The Portfolio Career That Made Him a Better Parent | Ben Erez (Dad of 1, PM Coach/Product Advisor)

Ben Erez (00:00):
Before you have kids, structure and routine feels limiting. And then after you have kids, structure and routine are liberating.

Adam Fishman (00:09):
Well, 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. Today I sat down with former founder and product leader turned solopreneur and girl dad Ben Erez. On today's episode, we talked about raising a daughter in New York City with his wife and their limited support structures, the impossible pros and cons exercise he went through when deciding on becoming a parent, why sometimes it's easier to parent solo on a weekday, why you need to rethink your weekends as a parent and the successful bedtime routine he's been doing with his daughter since she was three months old. I thoroughly enjoyed hearing about Ben's love of being a girl dad and his thoughts on structure and career for parents. If you like what you hear, please subscribe on Apple, Spotify or YouTube or any of your favorite podcast players so you never miss a weekly episode. Welcome Ben Erez to Startup Dad, Ben, glad to have you here.

Ben Erez (01:12):
Thanks so much for having me, Adam. I'm really excited about this.

Adam Fishman (01:15):
Let's jump into it. You, sir, have an almost two and a half year old daughter, probably pretty close to that now, but you are also the parent to someone named George. So tell me about both of your kids.

Ben Erez (01:30):
So the first one is laying right there behind me. I dunno if you see him curled up on his dog bed. George is our almost 8-year-old golden retriever. Got him in San Francisco as a eight week old puppy and he's the first one I've raised from scratch with my wife. So that's a huge part of our family. Yeah, we've got a 2-year-old daughter named Gaia and they're best friends mostly through her leaving food on the floor for him in a bunch of places. So that's the fundamental thing that bonds these two is the love of food and sloping and surround handling food.

Adam Fishman (02:01):
Love that. I have two retrievers, a white one and a red one. So I have one that kind of looks a little bit like George and they also love food. And my last dog when my kids are really young, probably about Gaia's age, their favorite pastime was, let's see how much stuff I can drop from the high chair and have the dog run around and grab it. And it was the greatest game in the world for them

Ben Erez (02:26):
To push it to taunting him. So she'll hold out something from her high chair and then just in time for him to come and try to eat it, she takes it away and she thinks it's really fun, but then other times when she just throws food on the floor and just assumes he'll clean it, it's a pretty good assumption. We've actually had a hard time sometimes cleaning up after her when he's at his dog sitter or something when we come back from a trip and she just throws food on the floor and my wife and I look at each other. Do I have to pick it up this time? Yeah.

Adam Fishman (02:50):
I did that same thing. We had the dog at a dog sitter's house. We were going on a trip and something ended up on the floor and my wife and I just walked by it for several hours and then we're like, oh, the dog's not here. So I guess we have to clean that up.

Ben Erez (03:05):
Yeah, it's the old school Roomba, right?

Adam Fishman (03:07):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So you never thought you wanted a daughter, but now you love being a girl dad. So tell me about the majesty of being a girl dad.

Ben Erez (03:19):
I knew I wanted to be a dad, but I don't think I ever explicitly knew whether I had a preference towards being a boy dad or a girl dad. I just wanted to be a dad. And then it wasn't until we found out we're having a girl, we did our gender reveal with a cupcake that had a pink filling or we found out it was pink after we bit into it. And it wasn't until I saw that pink color that I realized how much I had been subconsciously holding this almost assumption that I was going to have a boy. Until then, it was never conscious. And then I have one sister who's six years older than me and I kind of saw in my childhood and as an adult just like how her relationship with my dad has been special in ways that it's just completely different than my relationship with my dad and my relationship with my mom. It's just like the daughter, father kind of relationship always seemed so special and I kind of got really excited and emotional about having an opportunity to have that kind of relationship. And then it's fantastic. I know a bunch of other girl dads here in Brooklyn that live around me and I probably carry us bias towards being maybe a little bit more friendly with the ones that have daughters than sons because I feel like the nature of our bond with our kid is a little different.

Ben Erez (04:29):
So I love it. I think it's super gentle and playful and I see so many parts of my wife in her that are very feminine and it starts early and I just love that kind of female energy in a kid is something really special.

Adam Fishman (04:42):
That's great. Well, congratulations on being a girl dad. So you got many more years of excitement in front of you. I too have one girl, one boy, two. We got something in common there. You mentioned to me the Brett Weinstein quote, children will destroy your life and replace it with a better one. Tell me about that destruction and rebuilding of your life

Ben Erez (05:08):
When you're expecting you start sensitizing yourself to all kinds of advice and resources and stuff. And for some reason in the months leading up to having her daughter, that quote kind of stuck out as something that maybe set the right level of expectations about what might happen. And I think for us, we've been fortunate to be able to, I think keep a lot of the things that matter to us intact in our life has not been a destabilizer in any way of having a kid and the way that destroying your life sounds. I think for me what it feels more like is a process of trimming and reprioritizing, adding a level of intentionality I think about life that wasn't there before. The destruction is this kind of maybe creative destruction or a positive kind of forest fire to kind of clean up the brush and prepare for setting the stage for the next phase is kind of mostly what it's felt, but it's organized chaos is a lot of what it feels like and it's very meaningful, organized chaos, if that makes sense.

Adam Fishman (06:12):
Yeah, it does. What are a couple of the things that you found yourself trimming as you became a dad?

Ben Erez (06:20):
Things like going out for the sake of going out, socializing for the sake of socializing. If I'm going to socialize these days, I'm being intentional about socializing. I need some socializing time. So I think maybe the default patterns, the default habits have changed also because I do dad duty in the mornings. So every day I'm out of the two of us. I'm the morning person, so I go to Gaia at 6 15, 6 30 in the morning, and so therefore I have to be very rigid about my nighttime routine to get to bed. So an example is being able to squeeze in some work at night or catch up on work on the weekends. I can't do those things anymore, which has created this compression function on Workday productivity. It just feels like this compression during the week and then this complete wiping of what I can control as far as time goes on the weekends.

Adam Fishman (07:07):
Maybe those casual social interactions, they're not happening much anymore, but because the stuff you do is so much more meaningful and intentional, they're higher quality interactions when you get the chance to do them, maybe you're concentrating the quality of the social time.

