Going Full Startup CEO in the Delivery Room | Peter Kazanjy (Dad of 1, Founding Sales, Atrium)

[00:00:00] Peter Kazanjy: If you’re going to do a thing, then you ought to do it with excellence and you ought to get good at it because the alternative of never getting good at anything and giving up on things quickly is obviously…
[00:00:12] Adam Fishman: Not ideal. Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep in the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. Today I’m excited to host Peter Kazanjy, author of Founding Sales, co-founder of Atrium and a serial entrepreneur. Peter has written the canonical book about founder-driven sales and early stage go-to-market efforts. Perhaps even more importantly, he’s a husband and the father of one son.
Today we talked about he and his wife’s IVF journey with their son, quarterbacking the delivery room when his son was born, systems for making quality time, why the calendar is destiny and how to build capabilities and concepts of duty in your children. I learned why he considers himself a Tiger Lite dad and some other books he’s created through a process he calls Vibe Writing.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and if you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. Welcome Pete Kazanjy to Startup Dad. Pete, it is my absolute pleasure to have you here on the show. I’m very excited for this, so welcome.
[00:01:30] Peter Kazanjy: I am super pumped to just do dad jokes back and forth.
[00:01:34] Adam Fishman: That’s all we’re going to do. That’s all we’re going to do. 65 minutes of rapid fire dad jokes and shots of coffee. We both have our mugs. We’re all set. I wanted to give a special shout out before we dig into the episode here to the first ever Startup Dad guest, Nick Soman, for connecting the two of us. Nick recently merged his company, so congrats Nick. This is going to be lit, as the kids say. I’m pretty excited for it.
So a lot of people, myself included, will know you as the founder-led sales guy, and in fact, you did publish a book with that title. But I think very few people will know you as a dad to a 7-year-old son, Michael, and a husband to a super talented designer, Tracy, who I think did all of the illustrations in your book and the cover or the cover art. Is that right?
[00:02:28] Peter Kazanjy: That’s right, yeah.
[00:02:29] Adam Fishman: Cool. So tell me about your family.
[00:02:31] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, so we live in San Francisco. My son Michael just completed second grade and he goes to Chinese American International School, where he’s one of the few little Anglo boys running around and now speaking Mandarin very effectively and making fun of my pronunciation. And as you noted, my wife Tracy is a designer. She’s also an entrepreneur. She runs a company called Mascot Works that does physicalization of marketing assets largely for B2B software companies. She used to be a buyer at Williams Sonoma, and then also she went back to school after I sold my last company to do graphic design. And so we live in the Alamo Square area and love living in San Francisco.
[00:03:23] Adam Fishman: Yeah, very cool. In the acknowledgements of your book Founding Sales, you mentioned both Tracy and Michael. You also talked about your parents and your brother. So how have those three people influenced your life?
[00:03:43] Peter Kazanjy: I think that I’m highly representative of the things that made them. My mom was a teacher, administrator, professor of education, etc. My dad was an aerospace engineer who—I guess this is now popular again—in Southern California in the seventies and eighties, technology entrepreneurs did aerospace companies, not software companies. So that’s what he did when I was growing up. He started and sold a couple aerospace companies back in the day.
But I kind of consider myself a fairly representative admixture of the two: I have a very engineering mindset as it relates to how I approach go-to-market, sales, strategy. And then also I have a non-trivial amount of teaching stripe to me as well, which is important for marketing, education—when you’re taking a product to market—but also just educating the broader community as well as it relates to things like sales and go-to-market. And of course, my book Founding Sales is probably the best example of that.
[00:05:01] Adam Fishman: Cool. What about your brother? He was mentioned too.
[00:05:03] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, so my brother—Michael is actually named after his uncle Mike—was four years younger than me, and he actually passed away in a skiing accident in 2013 or so. We talk about that a lot in our family. We talk about Uncle Mike and what Uncle Mike liked to do. I think it’s a good reminder of how reality can kind of intervene and that you should be mindful of those things and make the most of your day-to-day because you never know when those sorts of things might happen.
[00:05:44] Adam Fishman: And how amazing to honor his legacy by naming your only kid after him too.
[00:05:49] Peter Kazanjy: Little Mike has some serious Uncle Mike stripes in him as well. Kind of more rambunctious, more disruptive, etc. I was the perfect older brother for a sibling, and Uncle Mike was a little bit of a rebel. And so little Mike kind of has themes of that going on.
[00:06:11] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, speaking of little Mike, I was surprised, impressed, astounded—I don’t know which adjective to use—to learn that he was the product of seven rounds of IVF. There are a lot of people who are listening to this show that might be going through that themselves, and so I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about that journey to get to Michael.
[00:06:40] Peter Kazanjy: I’m 45, my wife is five years older than me. She’s 50 now, but when we kind of first started on our fertility journey, I was 33 and she was 37, 38, and I think that at the time we were unaware of the common case of substantial fertility decline in ovarian reserve of most women post age 35…
[00:07:53] Peter Kazanjy: Anyway, all that is to say that if we had known, we would’ve started earlier, kind of been more proactive about that. But faced with the cards that we had—conveniently, we’re high grit people—and it was one of those things where we would just get one or two, what are known as follicles, essentially productive eggs per cycle…
[00:09:32] Peter Kazanjy: …I think the biggest takeaway from all of this is that people should be aware of these things early and often. The good news is there’s clever entrepreneurs doing stuff to make that accessible and easy, whereas historically, it was less accessible and people were less aware of it…
[00:09:52] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I think the conversation has really changed quite a bit since you started, what, 12-ish years ago to now? Was there ever a point where you and Tracy were going through this and you thought about giving up or stopping, or did your just innate grit kind of power the two of you through?
