Amazing Parenting Frameworks For You and Your Partner | Gaurav Vohra (father of 1, co-founder Superhuman)

Gaurav: To me, it seems absolutely wild because that is probably the most important hire you will ever make. And sure enough, a lot of my friends have had, mediocre or even bad childcare help, right? Where they've had some incidents or they've had, it's been fine, right? But, a whole year of someone living with you just being fine is, you know, something to put up with right at the end of the day.

So, for us, we really wanted to make sure that we found someone really great. And we did. And the person we found is absolutely phenomenal

Adam: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman, and in this episode, I sat down with Gaurav Vohra. Gaurav is the co-founder and head of growth at Superhuman, a company he founded with his brother.

He's also a growth advisor to many companies. A loving husband and the father of a two year old son. In this conversation, Gaurav and I navigate the heartwarming tales of his family life, the challenges and joys of being a father, and the unique experience of starting a company with a sibling. Gaurav talked to me about the influence of his immigrant parents on his own work ethic and values, his reflections on his parents profession and his decision not to follow in their footsteps, and the challenge and reward of starting a family with two demanding careers.

He dropped numerous parenting and partnership frameworks on me, from full vertical responsibility management, to the delete, automate, delegate framework in parenting, to how he and his wife developed a system for getting great childcare. The lessons shared in this episode are many, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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Adam: I would like to welcome Gaurav Vohra to the Startup Dad podcast. Gaurav, it is a pleasure to have you here and I hope that I did not butcher your name.

Gaurav: You nailed it. Thanks so much for having me. Really pleased to be here.

Adam: All right, let's dive in. I am very curious to hear more about your background. So tell me a little bit about your professional background.

Gaurav: Yeah, certainly. So professionally I started out my career in management consulting, which might seem like a little bit of a dirty word in tech in terms of a place to have started one's career. But you know, really it, for me, was the bedrock of really fundamentally understanding how businesses work.

And fortunately enough, the consulting company I was at, Oliver Wyman, was pretty far along the curve in terms of tech. I'm actually using technology as part of the solution. So instead of delivering just like a PowerPoint deck full of recommendations and strategic advice we were actually brought in to deliver software to our customers in addition to the strategy deck.

So, the software we would provide would be, you know, some kind of a front end to be used by the client, but also a ton of analytics and data in the backend. So a lot of what I was personally doing was building that kind of full stack system, including the data in the back end and also the front end that would be used by those people.

So sure enough, after, you know, five years of doing that I very quickly kind of gravitated towards more of the technical side of everything and realized, you know what I would really like to be in a place where I'm able to build software to be used by not just dozens of people, obviously doing very high leverage things, but.

By millions of people, it would be great to use these same skills building things and bring that to a much larger number of people and to have much more impact. So when I say I wanted to be in a place where I could do that meant both physically in terms of where I live in the world and also in terms of company and where I work.

So at the time I was working in London, in England, actually, you know, traveling and working all over Europe as part of the job. But kind of instigated a move to San Francisco and also relatively soon after that started looking into tech and saying, hey, you know, where could I land and have like a really big impact. Around the time when I moved from London to San Francisco was also around the time that we founded Superhuman which is a company that I'm sure many folks in tech are familiar with.

We build the fastest email experience ever made. And we save you more than four hours a week. People who use Superhuman get back to people faster and have more time for what matters. And so, serendipitously, you know, timing worked out really well. I was able to move into Superhuman as part of the founding team.

And I've spent the last nine or so years at Superhuman in a variety of different roles focused on mostly growth, but also analytics, product and marketing at different points in time. And just to round things out, for the last year or so, I've also been advising startups much smaller than Superhuman on all things growth.

Depending on what the startup needs, I might go into marketing, I might go into product or analytics. It really depends. Growth is a little bit of a mishmash of all of those things. And I've been doing that sort of alongside working at Superhuman as a way to start to give back to the startup community, but also to kind of expand and broaden my own horizons by working with different people and teams.

Adam: That's great. You sound like a very busy guy and we haven't even gotten to your family yet. So.

Gaurav: I'm certainly busy. That's true. But you know, we'll get into this. I've started to track the amount of hours I work and you know, I kind of need to know how many hours I work at different clients in particular, especially on advising gigs and so on. And you know, interestingly, I think I feel like I am doing more and adding more value in my career now than ever before.

I think that's generally a good thing for someone in their work life to feel that way. But I feel like I'm also working fewer hours than ever before, which is an interesting kind of duality of outcomes.

Adam: That's great.

Gaurav: Maybe we'll unpack a little bit about how to get there.

Adam: I hope so!

Gaurav: Or maybe we'll discover that's just a random fluke.

Adam: I don't think so. Something tells me it's quite intentional, but we will get there. And I also like to ask people a little bit about their life growing up and I think you have a really unique story because Superhuman you started with your brother, is that right? So you work with your brother. I don't know if you would say for your brother.

Not really. Although he is the CEO of the company. But yeah. So tell me a little bit about life growing up. And I guess also the decision to kind of start a company with your sibling, which could be very risky in some cases.

Gaurav: Yeah, certainly. A couple of things I should mention. So obviously growing up as siblings. I think this is true for most siblings. You spend a lot of time like quote unquote working on things together. Like maybe you're playing right? Like you're playing video games together or you're out in the yard doing things together or you know, you're building something that’s of meaning to you both.

And We have a relatively large age gap, right? There's a seven year age gap between us. So, ordinarily, that kind of an age gap might mean you spend less time together than if the age gap was smaller. Interestingly, in our case, by the time both of us were able to, you know, wrap our hands around a video game controller or, you know, operate a PC, we were collaborating on stuff.

We were doing really cool things together. You know, playing video games together, making music, doing... local area network, Command and Conquer, or Red Alert, kind of games with one another. And so was certainly growing up a lot of time spent jamming and collaborating on things that were meaningful and that mattered to us both.

Also from a work standpoint you know, I come from a fairly typical kind of first generation immigrant family. My parents immigrated from India sometime in the 80s to the UK and like many folks who immigrate from India to either the UK or the US, they work and work. They worked and work incredibly hard all the time.

And that was just the background and sort of the lifestyle growing up that we were both part of. And that sort of infiltrated its way for better or for worse into both of us, right? So we were both you know, very hard working kind of growing up and wanting to do well, however that was defined at the time. And the nice thing about the sort of sibling relationship is that we both felt that way, right?

It never was like one person wanted to do really well in school and kind of had no extracurricular pursuits and the other one didn't care anything about school and only wanted to pursue those activities. Like now for both of us, like we generally had a similar shared philosophy and maybe this was strongly influenced.

I think, by our parents.

Adam: Yeah.

Gaurav: Funnily, both parents are doctors and neither Rahul nor I, like, had any shred of desire to do medicine. I think maybe we saw them get woken up at 2 a. m. a few too many times to go and handle an on call patient emergency. So both of us, we were like, you know what, let's not do that.

That seems like a lot of, that's just hard, right?

Adam: Yeah.

Gaurav: Obviously incredibly valuable work, incredibly rewarding. But neither of us wanted to get into that. And so, well, Rahul actually studied computer science. I studied economics. As mentioned, you know, I took a detour through business and then kind of back into tech.

He actually went straight into entrepreneurship and has always been focused on tech. Kind of more from the product and just like the founder CEO angle. And the decision to start working together felt like a very natural fit. We both, at the time, and still to this day just bring very different skills to the table.

Rahul is incredibly vision led, entrepreneurial. He is sort of fairly prolific in the tech world and knows many of the investors and various folks that you know, just speaking candidly, when you start a startup, you need as many unfair advantages as you can. And he has a lot of those, right?

