Why I Tell Colleagues to Have Kids | Rishabh Jain (Dad of 2, Fermàt Commerce)

[00:00:00] Rishabh Jain: If current me told past me having a kid is better for the startup, believe me, I would not believe it, but I did have the view that I can’t have a kid and not be working on something that I am passionate about that I knew for sure because it’s like if my kid sees me doing stuff that I don’t love, that’s going to suck. And so if I’m going to have a kid, I better be doing something that I love.
[00:00:24] Adam Fishman: 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. In today’s episode, I’m joined by three time founder and CEO Rishabh Jain. He started his most recent company, Fairmont Commerce, when his oldest daughter was just a few weeks old. He’s a husband and the father of two kids under four. We talked about his contrarian intake, that it’s easier to start a company as a parent, why he tells colleagues who may be struggling with balance to just have some kids, how he’s navigated five flights to India with his family, and two important frameworks, how he manages his mornings and why time with your kids helps you feel more balanced at work. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube, Spotify or Apple. Welcome Rishabh Jain to Startup Dad, it is a pleasure having you here today. Thanks so much for joining me.
[00:01:23] Rishabh Jain: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.
[00:01:25] Adam Fishman: And you this week are fighting with one hand tied behind your back, your solo parenting while your wife, who is also also works full-time, is at a leadership retreat. So how are you surviving so far?
[00:01:38] Rishabh Jain: So far it’s great, by the way, technically solo parenting, but a lot of help at home. But yes, I am doing all of the drop offs and pickups and everything like that this week, which honestly, I’m pretty excited. You know what I mean? I’m not stressed at all about it, in fact. Yeah, it feels like a good relief.
[00:02:01] Adam Fishman: Well, we’ll get more into that. For those who don’t know, you founded three companies, you’ve two kids under the age of four, and your partner who I just mentioned, your wife also works full time, so that’s a lot. I want to jump right into somewhat of a contrarian take that I think you have. We might as well start this thing off with a bang and that take is that it’s easier to start a company as a parent, which I think is definitely a contrarian take. So why do you believe that it’s easier to start a company as a parent?
[00:02:34] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, I think there’s two aspects of it at least that I have felt. The first is that if you’re the most extreme opposite is like if you’re single, you really don’t have any other force in your life pulling at your time. And so then you could just work all the time. And yes, that has been true for me in the past where it’s just like without any other force to pull on your time, you could easily work 17, 18 hours. It’s very feasible, especially for founder character type of people. And I don’t think that that’s good because it is easy to fill your time with low impact work. That is an easy thing to do. And I think that the biggest in this dimension, the biggest reason why having kids and not having the ability to randomly fill your time is good, is that you have no choice but to ask, Hey, what is actually the most important thing for me to work on and how do I work on that the most effectively?
[00:03:36] Rishabh Jain: Just like any startup focus is helpful, this is a forcing function for focus. And so actually underlying this take is I think a very common take, which is focus is better than lack of focus, and I think that having kids just forces even more focus. So that’s one dimension. The other one is more psychological and emotional, which is at least I think most of us are extremely selfish beings, and it’s not until you have kids that there’s someone who you actually love more than yourself. And my best characterization of this is I’ll be very upfront and say, if you had asked me anytime before having kids, would you prefer you are sick or someone else’s sick and pick any other human, including my significant other, I would pick for the other person to be sick, have a cold or whatever, but if you were to ask me, Hey, would rather you be sick or your kid be sick? I would pick me every time. And I think that that psychological and emotional shift is a very big one. Yeah.
[00:04:41] Adam Fishman: Yeah. It’s also there’s something super fragile about seeing a little kid that’s sick and doesn’t know how to deal with it the way an adult or can’t deal with it. You can’t give them medicine often and stuff like that. That’s a really interesting, no one has ever mentioned that before on the show. I appreciate that. That’s really, really interesting.
[00:05:04] Rishabh Jain: Well, there you go, man. I guess there are takes that can be uniquely had up until a thousand episodes.
[00:05:14] Adam Fishman: Well, on the way, I’m only 10% of the way there. So you believe this concept so much around kids being enforcing function and helping with your own time management stuff, that when you have a colleague who’s struggling or working through how to balance their work, you tell them you should try having kids and not in a facetious way, like, oh, life’s so hard when you have kids, you actually encourage them in a mostly serious way to do it. Why is that?