Ben Erez (07:25):
I love social time these days with if I can socialize with another family, so I am with my wife and my daughter and we're hanging out with another set of parents and their kid or kids at the park or something, it no longer fits in the social bucket, it fits into the family time bucket. So I feel like there's been this expansion of my time spent and in intentional time spent on family bucket. And there are of course spontaneous social interactions that come up. You're walking out the park, you run into another couple and their kids and now you're going to go get coffee and the kids play. I still consider that almost intentional socializing, but in the context of family, I think the things I don't do as much really specific is the once a week happy hour after work to go get beers with other guys. I don't do that. I feel like it kind of kills my energy and I just have less and less in common with people that I think are available to go out.

Adam Fishman (08:16):
Yeah, you're not YOLO-ing the weeknights so much anymore, so.

Ben Erez (08:22):
I'm trying to age gracefully if I can.

Adam Fishman (08:22):
Yeah, that's good. So speaking of work, we talked about compressing. You've been a founder, a product manager, product leader, and now you have what you described to me as a portfolio career and I put portfolio career in quotes in air quotes. If you could do that on a podcast, what is a portfolio career?

Ben Erez (08:42):
I forget where I heard this term. I didn't come up with it. The competitors for how I would describe what I do are like I'm in a fractional phase or I'm in a solo entrepreneurship phase. It's kind of to some degree I view fractional product work as a subset of the overall solo entrepreneurship phase. But when people ask what I have, I can't say I have a solo entrepreneurship or I have a fractional. So I think of the portfolio career as the thing I actually have that these are these different swim lanes into which I'm putting time and my current portfolio looks have a part-time PM role at a series a FinTech company. So that's letting me stay fresh as a pm, but at a very small amount of time commitment. I have a Maven course that I teach that I just finished the sixth cohort of that's been featured on Lenny's newsletter and Lenny's List and I'm getting ready to run the seventh cohort of that.

Ben Erez (09:29):
And then I have a co-pilot that I built that reinforces a lot of my frameworks that I teach in my course, but people could buy that on their own and I'm constantly tweaking and iterating my AI copilot for that, which has been a nice revenue driver. I host a podcast on, it's called Super Insider that doesn't make money yet, but we've been building the audience quite nicely for that and it's giving me a lot of energy. So when I think of my portfolio career right now, it's kind of like a set of almost like batteries I imagine every day. It's almost like I put all four batteries, it's four or five depending on when we talk about this, but put the batteries in the wall, let them all charge up, and then when I wake up in the morning, I can extract as much energy as I need from each battery and then I can move on to the next battery. And I've really just embraced context switching and floating attention spans. I've never been diagnosed with anything like a DD or A DHD, but right before us recording this I was doing completely something different. And right after we're done with this, I'm going to go score grade homework assignments for my Maven course and I love just the contrast between the different ways of spending energy versus for the 10 years before this, spending all of my time at really one full-time job at a time and all of my cycles go into that one thing.

Adam Fishman (10:37):
Maybe it's a little self-reflection here, but you do four or five or six different things. Some people might say, look, is it hard to focus as a dad? It doesn't sound like that's your issue because it sounds like you maybe would've a harder time if you weren't doing that stuff.

Ben Erez (10:54):
I wouldn't relegate family time or fatherhood into one of the batteries. I think it trivializes it a bit. But I do think that my view of fatherhood and family time and quality time with my wife and daughter is one of those things that I get a tremendous amount of energy at it up to a certain number of hours and then I start to itch to do work productive things. Spending time with a 2-year-old is really fun, but it's not intellectually satisfying in the sense of building something or pushing my craft in some way. I go back and forth on whether family time is another battery that I tap into versus it being the water into which all of everything else just fits my fear with the second or the latter is that I never want to take the family stuff for granted. I never wanted to just fade into the background and I never intentionally focus on it. So I kind of am trying to treat it more as a very specific thing that I should give dedicated time and energy to so I don't fall.

Adam Fishman (11:54):
And the other thing you mentioned to me in our prep for this is that, and again this feels a little counterintuitive that being a solopreneur or having a portfolio career actually makes you feel more stable, which is the opposite of what somebody might expect. They're like, oh, I got to juggle all these things. Where's my next source of money coming in from? So I hear from a lot of solopreneurs who they get out of the game like, well, I couldn't handle the contact switching, I couldn't handle the instability. But for you it's different. How do you think it's different for you?

Ben Erez (12:29):
So I've been doing this for almost a year and a half I think since I've had my last full-time role. So I'm still early to it I would say. But when I was working at Continuum, which was the marketplace for fractional executives, I talked to over, I dunno, 50 or 60 executives that were doing fractional work, either making it to their full-time, they want to stay with it and commit with it or people that try it and then go back into full-time work. So I know I've actually made it further than a lot of the people that dabble. One of the biggest reasons I saw people not want to stick with it were people who I think had a very hard time balancing the business development side of it, marketing yourself, doing the work. And the thing that I'm doing I think different than a lot of the people that want to do just fractional work is, as I mentioned, fractional work is just one of the things in my overall kind of strategy.

Ben Erez (13:22):
So I actually really only do one fractional product work thing at a time. So I don't have the context switching between multiple startups that I'm doing part-time PM work at. I actually tried that in the first few months last year when I was getting started and I realized I hated that. I hated having two startups. I each was getting 15, 20 hours a week of my time. That drained me. But being able to do something like 15 hours a week total of part-time product work and that's the only product PM work that I do and I get to spend all the other time on other kinds of things has made the path feel more sustainable to me. And then back to your question around safety and security, it kind of feels like my revenue diversification is resilient so no one can fire me. The biggest hit that I can take right now to my income is just because I have four or five unique income streams is I think maybe the most concentration I have in one income stream in a given period is maybe depends on the month, but 30 to 50% of my income.

Ben Erez (14:23):
So I think that that's what I mean by feel safer is because I coach people. My course is a job search, like interview prep course and I coach a lot of people in their interview search. So many people are coming out of companies where they thought they had security. It's a full-time job. I've been here five to 10 years, I've been getting great performance reviews and before I just get the boot and now you're back on the market. So that's kind of what I mean is who has more job security at this point, the person that's been in their full-time for five years or someone who's got four or five different revenue streams that are diversified.