Like, he's a second time founder after Rapportive when founding Superhuman. I, on the other hand, am super methodical. I bring a whole ton of rigor and kind of step by step, brick by brick certainty to basically anything. That was a lot of what you have to do as a management consultant. Like, every i is dotted, every t is crossed and there is absolutely no way you can, like, wing your way past, you know, a client. And so I bring a lot of certainty and rigor to the table which works really well in fields like growth and analytics. So for the duration of really putting superhuman together, you know, we've divided and conquered different areas quite effectively. He's focused more on those visionary pieces, product strategy, handling external folks.

I've done a lot of the internal building. You know, at times I've been referred to as the company librarian, or the person, or the elephant, you know, who just remembers everything, can direct new people to those resources. And yeah, we've staked out different parts that need attention. So it's honestly, it's worked really well.

I would recommend it to anyone who feels like they have, you know, a functional relationship with their sibling.

Adam: Yeah, well, it seems like the two of you have a super complimentary skill set, which is, I think, really great. And I mean, critical of any co-founder relationship, let alone sibling co-founders, which I'm sure can be wrought with emotional baggage and a whole bunch of things. So, kudos to the two of you for doing so well with it.

Do you have any other siblings or is it just the two of you?

Gaurav: Just us.

Adam: Just the two of you. I talk to a lot of people who are, you know, children of immigrant parents, and there's often a lot of pressure to do more of a tried and true path. You know, be a doctor, be a lawyer, be an accountant, maybe a management consultant, something that like the parents can understand, right? Startup founder maybe doesn't fit that bill. Was there ever any pressure from your parents to kind of walk the straight and narrow path?

Gaurav: Oh, a ton. So I mentioned the age gap, which actually matters a lot in terms of the pressure that Raul faced versus the pressure that I faced. So in case anyone was wondering, he is the older of the two of us.

I remember when he was picking what he wanted to do after graduating, and it was like, be an entrepreneur.

And my parents were like, what is that? How are you gonna make money? And you know, I'm like kind of in the middle of my teenage years, like, I don't have to worry about this. I've just got the next, you know, set of grades or whatever to get and I'm just like this, you know, this is all going over my head I don't… you know, no stress for me but it was very I think it was a very stressful time for both my parents and Rahul because you know on both sides, there's just a lot of fear uncertainty and doubt. You know kudos to Rahul for sticking with it.

He said look this is the path I want to take I think in England as well. It was just a much less trodden path like

Adam: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Gaurav: Growing up in the states, whether he's east or west coast. I think there's maybe more evidence that is a career path that makes sense. But back then in the UK, it was you know, you're really kind of going against the grain here.

But he stuck with it and, you know, as is predictable for most all founders, generally speaking, like the first few endeavors didn't work out. Like there were different ideas and different explorations. And it took three or four tries before he got to Rapportive which was a successful company that was acquired by LinkedIn in 2000, I think 10 or 11.

So there were numerous moments of, are you still sure this is the path you should be on? And, you know, a lot of pressure kind of on that front. But, when I was graduating, first of all, I picked consulting. My parents you know, were just happy that it was kind of like a city job that kind of had a stable salary.

So that wasn't really too much of a discussion or anything. But when I moved into more of the tech world, by that time, Rahul had already exited Rapportive to LinkedIn. And so, you know, moving into tech at that point was not a risky thing. It was kind of like the sensible thing to do. It's like, okay, there was a successful acquisition here.

Clearly this is a good thing for you to be doing, you know, for me, you know, maybe I feel a little bad to say, but I feel like it was a much smoother path.

Adam: He sort of paved the way for you, which is kind of helpful.

Gaurav: Yeah, it certainly is.

Adam: Being that younger sibling. Yeah. So, I want to transition and ask you a bit about your family now. So we just heard about your parents and your brother and what it was like growing up and starting this company together.

Tell me about your family now. Tell me about your partner. And you have one young kid, as I understand.

Gaurav: That's right. Yeah. So my partner, her name is Lyndall. She's absolutely wonderful. We met a little over 10 years ago now. Funny story. We were actually interviewing for the same consulting job that ultimately both of us would end up to go on and actually have. So we worked together. We were side by side colleagues, part of the same kind of intake class, so to speak.

And we were colleagues for best part of five years. That move I mentioned from London to San Francisco was actually for the company, it was a two for one move. We both moved as part of that as a couple as employees of the company. So yeah, we've been together for a good long while, and we have one little one at home.

He's an absolute darling. He turned two just a couple of months ago, and he's... Our absolute obsession. We both love him very much.

Adam: All right. I can't wait to dive into it a little bit more. Does your partner work outside the home? Does she have as demanding of a job as you?

Gaurav: Arguably more demanding. So she not only has the, you know, the incredible and just absolutely all encompassing job of being a mom, right? Like being a parent is incredibly demanding, but in particular, being a mom, being a birthing parent kind of through pregnancy and then delivery.

And then in our case you know, we opted to breastfeed and so that's the first. You know, a year to a year and a half. There's just so much of a demand on your time and your attention and your focus. And then of course, that's everything that comes with being a parent. You know, it's just a lot of time and a lot of care and attention.

But she is also the VP chief of staff and head of people at her company. Her company is a little bit bigger than Superhuman. So, you know, she definitely has her hands full. And I would also add that she advises and coaches. Executives, particularly in the climate space on usually founders, right?

How can they grow their businesses? How can they be more successful as startups? So she has a number of different activities and things going on. She's very busy. And the last thing I would add is that she actually also runs a website and a blog that is also to do with parenting. It's called Parenting by Design.

She's kind of turned her attention in the last few years, a bit more to this whole world, probably similar to you. You know, taking a very deep interest in how families, maybe where both parents are working, are able to still have a fulfilling relationship and spend a good amount of time with their family, with their children.

And so she's, you know, she interviews folks. It's a bit of a different format to the podcast style, but she kind of runs that as well on the side.

Adam: That's awesome. I will have to link to her site in the show notes.

Gaurav: Yeah, absolutely.

Adam: So people can check that out. So given that the two of you have pretty demanding careers, you've got also advisor work that you do and both of you and now she has this other thing that she's doing, this sort of other business on the side, which sounds super valuable and exciting.

What was the decision like for the two of you to start a family with all this going on? Just throw one more thing onto the pile.

Gaurav: Yeah, it was a pandemic, so we're not doing much, you know, let's start a family now. I mean, maybe less flippantly. We'd always known that we wanted to have a family and, you know, have children and there was kind of a question of when's the right time. Like, when are we both feeling settled enough career wise that it makes sense.

I think a couple of entry conditions were like, okay, neither of us are working in a job that's like consulting and to take you away from the home, you know, multiple days or even weeks on end, neither of us are in a job like being super early stage at a startup where you just have no idea what the next week's going to look like.

You're just constantly, you know, working or you know, even financially, like you may not know that you're going to have enough finances for all the expensive things that having children often brings. And I also think that we both require just a little bit of stability in terms of. Okay, we know that our work and our lives are going to roughly look like the following, right?

At least for the next year or so from a location and just general planning ability. And, you know, at that time, then it's like, okay, then now we feel ready. We've been together for, at that time, maybe eight to nine years, maybe going on 10. So that decision kind of made a lot of sense with all of those conditions, feeling like we've, you know, we've got the right kind of bedrock to build on.

Adam: Great. Great. And it seems like everything went well and now you have a happy, healthy two year old, so that's exciting. So there's three topics that, you know, we kind of kicked around in the prep for this call. And I wanted to get started on the first one. And that is this concept that you introduced to me of full vertical responsibility management, which sounds very much like the kind of presentation you would have put together in consulting.