[00:05:48] Rishabh Jain: Well, sorry. It’s completely serious. And the big caveat is it is not my decision whether or not they have kids, right?
[00:05:56] Adam Fishman: Of course.
[00:05:58] Rishabh Jain: So that’s the part of it that I’m delicate about, which is like, look, ultimately it’s a highly personal decision. You should do it when it’s best for you. But with my co-founder, there’s enough trust in that relationship that I can seriously tell him, especially when he’s highly stressed, dude, you got to have kids. I have yet to meet someone actually who is highly functioning or very ambitious, who after having kids, it does not improve their work.
[00:06:26] Adam Fishman: I mean, I certainly have never met anyone on this show who said the opposite. We do try to keep it upbeat and positive here, but yeah, it’s pretty amazing. But I do have to ask you this because you also told me something in the prep for this show that might make me feel actually not, might definitely made me feel stressed out reading it, and that is that you and your family and your two kids under four or maybe at one point, just one kid have been to India five times in four years since they were born, you’ve actually gone more than once on average per year of life.
[00:07:07] Adam Fishman: There’s two things about that. One, I am insanely jealous of your kids’ frequent flyer status, but also not yours. Your kids start ’em young, right?
[00:07:18] Rishabh Jain: Yeah. I think mean, this is going to sound crazy, but I think that they probably are in the top 5% of frequent flyers period.
[00:07:28] Adam Fishman: Probably.
[00:07:29] Rishabh Jain: At this point. Yeah.
[00:07:30] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I mean that is a long ass trip. Just going to say, this is where the terror comes in for me. How do you pull off international trips to India and you’re in the Bay Area, kind of like me, and I think that’s like, well, depending on where you go in India, it’s like a 17 hour flight or something, not to mention all the other things, the prep, the whatever. So how do you pull that off with two kids under the age of four?
[00:07:54] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, I think, well, two things. One is my wife is very good at putting the kids to sleep on planes, so that is for sure a skill that she has that I think if it was just me, I’m not sure that it would be that good.
[00:08:13] Adam Fishman: You can tap into her superpower.
[00:08:14] Rishabh Jain: Totally. Yeah. So that’s a big part of it, but I think that the bigger issue is actually we’ve just gotten them, we just started doing it. Basically we just got on planes and at some point there’s a tipping point. It’s maybe sort of difficult and it’s inconvenient, and then there’s a tipping point after which you’re so used to it that it’s even second nature to them. So for my, not yet 4-year-old, but almost 4-year-old, she’s excited about going on planes, you know what I mean? And there’s a whole thing and she will help us, and so at some point it flips and so we just hit that faster basically because we travel so much.
[00:09:00] Adam Fishman: But I had to ask, okay, so your wife’s really good at getting them to go to sleep, but they can’t be sleeping for the full 17 hours of the flight. Maybe they can. And the other thing is when you’re awake and you’re three or younger, time passes very slowly. So what do you do to entertain them? They’re not quite, the younger one’s probably not even old enough to hold their attention for an episode of Daniel Tiger or Bluey or something, although maybe, I don’t know. So do you have any hacks or tricks aside from, obviously your wife is the baby whisper and can get them to go to sleep, but what do you do when they’re up? How do you entertain them or how does your three-year-old entertain themselves?
[00:09:44] Rishabh Jain: I think this is where the reps is really helpful because at this point we know all of the little toys and books and games and shows and all of the combinations and permutations of those things. I feel like we know exactly what to put into. This is now getting hyper specific, but we have one of our carry-ons that is full of the stuff for entertaining the kids for 24 hour journey because it’s actually a 24 hour journey because you have to lay over in the middle and all this other stuff.
[00:10:14] Rishabh Jain: We kind of know now the different types of books, the different types of toys, the different types of activities where this is a big psychological hack. I could not care less what other people in the plane think. I know there’s a lot of people who feel shame about when their kid is screaming or when they want to walk. I don’t care at all. So if my kid wants to run up and down the aisles and I’m like, yeah, let’s do it. And I think that a combination of just carrying all of the right playing activities, and then because we do so often, we know which ones entertain them for what period of time, and then running around and doing whatever we want is a good combo. It keeps them excited. Then my older one is very talkative too, and so I encourage her to go and hang out with the air hostess or whatever.