[00:10:42] Peter Kazanjy: I don’t think there was ever a time when we thought that we would stop simply because the leading indicators were there…
[00:12:16] Adam Fishman: If somebody was going through this process today or listening to this show and maybe feeling a little hopeless or feeling like this is a slog, and I don’t know if you’ve talked to people just in your everyday life, but what would you tell somebody who might be experiencing this themselves?
[00:13:00] Peter Kazanjy: I think everyone’s kind of experience is going to be unique to them. I would say that even though the process is highly laborious and fussy, and it’s not like anything is particularly wildly painful or what have you, especially for the man, and then people are like, okay, well, was it worth it? I’d be, and I’m like, yeah, totally. I would do it again times five, right? So I think the point is that the juice is worth the squeeze there. So to the extent that there is a path, I would encourage folks to continue to advance against it.
[00:13:10] Adam Fishman: Well, and so you got Michael after many rounds of IVF, and I’m curious what the earliest memory you have after becoming a dad was. So Michael
[00:13:10] Peter Kazanjy: Was born on the 4th of July and he was actually due, I don’t know, three weeks later or what have you. Michael was born at CPMC in San Francisco, which is where pretty much all the babies in San Francisco. It’s
[00:13:27] Adam Fishman: The baby factory of San Francisco. Yes,
[00:13:29] Peter Kazanjy: It is the baby factory of San Francisco. We had a pretty eventful delivery there, which is now seared into the memory. So I guess the question is what’s the earliest memory after becoming a father? It’s like, well, there was the shit show, there was the delivery, and Michael was delivered via a vacuum delivery, the modern forceps delivery, I guess his head is too giant. So we had a bunch of drama and typically I have this private kind of Google doc that I share with my buddies who are about to have their kids, and then I have a live conversation with them where I do some coaching around, Hey, look, you’re a thoughtful person. You shouldn’t edit yourself. If something seems wrong or weird, you should feel free to speak up because yes, we’ve all been indoctrinated that doctors are infallible or what have you, but it just turns out as soon as you learn the definitions of the different words that are being thrown around, you can kind of reason against them.
[00:14:28] Peter Kazanjy: And probably the best example of this we’re sitting in the room and they were going to do the vacuum delivery. And so when that happens, typically what you do is they bring in the neonatal ICU folks just in case hopefully it’s not needed, but you just do it just in case they have to bring those folks in and of course the obs there, et cetera, et cetera. And so we were waiting for that to happen. There were a bunch of people standing around and I was like, are we going to do this? The baby is half kind of out of the birth canal, and they’re like, oh, we’re waiting for the ICU folks. And this is again another example of how when you approach these things, maybe for the first time you don’t realize this. These people don’t work together. The OB has,
[00:15:10] Peter Kazanjy: They have hospital privileges, but they don’t know this. Oh, Bob, hey, what’s up? They don’t necessarily know these people. So at that point I was just like, okay, if you’re from the nicu, raise your hand and three people raise their hand. And I’m like, okay, can we go? They’re here. And they were like, oh, okay, cool. And so that happened. I know it was great. So they were doing the vacuum delivery and the OB who was great was pulling on Michael’s head with the vacuum and the vacuum popped off was great because there’s a spray, which was amazing. And then she and the vacuum kind of broke.
[00:15:56] Peter Kazanjy: I don’t think it broke, broke or whatever. I don’t know. It’s like the handle got weird or whatever. So she was kind of sitting there going like this, and then the delivery nurse was next to her and they were both kind of poking at her or whatever, and I was like, Hey guys, do you think there’s another one? And they’re like, oh yeah. And they just went on the hall, got one, it just on their merry way. Anyway, it’s funny in retrospect, but at the time it was peak entrepreneur shit show where you’re software company or whatever company, things are always fucking breaking. And so this was kind of the similar situation, but in the delivery room. And so this is why I tell folks, Hey, don’t turn your brain off. You’re able to do these sort of things. So I guess he was still in there, so I don’t know if I was a dad yet or whatever, but these are pretty good memories and highly didactic as well.
[00:16:49] Adam Fishman: Oh yes, I’ll count it. I’ll allow it for the purposes of this show and great content creation, I just love that you went full on startup CEO in the delivery room and you’re like, alright, I’m just going to quarterback this thing. Everyone’s kind of standing around not knowing each other and you’re like, all right, let’s do an icebreaker. Who’s on this team? Who’s on this team? Oh man, wow. What a world we live in. These are important capabilities. Yes, very important. Well, I’m very glad that all went well that Michael is here, that they found another vacuum. Turns out there’s more than one at CPMC, they probably deliver like hundred. I know. Exactly. And 50 babies a day. So I am curious now that Michael is here and he’s seven and you are a founder and an author and a busy guy who comes on podcasts and talks about fatherhood, you’ve got to have a bunch of systems for making time and kind of compartmentalizing your time and managing that effectively. One of those systems, I think you said calendar is destiny. So what does it mean that calendar is destiny?
[00:18:01] Peter Kazanjy: This is something that we talk about quite a bit at my company and also that is highly relevant to sales organizations which run on essentially operating rhythms. Your day should look like this. If you are an account executive, your day should be structured like this. And so highly successful organizations are the ones that highly strong operating rhythms that have the content of what needs to be done at those given times so they have a recipe of what ought to be done at what times and how frequently and so on and so forth. They also have the content of what ought to be done within those various blocks and the different kind of meetings and time intervals and so on and so forth. As Michael was ceasing to be kind of more of a larval entity and turning into more of a dynamic proto human, I found myself in a situation where being reactive was kind like tough because you would find yourself just overwhelmed with lots of stuff and you wouldn’t necessarily have time to do things.