Gaurav: Guilty.

Adam: Now that I know you have a consulting background, I can say that. But what does that mean? Tell me what that means.

Gaurav: Yeah I can only, you know, claim credit as the messenger. This is something that my wife actually brought into the family as a concept,

Adam: Love it!

Gaurav: But it makes a ton of sense. It's actually something we practice. Like we've enshrined as like an operating principle, at Superhuman, this idea of end to end ownership, right?

What does it mean? What does it mean? Yeah, it sounds like a lot of buzzwords on the slide. So take a vertical. Take any vertical that, as a couple needs doing in your household. Maybe the vertical is cleaning. Maybe the vertical is food or finances. You can define a vertical as broadly or as narrowly as you want, whatever makes sense.

But generally speaking, you know, there's about 20 of these verticals, maybe 15. There's a book called I think it's called Fair Play. I might have to just double check that, but I think that it actually outlines all of the verticals that might need to be taken care of. Also the Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work is another book that also has verticals listed out.

They call them more like responsibilities or duties. And it's part of an exercise where you figure out like who owns what. In any case, you take the vertical, and the idea behind this thinking is that it's significantly more efficient if one person in the household fully owns that vertical end to end.

So, in our case, I'll just give you an example, I am fully responsible for everything to do with cleaning. My partner doesn't even have to think one second about anything cleaning. So that includes all laundry, all dishwasher. All cleaning the kitchen, all figuring out when our cleaner's gonna come and making sure that someone's at home to let them in and QA-ing the work and making sure that they get paid.

Literally any removal of any trash, or compost, or recycling, or Amazon boxes from the house, or any clutter that builds up, like, that is fully in my wheelhouse, that's my end to end vertical. On the other hand, food is her vertical. I think zero seconds in a week about obtaining groceries. You know, preparing meals, that's not strictly true.

I do order, you know, I do sometimes help with the cooking as like a sous chef where I like…

Adam: Sure.

Gaurav: Order takeout once in a while. But for the most part, you know, she takes care of all food stuff. And then of course I'm on the other end of it, making sure that we are really tidy after dinner and that, you know, after everything is done, like the kitchen's back to where it was before the meal prep started.

So you can kind of take this whole system. You can then map out all of the stuff that you need to do. And like I mentioned, there's tons of different verticals, right? Food, finance, travel, social plans at the weekend, childcare is a huge one.

Vacation planning. There's just so many different pieces. You can figure out which bits are conceptually similar bundle those together, and then just making sure that you've evenly or whatever split makes sense for your, you know, your situation make sure that it's, known who is owning the thing.

And that way, a couple of things emerge as a result. First, everything just moves way faster. Like I can just independently make decisions about cleaning. My partner can independently make decisions about food. Obviously you can get the other person's input if you need to, but things just happen a lot faster.

Things don't like pile up or build up. Second, if a new task comes along, it's very clear who needs to take ownership of that which is really helpful because those things can often just like kind of linger and fall between the cracks. And then, you know, thirdly, you can have a shared language and a framework for how you should rebalance and shuffle things if things are feeling too overwhelming for one person.

Or if someone feels like they have loads of bandwidth and could help out on something. So, you know, we've moved tasks from one person to the other, where we're like, wait, isn't this kind of part of the cleaning vertical? Like, I think you should take that. I'm like, yep, makes total sense. Like, I'd probably, you know, fold it into the same time I think about this other thing.

So, I am a huge advocate of this. I also speak to couples and families where they're like, you know what, we just 50/50 it. Or we just kind of muddle our way through it, you know. Or we 60/60, that's another framework. It's like each person. I love that principle, but as an economist, right? And my partner's also studied economics at university.

My brain just can't handle that.

Adam: Right.

Gaurav: Clearly someone is going to be doing more and someone is going to be shirking. So I, I do like the sort of predefined structure that makes it a little bit clearer.

Adam: Yeah, I think this is great. I've heard very few people talk about dividing up household responsibility in this way. And it sounds like a really interesting system and that's worked out super well for the two of you. So I suppose that the two of you have to have sort of... Similar standards or points of view on each other's tasks.

Like what happens when there's a conflict? Let me give you an example. Let's say you're in charge of cleaning, but you know, your tolerance for clutter is maybe a little bit more than your partner's tolerance for clutter. How does that work out? Or is that something that you align on?

Upfront where you kind of know each other's expectations and standards for the thing.

Gaurav: That's actually what defines who owns which vertical. So I have a way higher standard and bar when it comes to clutter or like, you know, cleaning and therefore I am the person who owns that vertical. She has a way higher standard for the Airbnb and like the places we travel to and how we get there. So she's the owner of the travel vertical.

Like if it were left to me to book a holiday, I would book the crappiest coach flight and just, you know, rubbish Airbnb. That's really far away from all the good stuff. And like, we'd get there and we'd be miserable for the whole week. But like, she knows to look through the listings and actually make sure that we get, you know, the amazing plan.

I know to clean to a certain level and, you know, same with food. Like I'd probably be happy with takeout every day, but she wouldn't be so actually like the person who naturally leans more towards the area means that should probably be your vertical. Now, if there are issues, right? Like there'll certainly be times where she's like, Hey, this thing is piling up.

Like it's, you know, part of your vertical. Really we just bring it up, right. And have like a sensible conversation about it but it's so infrequent because of the aforementioned kind of like structure by design.

Adam: Yeah. That's great. I love this. Maybe I'll try and implement a piece of this at home. We can each pick a vertical or something like that.

I wanted to go back to around the time where your son was born or even maybe before that. And just ask you what the earliest memory or memories that you have of becoming a dad.

Gaurav: Oh goodness me. Also our son's birth was pretty late in the day. It was like 11: 30 pm after almost a 24 hour labor or so. So it was quite a long haul. My memory is therefore not particularly clear.

Adam: Little fuzzy.

Gaurav: Little fuzzy. We did have we had a birthing doula present and one of the things that she did, which we hadn't really thought much about before the birth, but made a ton of sense in retrospect, she actually helped take a bunch of pictures and, you know, kind of record key moments which is funny because, you know, five minutes before delivery, she was like, do you mind if I record stuff?

And both of us were like, sure, if you want, like you're the expert, you probably have a good idea if this is worthwhile or not. Um, But, you know, as expected, when you're sleep deprived, like your memory is just, you know, terrible. So, most of my memories really go back to some of those photos and those moments that she'd recorded for us.

But, yeah, I just remember as our son was born, first of all thinking, Oh my God, he's so tiny, like he's just absolutely, you know, frail and delicate and small. And then also, he also looks kind of a lot like an old man, this is kind of weird. Does that sort itself out? Like, and sure enough, like within three or four hours, you know, we'll sleep for like 90 minutes and then he starts crying and we all wake up and it's like, oh yeah, he's looking a lot more like a baby now.

Adam: somebody used to tell me that's like the Winston Churchill phase of your baby, that they all come out kind of looking like Winston Churchill. And then eventually that, that normalizes a little bit, so

Gaurav: Yeah. It was pretty funny. Definitely have like a pretty funny photo. Then the nurse insisted on taking a photo of him. You know, on top of the weighing scales, and he was on his back, just like, looking super angry. Like, why am I over here? Get me back to my mum.

Adam: He's cold. He's like on a metal object. Yeah, not great. When you think about the earliest sort of memories that you have with him, maybe even time with your partner, what are some of the more surprising things that you've discovered since becoming a dad?