[00:11:02] Adam Fishman: I love that she’s chatting up the flight attendant, so a giant Mary Poppins esque bag where you can just pull out random toys, books, distracting objects, but everything’s in that so that whatever I reach in and grab, it’s going to be something for the kids that’s helpful. And then let the kids just do what it, don’t worry. Don’t try not to stress about the noise. I tend to agree with you on this, by the way. Before I had kids, I would always be like, oh, there’s a loud kid on the plane. Oh, that’s such a bummer, whatever. Now, I mean this is why noise canceling headphones and earplugs were invented. If you are traveling on a long flight, you need to have those things as a passenger, and if you don’t and someone’s making noise, it’s probably more on you than the three-year-old who can’t necessarily be quiet because they’re three. So I love that psychological hack of just getting used to the kids just being kids on an airplane. They can’t stop being a kid just 30,000 feet in the air.
[00:12:05] Rishabh Jain: I mean, this is going to sound bad, but I have no sympathy for the person. It’s like, oh, it should be quiet. It’s like, right, dude, this plane engine is plenty loud. Get over yourself. You know what I mean? If you care that much about quiet, we wouldn’t be here. Let’s just be honest with each other.
[00:12:24] Adam Fishman: Exactly, exactly. Okay, so I do want to go back and ask you a little bit about your family. So you’ve mentioned you have two kids under the age of four, and then you have a wife who works full-time as a school administrator. Tell me a little bit more about your family. How’d you and your wife meet each other?
[00:12:40] Rishabh Jain: Oh, actually we got introduced through family, so actually very stereotypical the Indian person getting introduced through family, and it worked out great actually, obviously because now it’s been 11 years of being together and we have two kids and we go back twice a year roughly to India, so that’s also amazing. I feel like it’s actually very lucky because I take so much risk in my professional life with the startup that I feel like in some ways it’s a very boring personal life, which I think is the only way that I can have such high risk tolerance in my professional life. I’m very willing to take extraordinary risk in my professional life, and I think it’s because I am so secure in my personal life. Yeah.
[00:13:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. You’ve got this sort of nice family that’s providing the anchor to you as the balloon that’s over here going like this. So yeah, I love that your wife does not exactly have a lightweight career by any stretch. Being in administration in school is a very challenging job in addition to then coming home and having a couple kids at home too. And you started Fairmont right around the time that your oldest was two weeks old, brand new. Exactly. Really young. Take me back to that time. What was the conversation, and obviously Fairmont didn’t start the moment your kid was born. You’ve been thinking about it for a while, probably talking about it. What was that conversation like with your wife about hey, I want to start this thing and also we’re going to start a family. If you go back in time like four or five years, how did that transpire?
[00:14:29] Rishabh Jain: So this is a little convoluted because of the pandemic, so there were sort of three factors that needed to come together at the same time. So the first is like, do we have confidence trying to have kids right now given the status of the vaccine? So if you transport yourself back to 2020, I joke often, but I’m pretty sure this is true. There’s a lot of pent-up kid demand. So people stopped trying from March of 2020 to December of 2020, and then all of that pent-up demand got released in December and January, and so there’s a lot of September, October 2021 birthdays. It’s very obvious that there’s just people who were not willing to try before they knew what was happening with the vaccine.
[00:15:15] Adam Fishman: Well waiting to see that the planet wasn’t going to implode perhaps.
[00:15:19] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, totally. Totally. So that was one big part, and so we wanted to have kids, and so I would be lying if I said, hey, the pandemic forced the issue once vaccines became available. So once vaccines became available, we had more confidence in trying again. So that was one part of it. Another part of it was, again, if current me told past me having a kid is better for the startup, believe me, I would not believe it. Okay. There’s no way that I would’ve believed it, even if it was literally me from the future, I would’ve just been like, okay, dude, this is Stockholm syndrome situation, but I did have the view that I can’t have a kid and not be working on something that I am passionate about. That I knew for sure because it’s like if my kid sees me doing stuff that I don’t love, that’s going to suck.