Adam Fishman (14:56):
That makes a ton of sense. Alright, I want to talk about your kids some more and your partner. So tell me about the decision making process for you and your wife when it came to having kids.

Ben Erez (15:07):
My wife is a couple years older than me and we have been together now for a little over 10 years and our daughter, as I mentioned is almost two and a half. So we had quite a good run before we had kids and did a lot of travel and enjoyed life and lived in San Francisco for a while and then moved to New York about three and a half years ago and we talked about starting a family in San Francisco, but I don't think either of us ever had this burning desire to have kids in San Francisco. And then when we decided to move to New York, my wife got pregnant six months later. So I don't know if it just coincidence or if we actually just felt like something was more resonant in New York, but I think we kind of embraced that at that point. And when I think about the thought process and the years leading up to that to we didn't take it for granted that we should have kids, we actually thought about not having kids.

Ben Erez (15:58):
Life's pretty fun. We can do a lot of things. We can take all this money and time and energy and I guess put it towards more of what we've been doing and that kind of thing. In typical PM fashion, I started thinking in terms of pros and cons and just talked to everyone I could to ask them, what would you put in each column just based on your experience having kids? And what was interesting for me is that the cons column of having kids, what reasons not to have a kid were all these kind of known knowns. They're all things that I like about my life that will change or evolve in ways that feel unfavorable in some capacity. And then the pros column was all this kind of cliche, open-ended, anecdotal, hand wavy stuff from people about why it's the best decision they've ever made to have kids.

(16:51):
And so for me it kind of ended up looking like this very long list of cons, each of which is very known and then this magical black box of there's only one way to know what's in the pros column and it's to actually have kids. I think it's a leap of faith of some type to end up deciding in that decision to have kids. I'm so happy I did and we did and I'm happy that my wife was excited as well. I think our biggest challenge was just thinking about timing. It feels like there's never a right timing to do it. For example, we talked about going to Burning Man for the longest time and we never got tickets and we finally got tickets and the tickets would've been for that summer right after we found out she was pregnant. So we were like, crap, we got to cancel Burning Man. We also booked this two week trip to Peru to go hike Machu Picchu and stuff and obviously we wouldn't be able to do that when she's seven months pregnant. So there was these frustrating trade-offs that we had to make that were very shortsighted in hindsight, but we made the trade-offs obviously, but those were some of the challenges. It's like is there ever going to be a right time where this just feels like everything's calm enough to have kids?

Adam Fishman (17:54):
There's no homeostasis moment so to speak there.

Ben Erez (17:58):
I mean if you're doing things well, there should always be a lot of progress. Momentum, zigzagging adventure.

Adam Fishman (18:04):
Did you review your pros and list with your wife or did you make it together?

Ben Erez (18:09):
We never wrote it down, but we just talked about it a lot. Right. So basically every time we talked about it, I felt like our implicit dialogue took the form of me presenting all the cases for why the black magic box is better than the sum of all of the ticks and the negative in the cons column and her being like, yeah, maybe kept going back and forth about it.

Adam Fishman (18:35):
I love that you pmd it too with the pros cons list and then when it was time, did you draft a PRD for your wife and you're like, all right, here's how this is going to work.

Ben Erez (18:46):
No, no. My wife is also French, so she's not into the very structured way of communicating about family or relationships or life.

Adam Fishman (18:55):
I have interviewed a few French folks on this podcast just to learn about a different perspective, so So you live in New York now, your wife got pregnant about six months after you moved there and now you've been raising a family in New York, which to me sounds terrifying. I mean I live in the burbs now, although I guess you do too. Maybe Brooklyn, I dunno, it's still New York though. Do you have friends and family nearby?

Ben Erez (19:22):
It's mostly friends we've met in this stage of life or right towards the maybe some acquaintances from SF that are now at the same stage of life here. So we have a really nice community, growing community of other parents with kids and I'm super grateful for that. I don't think it's helpful in a childcare sense, but when you can get together and your kids can keep each other busy and play, I think that just takes a little bit of pressure off for moments to just feel like you're enjoying the weekend with some other adults, sometimes. No immediate family though around here. My mom, as I mentioned, I have one sister, so my sister and my dad live in Israel and then my mom lives in Florida and then my wife Carol, her parents live on opposite sides of France. So both of our parents are divorced and we've scattered and she has no siblings. So we're basically out here on our own. And then the biggest form of childcare support or help that we get is our daycare and we love our daycare.

Adam Fishman (20:14):
Yeah, I was going to ask, besides your furry vacuum cleaner, George, what other support structures have you found that you needed to get into place as a set of young parents in New York without really any family nearby daycare, no nanny. What was your decision process around daycare or what some of the support structures would be?

Ben Erez (20:41):
Something that every parent I know here is thinking through and everyone comes to different conclusions and there's no right answer for us. So my wife works as well. Carol works at a company called Fair, so she's got a pretty demanding job and likes her career. So she had I think four-ish months maternity leave. So Gaia, our daughter started in daycare when she's about four and a half months old and she's been in the same daycare this whole time. She's gone up a few classes. We've had some babysitters that we tap into. There's actually a really nice kind of French community here. So my wife's been able to get some babysitters that are here for either foreign exchange programs or they're not quite au pairs, but they just really solid French women in their usually early twenties or something that are here for a year or six months.

Ben Erez (21:26):
And they'll come and they'll read a book or watch a movie or something and watch Gaia while we go have dinner or go out see some friends. So that's been helpful. And then you mentioned George, so every time we travel or go somewhere, because he's a 75 pound dog, we can't really take him with us. We have an incredible dog sitter that lives an hour outside of the city and loves to watch George at no charge. He's retired and he's ripped up a couple checks when I've tried to give him money for stuff, he loves to watch George and he's watched him for as long as a whole month when we've gone to France to see Carol's family. So I think that's been a huge form of support. Don't take him for granted at all. That's basically been the forms of support we've had.