Gaurav: I think that there's two sides of the same coin. I'll start with the maybe like more flippant and cynical one. There is a lot of repetitive stuff you have to do. I wasn't quite prepared for just quite, you know, just how much of that there is. But whether it's when they're really young and it's just the constant cycle of feeding and nappy change and sleep, or even now it's like, we'll be reading a pretty complex book or, you know, singing songs together and, you know, fun activities as soon as it ends, he wants to like start at the beginning and I'm like, this is the seventh time we have done this as someone who, you know, clearly through my work, like crave variety and, you know, novelty and differences and stuff. So that's something I've learned to just like, enjoy, right?

Like, and enjoy the sort of moments. But then at the same time on the flip side, just spending that time with, you know, the child or with the whole family in that context, right? Kind of discovering the intrinsic joy that you kind of didn't know was possible before you had the child. I feel like it's one thing to spend really high quality time with your partner.

But there's just a whole new dimension that feels like it got introduced having a family and just spending that time, you know, whether it's just looking at them or admiring what they're doing or seeing how they change day over day. It's just a much deeper sense of connection than I was really prepared for.

And I guess maybe it sounds a little bit corny, but you know, you really have to kind of, I feel like you have to experience it to really understand kind of how that feels. And it's hard to not come off as just like that parent that's completely overly obsessed. You know, when someone asks me, how's your kid doing?

It's like, okay, I just wanted a one word answer. I didn't want like the whole essay.

Adam: How much time do you have? Two hours later.

Gaurav: Yeah. Do you want to see all my pictures? Like, yeah.

Adam: It's probably even worse now because, you know, we don't store pictures in our wallet anymore. We store them in our phone. So there's like an infinite supply of photos that you can go through.

Gaurav: It's risky. Yeah

Adam: Yeah. That thing about repetition really resonates with me and my kids are older now, but.

Yeah, the number of children's books that I've memorized just by sheer force of will of reading it over and over again. I just sort of don't even have to look at the page anymore. Pretty impressive.

Gaurav: Something I've enjoyed recently is using chat GPT to synthesize bedtime stories. It's really good like amazingly good at taking a couple of pointers and then coming up with an incredibly well put together story. So, you know I can ask my toddler. I'm like, what do you want a bedtime story? And he's like tell me a story about Thomas the Tank Engine with some leopards in a nighttime jungle, and he's just like murmuring random stuff.

And I'm like, Oh, okay, like punch it into chatGPT. And then all of a sudden it's just like a beautifully put together story. In fact, someone needs to create a, you know, service where it puts that together with some mid journey images and maybe even like digitally or physically kind of sends you an actual story or this is the other startup idea - connects it to a a model of my voice, right? So that I can then just like set my voice line of like narrating the story and just leave the room.

Adam: Yeah yeah. Or turn it into a recorded thing so that, you know, when you're out of town or something, he can listen to it. I love that. Come for the dad advice. Stay for the startup ideas.

Gaurav: Right. If anyone listening takes that idea I'm sure in the show notes, there'll be some ways of contacting me. Let me know.

Adam: Sure. Seed investment, angel investment from you. So I wanted to ask you a bit about parenting frameworks. I've already learned one on this. The idea of the sort of total vertical ownership, I think that's great. Another one that you talked about is this idea of delete, automate, delegate, and I think in theory, I have some idea of what that is, but I'm really curious to hear you describe that to the listeners.

Gaurav: Well, so I work at Superhuman and we're, you know, all productivity nerds. We're constantly thinking about how to be more efficient and more productive.

Adam: I love it.

Gaurav: This feels very natural to me in both the parenting and the non parenting world. I forget who actually came up with the framework, but it definitely seeped into my brain through more of a, like, work focus rather than a home life focus.

So this is one of these frameworks that I've ported over from Works Personal. But the basic thinking is given any task, right, like, you're always trying to figure out how you can maybe achieve more with a certain amount of time. Like maybe there's stuff you need to get to, it's piling up, like responsibilities or things you want to achieve.

But there's only so many hours in a day where you have time to do those things. So what do you do? And a delete, automate, delegate really encourages you to think about, first of all, delete. Like, is this a task I need to actually do? Or can I just delete the task? A really good example might be, maybe you spend time checking your credit card statements every month.

Maybe you don't need to do that. Maybe you can set up a rule that triggers any time there's a purchase over a certain amount that emails you. So you just delete that activity from your roster of activities altogether. Very basic example. But there are so many things that people do that can just be deleted from how they spend their time.

If you really just think about it.

And actually maybe that one is a little bit of a cheat because it actually bridges a bit into automate. There's a little bit of an automation there. You could just argue, just don't do the task. You don't need to do it, maybe. So then that brings me into automate. Like, is there a way that you could through technology or through some other system put this thing on autopilot?

So really good examples here would be auto paying your bills, right? Like, you know, I don't always practice what I preach. I still spent like 20 minutes this weekend figuring out how to pay my home insurance. It's like, I should just put that on an automatic recurring payment, like I have my car insurance.

It's so much less effort when I just get the email from Geico that's like, hey, we're just billing your card again for another year. And I'm like, okay, great. It's automated. Archive that email. So automate you know, the key here is you're not actually pushing the work to another human.

Like you're pushing it to a system or code. And the nice thing there is you barely have to QA it, like you don't have to keep on top of the output, making sure that person is doing what you want them to do and any of that kind of stuff. And then of course there's stuff that cannot be automated, so that's where delegate comes in.

And really good examples here are things like getting a cleaner around, you know, that's hours and hours of work that they're so much better at than you are, so it just makes a ton of sense. Or childcare, really, like many different forms of childcare from nannies to au pairs to daycares to family. But can you delegate big chunks of that time, such that you get a lot of your own headspace and time back.

In particular delegating things that you enjoy less, that you don't want to do as much or that you're less good at, even if you like it. Because that way you know, you can get some nice, like, economies of scale, like, specializing in areas where you're really good, or where someone else may be really good.

Adam: Yeah. The number of people who I've talked to who said, you know, having a house cleaner may have saved my marriage. Um, It's pretty, pretty impressive.

Gaurav: I would add to that and say, like, you need the right one. So we’ve had

Adam: Right.

Gaurav: You know, some great ones. We've had some less great ones. The cleans we have right now are phenomenal. And when you have that person that can kind of go the extra mile, that makes such a difference.

Adam: And the good news is with your first framework, you're entirely in charge of making that call. So you own it

Gaurav: That's absolutely right. Yeah.

Adam: I wanted to zoom back to automate and delete. Are there any parenting tasks maybe that fall into the delete category where you were doing them for a long time and then you realized, This task isn't adding a whole lot of value.

We don't even really need to do this anymore.

Gaurav: This is kind of weird, but like poopy diaper changes, like I deleted using wipes to clean poopy diaper changes. Instead, you know, we're already moving towards the potty in the bathroom. You know, just might as well go straight to toilet paper. And we actually just use the kind of like faucet in the shower as kind of like a bidet.

Adam:Yeah. There you go.

Gaurav: And it's like, it saves a ton of time. It's like, you know, it takes something that might take like three or four minutes, probably the worst three or four minutes of the day. Something that's maybe like, I don't know, a minute, 30 seconds. And. Obviously it's got to change as the child grows older and like, that's not always going to be how it's, how he'll clean himself or whatever, but you know, that's maybe one that we just straight up deleted.

Adam: I love that. That's bold. That's bold. And it seems to have worked.

Gaurav: It definitely saves me time and also like a bunch of headache. Another one, this is kind of more in, it's between delete and automate. There are two services that we've used pretty ardently since our child was born. So one is called Upchoose. They're basically like a clothes rental service.