[00:19:10] Peter Kazanjy: And so I kind of patterned some of what I do for making quality time with him through just structuring your day, week, month, quarter, year in a way where these things kind of come back up again. So whether that’s making sure that there is a structured, I’m going to take these delivery periods or what have you during the summer, I take ‘em to his camps as an example, and we commute together. And that’s something that I’ve baked into my operating rhythm as a executive is essentially this hour and a half block where we actually take Muni together, which is super fun because we get to hang out and talk and there’s just all sorts of things that show up in the environment, which then act as little sea crystals for discussions and teachable moments and so on and so forth. So that’s an example of something that’s in my operating rhythm now.
[00:20:14] Peter Kazanjy: And so that time is blocked. And so oftentimes what I’ll do is I’ll take calls earlier in the day. I’ll take 6:00 AM calls or 7:00 AM calls with the East Coast or Europe such that I can have that 90 minute block. We’re not commuting the entire 90 minutes. It’s part of that. And then of course it’s getting back to the office and playing my favorite video game email the whole time on the way back. So that’s a good example of that is making space on the calendar. And then I do the same thing on a monthly and quarterly as well. So I have a bunch of stuff scattered throughout the calendar as reminders to the week associated with his birthday, do the same thing in anticipation of the holiday season. So set that up. I like to take him on various incurs in the San Francisco Bay area.
[00:21:08] Peter Kazanjy: And so we have an inventory of those things that we like to do on a recurring basis. You don’t go whale watching multiple times a summer. You maybe go once a summer, but then you don’t want to forget to do that and accidentally skip a summer. So an annual recurring meeting invite that just recurs that reminds you to then put that on the calendar or other things like that from the inventory of things to do can be very effective. And so that’s what I mean when I say have a good operating rhythm, which means slots on the calendar that are for these things. And then not only have the space that is burdened on the calendar for that, also have recurring ness to remind yourself to refill those slots from your inventory. And then the other thing I’ve been doing quite a bit is publishing these sort of things. So Google Docs is kind of my favorite content management system for this just because my blog on subtle is a pain in the ass to write markdown. I guess with lms I could probably do a better job of that, but I’ve synthesized all those things on what a dad with a curious kid in the San Francisco Bay area could be spending their time on. It’s just an inventory of probably, I dunno, 30 things that then you could just pop into the various slots.
[00:22:32] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. And is that something that you’ve built over time? Did you do a concentrated research period trying to figure out or was it kind of driven maybe a little bit by Michael too and what he’s into?
[00:22:44] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, I mean I think it started out as something where we’re like, okay, cool, we want to go. And there were things that me and my wife liked to do, hike up to the top of Seara Tower. There were things that I grew up doing with my dad going whale watching or going to the exploratorium or what have you. And then I think we just ended up kind of accreting other things over time and then just updating the relevant documentation such that it’s in the inventory to then pick from for next time.
[00:23:15] Adam Fishman: Love that. What is Michael’s favorite thing in the inventory to do?
[00:23:20] Peter Kazanjy: Probably our favorite thing to do together is go to the Exploratorium right now. That is a great place. That’s probably a number one thing there. Prior to that, he liked to go to the California Academy of Sciences and go into the earthquake house and so on and so forth. But then once he got to the point where he could read the exploratorium was a lot cooler for him because now he could decipher what was going on with the different exhibits, so on and so forth. So
[00:23:49] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I’m a pretty big fan myself. Second thing that’s super important to you, and you did a whole podcast on this, is this idea of instilling concepts of duty and kind of teaching Michael about that. So what does that mean? What does it mean to instill a concept of duty and how does that work in your household?
[00:24:11] Peter Kazanjy: If you are highly capable and Michael is his father and his mother are both highly capable people only comes from a long line of highly capable folks, then you have a duty to make use of that for your family, for yourself, but also other people in your life. And so just kind of instilling that discipline and rigor and also the fact that this is an important thing that you need to externalize for your community for commercial success, which is what we do as entrepreneurs. And so we use our capability for commercial success and in doing that, obviously benefit the community as well through commercial mutually beneficial trade, the crux of how our economy works, but also just externalizing that as well. So we talk about the importance of keeping our neighborhood clean and looking out for other people, even though there’s maybe not necessarily any immediate upside for us. When you come from a place where you have privilege and capability, I believe that it is your duty to leverage that individually the same way that your father and mother and their fathers and mothers and their fathers and mothers have done before that because you are the beneficiary of all that and you live in a sequence of that, so you ought to do that, but also do it outside of your family as well.
[00:25:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Have you ever seen Michael take those lessons and independently model that behavior?
[00:25:55] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, for sure. I mean, he’s getting to the point where he starts doing that. It’s more you see it at school where if the kids are doing crazy stuff or whatever and someone is engaging in their base instincts of let’s leave a bunch of junk on the ground, or let’s be mean to this other kid or what have you, and instead Michael intervenes or even minimally cleans up after other people. That’s a very, very basic example of that. But just the base concept of reducing entropy in the world and being a smart actor is the first step there because then that will then lever up over time into other more grandiose versions of that.
[00:26:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And it’s working way to go. You describe yourself to me as a little bit of a tiger lite dad. So many people may be familiar with the concept of Tiger dad or a tiger mom, but what does a tiger lite dad?