[00:16:10] Rishabh Jain: And so if I’m going to have a kid, I better be doing something that I love. So that was more the calculus, which is like, okay, I have to start a company because I know that that’s what I love, and so I want the kid to grow up in an environment where they’re observing their parents doing things that they love. So that was actually the calculus, and so that’s sort of what our conversations were centered around and the rest of it, the economics and things like that, we made sure that everything was set up so that way we could take that bet, but that was fundamentally what it was about is how do we want to raise kids and it’s like we want to raise kids in a home environment where they see their parents are passionate about what they do and the rest of it will follow, is roughly what my thinking is. Yeah.
[00:16:56] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that’s really interesting approach. A lot of people would be afraid of starting a family and a business at the same time, but for you it’s actually kind of a catalyst. You needed the energy and the enthusiasm and the excitement that building a company brings you to be better dad, better parent.
[00:17:17] Rishabh Jain: Yeah. I mean I think it’s just like do you find yourself to be a better dad now that you’re doing the podcast?
[00:17:23] Adam Fishman: Probably.
[00:17:24] Rishabh Jain: Yeah. You have more energy-giving things in your life, right?
[00:17:31] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:17:31] Rishabh Jain: My guess is you wouldn’t be doing this if it weren’t energy giving in some way as opposed to energy taking. And so lots of people have optionality in their career where it’s like, hey, I’m fortunate enough to have optionality. I can do whatever I choose to do. Given that optionality, I better be doing things that are energy giving versus energy taking because then I can do more things that are further energy giving, like spend time with my kids in a way in which is energy giving and so on and so on and so on and so on. I think it’s roughly in that category, and my prior job was I grew a lot, but it was energy taking and that’s not the same at all. Right?
[00:18:15] Adam Fishman: Yeah. What are some of the more surprising things that you’ve discovered since becoming a dad?
[00:18:21] Rishabh Jain: I hate using this analogy, but it is sort of true. I think that my expectation of adults has increased at the same time as my patience for kids has increased.
[00:18:33] Adam Fishman: Why do you hate using that analogy?
[00:18:35] Rishabh Jain: The worst way of saying this is I don’t want to feel like I have to parent people at work. That’s the worst way of saying it, and the sort of more eloquent way of saying it is for a kid, you can tell what their learning curve is and it’s very easy to have, at least for me, very easy to have a lot of patience with kids and at the same time with adults. I’m like, now the difference between an adult and a kid is extremely clear to me. You should be able to hold yourself to whatever thing it is that you’re trying to accomplish as an adult. Actually, my patience with adults has gone down at the same time as my patience with kids has gone up, which I would not have expected.
[00:19:15] Adam Fishman: And that’s because of that just extreme contrast between what is it like to have a couple of kids under the age of four versus working with competent professionals at the top of their game. Not that your kids are not competent, but they can’t do very much at their ages.
[00:19:32] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Or at a minimum, even with lack of competence, the desire to learn of a kid is extreme. Maybe this is what it is. A kid’s desire to learn is extraordinarily high, even if they get frustrated when it doesn’t work and things like that. The desire to learn is very high, whereas with an adult, it’s like if you’re neither showing competence nor a desire to learn, then I am not sure that I can actually, I’m not the right person for you to interact with. Yeah.
[00:19:56] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So would you say having kids has raised your bar as a founder in some ways?
[00:20:04] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, exactly. For anybody who I interact with, whether it’s like an employee, like a stakeholder, an investor, whatever it may be, because either that you don’t know or you actually are highly competent at something, and in either case you should be able to hold yourself to the self-learning cycle as opposed to with a kid who does need teachers. Those are very different learning and growth paradigms.
[00:20:31] Adam Fishman: So you mentioned that if you could rewind the clock and you bumped into your younger self and you were like, hey, being a parent is going to make me a better founder, that younger Rishabh would be like, no, no way. I don’t believe for a second. So you found that to be true now, but if you could go back and you bumped into your younger self, is there any advice that you would give the four year ago version of yourself, four or five year ago version, about becoming a dad?
[00:21:02] Rishabh Jain: I’m not totally sure to be honest. There’s only one thing that I have felt about being a dad that I did not, again, I would not have known prior to it, which is I think it is the case that it’s hard for it to feel like you did it too soon within a certain range. It’s easy for it to feel like you did it too late. Yeah, that’s roughly the one thing that I think probably.