I don't know how widely distributed they are, but you know, kids are constantly racing through different sized clothes, and it's really annoying to have to keep up with purchasing those. So instead what they do is they send you a little packet that's just full of baby clothes. And the packet's kind of small because baby clothes are kind of small, but it's everything you need, right?

And we've probably been through about ten packets with them over two years. And It’s all nice like, you know, 100 percent cotton, like, just nice clothes. They make sure they're like taken good care of. If you send them back, you know, they'll sort them and clean them up and then the next family kind of can benefit. So I think it's kind of a monthly subscription, you know, but you basically like delete/automate a lot of the hassle of figuring out what to put your child in terms of clothes.

Obviously, you can still get other clothes, people, gifty clothes, that's going to happen. But it just meant that we always had like a basic set of everything from, you know, bottoms and tops to pajamas to baby grows, all that. And then similarly for toys, so I think Lovevery is way more well known or very well known, I think , in certain parent communities.

And they do the same thing, right? They sort of send you a box of toys every three months or so. So you don't have to think about the kinds of toys that you need to get. I think that was really helpful for the first 12 to 18 months. Now, kids are older, like, I think kids, you know, develop their own kind of interests, and you may want to branch into puzzles or books or musical things or...

Eventually might maybe migrate into something like a KiwiCo or something a little bit more like hands on. But certainly for those first kind of like one to two years, like, I don't think most parents know what kind of toy is entertaining for a four month old, but like, Lovevery sure does. So.

Adam: Sure. Yeah.

Gaurav: That's something that I thought was incredibly helpful.

And I would also say like, this is part of the vertical ownership, like, my wife was actually the person who found both of those services and like really pushed to make them happen, so. You know, that's credit to her for actually finding them.

Adam: Yeah, I love that. Yeah, if you're both working parents, who is the time to do hours of research on what is developmentally appropriate for a four month old, you can outsource that you can automate it. I love that. I love those. Those are a couple of great great ones. So I wanted to go to another topic that you talked about in our prep, which is this idea of systematically getting great childcare.

And so I wanted to ask you what that means to you and how you went about systematically getting great childcare.

Gaurav: Yeah. So a couple of bits of context here. When I was growing up, I mentioned my parents were both doctors. They were both working full time. And so I always had live-in help growing up. My parents were you know, they had somewhere between 15 to 20 au pairs that I can remember from the age, from my earliest memory to about 13 or 14 is when I think we had our last au pair.

And there was always a new au pair every year. Sometimes they wouldn't be with us for very long, so maybe we would cycle through one or two or three in a couple of months until we found someone that was really great and who stuck around for like a full year. Now, being part of that process as a child, first of all, I saw what it looked like to have someone not great not work out with the family and it was, it's a lot of time and work and effort for everyone you know, including the au pair.

And so that was... predisposed to being like, hey, I want to make sure if we find someone that they're going to be great, whether it's a nanny who doesn't live with you or an au pair who does. And second I also saw the other side of that, how great it is when you get someone who is just phenomenal, who stays with you for a year, maybe two, and who clicks with the family and who really just gets it in terms of your, you know, household vibe.

So that was the first piece of context, my childhood experiences. The second piece of context is you know, we're both working, my wife and I, and we impose a fairly high bar in terms of the quality of care, and we were like, well, one on one care is what we really want, at least for the first couple of years, you know, we didn't really want to go with like a daycare, particularly during the pandemic as well, and COVID, we were a little bit sheepish about infection risk and unvaccinated children and all this kind of stuff.

So. We were like, you know what, we're going to have one on one care. So we were sort of narrowing down our options when we were approaching the midpoint of kind of that parental leave period. And of like, hey, this is really hard. What are we going to do when we go back to work? And so that's where I was like, hey, I think we should consider getting an au pair.

It's either that or a nanny. The benefit of an au pair is a lot more flexibility. It's a lot more easygoing, right? There's not as much of a rigid or fixed schedule as with a nanny. And so that works really well for our family, and it was the one on one care that we were looking for. Now, both my wife and I, as I mentioned, have worked in tech now for kind of approaching 10 years or longer, like if you include the consulting time, and in that entire time, we've collectively probably interviewed like 2,000 people, right, for different jobs.

So, in this process of trying to find an au pair, we brought every shred of knowledge and experience of interviewing from a work standpoint into interviewing for, you know, domestic help and in the form of child care What we did was we put together a really robust and thoughtful interview plan There was three stage, right?

It was like the initial screen the quote unquote on site virtually obviously and then that last call which is kind of a little bit more of a get to know you, but also a cell and you know, and I'm not even joking, like, everything I learned about delivering a compelling offer from Superhuman was something we brought to bear in this process to the point where we even had, like, our four month old son.

You know, holding the, will you be my au pair kind of like offer letter on like a video call on WhatsApp,

Adam: I love it.

Gaurav: to this au pair who was at the time was in Columbia, right?

Adam: Yeah.

Gaurav: So we put together this interview plan. I, you know, I've actually already shared it with like 20, 30 people. Because what I found when I talked to other families is that most parents don't have an interview plan for the person they want to bring into their house as an au pair or a nanny.

Adam: Yeah.

Gaurav: To me, it seems absolutely wild because that is probably the most important hire you will ever make. And sure enough, a lot of my friends have had, you know, mediocre or even bad childcare help, right? Where they've had some incidents or they've had, it's been fine, right? But, you know, a whole year of someone living with you just being fine is, you know, something to put up with right at the end of the day.

So, for us, we really wanted to make sure that we found someone really great. And we did. And the person we found is absolutely phenomenal. Like, our lives would be so different if we hadn't found them. And so she is with our child. Like, she takes care of our child for 45 hours a week. That's a huge lift in terms of how much time my wife and I have back for what we need to do, whether it's work or ourselves or anything else.

And the really nice thing is because our au pair lives at home, and we also work from home for the most part. We actually just see a lot of our child anyway, right? Like, we've gotten so much time with him over the last two and a bit years. And we've actually also traveled together as well. Our au pair comes with us when we travel for the most part, so we've had the opportunity to go to different places, work from different places, travel, you know, be in different locations.

But also still have that opportunity to have childcare when we go. So I think it's different for every, you know, family, every situation to really make an au pair work. You, you need another room, like, and you need to be okay with having somebody in your house. Therefore you're looking for someone who, you know, jives with the family.

But if you can make it work, I definitely recommend it. I'm quite an advocate of it. If the conditions are right and if the other options also don't seem like they're working.

Adam: Yeah. Yeah. We have also benefited from an au pair program in our family, so. Very supportive of that of that process. And it sounds like you have a phenomenal interview process, which can be really challenging with those programs.

Gaurav: The agency that we worked with when we found a match was like, wow you all found a match the fastest of any parents we've ever worked with. It was like seven days you know, JD to close, so to speak.

Adam: I mean, it's a good validation of the system that you've got going

Gaurav: I think so.

Adam: So yeah. Speaking of which the systems that you have in place with your partner and the kind of framework and aligning on your help hiring childcare and how to create the system there.

And partnership is one of those things that is so incredibly important when you have One kid, multiple kids, I mean, really anything in life and probably in business too. But, I would add, it is hard to agree 100 percent of the time with your significant other. And so I'm curious if that has come up with you and your partner, and maybe, where's an area where you don't always agree or see eye to eye?

Gaurav: There's a few different ones. For the most part, we try and work our way through things. So in hindsight, you know, looking. In the rear view mirror, it feels as like, it feels as though we found solutions to all of these things. And that just as a sidebar comes again from the Seven Principles of Making Marriage work book where we'll first identify which problems are solvable versus unsolvable, solve your solvable problems, and then here's how to deal with your unsolvable problems.