[00:27:02] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, I mean I think it’s related to the prior thing, which is just like I think that instilling in your kids that if you’re going to do things, you ought to do things well and with rigor and through completion, all those sort of things. I think the notion some of these concepts, at least outside of first generation immigrant families have been a little bit less received wisdom versus do what you want, follow your bliss. I think that trying things to see what it is that resonates with you is good, but also you’re never going to figure out what you’re going to be excellent at. And then moreover, you’re never going to acquire the skill of being able to become excellent. And then there’s the meta skill, which is the ability to acquire a new capability. You’re never going to acquire that skill of skill acquisition if you are flitting from thing to thing to thing thing
[00:28:17] Peter Kazanjy: Versus buckling down and actually breaking through the initial parts that are difficult and then don’t come naturally. And I think that that’s something that over the last 20 to 30 years has been kind of lost. And this is something that is a fairly hot topic in our industry is around the decline and lethargy of sales performance that is driven by a variety of drivers. But I think that this is something that at least I want to make sure that my son is not subject to because I think that the outputs of kids who come up in a planktonic like they’re plankton and kind of just going this way and that way and versus driving towards something, it’s not good. I’ve read all of Jonathan Heights books on these topics and a number of others as well, and I think that directed, not strict swim lanes are exactly what’s needed, but certainly the general concept of if you’re going to do a thing, then you ought to do it with excellence and you ought to get good at it because the alternative of never getting good at anything and giving up on things quickly is obviously not
[00:29:43] Adam Fishman: Ideal. It sounds like what you are trying to do, and you can describe it as being Tiger Lite Dad, you’re really just instilling this concept that you and your wife follow this concept of grit, trying to find a way to instill that in your son and model that for him and give him that sticktuitiveness for lack of a better term.
[00:30:07] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, for sure. And probably the best example of this is, so Mikey, he’s a really good soccer player now he’s young for his age. He was, he’s like a late July baby, and so when he started out in soccer, he was fine, but he was definitely not at the head of the class and he was kind of frustrated by that. And we talked about this and we said, okay, well Mike, do you want to get good at this? He was like, yes, I do. Which is probably when he was five. And I was like, okay, well if you want to get good, then there are things that we can do in order to make it such that you can get good at this, but it is going to require things like we can find a soccer tutor for you and we can allocate the time to do that, and we can do that on a weekly basis or what have you. But when it’s time to go to the soccer tutor at eight in the morning on Sunday and you don’t want to get up, we need to actually do that. We’re not going to do it halfway. And so we did that over the, it’s like a 12 month period or 18 month period or what have you, and he progressed, but with all these sort of things, what ends up happening is it compounds over time and kind of like levers.
[00:31:24] Peter Kazanjy: And six months in he had gotten dramatically, dramatically, dramatically better than he had been previously. And so he then recognized that because on his team he was scoring a bunch and then importantly, all the kids were like, oh my gosh, what happened? What happened with Michael? That was a very important lesson for him of it’s cute that you have a 7-year-old who is having fun, being successful at soccer, having the adulation of their peers, and that’s an important thing. You want your kids to have those opportunities that are real and not fake. But the bigger thing, of course in this case was, and this is what we talk with him about, is like, okay, well do you remember back here where we were and how we committed to do this and then we did, and then this is the outcome associated with that. And so I think that really harping on that and saying, okay, cool. And then the next time that happens where you’re not where you need to be, and then we create a plan of how to make yourself better, and then you get there and so then you execute the plan and you get there. Then you emphasize the fact like, ah, that was one of those things again where you built capability Because Once you that meta ability, you can do it anywhere in your life, especially post LLM and what have you, where focus and agency and so on and so forth are kind of the only blockers to new information or doing things.
[00:32:54] Adam Fishman: And I mean the meta capability there is if you want to be good at something or excellent at something and you commit to putting in the time and the work, which it’s hard and have that grit, you can be excellent at something. You mentioned this about entrepreneurship, the technology is there, we can make whatever it is that we want as long as we stick to it and work really hard at it.
[00:33:23] Peter Kazanjy: And I think this is something that I talk about certainly in founding sales where the whole premise of founding sales and the concept of founder led sales, which was a coinage that kind of cascaded off of the book, is that people have these erroneous beliefs that folks are natural X, Y, Z, like, oh, you’re a natural seller or what have you. And it just turns out that it’s just a skill that you acquire over time and you just to need a recipe to follow, and then B, you just need to do it again and again and again and again and maybe you have coaching or maybe you just do it by trial and error yourself following the recipe. The notion of learning and growth and the fact that it’s your responsibility and it can be done is a really important thing in startups. It’s for entrepreneurs, for your staff in organizations as well who may have self-limiting beliefs and certainly for your kid.
[00:34:25] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I mean you’re teaching, you sort of just described the genesis of the growth mindset in a way there, which is innate ability. There are definitely some outliers that have innate ability. You can just do a thing naturally gifted that’s not most people. Most people have to work at something and you’re teaching your kid and your employees that you get results when you work at something. So I think that’s awesome. One piece of advice that you give to new dads, which I loved hearing about, was that certainly people take pictures and things like that of their kids, but you said recording video and then especially audio is really important and that dad should do that, parents should do that. So what is it about audio that you find so important?
[00:35:17] Peter Kazanjy: I have this video of Michael laying on my chest and he is probably like, I dunno, five days old or seven days old or whatever, and he is making these funny little grunting noises or what have you. We take pictures and we take videos of things that are visually arresting like, oh, he’s walking or look at him rolling around, et cetera, et cetera. That’s fun and you’re going to naturally do that, but you don’t think to video record the sounds and the sounds end up actually being really emotionally arresting. Tracy and I have a whole album, it’s called The Sounds of Astro. So Astro was Michael’s code name when he was in utero. And so what ends up happening is you accrete these not just when they’re a newborn, but you know how it is, right? They’re six months old, they sound a certain way when they’re year, they sound a certain way, they start selling silly things, they start babbling, all these sort of things, especially when they start talking. And I think an important thing there is that the things that they say or the sounds that they make are highly ephemeral. They’re only there for a month or three months or whatever, and then they learn to say the word the right way and the old way that they said it that was so funny and cute is gone.