Adam Fishman (22:05):
So you mentioned your wife Carol. She works in localization, travels, decent amount it sounds like with her job. That means many times during the week you are a solo parent, but I think you've learned something and some dads in your position would be like, oh my god, what do I do? It's diapers, bottles, daycare. It's probably a cop out for many dads. But you've learned something a bit counterintuitive about solo parenting during those weekdays. What is that?

Ben Erez (22:36):
I think in my mind of parenting on weekdays and parenting on weekends as two completely different buckets of parenting, I am about actually this weekend to go through my first solo parenting on a weekend. My wife has finally taken a special Mother's Day trip with a few of her good girlfriends from New York and they're going to go to Colorado for the weekend for the weekdays. I think that the thing I mentioned that felt counterintuitive to me when I started thinking about it and then the more I bounced this off of other dads seems to resonate well with a lot of other dads that I know in the neighborhood is that when I think of the day-to-day playbook or the day-to-day routine or logistics of just getting through the day with a kid, you've got your morning chunk, you've got daycare drop off at the end of that, then you've got your workday and then you've got the pickup and then the period for us it's basically to feed, bathe, put to bed, and then you've got your little evening chunk and go to sleep and then you do the whole thing again the next day I usually do the morning piece of it and then my wife does the pickup and bring home piece of it and then we kind of share what happens at home piece of it.

Ben Erez (23:42):
And there needs to be coordination. It's kind of hectic at home in both the morning and the evening because we're both kind of tag teaming the whole thing. And so what I found is that a lot of my stress about these routines comes from a fundamental and coordination stress. It's not the tasks themselves being stressful or demanding or my daughter throwing curve balls at me or something. Those turns out not the stressful things is like, did you put the backpack together? Are the diapers in the bag? Is the water in the bag? Did you get the pacifier? Did you check when the bus is coming? Did George go out? So it's all these questions of did you feed the dog yet? So it's like you don't know what you don't know, and that makes me stressed. So what I find is that when my wife is gone on weekdays for work trips, for example, and I just have to do the whole thing on my own, I just keep it all in my head and I know what happened because if I didn't do it, no one did it.

Ben Erez (24:35):
So it turns out that the control freak in me finds that quite relaxing. So I find it very rewarding and even fun to get through solo parenting on weekdays because I get to use daycare. I've had to do that I think on one or two work days where either daycare was closed or my daughter was homesick from daycare and those feel more like weekends, which is just hard because I need to go, when can I go to the bathroom? It's like if it's just me, those are the kinds of questions that I think are challenging.

Adam Fishman (25:04):
So I want to talk about weekends for a little bit, but I do think that's really interesting what you mentioned that when you're on your own there's just no communication overhead and so again, a great pm, you're like, ah, I'm in charge. I don't have to worry about that. I don't have to inform my engineers or my designers or my spouse about what's happening, so it's just me.

Ben Erez (25:25):
Or ask for updates. Yeah,.

Adam Fishman (25:26):
Yeah, or ask. You get your standup with daily standup with your wife. Okay, so weekends, I always find this fascinating. I work with a bunch of founders and a lot of founders that I work with are younger, don't have a family, sort of the idea of a family is a novelty to them and they're always like, Hey, if you want, we could get together and jam on this over the weekend. And I'm like, oh, I don't think you quite understand what weekends are like for parents. No shade to them. They don't know. I didn't know when I was young and didn't have kids. I was like, oh, it weekends are for fun and catching up on work. Obviously that's not your experience, so why is that? Why are the weekends so different from the weekdays?

Ben Erez (26:08):
So maybe this gets at the crux of just the structure of our parents' style, but we're like 50 50 partners is what it feels like. So we like to do things together. Basically the default is that we're together doing everything and then if one of us has to peel out to do something on our own, it's usually an explicit thing that's like, Hey, I got this thing to do. Can you watch Gaia while I go do this thing? I think I need the weekends more than my wife does to catch up on some work. Carol's warmed up to giving me maybe a couple hours on a Sunday to catch up on things, but I try to not work on Saturdays if I can. I don't ask her for that on a Saturday. She never asks me to cover for her to get work done on the weekends.

Ben Erez (26:49):
The main reason weekends feel full more full than weekdays is because the assumption is that I'm going to be always on for family and fully focused on family on the weekends. And then the curve ball that I think is hardest to explain to people is that there's an unpredictability to how the weekends play out. I can't make weekend plans and in the beginning I tried and then you're 45 minutes late to something that's going to be whatever an hour and it makes no sense. So that's kind of where I've found that I just tell people no weekends. If it doesn't matter to me enough to move things around during the week to make time for it, then maybe that's a sign that it's just not going to make the cut. It's not a priority.

Adam Fishman (27:31):
I remember one time I asked a dad, this was before I had kids, I was like, what do you really want to do this weekend? And he's like, my ideal situation is just have a cup of coffee in an hour and sit at the table and read the newspaper. And I was like, okay, cool, love that. And now I really have a full appreciation for that.

Ben Erez (27:53):
Obviously anyone with a basic understanding economics understands supply and demand dynamics and if something's in short supply, its value goes up. The shortage of time available to do things like read a book with a coffee on a Saturday morning when it's nice out and just have a notebook and write thoughts that come up and whatever creative grooves I could get into in my mid and late twenties in San Francisco at a coffee shop. I just don't have that time on weekends. But this is another big advantage to this kind of portfolio solopreneur thing that I guess technically you and I are both doing right now is if you want to carve out your mornings or afternoons during the week to do something you can. And so my Calendly links don't let anyone book time with me in the mornings

Ben Erez (28:43):
And as a result, I never have morning meetings, which makes me really happy. I get to go to a coffee shop and sit with my laptop and write cool shit down on notebooks and get focused, time done. It just happens during the week. It's just not things I can do on the weekend anymore.

Adam Fishman (28:57):
Yeah, I think that that's one of the best parts of that portfolio approach. I do the same thing. My calendar is pretty blocked in the morning so that nothing can be scheduled and that's me time. What are a couple of the most surprising things that you've discovered as a dad?