So there's some really good sort of tactical advice in that book and in that chapter on how to think about those things. I think the biggest one that comes up for me right now, and we have a pretty good solution to it, but the biggest one is location. Like, where do we actually want to be? Where do we want to live? I am a creature of habit. Like, if given no external push or stimulus, I'd probably just stay in the same place my entire life. And, candidly, you know, if I were to look back on that life at the age of 80, I might think that I'd... Led an unrewarding life that was devoid of color and richness. But like, I wouldn't recognize it in the moment.

Like, I think I've benefited greatly from having a partner that pushes me out of my comfort zone. And you can probably see where this is going. My partner, on the other hand, loves to explore and travel and be in different places and live in different places. There's also an element of preferences around being close to other family or you know, there's some climate related preferences that sort of school education related preferences. So there's a number of things that go into the mix, but long story short, you know, she wants to be in different places. And right now we are here in the Bay area in California. So, that has been a tricky one because the moment you have kids, there's a whole bunch more infrastructure and kind of location related dependencies that come into the mix.

So working through that one has been a tricky one, but we found our way through it, at least for the short run, like next one or two years kind of aligning on the things that matter to us both and coming up with a plan that we both feel is kind of acceptable for us both without having to really commit to something that's 5 or 10 years out because as soon as you start to get into those longer term considerations, it can get very, you know, stressful and it's unclear what you're signing up for.

But if you can come up with a plan that's a little bit more near term that allows you to explore and discover and then agree to make a decision based on what you've learned, we've both found that to work really well. And so we have like a super exciting plan for the next one or two years. Like actually on that note, you know, it's going to push me way out of my comfort zone, but it's something I'm really excited about nonetheless.

So, you know, we've also been observing other families that go through the same thing. And this idea of kind of putting foot in front of the other, but not necessarily stressing out too much about where you're going to be three or five or 10 years from now seems to be something that families and couples that are really happy and having, you know, really rich experiences seem to be doing.

Adam: Yeah. That's great. I love that and I'm glad that your wife has nudged you a little bit out of your comfort zone. So, good. Sounds like you've got an exciting plan coming up. I wanted to ask if, you know, you have a young kid, only two, Only just turned two, but do you ever feel like there's a mistake that you've made as a dad in his first two years?

Or something you wish you, could do over?

Gaurav: so we didn't go for a crib, we just put him in the floor bed at the advice of some friends of us who at the time only had like an 18 month old. So that was maybe lesson number one is don't take advice from parents who only have an 18 month old, where they themselves haven't really experienced the consequences of what could have been a terrible decision.

I think it was not, I don't know if it was a good decision for them or not, but in any case. So our son has never slept in a crib and also he was like an early mover, he was crawling around five months.

Adam: Oh wow. 

Gaurav: Yeah. And he's kind of tall, so he can reach door handles pretty easily.

You can see where this is going.

Adam: There's a trifecta here that is a perfect storm.

Gaurav: He doesn't do well being left alone in his floor bed, right? Knowing exactly where the door is and exactly where mom and dad are. And as a result, we've spent a lot of time putting him to sleep in these last two years. I mean, just to be blunt, like, you know, I cuddle him to bed most every night.

In this floor bed, which is absolutely delightful. It's like I'm usually pretty tired and about to fall asleep myself. And it is, you know, very rich and rewarding and lovely kind of like family bonding time for me and him. But when we... Do a sleepover at our friend's place, or we see other parents kind of putting their kids down.

They're just like, take the kid, put it in the crib, and then just like leave. And it's like five minutes, right? Like, I'm like, oh my god, like that takes me like an hour. Like we're talking this order of magnitude difference in efficiency. And again, like a, you know, I work at a productivity company, like efficiency is my jam.

Like I'm, you know, sometimes I'm like, well, I'm so efficient in every other part of my life. Just so that I can earn the right to be incredibly hyper inefficient at bedtime. But it's, you know, we're getting there. Like, he's now at the age where we can communicate and I can say something like, I am leaving the room.

I'm still here if you need me. Or like, I would like you to stay in bed. You know, he can kind of understand these things now. There was a whole period where I was trying that and it just didn't compute for him. Like, he would just get stressed out.

Gaurav: But, you know, what would I do over? I'd buy a crib. Like, so, you know, people have figured this out.

There is a reason those things have, like walls around them that mean that the kid cannot escape and I never had the heart to, like, lock the door from the outside or anything like that, so, that's definitely a do over moment.

Adam: You wouldn't, by the way, you wouldn't be the only one who's ever done that if you did.

Gaurav: Right, yeah I've heard this advice

Adam: uh, much more common than you might think.

Gaurav: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, and also I've read about transitions from cribs to beds basically, like, evoking the exact same challenge, you know, even if the kids seem to be, like, pretty good at putting themselves to bed. So, and then, yeah, that's when I've read about people, Oh, you just lock the door from the outside and leave them to it.

But I think, yeah, it, maybe we would have saved a bunch more time if we had a place to put the baby.

Adam: Another way to look at it is maybe his eventual transition to a regular bed will be super smooth because it's not much different than the floor bed.

Gaurav: Maybe.

Adam: It is funny what you mentioned about efficiency and you said you, you know, you work for like a productivity startup, this job is to make people more efficient with their time.

And you've seemed like you've optimized a lot of your life around really good efficiency and frameworks and things like that. And then there are always some slices with a kid that you just can't quite make as efficient as you’d like them to be.

Gaurav: It makes no sense. It just, I’m trying!

Adam: Yeah, those two year olds, they're so irrational. I love that. Last couple questions that I had for you. So you're the co-founder of a company with your brother. I wanted to ask you what your parental leave was like. What sort of time did you take off from work?

Gaurav: Yeah, it was, it's a really generous policy. I mean, we have a great parental leave policy. It's pretty close to what a lot of startups have. Arguably, I think the bigger tech companies, like the fangs of the world, have amazing policies, like, you know, I think it's like six months at Apple or something like that.

Ours was I think is 3 months for all parents. California, there's an extra month of paid state leave, so that can add up to four months for the birthing parent which, you know, my partner at her company took, she took four months, I took three starting the day or two before, and for both of us before delivery and then, yeah, running we both took all of it at the beginning, I know there's always that question of do you take a little bit and then come back a little bit later, some of my friends have taken more staggered leave and love it, right, because you get, time maybe when the kids older and they're a little bit more fun, but for us, you know our kid was not a great sort of napper necessarily And I think it would have been quite chaotic if it was just one parent and that early time think each child's different. So we took that time. The other thing that we did was we actually traveled internationally So we went back to England where both of us have lots of family.

Our parents were both there. It was the middle of the pandemic. So neither set of parents was easily able to come and be with us in California. But what we could easily do was go there and just shuttle between sort of our parents houses and get a little bit of that extra help in those first few months.

And even when my leave ended and my partner's leave was still ongoing, we were still in England, but I was working remotely on Pacific time, which actually works pretty great. You know, the time zone offset is such that you get these mornings with the family, with the child, but then you work from like 2 until 10, if you're okay with doing that.

So you trade sort of an evening with the family, which is what you'd get here, with having a morning with your family, which is what you'd get over there. And then you just kind of work and then 10 or 11, last meeting of the day, just close your laptop lid and go to sleep.

Adam: Yep. Yeah, that's interesting that work out and you got a more awake kid to deal with in the morning, which is fun, so.

Gaurav: Mhm. Yeah.

Adam: and you're pretty well rested at that point. So that's good.

Was it really important for you as a leader or I guess maybe just in general to take that full parental leave kind of lead by example.