[00:21:26] Adam Fishman: And why is that? Why is it hard to think it’s too soon and easy to think it’s too late?
[00:21:31] Rishabh Jain: The part of parenting that everybody tells you which ends up being true is you figure it out. So that’s the part of it that it’s somehow making that more real for someone is very hard to do until they actually experience it. But it is true that you just figure it out. At the same time, there are aspects of it being too late that are very real. A big thing that I invest into now is I invest into my physical health because I’m very viscerally aware that my kids are going to be in their twenties when I’m in my sixties or late fifties, sixties, and so it’s like, oh my God, I want to be able to do stuff with them, literally whatever they want to do, whether it’s hiking, running, it doesn’t matter what they want to do, sailing. I want to be able to do that. And so I am investing an incredible amount in staying healthy in order to be able to enjoy as much as I can with them. And so that’s the part that it can be easy to feel like it’s too late, but it’s harder for me to imagine it feeling like it was too early.
[00:22:37] Adam Fishman: That makes a ton of sense. And now I want to talk a little bit about in addition to advice that you would give your younger self, you have a couple of frameworks, we’ll loosely call them frameworks for being a dad, being a founder, balancing those two things. The first one is how you manage your mornings. So why is it important for you to manage your mornings and what do you do in the morning?
[00:22:59] Rishabh Jain: I was talking to another friend of mine who’s also an investor, and I was telling him that the morning time is the most precious time for two reasons. One is especially when your kids are younger, that’s actually when they are the most fun to interact with. By the evenings, they get tired and cranky and it’s like the quality of that time is not as high basically. And so one part of it is just making sure you’re able to actually spend morning time with your kids. That’s a big part of it. The second big part of it is, at least for me, I’ve always been a morning person, and so instead of trying to do work at night after they go to bed, I now think about how do I get work done in the morning before they’re up, and that’s actually more effective for me because I’m sufficiently tired by the end of the night that trying to knock things out after they go to bed is not realistic essentially. I would much rather just go to bed at the same time as them and wake up super early, which is what my schedule has ended up becoming.
[00:24:04] Adam Fishman: And what is super early in your household? What time do your kids get up in the morning?
[00:24:09] Rishabh Jain: I wake up at five and they wake up at six thirty, so I have an hour and a half before they get up.
[00:24:15] Adam Fishman: When your kids get up, you’re already fully awake, you’ve cranked out at least probably an hour of work, maybe had some coffee or tea or something. You’re ready to go for the day. So are you then the person that’s greeting the kids, getting them up, getting them going? Obviously this week you are because your wife is traveling, but is that a typical day in your household?
[00:24:37] Rishabh Jain: Exactly, yeah, so I’m the one getting them ready basically. Yeah, so I’m getting the older one ready and then my wife drops her to school and then once that happens, I’m taking care of the younger one until the nanny comes in, so I have an hour and a half with them every morning.
[00:24:55] Adam Fishman: Great. From six thirty to eight or something?
[00:24:58] Rishabh Jain: Eight, exactly.
[00:24:59] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome.
[00:24:59] Rishabh Jain: Exactly.
[00:25:00] Adam Fishman: What’s interesting about that is a lot of founders, and also myself included, when I had young kids, I didn’t do that system even though I’m a morning person, I didn’t get up earlier. I woke up a little bit before them, but not too much. And I would do the kind of like, I’m going to take a breather at night, be with the kids for a couple hours, put them to bed and then get back online. You’re sort of doing the opposite. You’re inverting the day in a way because you’re going to bed roughly shortly thereafter them and not trying to do a bunch of extra work at night probably also helps your sleep too, which is really interesting. Not great to be on a computer right before you go to bed. So interesting approach. I love it. Second framework is that time with your kids helps you feel more balanced at work. So tell me about that. You mentioned a little bit about emotional balance and the physical demands of being with your kids, but tell me about how it makes you feel more balanced at work.
[00:25:56] Rishabh Jain: I think the parts of me that have to be engaged at work is so different than the parts of me that have to be engaged at home. At work it is mostly my thinking self, not that being emotionally supportive to your team isn’t important, but it’s just that is not the thing that my team comes to me for.
