MIdnight cowboy: what sleep training taught me about fundraising

When you start your business and your family, nobody thinks to tell you that the Series A grind and getting your child to sleep through the night involve the same psychological warfare tools. And both find you sitting in a dark room, praying for a reward that never seems to come.

Lately, I’ve been juggling the rollout of our latest ReflectAI® updates with my daughter’s early waking. In the startup world, we talk about burn rate – the speed at which you consume capital. In fatherhood, I measure burn rate in my own sanity. I used to think a 7am investor call was early? Pah! Now, 7am feels like the afternoon, given I’ve already put in a four-hour shift as a human Fisher-Price activity mat.

I know this feeling is nothing new that millions of working parents haven’t experienced before, but I do genuinely sometimes feel like I’m failing both. I can be on a Zoom call with a pitch deck in front of me, but my ears are tuned to the nursery monitor. I’m there for bath time, but my brain is debugging a computer vision glitch that’s miscounting bicep curls.

But this is what I keep going back to – constraint is the mother of efficiency. Before I was a dad, I’d spend twelve hours working on things that should have taken four. Now, because my time is literally guarded by a toddler, I’ve become ruthless. If a meeting doesn’t have a clear ROI, it’s gone. If a feature doesn’t solve a core problem, we scrap it.

Parenthood has stripped away the startup theatre. I don’t have time to perform the role of the busy CEO anymore – I just have to do it. Which means I have enough time for bathtime. It turns out that when you’re forced to be in two worlds at once, you stop wasting time in either.