Ben Erez (29:14):
I forget who I was describing this to the other day, but I find myself, whether it's on the bus with my daughter, I traveled with her last Thanksgiving to Austin to visit my best friend solo actually. So I went on a plane with her alone and I had this moment where I realized I've been so many places with her and every time I go somewhere with her, I feel like it's exactly where I belong. There's a sense of belonging just by being with her. And I found that surprising because I felt way more at home traveling with my wife than I'd be on my own. Being with my daughter feels like I'm creating a little bubble of whatever home means in that moment. It could be on the bus, it could be in a restaurant, it could be in the airport. That's something that I was just kind of impossible to simulate the feeling about before I had her.

Ben Erez (30:02):
And I can contrast that with maybe senses of when you're younger or when I was younger, feeling a little insecure and not being able to find my place in an environment of some kind, like a new place and I feel like I'm all on my own. If people can manufacture that sense of feeling like entirely at home and at peace and a perfect sense of belonging where they are on their own, that's beautiful and maybe that's a path of mindfulness and meditation or something like that can get you there. But for me, just literally just being with her anywhere just feels kind of like I'm exactly where I need to be and that's been really, really special and surprising.

Adam Fishman (30:35):
I know exactly what you mean. I'm also very curious about that solo airplane flight with the 2-year-old over Thanksgiving, two year olds have a lot of energy by the way, for those listening that may not have a 2-year-old and an airplane is a relatively confined space. So did you have a Mary Poppins esque bag of things that you just keep pulling stuff out of? What was your dad's strategy for that flight?

Ben Erez (30:59):
I'll give 100% of the credit to my wife for preparing basically all snacks games, all the entertainment bundle that was required to keep my daughter well fed and entertained. I just had to execute. I think the flight to Austin was a little trickier because our plane was two hours delayed, so we just hung out on the ground for two hours before taking off. It was kind of getting warm on the plane, so they had to open the sleeve and we had to go outside to cool off in November, so it was freezing outside and it was too hot inside, so just balancing the temperature swings. But there was a really nice gentleman that was sitting next to us in the row and he was really cool. He had his own kids or he is already a grandparent. I feel like people were really cool with me in general traveling with a kid.

Ben Erez (31:40):
Everyone just, it's like the world just opens up to you in ways. It's like where's all this generosity when I'm just not with my kid. Being fully responsible for another person while traveling is a very interesting experience. Most of my travel experience was either with my wife or my wife is primarily taking care of my daughter or on my own where I'm watching a movie or listening to a podcast or something. You can't listen to a podcast or watch anything when you're taking care of a kid. It's a full-time thing and it's also very, dizzying is probably one of the words that I would use visually because the space is so confined and it's so small and kids are dropping stuff and moving around and spilling and going up and going down and the screens. Every time I tried to turn off the screen on the plane, it kept turning back on again and it's like, so you've got these LED screens. I dunno. The whole thing was just visually walking through a casino in Vegas or something, but on steroids, yeah, it's just too much.

Adam Fishman (32:37):
Wow. Alright, well let's talk about something that's not too much, maybe not for you could be for other people. I want to talk about bedtime routines because one of the things you mentioned is that you have a good bedtime routine that works for you and Carol and Gaia and you started it when Gaia was about three months old. So can you walk me through Ben's door busting tip for bedtime routine.

Ben Erez (33:02):
And again, I give all the credit to Carol on this. I think I was just following her lead a lot until today too, but especially in the beginning, but she had this idea probably around three months that in hindsight it's linear. At the time I'm sure it was like, we should try this. We were probably scrambling to do something, but we basically ended up doing the bath body temperature probably, I dunno, five minutes or something, and at that age, so they barely move, right? So you just kind of rinse them a little bit, dry them off, took her to the bedroom, put on her diaper changing station, massage her with some, I think at the time it was either baby oil or just some lotion. I forget what it was, and then put on her sleeping stuff and then give her a bottle and put on her hatch. We use hatch, put on the bedtime music and get all the light down and quiet down and then just hold her until she falls asleep and just put her in the crib and we just walk out of the room. It stuck I think that first time we probably put her down around seven 30 or 8:00 PM and she woke up at 6:00 AM and we're like, that's crazy. That's the first time we've had a full night of sleep in three months. So we just haven't messed with that routine. We've basically been running the same basic playbook now the milk is mostly a maybe comfort thing and sometimes she doesn't even need the milk, but the fundamental routine is the same.

Adam Fishman (34:28):
Wow, love that and end to end. How much time would you say that that took that routine.

Ben Erez (34:34):
Back then, it was probably like a maybe 15, 20 minute thing. I mean now you could argue the bedtime routine starts with dinner, but I'd say now it's probably closer from the moment we're like, okay, we're having dinner to getting to bed and sleeping is probably somewhere around 45 minutes, maybe an hour.

Adam Fishman (34:53):
It sounds like structure and routine is pretty important in your house. You mentioned this earlier, that structure helps. Is that true?

Ben Erez (35:03):
Yeah, I think it's really, really important and I'm a sucker for stealing quotes that I like that resonate, but someone said something like before you have kids structure and routine feels limiting, and then after you have kids, structure and routine are liberating and that resonates a lot for me. If I have some focus work to do, for example, I just pick on work for a second. If I know I need two hours to do some deep work on something, the only way that I can be confident that I'll get it done is if I can count on my structure and my routine. So in that sense, liberating me. So when I show up and I sit down to do that work, I feel like I am empowered. Feel free to do that work If things are chaotic and unorganized, I feel like that chaos devours planning, I can't get anything focused on in the face of the chaos.

Ben Erez (35:56):
An example is if I have to send an email to my wait list for my course and that's going to take me 20 minutes or 15, 20 minutes if I start drafting that email and then dad duties just come and sideswipe everything I'm working on. Thankfully now they have a feature that allows me to save a draft, but I have to abandon that task and then the context switching costs have to be paid a lot more. So that's kind of an example of how the structure lets me just plan ahead and put stuff on the calendar. When I get to this time at this place, I will do this thing and then I just have to hold myself to the discipline of doing it in the moment, which is something I embrace that responsibility.