[00:26:18] Rishabh Jain: The thing that my team comes to me for is my ability to problem solve or clarify strategy or things like that. And actually they go to my co-founder for the more empathy related topics, which is just an evolution of both how I show up at work and also where my co-founder’s strengths are, right? So that actually means that I get engaged very differently at work than I do with my kids, and so with my kids, it is emotion, physical, creative in different ways than at work. And so I think that balance of how you get engaged, again, going back to the energy-giving thing, it’s much more energy giving, and so that has helped me balance way more because otherwise, again, this whole you can work 17 hours straight. The problem with working, at least for me, one of the biggest problems with working 17 hours straight is the part of my brain that gets engaged is the same all 17, and that’s annoying. It’s not that annoying that you have to work a lot as a founder. What’s annoying is if you have to work a lot and it’s all the same type of work. That’s what I think is the part about it that’s much more high balance with kids in my opinion.
[00:27:38] Adam Fishman: Yeah, it’s like you get to kind of engage a portfolio of stuff between work and home. You’re not rolling around on the floor, I would hope, with your coworkers and your teammates, but you get to do that at home.
[00:27:51] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Literally.
[00:27:55] Adam Fishman: How old are your kids?
[00:27:59] Rishabh Jain: Okay. So I don’t know if this is relevant anymore, but a big unlock I discovered yesterday is YouTube videos for dance classes. So my older one is now at the age at which she’s again desiring to learn a lot of different things, and so I just put on a YouTube video of a dance class for toddlers and it’s like a 10, 15 minute video and I put it on repeat and she did the class like five times in a row. So the five times in a row part might not work for a 10-year-old, but the classes through YouTube, I mean this is such an obvious thing in retrospect, but the classes through YouTube even for toddlers is so effective. I mean it was kind of mind boggling actually.
[00:28:50] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Did you do the dancing with her? Maybe not all five of the times, but a couple.
[00:28:54] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, exactly. So this is my point is you can, and there are parts of her learning in that medium that I’m not able to do because there’s other kids on the video and whatever, but I’ve been wanting to do dance because I like dancing too, and so I’ve been wanting to do dance with her forever and I try all the time and we do all sorts of other fun dance, but this is a way to upskill the different movements that her body is learning basically.
[00:29:25] Adam Fishman: Very cool. Love that. I’ll have to check it out and see if the 10 or 12 and a half year old is into it. Maybe the 12 and a half year old will be. We’ll see. She already does dance, so you might want to do some YouTube. Amazing. Although she may be too embarrassed to do it with me. We’ll see. Okay. You mentioned that your wife is the baby whisperer when it comes to getting your kids to sleep on an airplane. What is something else that you’ve learned about parenting from your wife who has a lot of interactions with kids? I would imagine in her life as a school administrator.
[00:29:58] Rishabh Jain: I’ve been actually very pleasantly surprised at how much we both agree that at least for our kids, I live in the Bay area and one of the biggest things that I have to worry about is there’s so much pressure on kids in school to perform. And so luckily for us, my wife works at a school that prioritizes social emotional learning, and we both agree very heavily that the priority is social emotional skills over can she do math at four or five or six or because it’s like the math is going to come and there’s going to be plenty of other pressure to be good at it. She’s going to grow up in the Bay Area no matter what I do, for better or for worse, that’s going to happen. So because she comes from that type of schooling, she just has more tools and techniques to think about that. So we both have the same desired outcome, and so she just has more ways to, which has been really great. It’s a somewhat more tactical thing, but the philosophy of how to go about thinking about that when you’re raising kids at this age has been really great.
[00:31:12] Adam Fishman: That’s great. What’s an area that you and your wife don’t agree on when it comes to parenting?
[00:31:20] Rishabh Jain: Modes of failure and risk seeking. I am seeking to introduce more risk and more modes of failure into our kids’ life at higher rate than she is. I’ll give you the simplest example of how this shows up. It’s like if our daughter’s jumping off the sofa or things like that, I’m like, you have to jump higher. And my wife is like, don’t jump off the sofa. Do you see how it shows up? Yeah, yeah. I’m like, put an object in the middle. See if you can jump over the object, make it harder. Let’s put more risk and more likelihood of failure into the system. Yeah.