I don't know if that was a thing that was going through your head when you did that

Gaurav: Yeah, absolutely was. I wanted to make sure that I took the full thing. Role wise, I was in between sort of transitioning different responsibilities, which circumstantially worked out quite well, but is something I would encourage if folks can kind of make it happen. In my case, handing over a couple of teams and then coming back to sort of start a new department or start a new team, rather than having like a ton of stuff in flight.

Pretty early into the pregnancy, like we started talking about what that transition would look like. So If you're able to have an open conversation and you feel good about the pregnancy and where it's headed, then you're in that leadership position having, you know, four to six months worth of lead time versus maybe four to six weeks of lead time to be able to put those pieces into motion is really helpful.

So, you know, for me, we raised our series C like while I was out on leave, but the last thing I did and, you know, I was still sort of doing up until my last day of work before leave was helping put that deck together and do all the analysis and all the, like, deep digging to put together a really compelling pitch deck.

So, you know, was still able to meaningfully contribute, kind of, in the build up towards the leave, and then also coming back from leave. And I actually wrote about this in an article for Inc. Not having to think about work while I was away, just making sure that all the contingencies and things were in place, and then being able to come back and really kind of hit the ground running with kind of a new mandate, a new area in this new capacity.

Adam: Great. I will have to link to that article. You said it was from Inc. In the show notes. So I'll follow up with you afterwards to make sure we get that in there. Before we get into our rapid fire round, which is always fun. I wanted to ask if there was any way if people wanted to be helpful to you or follow along.

What's the best way for people to kind of connect and keep tabs on what you're up to?

Gaurav: So if you want to see my slightly more unhinged messages that I throw out into the internet void, you can follow me on Twitter. It's @gauravvohra1. Just search my name and it'll probably come up. My somewhat more professional side is available and visible on LinkedIn. Again, search my name.

I post occasionally on both, sometimes the same stuff, sometimes the more unhinged version on Twitter.

Adam: All right. I will make sure to link the both of those things.

Okay. Well that does it for our interview. Are you ready for rapid fire?

Gaurav: No, but let's do it.

Adam: Here are the rules of rapid fire. There really are no rules. I ask you a very quick question. You respond with the first thing that comes into your mind to answer that question.

And we just keep rolling. I do realize though, now that we've had this conversation about vertical ownership of responsibility, some of these things may be outside of your areas of vertical ownership. Do your best. You can also say pass if you really want to but you know you probably remember something from a conversation with your partner so we will see.

Gaurav: 15 years ago when I used to do it. Yeah. 

Adam: Sure. All right. Here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product that you have ever purchased?

Gaurav: I'm gonna say, I think it's a stocky tower. I really like it. It's like a little tower that goes up to our kitchen island. My son spends a tremendous amount of time up there. We feed him breakfast up there. He can like see what's going on.

Adam: love that.

Gaurav: Super indispensable. I'm sure like seconds after this, I'll think of something even more indispensable, but it was the first one that popped into my head.

Adam: Okay. Now, of course, you know, I also have to ask you, what is the most useless parenting product that you've ever purchased?

Gaurav: So lovevery has this mobile. It's like a dangly mobile that like, it's like a springy thing that goes above the changing mat and table. And I'm quite tall. So getting the height of this thing was an ordeal. It is constantly bashing me in the face and like my son finds it really funny to like kick it and make it like fly into my eyes

Adam: Yes.

Gaurav: It also like gets longer over time because it's a spring but it kind of stretches out And so I'm constantly going up there and trying to like shorten the damn thing. Also, my son gets longer over time like, who knew, so he can reach so I like and what now that it's there I don't want to remove it because I'm like, oh, it's kind of fun.

Like it's something fun to look at adds a bit of charm to the room, but man, I hate that thing.

Adam: I love that. That is hilarious. That is hilarious. Okay, so in addition to that, what is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?

Gaurav: Oh, traveling on a flight back from LA to San Francisco. I won't name and shame the airline. Keep it above that line. But I had a carry-on bag, right? It's like backpack. It looks like a big bag, but it's actually pretty squishy. Like it goes under the seat. And I know this because I travel with it all the time, but the airline staff told us it was a full flight and that I had to check this bag. Now, of course, we were traveling at the time, six months, five months old, maybe. That was just a non-starter. I mean, this thing had like our diapers, our milk, emergency supplies, water, like everything we needed, the diaper change, like, like it was impossible to check this bag and so there was a whole discussion, a bit of an ordeal really, about why we needed to keep this bag on our persons and the fact that it would fit in the thing.

To the point where the airline actually, like, closed the door, like, the gate door on my wife and son, right, and, like, separated me from them as though to say, like, well, look, if you don't want to check your bag, then you and your stupid bag are going to stay here in L.A. and your son and wife can board that plane and I guess you'll see them tomorrow, and I was like, yeah, I nearly, like, completely, like, I was about to lose my yeah.

Fortunately, I don't even remember, like, I was, It's seeing blood red at this point, but,

Adam: Yeah.

Gaurav: Someone came along and defused the situation. I can't even remember. I think we checked the bag, but took the important stuff out in a plastic bag and kept that with us. You know, it was like a, I mean, I feel kind of anxious, just like angry talking about it!

Adam: Tightening up.

Gaurav: Going back to that.

Adam: I had the same, I had the same conversation with Ben Williams. And he said he felt himself tightening up remembering his frustrating experience. So that's that's great. Okay. And I appreciate you not naming the airline because they would probably never be a sponsor of this podcast if that

Gaurav: Yeah, we've got to keep things above the board. Like,

Adam: Okay. How many parenting books do you have in your house?

Gaurav: Oh, at the moment, like, zero. We had about ten that friends had given us and I got, like, ten pages into most of them and thought, ah, this is annoying, this

Adam: That was my follow up question. How many of you have you actually read cover to cover? Sounds like zero is the answer.

Gaurav: Zero. Big fat zero. Actually, the one parenting book that we did read cover to cover was called How to Have a Baby and it was more about, like, pre delivery and the delivery itself and it's, like, a very elegant, artful book.

It's, you know, not many words per page, but that was the one that both my wife and I actually did read cover to cover, back I guess when we had enough time to read a parenting book. Yeah.

Adam: Now you only have a two year old, so I'm wondering if this has come into play yet, but how do you feel about screen time? Good, bad, indifferent?

Gaurav: Mostly bad. We do almost zero screen time. The only screen time we have is FaceTiming relatives and occasionally looking at photos and videos. To kind of relive moments. You know, we found even when we play a song on our phones on Spotify, and there's like some, you know, 10 second loop of a clip that like just repeats like our son wants to just look at that and it just doesn't seem right. Like even that is kind of a magnet for his attention. So we try and minimize that. We don't have a, I mean, we have a Samsung frame TV, which conveniently looks like a piece of art 99 percent of the time.

Adam: He’ll never know!

Gaurav: He'll never know. I don't think he's really connected the dots that, like, you could literally access anything on that screen yet.

He doesn't know that yet. So we try and keep screen time to, like, a real minimum.

Adam: Good.

Gaurav: My Wife recently published an interesting blog post on this that has, I think she borrowed a framework, but it has kind of like a pyramid of, like, tech needs, right? Like, Maslow's kind of hierarchy style and talks a little bit about, You know, things you can do without supervision, things that will require supervision.

I think it's quite an interesting piece, especially as children get older and they get more and more exposed to technology.

Adam: That's great. I will have to link to that one too. Okay, so you've got the floor bed for your son. Have you ever pretended to be asleep in the middle of the night to avoid a wake up?

Gaurav: Yes.

