milk, and play until 8:30 AM, when her mom or a nanny takes over. I used to do this routine seven days a week, but then Nathan (aka Nato), my co-founder/brother-from-another-mother had to go and ALSO have a baby.

Nato's baby, Violet, is a tender 9 weeks old and just starting to get out of the wrinkly stage. Nato and his wife had been stretched pretty thin, with her doing days while he worked at Longshot, and him covering nights and sleeping when he could between feedings. Nato's parents helped them out with a night doula for a while, but as anyone who's had a kid in the Bay Area knows, they can run $500 per night. Nato needed help, and I figured that my CTO having a head full of sleep was more important (at this juncture of the company's life) than my full functionality.

So, on Tuesday and Thursday after work, I head over to Nato's house around 7 PM and stay with Violet until 7 AM the next morning, so Mom and Dad can watch some TV, relax, and sleep. Then it's coffee for me and back to Longshot to put in my big-important-CEO-guy day. That afternoon, I'm back home to take care of Altea again.

All in all, in addition to ~60 hours a week as CEO of Longshot (I'm usually on at least one day on the weekends), I'm doing about 40 hours a week of childcare to help my housemate, who's doing the single mom thing while working full time at Google, and Nato, who's the lead engineer of the team I tricked into building this awesome space-gun.

I sleep around seven hours a night (unless I'm doing an overnight, then it's more like two or three), and if I'm not working or taking care of a baby, I'm spending time with my wife. My life is crazy busy and very exhausting. I also feel the best (emotionally, not necessarily physically) I have ever felt in my life.

My every waking moment is spent engaged in acts of significant creation. I have the privilege of getting to see these two young women grow from pink little grubs to witness the light of intelligence and awareness in their eyes. I have a role in a critical part of their development. I keep them fed, warm, and safe, so they can go forward in time and do all the great things. The greatness of those future things is a fact of which I have zero doubt. The childcare I do is a pure and delightful privilege. Basically, ditto Longshot. My precious little-bitty space-gun prototype.

When I'm not facilitating human greatness via getting peed and vomited upon, I'm offering up my own sweat, tears, bile, phlegm, and other humors to wrench a kinetic space launch system from the cruel and indifferent obstacle course of techno-economic possibility space. In the thin cracks between those things, a woman loves me, and I love her. Everything is hard, I'm exhausted, and my life is basically perfect.

I spent six months as a grunt at a remote Army FOB in Afghanistan working ~14 hours a night, 14 nights consecutively, with one night off. I was on an isolated observation point that was periodically mortared with two other guys. I have a good idea of my limits under stress. What I am doing now is, in some ways, more taxing than my time in combat. But the simple fact is I am a man built for lovin', not for fightin'. I hated combat! That's why it was hard and stressful. Not the hours or the danger. If you love fighting (and there are people who do), it's downright addictive.

I am blessed with the hybrid disposition of the Happy Warrior and Mary Poppins. But my battles are struggles of creation, not destruction. In both the little victories and many small defeats found in the struggles children and space-guns impose, I have found great joy, and I am grateful to the vicissitudes that landed me here.