[00:31:58] Adam Fishman: I mean that kind of fits with the career paths that each of you have chosen and things like that. It sounds like a good balance, right? Your daughter’s probably going to be fine because you got that good little yin and yang.
[00:32:10] Rishabh Jain: Totally. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think all of these are like, I don’t want to get into a whole nature nurture debate, but how much a parent can influence their kids. It’s like we’re going to try to be as helpful as possible and hope we don’t cause too much therapy in the future.
[00:32:29] Speaker 3: And.
[00:32:30] Rishabh Jain: Past that, I’m not sure because they’re just going to have so many other inputs. They’re going to have school, they’re going to have friends, they’re going to have the environment. The total number of inputs is going to be so massive. It’s just hard to know.
[00:32:43] Adam Fishman: Yeah, you would be in good company with many of the other dads on this show who feel very similar. Not every one of them had a lot, but it’s a common refrain. Speaking of something you have in common with some of the other dads on the show, you’re a founder in technology. You founded a bunch of companies. I would say probably your entire professional career has been steeped in working in and around technology. You live in the Bay Area, it’s like ground zero for that here. When you think about the relationship you want your kids to have with technology, especially with the pace that is changing and what we’re experiencing now, what do you think about, what is that relationship that you want your kids to have with technology as they start to get older?
[00:33:25] Rishabh Jain: I wish I was using technology sooner than I have had when I was growing up, and I think that a lot of people say, oh, if you let your kids use ChatGPT for everything, then what are they going to think about? Or whatever. Or there’s this study that got published where it’s like if you use ChatGPT, you don’t think as much, or there was all sorts of things like that. So I grew up without using a calculator. So until I want to say 11th grade, I didn’t use a calculator. I used log books and I could do everything either in my head or on paper, which just means that at this point in my life, I’m really good at calculating the tip. That’s basically it. That’s the only use of this extraordinary math capability.
[00:34:12] Rishabh Jain: And that’s sort of the point that I try to make to people whenever they say this, it’s like, oh, you shouldn’t use it too much because then you won’t learn how to think. And I’m like, guys, I am the version of you that did not use technology. If you want to run the A/B test, you and me are both sitting here. We grew up around the same time, I assume, and I’m the version of you that did not use technology. I did not use a calculator. And let me tell you, it did not help. And so don’t stop people from using ChatGPT to do their thing because what will happen is instead of sitting there trying to figure out how to multiply 18 by 137, they’re going to think about the next order problem. And so your abstraction capability, your ability to think at higher abstraction and therefore about more important things because you can outsource a low level part of your thinking is going to be so much bigger that actually that’s the more important thing to worry about.
[00:35:07] Rishabh Jain: And today we don’t even know what that kind of abstraction thinking looks like. And by the way, it’s obviously the biggest fault with studies that are studying right now, whether or not people are thinking because we have not given enough time for us as humans to adapt to what is the new order of thinking that we can now do, now that we can outsource shitty thinking to Chad GBT, but our brains are magnificent, so they will evolve into the next layer of being able to think and or we don’t know how to test it. Likely the latter because we’re notoriously bad at testing things. But that’s my point is I definitely want my kids to grow up with technology. I definitely think they should be highly competent. I think they should use it to the extremes, and I think that that will allow them to worry about the right problems and not about multiplying when I grew up.
[00:35:55] Adam Fishman: I love that approach. It’s very interesting. I want to stay on the AI topic for a second. Not sure if you’ve heard of it. It’s on a lot of people’s minds lately. You mentioned chat, GPT, so I assume you are a user of it. You also told me that you use chatt PT, your kids are a little too young, I think, to be giving prompts and stuff like that. But you said you use it voice mode. I dunno if it’s chat, GPT or Claude or one of the other ones to help answer some of your kids’ questions. So I wanted to ask you, what are some of the favorites that come up in your household that you’ve used voice mode to answer.