[00:36:36] Peter Kazanjy: And so to the extent that you can record these things and kind of persist them off, I find myself typically where I end up kind of consuming this is if I don’t have wifi on planes.
[00:36:47] Adam Fishman: Oh, I love that. Also, great use of no wifi on the airplane, which seems like it never works when I need it to. So now I have something else to do with my time, which is great. We talked about systems and calendaring and organizing and prioritizing your time. I am curious if having Michael seven years ago changed how you structure your professional life.
[00:37:15] Peter Kazanjy: I sold my first company in 2014, and then we pretty much immediately started that the IVF journey. Michael was born in 2017 and sorry, and Tracy was doing, she had gone back to school to do her graphic design degree at the time and she hadn’t completed it. And so she went back to school to complete that after Michael was born. And so she wasn’t working and so she was promo. And so for the most part, at least in the early parts of Mike’s life, Tracy was able to absorb a lot of the logistics associated with that, et cetera, et cetera. But now as Tracy’s gone back to do her own entrepreneurial experience with Mascot Works, I’ve been doing the things that we’ve described earlier around structuring things from a commute standpoint and so on and so forth. But I think what ends up happening there is you can do time shifting things that otherwise you might not think of that end up allowing more quality time. I think the important thing there from a startup standpoint is to just make that very clear to your staff. I get in the office at nine 30, but externalize the six and seven o’clock calls.
[00:38:40] Peter Kazanjy: Here’s what’s happening leading up to that 10:00 AM arrival. And I think this is something that I think it was really problematic. This is all just the result of Zer and the run up to Zer as well. I mean, good times leads to soft entrepreneurs, soft professionals, et cetera.
[00:39:02] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, you had things where it’s like, oh, you really shouldn’t send slacks after hours because you might create this expectation. And I think that that’s utter bullshit because as a founder, you’re the high watermark in terms of level of effort. And so externalizing those sort of things end up being very important. So the point is, as you are changing your schedule or your structure or whatever, I think you can do that, but then it’s also really important to make sure that you are externalizing your efforts in a way that is easily consumable to your staff as well, so they don’t get
[00:39:44] Adam Fishman: Confused. Reflecting on the last seven, now almost eight years of Michael’s life and early happy birthday to him and to America. So I’m curious what you would say in reflection is maybe a mistake that you’ve made as a dad.
[00:40:08] Peter Kazanjy: Probably the high order mistake that we made or that I made it as a dad and we made as parents was at least in our case, not being as aware of our fertility situation as we would’ve preferred. Because if that wasn’t the case, Micah would probably have siblings. There’s that, and I think that probably the other mistake was not getting as on the front foot as I now subsequently, I spent a lot of time with Mike. It’s very well structured. He gets enough of me. I love spending time with him, but as a 7-year-old, he gets his fill and is like, okay, cool. Probably could have gotten on that probably a year earlier. And I think that was one of the things that motivated, alright, I’m going to get rigorous around this. We’re going to have the different things that we want to do. We’re going to have times slotted for that.
[00:40:57] Peter Kazanjy: We’re going to have a system by which they rotate these things on the calendar. We’re going to make sure that this happens. Was kind of in a reaction to that. Like, oh man, I haven’t been doing a good job with this. Okay, let’s fix the shit out of this. Well, would’ve been ideal is to for me five years ago or four years ago, to have heard an episode like this and be like, yeah, you know what? I need to get on that, right? And hear that when Micah was too and kind of just rolling around on the ground or what have you, or sorry, kind of toddling around then figuring it out when he was three or when he was four.
[00:41:31] Adam Fishman: I guess the lesson there is think about kind of everything a little bit earlier. So fertility a little bit earlier, how you’re going to manage your time, do that when your kid’s still a potato and sort that out so that when they’re a whirling dervish or whatever, a Tasmanian devil, you’re in a good place. So I’m not sure that many people listening to this will know this about you, but you went to school for English and you ended up running tech startups writing a book about sales for founders. You’ve spent pretty much all of your career in technology, but I’ve noticed that you still write things and obviously you wrote a book and that sort of thing. So that’s an interesting juxtaposition. And so I’m curious how that has influenced or if it has influenced the relationship that you want your son to have with technology as he gets older.