Adam Fishman (36:31):
And do you calendar out specific tasks or things that you're going to do so that you remember, oh, I have this block of one hour. This is how I remember I'm going to spend this time

Ben Erez (36:42):
I never used to and now I find myself really enjoying doing that. I think I was listening to a podcast with Rahul Vohra, the founder of Superhuman Superhuman. It goes on the Lenny podcast and I think he talked about how he follows his curiosity when he works. So if he sits down to do task A and then task B just starts bubbling up in his head, like Raul should really do task B. He doesn't hold himself to finish task A before he goes into does task B. He trusts his intuition.

Ben Erez (37:15):
That if my body is telling me Task B really needs my attention right now, I'm going to put a pin in task A and I'm going to go do task B, and then when I'm done, I'll look back and I'll track my time. So basically if I spent 15 minutes on task A, maybe I'll just put a 15 minute on my calendar and then 30 minutes on task B to kind of look back. So I'm doing more of that now and I find that pretty liberating. I do think that generally speaking, if my intuition points me towards something being more important, I should shift my attention to it. So I have blocks in my calendar after this. I have a two hour block, like I mentioned to grade some homework assignments. Unless something more important comes up while I'm doing that, that's going to be what I do for those two hours. But if something more important or more pressing comes up, I'll probably pause and shift my attention during that.

Adam Fishman (38:07):
Great. So sounds like routines working out well. The bedtime routines still going strong almost two and a half years. Can you tell me about some of the other frameworks or principles that you have about parenting?

Ben Erez (38:20):
So our daughter, I don't know if she's going through a growth spurt. Aya has been eating a lot and her favorite new phrase is, I want something else. And she does not know that that applies to things that are not food. If we're on the swing at the playground and she says, I want something else, I'm like, oh, you want to go on the slide? And she's like, no, I want a snack. Right.

Adam Fishman (38:38):
Yeah.

Ben Erez (38:38):
So she uses that term for that. The other thing is I think some of what we talked about too is not just about the parenting, but more about the kind of process slash general frameworks is that I will not always agree with my wife on how to handle things as parents. I think there's always going to be disagreements. I think every couple I know these, you'll think you're on the same page until you encounter a situation neither of you has thought about before and you realize you have different views on how to handle it. I think that being able to recognize those differences and then when the dust settles just kind of reflect on, I thought we should do this, you thought we should do that. I don't know if either of us is right, but I think what's most important is that we're consistent in how we handle that in the future, so let's just talk about it.

Ben Erez (39:24):
I feel like that process of just having just that awareness of the moments where we're not on the same page about something and the ability to have the conversation about, I don't want to say the right way to handle it would be, but a way to handle it would be that at least we're on the same page next time has been really helpful and sometimes it's not fun to have those conversations. The last thing you want to do is reflect on a tantrum that turned into a argument between us kids' tantrum that turns into a parental argument. I believe in addressing disagreements and conflict early before it becomes this big thing. So that's been helpful for us too.

Adam Fishman (40:00):
Okay. You mentioned at the start of the show that you have friends in sort of a dad's group in Brooklyn, like a bunch of other, you mentioned girl dads, I'm sure there's some boy dads in there too. How has the dad's group been helpful to you?

Ben Erez (40:18):
I was at the playground with Gaia probably over a year ago and met this other nice guy and his partner and their son, and we started talking and he's like, Hey, I've got this WhatsApp group. You seem like a cool guy. I'll add you. It's called the dad milk, which I think is funny. It's a group of about eight dads here in the neighborhood that I lived in Brooklyn, and we have gone together as a group probably four or five times in the last six to nine months, but there's a lot of one-on-one engagement with different, for example, on Saturday we went to the Bronx Zoo and one of the dads in the group with his daughter drove me and Carol and Gaia to the Bronx Zoo. So I met him through that group. Yesterday we went to a barbecue in the backyard, which is super rare in Brooklyn of another dad in the group who was hosting a Mother's Day slash birthday party celebration for his wife, and they have a daughter in the same daycare as our daughter.

Ben Erez (41:18):
So that's the kind of community and dad group is like, we meet these guys and basically give each other permission to talk about what's awesome about parenting after a couple beers, what the challenges are. That is a group that I'll let loose on, but again, it's intentional if I'm going to go to a happy hour with the dad group, I know we're going to talk about dad stuff. It's been equally helpful in thinking through relationship tensions and relationship problems with Carol as it has been with thinking through parenting stuff with Gaia. And the more time that passes, the less, I think there's a clear cut between parenting as in the vertical relationship with your kid and relationships in general, like your marriage or whatever, your relationship with your spouse. It feels to me like what the atomic unit is, the family and all of those relationships kind of interplay with each other. So I feel like being able to get together with another group that has all the same kind of set of considerations to play with, it gives me something very different than hanging out with my friends who are married but no kids, that kind of thing.

Adam Fishman (42:22):
Yeah. One of the things that's come up on this show a few times is that being a dad can be isolating. The dads don't often get together and talk about this sort of stuff, and so it sounds like you found something, or even if it's a small group, you can do that and that's maybe a little less isolating, which is great.

Ben Erez (42:41):
I don't know how much of it is because I'm signaling in some way that I'm open to it or that I'm inviting that energy, but there's a bigger surface area of organic interactions happening. I take her to the playground, I take her to daycare I am around. I think if I wasn't as available, I think it would be much harder for me to find that community because I would be kind of like an absentee. But I think one of the reasons I've been very fortunate, I think in the community sense with other dads is because it's a priority for me to invest time and to be present. And this conversation we're having right now talking about parenting and stuff, it just feels so meaningful. This is a very meaningful part of my life. It doesn't feel trivial. So I suspect I put that energy out and maybe other dads feel like they want to engage and also talk about their experience as dads, but if someone's struggling to find that community, I'm not going to give advice, but I would just maybe ask yourself if you're putting out the energy that's inviting other dads to want to get real with you about it too.

Adam Fishman (43:40):
That makes a lot of sense. You have a somewhat contrarian take about parenting books or baby books. I say contrarian only because there's an entire industry built around dispensing advice to parents in book form and other forms. But your take is that you haven't found that to be particularly helpful or it's not something that you've pursued. So can you tell me more about that approach?