Adam: Guilty! We all are! Okay, have you ever secretly thrown away a piece of your son's artwork?

Gaurav: Yep!

Adam: No shame here, by the way. There's no shame on the dad pod. Okay.

Gaurav: My vertical is cleaning, right? So any sort of clutter. What I, if it was really valuable or important, I might, you know, take a photo of it in Dropbox and then recycle it.

Adam: Okay okay. What is the longest that you have gone without bathing your son?

Gaurav: Ooh, interesting. We're pretty fastidious about this. So some of our friends are like, Oh, I don't know. You know, one or two times a week is all you need. We're pretty much like every day bath time. Perhaps the longest would be when, I don't know, yeah, we were out and came home and didn't need…

Adam: Mm

Gaurav: didn't have the time, sorry, to do bath time.

So maybe only like two days, maybe three days.

Adam: Makes sense.

Gaurav: You know, see also my earlier point around the shower bidet type situation where we're kind of in that category.

Adam: Right. Right.

Gaurav: Yeah.

Adam: Have you ever used your son to get out of social events?

Gaurav: Ooh, yes. The, you know, I just gotta, yeah. I gotta stay with my kid. I've got, you know, parenting obligations. Sorry, I gotta leave this dinner. Gotta go put my son down, even though he is probably already asleep. 

Adam: They’ll never know.

Gaurav: Yes!

Adam: Is there a Disney or Pixar movie that you are secretly a fan of?

Gaurav: Is the key here that I have to be, like, it has to be a secret

thing or…?

Adam: What is your favorite then? Maybe it's not a secret.

Gaurav: There's two coming to mind, and I'm kind of questioning if this is even Disney or Pixar. The Aristocats. It's a really great movie. I actually can't remember, I can't remember which.

Adam: I think that is a Disney film.

Gaurav: Is it? Okay. I loved that movie. Just such great songs and characters and so wacky and so fantastic.

And just like, I feel like, you know, you learn a lot about the world kind of watching that movie. So I was a big fan of that growing up. And then a little bit of a dark horse pick. The Emperor's New Groove was really funny,

Adam: Oh, funny, yeah, it's great. It's really good

How good are you at assembling toys or children's furniture?

Gaurav: I'd like to say I'm, I'd like to say I'm good, right, this is my self perception, but then the reality is I put together a bookcase, like, two weeks ago, and I got to the end of it, and I looked on the floor, and there were, like, four pieces of wood. I was like, where did these things go? Like, go back to the diagram, it's like, oh, it was there all along, I just didn't pay enough attention.

Disassemble them, you know, hand unwinding all of those those screws. Put those pieces of wood in, like, put the whole thing back together, and I look on the floor, and there's, like, twelve unused wooden dowels that supposedly hold these things together. I'm like, then I'm, like, wiggling all of the wooden things to be like, are these stable?

Like, does it matter if these things are not there? Because I'm pretty sure everything had something. You know, there's, like, metal screws and also dowels, so I'm like, you know, that bag of wooden dowels is still on my side counter, and I'm like, What do I do with that? Yeah,

Adam: Good enough. Good enough. Give it to your son to play with.

Where is the weirdest place that you have ever changed a diaper?

Gaurav: Ooh, interesting. I feel like the kind of obvious pick is gonna be like, an airplane bathroom. But that, that almost feels too obvious. I might say like a ski gondola, you know? Like…

Adam: That's a first for me, that’s a new one.

Gaurav: Maybe a little bit weird. Yeah, something like, I think so.

Adam: What is the most absurd thing that you've ever done to get your son to stop crying?

Gaurav: I don't think it's absurd, but he and maybe this is true of lots of small children when he was really little, you know, he just needed to like suck on a finger.

So, you know, I have, maybe it's not absurd. I just have very fond memories of when that would work. Like he never took a pacifier, but he was always incredibly happy to have my little finger to help him stop crying and fall asleep.

And so I have these very fond and, you know, rose tinted memories of feeling like there was a semblance of, you know, peace when I was able to figure that out and when he was able to kind of settle into that.

Adam: I love it. Okay, I have just a couple more, how often do you anticipate telling your son back in my day stories when he's older?

Gaurav: Ooh, I think I already tell him those.

Adam: Okay, that's a strong signal.

Gaurav: I think a lot, I mean, I feel like the pace of change is so high that there's definitely going to be some good back in my day stories.

Adam: All right. you've already done a great job making your partner shine, but here's one more chance to do that. What was the last kid situation that you found yourself in where you felt completely helpless and needed to call for help?

Gaurav: Interesting. Can I flip this one?

Adam: Sure.

Gaurav: Just yesterday for the first time, we've started him at a half day daycare, so he's starting to see other kids. It's like outside, so he's starting to see other kids use this kind of like outdoor potty and he started to take like a real interest in it. We've not bothered potty training.

It's like super low on our list of priorities at the moment. But you know, much to our delight, he learned how to take his own diaper off. He's kind of on pull up, so it's kind of easy to just pull it down. And you know, he just popped a squat over the potty and, you know, laid a dookie right there.

But what was funny was because he was like rehearsing it, like he did the routine like seven or eight times, sat down, didn't do anything, pulled it up, went to the sink, washed his hands, came out, went back in, and I was like, I'm just gonna leave him doing that, like there's something strange is going on.

And then like, on the seventh iteration, like he actually, you know did a poop

Adam: Way to go!

Gaurav: And so I think I'm probably answering on behalf of my wife here, but like, she was the one who like found it and was like, Gaurav, I need you. Like, I don't know what to do in this situation. Like, I haven't even thought about how you even like clean a potty.

Like, I'm sure for the, you know, more experienced parents listening, you're like, this is old news, buddy. But you know, I was like, all right, bring in the heavies. Let's go.

Adam: Put on your hazmat suit and you are ready to go.

Gaurav: Yeah.

Adam: Okay, last question. I ask this of everyone. You probably do not have a large enough family to own one But what is your take on minivans?

Gaurav: Ooh. Yeah. I mean, we can't fit a car that's like, longer than a Chevy Bolt, which is a small compact car in our garage. I mean, it's a real problem. Like we were looking at cars to buy, there is literally one EV that fits, there's maybe like four or five non EVs that fit. So I would love conceptually the idea of a minivan, but not where we live today, it just wouldn't work.

But it's something we think about because we have, you know, an au pair, we sometimes have grandparents visiting.

Adam: Yeah,

Gaurav: We have talks and plans of what it would look like to grow a family and it's like how do you fit all of those people in a, in one vehicle. So I'm, you know, I'm a big fan of minivans. When I was growing up with my parents and we would go on vacation with the four of us, sometimes my parents would just get the bigger car kind of as an upgrade from the rental car company. And I loved when my brother and I each had like three seats to ourselves.

Adam: Your own row.

Gaurav: Yeah, it was, clutch, yea

Adam: awesome.

Gaurav: So I'm generally a fan although obviously I've already disclosed I'm an EV owner here. So from an efficiency standpoint there's, you know, something in my mind around, do you really need it?

But I think when you've got all those people, it certainly adds to the road trip, shall we say?

Adam: All right. I love it. Maybe in your future with a bigger garage. We'll see. And it must be an electric one. All right. Well, Gaurav, thank you so much for coming on Startup Dad today. This was an awesome conversation. I learned a ton. So will our listeners. And I really appreciate you taking the time.

Gaurav: Amazing. Thank you, Adam. This was a lot of fun.

Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Superhuman co-founder Gaurav Vohra. If you enjoyed the show today, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review. It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Heron. You can stay up to date on my thoughts on growth, product and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF Newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening. See you next week.