[00:42:34] Peter Kazanjy: I think that they’re not as conflicting as one might think, right? So as I was mentioning earlier, my dad was an aerospace engineer, my mom was a teacher and a professor of education and what have you. I think that English is really the study of communication, but also theory of mind. And of course with the LLMs where you now have the ability for humans to talk to machines and machines to talk back to humans in ways that they understand really what effective liberal arts, or at least English study leads you to, is understanding desire, what people want, what motivates them to want those things, how to communicate things to folks that says that they understand that they want it, and that this vision of a good life aligns with what their aspirations are. Then the mechanism by which you then make that happen is technology, a productive relationship with technology. Is technology a means to the end of living a good life versus, and I think you have this where if you’re not careful, you can end up with technology as a mechanism to hack attention loops or things that historically were effective adaptively for humans. Like, oh, this salty sweet thing is delicious because 200,000 years ago when we stumbled upon a beehive that’s full of honey, well, you certainly want to eat those calories. And Then very clever, like food scientists in New Jersey who work for Frito-Lay, figure out how to then make Doritos or Skittles. Then that’s one version of technology. And then another version is TikTok and YouTube shorts and so on and so forth. And so I think the thing that you have to be careful about is when technology is not the means to the end anymore, but then now is kind of subverting the end to its own reward function, I want Michael to see technology as a tool to kind of help himself achieve things and also to serve others in a way that’s a global maximum versus a local maximum. He primarily uses technology in the context of learning. We talk about brain rot, brain swap stuff. I think that these are attention vampires and dopamine vampires are something that is just present in the modern world, and kids need to be super aware of these things because I think that we’re going to see the outputs of that in the next five to 10 years as the first. I mean, I’m already seeing it in my industry where the first kids who were raised on iPhones are coming into the work environment and are petrified of having verbal synchronous conversations,
[00:45:46] Peter Kazanjy: Right? And that was even before you had short form video that was essentially just the result of iMessage and Snapchat intermediated communication that is a separate thing from attention degradation, from short form content, et cetera, et cetera. So I want Michael to have a good relationship with technology, but also just be aware of the fact that there are people who are out there that will want to use that technology for their ends versus making you successful.
[00:46:18] Adam Fishman: Yeah, yeah. And it sounds like a year more of a fan of using, especially as a writer, technology, as an enhancer of creativity or an enabler of creativity than a substitute for
[00:46:32] Peter Kazanjy: Creativity. Yeah, I think that’s well said. The challenge of course is there’s a circularity there a little bit. We took Mike to Europe 18 months ago, or I guess it was actually two years ago at this point. He was jet lagged out of his mind, and we were in Amsterdam, and so he and I were up at two in the morning, and so we were like, alright, what are we going to do with this kid? His mom is asleep. And so I was going to see if I could use Chatt BT three five, or I guess it was four, had maybe just shipped to generate custom Pokemon,
[00:47:07] Peter Kazanjy: Where what that required was him saying, okay, well, I want it to be this. I want it to be a fire type, but also flying and I wanted to look like an eagle, but also it has fire coming out of its butt and it has these special powers right here. And then of course the LLM is like, and generate a bunch of the prompt I constructed generates a bunch of stuff out of that, et cetera, et cetera. If he were, and of course, probably not as a 4-year-old, if the kid was compelled to sit down and buckle down and actually produce all that, that probably would be better. So that’s why, yes, it is a creativity lever there, but also the friction actually does spur creativity and then the friction also does create capability. So
[00:48:02] Adam Fishman: I wanted to ask you, one of my last couple of questions we’re sticking on this topic of ai. You introduced me to the concept of vibe writing, which I’ve heard of vibe coding. I’ve now heard of Vibe Marketing, vibe Writing was a new one for me, and I think the other thing that I learned from you is that founding sales is not the only book that you have written. You have in fact also vibe written, your latest novel Michael’s hotdog Stand. It sounds like a project maybe you and Michael did together. So I’m curious about vibe writing Michael’s hotdog stand first. What is it and what did you do here?
[00:48:43] Peter Kazanjy: Part of this was inspired by some of the challenges I see in our industry around people entering industry that are just not very familiar with the ins and outs of economics or business as I feel like reflected on this. I think that one, a lot of folks who are entering industry right now, their parents, they’ve been knowledge workers. Maybe they’re a lawyer or a software engineer or a marketer or what have you, whereas maybe those people, their parents were like, maybe they own a store
[00:49:21] Peter Kazanjy: Or they had a small business or what have you. That generation had more proximity to things like, I need my shoes fixed and you’re going to fix my shoes. And then the labor costs associated with fixing the shoes is a component of what eventually is charged and so on and so forth. And so there was that observation. I was like, okay, well this is a problem and I think that it’s only going to continue to be the case, so I want to fix this for my son and potentially other folks as well. And then I had been doing a bunch of experiments using LLMs for compressing. So I took founding sales, which was like 400 pages long and had compressed it to a hundred page digested version of it. Some of the other things I was thinking about is taking existing texts, other texts in the world like Friedrich Hayek’s use of knowledge in society as one of my favorite economics papers to share with folks, but it’s not the most complicated thing in the world, but it’s also not easy reading.
[00:50:23] Peter Kazanjy: And so I started using LLMs to kitify these different things. And then at a certain point it was like, Hey, I bet that we could write a parable of commerce. I’m a big fan of the parable format for didactic communication. One of my favorite business books is the Goal. Obviously there’s Patrick Lencioni’s, 5G functions of the Team, Phoenix Project, all those sort of things. I think humans are particularly attuned for narrative consumption and understanding that probably from an evolutionary pressure standpoint. And so all this kind of came together to, in the form of essentially writing a parable of a kid starting essentially learning business through the context of going to the park with his dad, being hungry, identifying the fact that there was no food in the park and he didn’t want to leave, had to go home. Hey, maybe someone should be here selling candy bars. Hey, why isn’t that you? Okay, let’s go do that. How much does the candy bars cost? How much should we sell them for? What’s the best alternative in the park? Well, there’s a bodega, but it’s like six blocks away, et cetera, et cetera. Oh, okay. Well, what about more substantial food? And then one of the things that’s kind of fun is that you can kind of give the general narrative parameters that you’re looking to expound on and give that to it, and it can fill in the dialogue back and forth as an Example.
[00:51:55] Peter Kazanjy: And again, back to the ambivalence sort of thing. On the one hand, this is why I call it vibrating. Like, oh, I vibrate this because I don’t know, it probably took me 20 hours over in aggregate, but that probably would’ve taken many hundreds of hours if I were to actually write out the dialogue and I would’ve never done it. So I think that on the one hand, it wasn’t fully written, and it also probably didn’t, I probably don’t have it in my brain to the same level that I would’ve if I had actually written it. And maybe it’s not of the same quality, although who knows, it’s probably better quality. Claude’s pretty rad as compared to if I had done it the old school way. But on the other hand, this would’ve never existed. And so now I shared it with the dad’s group through my son’s school.
