Perhaps it is a problem that the people we want to be having kids are clearly told (explicitly or implicitly) that they should not have children, or that they should delay child bearing until near the end of their healthy reproductive life (let alone the energy and fitness required to parent babies/toddlers).
But per the tyranny of biological clocks: this only matters for women.
I burned many years of furious 80+ hour weeks in my youth, doing my startups, and couldn't have had kids then. Now I'm retired in my early forties and thinking of starting a family. The fertility for a 40's man and a 20's woman is basically the same as a 20's and 20's MF couple - mid nineties percent chance of healthy pregnancy in a year.
So cost to my fertility? Zero. And I'm dating women in their early twenties for the obvious reasons, but also because I want the runway to be able to have 3-6 kids.
I agree the picture is exceedingly grim for women founders. Fortunately, most startup founders are men, so the costs in this area are much lower than they could be.
1) The activities involved in parenting do not end with conception. Fertility is the obvious thing people latch onto with aging, but energy is a very large factor with young children. My ability to go without sleep, to maintain energy throughout the day, and to carry children around without hurting my back are much lower now (late thirties) than in my twenties. It's still an enormously worthwhile endeavour, but the energy point is not one I see people take into account when timing their children.
2) Start ups are not the only time-greedy job; smart, hardworking people are generally pushed towards roles which have time expectations that make having a family near impossible.
3) Re: start-up founders being men: is it not possible that we're *already* paying that cost?
Good points. I think 2) in particular is probably the dominant factor in high-human-capital fertility reduction, but you're almost certainly right that the other two are also dragging down total fertility for this group in the aggregate.
But still from an individual perspective, I think most men shouldn't worry so much about the explicit fertility costs of starting your own company, especially if you're doing it when young. The opportunity cost isn't that high, and most young men don't have kids anyways - and the world definitely needs more businesses driving value and creating jobs and things that people will happily pay money for.
I would agree on your conclusion here; given most people's excessive risk aversion (guilty) and the dominant cultural pressure against having kids young for people in this demographic, 'do it' is still probably an underselected option.
"But whatever the law might say, we should not kid ourselves that some jobs greatly benefit from a lack of commitments."
It's generally true that Great Work requires complete devotion. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you're a parent, you have that many fewer hours to devote to your work. There are a few outliers, like Claude Shannon, who are so phenomenally talented that they can do work of incredible quality while having seemingly unlimited time for hobbies and family and other outside pursuits. But for us mortals, when we get into our early 30s, we face a pretty stark choice: get off the Great Work track (e.g. by accepting a role with fewer hours and more flexibility but much less upside) and have a family, or double down on your career and hope it pays off for you later. Double down long enough, and you'll either miss your chance to start a family, or your values will change enough that you won't want to.
That's just a terrible choice, and it seems to apply to more and more career paths. So I understand the romance of single-minded devotion to the work, and I realize that incredible companies are generally not built by people working 40 hours a week. But I'm wary of the social consequences of over-emphasizing this message.
I googled a description of MetaMeds business model. Clearly needed fairly powerful AI to be viable, to automate and validate the meta analysis and reduce costs. Kind of ironic that Zvi is now an AI doomer given his startup would be viable with AGI.
"There are not literally zero stupid questions, but in math, basically, yeah"
I retook differential equations via the local community college's distance education program. Since I was the only person to show up to the live, online lectures and ask questions, I basically had my own math tutor for the semester. Once I derailed an entire lesson plan by asking "what exactly is a linear operator?". After the professor's 30 minute answer, I sill don't really know, but the answer I got made me curious enough that I might take linear algebra at some point.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/startup-roundup-2
typo: and told us to prey
I considered applying to one of MetaMed's job postings, but it wasn't a perfect fit and I was risk averse, and applying to jobs is work.
Yeah, I get that. I think the work was pretty sweet, we were intentionally paying a premium and it was interesting. But of course YMMV.
It looked very interesting for sure.
Perhaps it is a problem that the people we want to be having kids are clearly told (explicitly or implicitly) that they should not have children, or that they should delay child bearing until near the end of their healthy reproductive life (let alone the energy and fitness required to parent babies/toddlers).
But per the tyranny of biological clocks: this only matters for women.
I burned many years of furious 80+ hour weeks in my youth, doing my startups, and couldn't have had kids then. Now I'm retired in my early forties and thinking of starting a family. The fertility for a 40's man and a 20's woman is basically the same as a 20's and 20's MF couple - mid nineties percent chance of healthy pregnancy in a year.
So cost to my fertility? Zero. And I'm dating women in their early twenties for the obvious reasons, but also because I want the runway to be able to have 3-6 kids.
I agree the picture is exceedingly grim for women founders. Fortunately, most startup founders are men, so the costs in this area are much lower than they could be.
1) The activities involved in parenting do not end with conception. Fertility is the obvious thing people latch onto with aging, but energy is a very large factor with young children. My ability to go without sleep, to maintain energy throughout the day, and to carry children around without hurting my back are much lower now (late thirties) than in my twenties. It's still an enormously worthwhile endeavour, but the energy point is not one I see people take into account when timing their children.
2) Start ups are not the only time-greedy job; smart, hardworking people are generally pushed towards roles which have time expectations that make having a family near impossible.
3) Re: start-up founders being men: is it not possible that we're *already* paying that cost?
Good points. I think 2) in particular is probably the dominant factor in high-human-capital fertility reduction, but you're almost certainly right that the other two are also dragging down total fertility for this group in the aggregate.
But still from an individual perspective, I think most men shouldn't worry so much about the explicit fertility costs of starting your own company, especially if you're doing it when young. The opportunity cost isn't that high, and most young men don't have kids anyways - and the world definitely needs more businesses driving value and creating jobs and things that people will happily pay money for.
I would agree on your conclusion here; given most people's excessive risk aversion (guilty) and the dominant cultural pressure against having kids young for people in this demographic, 'do it' is still probably an underselected option.
"But whatever the law might say, we should not kid ourselves that some jobs greatly benefit from a lack of commitments."
It's generally true that Great Work requires complete devotion. There are only so many hours in the day, and if you're a parent, you have that many fewer hours to devote to your work. There are a few outliers, like Claude Shannon, who are so phenomenally talented that they can do work of incredible quality while having seemingly unlimited time for hobbies and family and other outside pursuits. But for us mortals, when we get into our early 30s, we face a pretty stark choice: get off the Great Work track (e.g. by accepting a role with fewer hours and more flexibility but much less upside) and have a family, or double down on your career and hope it pays off for you later. Double down long enough, and you'll either miss your chance to start a family, or your values will change enough that you won't want to.
That's just a terrible choice, and it seems to apply to more and more career paths. So I understand the romance of single-minded devotion to the work, and I realize that incredible companies are generally not built by people working 40 hours a week. But I'm wary of the social consequences of over-emphasizing this message.
I googled a description of MetaMeds business model. Clearly needed fairly powerful AI to be viable, to automate and validate the meta analysis and reduce costs. Kind of ironic that Zvi is now an AI doomer given his startup would be viable with AGI.
"There are not literally zero stupid questions, but in math, basically, yeah"
I retook differential equations via the local community college's distance education program. Since I was the only person to show up to the live, online lectures and ask questions, I basically had my own math tutor for the semester. Once I derailed an entire lesson plan by asking "what exactly is a linear operator?". After the professor's 30 minute answer, I sill don't really know, but the answer I got made me curious enough that I might take linear algebra at some point.