Ben Erez (44:10):
I've finished zero books, baby books, and I don't think I've even made it halfway into any of them, and yet here I am two and a half years later and we don't have everything figured out, but we're kind of surviving. Things are working. I love how Gaia is turning out. So I think I just have an open question in my mind about the role of parenting books. If it's possible to get to this point without having read any of them and internalized any of them, then what's the story that I need to tell myself to explain how common and seemingly necessary the parenting books are? I think the most helpful thing from an education perspective for me personally, was going to a three hour doula workshop in Brooklyn. We had a birth doula that my wife got for herself just for the birth. There was a three hour workshop, probably a month or two before her due date, and it was us and three other couples. I asked a billion questions and I felt like it was my chance to just all of the little gaps in my head of what I didn't know to ask about or expect at the birth or after the birth. I just got a chance to ask all of it, and I just am like, cool. I get it now. And then I've been good since then, so I felt like I haven't needed it personally.

Adam Fishman (45:31):
I have to ask you technology and parenting intersection question. So you are pretty involved in ai. You do a lot of things. I don't know, I think you advise maybe some companies there. Anyway, ai, it's a thing. Have you leveraged AI in parenting at all?

Ben Erez (45:52):
Not that I could think of. If something happens, I'll usually Google it. I haven't actually sat down to chat with Claude or ChatGPT about.

Adam Fishman (46:01):
Let me know if you do. I'm very curious about this.

Ben Erez (46:03):
She does really love Alexa though. She officially shouts Alexa. Alexa, and she wants to play Miss Rachel and other stuff.

Adam Fishman (46:11):
Oh, that's cool. So you just mentioned Alexa and Gaia talking to Alexa. How do you think about the role of technology in her life as she gets older, especially as somebody who's built an entire career in technology?

Ben Erez (46:28):
We generally have a no screens policy with her still. We'll see how long we can stretch it. We, about a month ago, took a trip, like a vacation to Belize and brought in my iPad, and I downloaded some Ms. Rachel on Netflix for her, and that allowed us to get through the flight and the trips and the car trips. I mean, the drives as a side effect. When we got back there was 48 to 72 hours of just her demanding more video, more video, more video. And we basically had to pull it back and say, it's broken. You can't use it, but here's Alexa, let's listen Instead. What I'm surprised by is how fast that storm passes, just like she's just forgotten about that now. So I think we're trying to be careful about exposure to screens, but I'm hoping that societally we're going to normalize not having smartphones and social media until a certain age. I actually do want to read as a Jonathan Jonathan Haidt book.

Adam Fishman (47:23):
The Anxious Generation.

Ben Erez (47:24):
The Anxious Generation that's been on my list, and I really want to check that out. I think the summaries, I've heard of some of the key points. He makes resonate a lot with me. I've mentioned some of those to my wife, and I think we're on the same page there. But yeah, I don't know. I think I have a very hard time anticipating where technology is going to be when she gets even two or three years older. So I'm reserving the right to cross that bridge when I get there. I guess just wing it.

Adam Fishman (47:47):
Yeah, you never know. We might all be living on Mars by then. Who knows.

Ben Erez (47:51):
Yeah, I don't know about that until she doesn't want to go to Mars.

Adam Fishman (47:53):
Probably not Mars, but certainly we'll see cell phones, neural Lincoln beds, who knows? Last official Startup Dad, question for you before our lightning round. What would you say is a mistake that you've made as a dad and what have you learned from it?

Ben Erez (48:08):
I don't talk about this a lot in general. It was super scary, but I think enough time has passed that it's like I can see it clearly now, but basically when guys started walking, we had baby proofed everything inside the apartment, so she couldn't open cabinets or access dangerous stuff in the apartment. And we even got the thing that latches to the door, the front door of the apartment to make sure she can't get out. We live in a four unit building, so it's like two downstairs, two upstairs. So we're upstairs and there's a little stairwell that gets you out of the building, and so if you exit our doorway, there's a stairwell and we have a little shoe rack. So I went out to put my shoes on and I guess my daughter Gaia followed me out into the hallway and she's so quiet I didn't hear her. My wife saw her go out, but she assumed I had her, so I didn't hear her following me, and my wife thought I had her, and I grabbed my shoes and I was going to put them on. As I see her, I noticed she's there because she was so quiet and so small. I see her standing at the top of the stairwell and by the time I reach out to grab her, she had already took a step down the stairs and ended up tumbling down 15 stairs.

Adam Fishman (49:11):
Whoa.

Ben Erez (49:12):
And I've never been that scared in my whole life, and she was crying, thankfully, which now I know is a good sign. We rushed to the emergency room, spent the whole rest of our Sunday at the emergency room. She had a bump on her head, but thankfully nothing major happened. I think the more time has passed, the more I kind of feel ownership over that situation and that I kind of just wasn't paying attention. Ever since then. My learning from that experience is that I have to always know where she is when they start walking. It's a new muscle to develop because until they start moving around, there's only one place they could be. It's like where you left them. And then once they start moving around, even if they're crawling, they can't reach certain things, they can, but then once they can walk and they could reach things and they're quiet, they can actually get into places that you don't notice. And for me, I felt like that was the next level learning as just so be careful and just take everything super seriously be more cautious. So yeah, that's a big mistake. I feel like I made so far as a dad and it sucks. It was so freaking scary.

Adam Fishman (50:18):
I'll bet. Well, I'm glad that she's okay and also don't beat yourself up too bad because I feel like that is a dad rite of passage. Well, it's actually a parent rite of passage for your kid to take a big fall or a tumble and then it never happens again because of exactly what you described. You learn that lesson of like, I got to have my head in a swivel. They're pretty mobile and quiet. They're stealthy. Alright, final question for you. How can people follow along or be helpful to you in your journey, parenting or otherwise?

Ben Erez (50:51):
What I write on LinkedIn is one way to kind of follow my thinking. It's probably my go-to place for posting and sharing thoughts these days. Ben Erez on LinkedIn and then if someone is in the market for their next role and they're looking to interview with a big tech company somewhere, you might be expected to do a product sense or an analytical thinking interview. Check out my course on me. Then it's designed specifically for those two interviews.

Adam Fishman (51:13):
Okay, cool. I will send everybody your way. Do we have a few minutes for lightning round?

Ben Erez (51:19):
Yeah, we do.