[00:52:50] Peter Kazanjy: It’s kind of like founding sales. Founding sales started out as Google Doc, and I would jump into the Google Doc and there’d be all these anonymous emus up on the Google Doc reading. Yeah, reading it. And the same thing is kind of the case with Michael’s hotdog Stan. And so Tracy, sorry. Then we did chat, GBT image, gen kind images for it, et cetera, et cetera. And she’s going to lay it out and we’re going to throw it up on Amazon, because right now we have all these parents who are flinging it around. They’re like, yes, this is what we’ve wanted. Right. So yeah, I wouldn’t say that I’ve written a novel. I would say that I have vibe written what essentially is the young adult literature version of if folks are my age who might remember Lemonade Stand the video game way back in the Day. This is the young adult kind of version of that core commercial concepts and also just core professional concepts.
[00:53:47] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, I love that. And here on Startup Dad, we always approach things with the most generous interpretation. So I’m going to say you wrote a novel, a children’s novel. We can debate that separately. I’m going to give you credit for that, but that sounds amazing. I can’t wait to get a copy of it when it’s up on Amazon. Okay, last question, and hopefully we have a couple minutes for lightning round, but how can people follow along or be helpful to you?
[00:54:16] Peter Kazanjy: Well, I’m pretty easy to find on Twitter, right? I’m the only person named Peter Kazanjy, and don’t worry, Google will autocorrect it when you invariably don’t spell it correctly. So that’s probably the easiest place to find me there. And then if you ever have people in your life who need to learn how to sell the software that their or hardware that their company is making, my book Founding Sales is really effective for that. It’s available in its entirety for free@foundingsales.com, but you can also buy copies of it as well on Amazon, both epub and then also paper-based.
[00:54:54] Adam Fishman: Cool. Well, we will send people in that direction. Hopefully you sell a few more copies from the hordes of people that listen to this podcast. Okay. Lightning round. If you’ve got the time for it, we will zip through this real fast. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:55:15] Peter Kazanjy: I think that was probably the dunes stroller that Michael first cruised around and when he was newborn.
[00:55:24] Adam Fishman: Okay. I believe I heard that also from DURs contractor, his favorite. What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:55:32] Peter Kazanjy: I don’t know. Probably one of the many activity books that he ended up not using. I’m not sure that there’s a specific one. There’s been a number of them.
[00:55:42] Adam Fishman: What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever found in Michael’s pockets or in the washing machine?
[00:55:47] Peter Kazanjy: It’s probably not just the weirdest thing, but I think just the magnitude of stuff that is constantly in the pockets. And then the funny thing is that he’s got this dresser that also has a changing table, and obviously we don’t have change ’em on it anymore. And so the top is just full of what he calls treasures, which invariably are things that go into the pockets, come out in the washing machine, and then end up on the treasure pile there. So just the pure magnitude,
[00:56:11] Adam Fishman: The volume of treasures that you discover? Yeah.
[00:56:14] Peter Kazanjy: So many treasures.
[00:56:15] Adam Fishman: Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher
[00:56:19] Peter Kazanjy: In our household. It’s false. I’ve just given up on that. They can do it however they want.
[00:56:24] Adam Fishman: I’m sensing in your mind there is one way, but you’ve succumbed to the external pressures. So
[00:56:31] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, there’s coaching around the edges, but we’re not going to be super rigorous about this.
[00:56:36] Adam Fishman: Pick your battles, I suppose. What is your signature Dad’s superpower?
[00:56:40] Peter Kazanjy: Making my son laugh.
[00:56:42] Adam Fishman: Aha. Crazier block of time in your house? 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
[00:56:48] Peter Kazanjy: Oh, definitely the morning. Okay. Yeah. Michael is not a morning person.
[00:56:52] Adam Fishman: He’s not a morning person. Okay. Are you a morning person?
[00:56:55] Peter Kazanjy: Yes.
[00:56:56] Adam Fishman: Were you one before kids? Okay. Alright. Way to go. The ideal day with Michael involves which one activity is that? Exploratorium?
[00:57:06] Peter Kazanjy: Yes.
[00:57:07] Adam Fishman: If he had to describe you in one word, what would it be? Funny. What is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?
[00:57:16] Peter Kazanjy: The prototypical thing would be doing the thing that was required or was asked for, whether it’s cooking a thing or what have you, and then you deliver it and the requirements have completely changed or it actually wasn’t the thing that was wanted. Yeah.
[00:57:34] Adam Fishman: Yeah. The cereal can’t go in the bowl before you pour the milk. Now it has to go in after you pour the milk or something like that. Yeah, times 10. Exactly. What is the funniest or slash most embarrassing thing Michael’s ever said in public?
[00:57:48] Peter Kazanjy: There was this lady who had a very substantial septum piercing That Was sitting across from us, and Michael asked me kind of loudly, why does that man have a nail in his nose? And I was like, we’ll talk about that later. That’s awesome. What is your go-to dad wardrobe? Standard startup outfit jeans, but I’m shirt and Patagonia jacket.
[00:58:17] Adam Fishman: Okay. How many parenting books do you have in your house?
[00:58:20] Peter Kazanjy: I think it’s the Jonathan Het stuff. Leno Esken stuff. I guess those are our parenting. I think of more just didactic parenting, do these specific things. These are more kind of pop research, if you will. So if you count that, probably like a dozen. If you’re looking for things like Dr. Spock stuff, we don’t have any of that.
[00:58:40] Adam Fishman: None of those. Of course. You mentioned Lenore Scani. She’s the author of Free Range Kids, if I’m not mistaken. Is that right?
[00:58:47] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, that’s right,
[00:58:48] Adam Fishman: Exactly. And Pals to Jonathan, he, how many parenting books have you actually read cover to cover?
[00:58:55] Peter Kazanjy: Well, if it’s that category, probably like a dozen, but if the prior one’s not so much.
[00:59:01] Adam Fishman: No doctor’s box. Alright. How many dad jokes do you tell on average in a given day?
[00:59:06] Peter Kazanjy: Probably two per commute, so maybe that’s probably two
[00:59:10] Adam Fishman: Per commute. What’s the most embarrassing thing you’ve ever done in front of Michael? Or is he not old enough to be embarrassed by you yet?
[00:59:17] Peter Kazanjy: I don’t think he’s old enough to be embarrassed just yet. I communicate with his friends quite a bit and other folks, and I’m doing that on purpose to demonstrate. One of the things we talk about is when I asked that person that question, how did it make them feel? What were they thinking? Theory of mind exercises, and I think that that kind of makes him a little bit uncomfortable, but mainly because he’s getting better at it.
[00:59:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah. What is the most absurd thing that Michael’s ever asked you to buy for him?
[00:59:50] Peter Kazanjy: It’s probably, again, just the magnitude of Pokemon cards is the biggest
[00:59:55] Adam Fishman: Thing there. I recall that seven to 8-year-old phase, it’s all Pokemon all the time. What’s the most difficult kids TV show you’ve had to sit through?
[01:00:03] Peter Kazanjy: I think that probably the most difficult kids TV show we had to sit through was Blippy initially, and then we’re like, okay, we’re done. And then Blippy then proceeded to precipitated a kid’s TV show ban in our household.
[01:00:17] Adam Fishman: Yes, yes. Which is
[01:00:18] Peter Kazanjy: Probably not a bad thing.
[01:00:19] Adam Fishman: Don’t ever go down the rabbit hole of researching the history behind that guy from Blippy. You will be, oh goodness, appalled by what you find out. What is your favorite kids’ movie?
[01:00:30] Peter Kazanjy: I think probably right now our favorite movie is Avatar. What is it? The Last Airbender.
[01:00:36] Adam Fishman: Do you have a nostalgic movie that you cannot wait to force Michael to watch when he’s old enough?
[01:00:43] Peter Kazanjy: We haven’t watched Ghostbusters yet, so I’m looking forward to that because it’s
[01:00:47] Adam Fishman: Classic of the genre.
[01:00:50] Peter Kazanjy: Exactly.
[01:00:51] Adam Fishman: What is the worst experience you’ve ever had assembling a kid’s toy or piece of furniture?
[01:00:55] Peter Kazanjy: Probably the worst experience I’ve had was disassembling a Lego kit and proceeding to break a tooth while doing that. Much to my father’s chagrin, who is always warned not to do that. So that’s probably the worst experience.
[01:01:10] Adam Fishman: Worst and possibly most expensive. How often do you tell Michael? Back in my day stories,
[01:01:18] Peter Kazanjy: I don’t think we’ve gotten into those yet. Maybe I’ll up requirements there.
[01:01:21] Adam Fishman: It’s coming. Do you have a favorite dad hack for road trips or flights?
[01:01:26] Peter Kazanjy: Yeah, so we were just in New York recently and these were two things that I kind of stumbled upon that I wish I had known earlier. I think restaurants are probably a subgenre
[01:01:39] Peter Kazanjy: Of this as well. So small Lego kits are amazing for this. So Lego kits of like 50, a hundred pieces or whatever Michael used to call them restaurant Legos. It’s enough time. It’s like 60 minutes to lock ‘em in. And then there’s another kind of related toy called Brain Flakes that are kind of like friction based magnet tiles. So instead being magnets, it’s these little things that look like snowflakes. The kids can use them to put stuff together. Those are particularly good on flights and drives because you don’t need specific pieces in a specific order like Legos. Any brain flake can be used to proceed on the building, the thing that they’re trying to build. So the hard thing is before they can read, what do you do with them? And I’m not a fan of branding them with an iPad. And so I think that those are two good approaches.
[01:02:37] Adam Fishman: Okay. So if it’s a stationary thing, like a restaurant, do the mini Lego packs if it’s a moving target, Brain Flakes. Nailed
[01:02:47] Peter Kazanjy: It.
[01:02:48] Adam Fishman: Okay. Finally, speaking of moving targets, what is your take on minivans?
[01:02:54] Peter Kazanjy: I think they’re great. We don’t have a car, but I grew up in Southern California being ferried around in one and then it was my first car in high school. I think they’re absolutely fantastic.
[01:03:04] Adam Fishman: Okay. Team minivan right here. Would your wife agree?
[01:03:07] Peter Kazanjy: Probably. But we’d live in the city, so she’s more of a cargo bike person. But I think if we had to, I’m not, minivans are great.
[01:03:15] Adam Fishman: Okay. Alright. The need has not arisen yet. Not yet. Yeah. Alright. Well, Peter, thank you so much for joining me today and dropping some knowledge on me and fellow dads everywhere. I wish you Michael and your wife Tracy. All the best for the rest of the summer and the rest of your year. Great to meet you.
[01:03:37] Peter Kazanjy: Thanks Adam. Have a great rest of your day. Okay.
[01:03:40] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Peter Kazanjy. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or whatever you get your podcast. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.