Adam Fishman (51:20):
Okay, here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product that you have ever purchased?

Ben Erez (51:27):
Probably the Nannette.

Adam Fishman (51:29):
Okay. What is the most useless parenting product that you've ever purchased?

Ben Erez (51:34):
Probably our Cradlewise.

Adam Fishman (51:36):
What is a Cradlewise?

Ben Erez (51:37):
Wise? It's a smart crib that has a speaker in it and it has a camera in it and it got the motion of a SNOO baked into it and we ended up just using it as a crib and got a hatch and a Nanette and never needed the movement action.

Adam Fishman (51:51):
So you bought the all in one and then you just didn't use any of the pieces of it?

Ben Erez (51:55):
Just use it as a dumb, as a dumb crib.

Adam Fishman (51:57):
Yeah. You unbundled as they say. I don't know if this is happening yet, but what is the weirdest thing you've ever found in one of gaia's pockets or in the washing machine?

Ben Erez (52:08):
She's got a habit of collecting pebbles from the park so her pockets are unexpectedly full of pebbles all the time.

Adam Fishman (52:16):
It's a very common refrain on this show. True or false, there is only one correct way to load the dishwasher?

Ben Erez (52:22):
True.

Adam Fishman (52:23):
Okay, and is that your way or Carol's way?

Ben Erez (52:26):
It's now my way, but I've learned from Carol that it's the right way.

Adam Fishman (52:29):
Excellent. That's a flawless answer to that question. What is your signature dad's superpower?

Ben Erez (52:36):
I think just being kind of like an island of calm in the storm sometimes I can certainly escalate to if I'm not in the right head space, but I think that I have the ability to create a very calm island for Gaia and just pick her up, hold her and give her a nice big calming hug. And I think that it's probably not a unique superpower, but it's something I think I'm good at.

Adam Fishman (52:59):
Hey, it's yours. You got it. Given that, what is the crazier block of time in your house? 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

Ben Erez (53:08):
I think it's exactly 7:00 AM to 8:00 AM which is when we're getting ready to go to daycare and because the daycare is mad at us, if guy gets there after 9:00 AM and we have a 30 minute walk and sometimes take the bus. So yeah, getting ready for the daycare has a deadline, whereas at the end of the day everything kind of flows when it flows.

Adam Fishman (53:27):
Definitely a morning is more chaotic than evening person too. Okay. Swings or slides for Gaia?

Ben Erez (53:34):
Nowadays, man, she's like 50 50 used to be entirely swings for a long time, but now I think she really appreciates slides.

Adam Fishman (53:42):
Okay, great. If she had to describe you in one word, what would it be?

Ben Erez (53:47):
She calls me papa. So she says papa fast, Gaia funny.

Adam Fishman (53:53):
I love that. I love that you are fast.

Ben Erez (53:56):
Fast I guess.

Adam Fishman (53:56):
Yeah, fast. What is your go-to dad wardrobe

Ben Erez (54:00):
Now that it's getting warm out, I really like my Birkenstocks and my shorts and a t-shirt and a hat.

Adam Fishman (54:07):
Alright. What is your favorite bribe for good behavior?

Ben Erez (54:12):
Gaia loves chocolate when we feed her anything that is not chocolate. When I give her some mashed potatoes or sweet, I'm like, it's orange chocolate. She basically anything that has chocolate, she loves.

Adam Fishman (54:24):
Love that she's a girl after my own heart. How many dad jokes do you tell on average in a given day?

Ben Erez (54:31):
Not enough. Yeah, probably none today.

Adam Fishman (54:34):
What is the most difficult kids' TV show that you've ever had to sit through?

Ben Erez (54:39):
Just like loops of Miss Rachel on YouTube.

Adam Fishman (54:43):
Okay. Do you have a favorite kid movie?

Ben Erez (54:47):
I used to love all the Disney ones, like the Jungle Book and Aladdin. Those probably were my favorites.

Adam Fishman (54:54):
Okay. Now here's another different take here. What nostalgic movie can you not wait to force Gaia to watch when she's old enough to watch it with you?

Ben Erez (55:05):
My wife and I love Forrest Gump. Maybe if she can ever find the will to sit through Forrest Gump with us, I think that would be great.

Adam Fishman (55:11):
That is a long movie. Great soundtrack though.

Ben Erez (55:14):
I love the movie and love the soundtrack.

(55:16):
It's kind of like a perfect movie for me.

Adam Fishman (55:18):
What is the worst experience that you've ever had? Assembling a toy or a piece of furniture?

Ben Erez (55:24):
I can't remember when it was, but we ended up having to throw away something we bought at Ikea because they put one of the screws in an irreversibly wrong way. It'd been a TV stand or something.

Adam Fishman (55:34):
Okay. Yeah, you don't want to mess around with a TV stand. Alright, I think I know the answer to this because George, but how long can a piece of food sit on the floor in your apartment and you will still eat it?

Ben Erez (55:46):
The moment I pick it up it's likely going to have hair on it immediately, so I think that the question is just how removable is the hair.

Adam Fishman (55:54):
Okay. Last question for you. I think I probably know the answer to this because you do live in New York. What is your take on minivans?

Ben Erez (56:02):
We don't have a car, but we crossed the country in a minivan when we moved here from SF with George because we didn't have a flight option and I thought it was amazing how much you could pack into it. We put our whole life in that thing and other than the furniture and stuff we shipped, so was a huge fan of how they handled. I thought it was a great car and that was the most time I've ever spent in a minivan.

Adam Fishman (56:24):
Okay, so you're team minivan but you don't own a car, so no need for one right now. Makes sense. It's a lot of public transit options in New York, so.

Ben Erez (56:34):
And his zip car is rental cars, all that good stuff.

Adam Fishman (56:37):
Alright, Ben, it has been my absolute pleasure having you on the show today. Thank you for joining me and thanks for talking about your family and I wish you the best of luck with your family and your portfolio career.

Ben Erez (56:51):
Thanks, Adam. This was a lot of fun. Appreciate the invite.

Adam Fishman (56:55):
Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Ben Erez. Startup Dad is available in all your favorite podcast players and on YouTube. Just search for Startup Dad to find it anywhere you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening and see you next week.