[00:36:31] Rishabh Jain: At this point? It’s simpler things like you said, because my kids are younger, but right now my older daughter is in the why that stage and says I won’t know sometimes. And so I just say, I don’t know. Let’s ask my phone. She knows Google. She doesn’t know chat GPT, but so I’ll use that and say, Hey, what is this? And then it’ll tell us, or I’ll use it to say, Hey, this is the weather. Should a 4-year-old wear a jacket’s? You know what I mean? And then it’ll tell us, right? And so I use it in that capacity and for my daughter, it makes it a source of information and action that is usable and it makes it feel like another input that is not her, not me. And it is just another thing, which I think is the right way for her to grow up and think about this technology is as a whatever, copilot or whatever your favorite analogy is. She knows that that is possible, but it is not the same as a human interaction.
[00:37:37] Adam Fishman: That’s really interesting, and it’s just another data point. It’s not like an authoritative figure or anything like that. It’s just another input into whether we should wear a jacket today. Oh, it looks like dad and the phone agree. Probably we should wear a jacket.
[00:37:54] Rishabh Jain: But sometimes the phone doesn’t agree with me, which is kind of surprising actually. You know what I mean? I’m hoping it agrees with me, but sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s okay too.
[00:38:05] Adam Fishman: Especially because open AI is based in the Bay Area. You would think it would have this weather thing figured out. Before we adjourn and get into lightning around, I wanted to ask you two more things. One is I wanted to ask you a little bit a question about how you think, and I think I can sort of infer that from this conversation, but as a dad and a founder, one of the things that you told me is that being clear-minded about what matters is the most helpful thing. So tell me more about that.
[00:38:35] Rishabh Jain: The thing that I go back to over and over again that has helped me so far is knowing what to ignore, which is almost everything, and then knowing what are the one or two things that are actually likely to make a difference either at home or at work. And so my wife does not love this, but there’s a large number of things at home that I’m just like, we can pick anything. It’s really just not going to matter. This is not the thing that sets the timeline as it were, so trying to just be very clear, at least for our family and our family values. What are the one or two things that we actually care about so we can spend our time on that and energy on that. At work, this becomes super important because you just don’t have, if you’re running a startup, especially, you just don’t have the bandwidth to overthink things that don’t matter.
[00:39:24] Rishabh Jain: I was telling, actually, my coach recently, so I worked with an exec coach and I was telling him recently, I kind of understand why Peter Thiel said, if you’re not talking to me about the one thing that matters, I’m walking away. I think that that’s a extreme way of implementing the belief. Trust me, I heard about this 15 years ago and I thought it was crazy that somebody did this, and now I’m like, oh my God, there’s so much wisdom in that. I’m trying to implement my version of that, which is not as aggressive as walking out of the room, but it’s like if somebody brings something up, I’ll just ask them how does this affect, and then the thing, the
[00:40:02] Adam Fishman: Most important thing,
[00:40:03] Rishabh Jain: And then they say it doesn’t, and then I’m like, okay, interesting. So why do you think we should spend time on it? Maybe, I don’t know. Right? Maybe there is a reason why we should spend time on it, even though it’s not the thing, and I want to learn if there is a reason, but if there isn’t a good reason, then I don’t want to spend time. The inverse is also true. This morning I had my leadership team meeting and I asked my CMO was concerned about something and I said, okay, great. Does it matter? And he’s like, yes, it matters. I was like, are you sure it matters? He’s like, yes, I’m sure it matters. I was like, okay, great. We’re putting a meeting every day for 15 minutes every day where these four people are going to report on this thing every day until it doesn’t matter anymore, and you’re going to be one of those people if it matters, you should be willing to come every day to a 15 minute standup. Are you willing to do that? And I said, yeah. So I was like, great. Then that’s what we’re going to do because either things matter or they don’t matter, and you just push it to its extreme and then you will very quickly figure out whether the thing matters or not.
[00:41:02] Adam Fishman: I love that to end, how can people follow along or be helpful to you?
[00:41:08] Rishabh Jain: We were talking about it right before we recorded, but I’m very active on the socials. I’m just rich MJ on either Twitter or LinkedIn and also have a couple of podcasts if they’re interesting for people in e-comm, e-comm and marketing oriented. So if you’re interested in NewCom marketing, please follow those too.
[00:41:25] Adam Fishman: Awesome. We will link to all of those things in the show notes, and I hope you get a few more listeners to your pod as a result. Are you ready for lightning round?
[00:41:35] Rishabh Jain: Yes, and this one I did not read ahead purposely because I thought it would be more fun to just get my instant reactions. Everything else I was prepped for, and I was like, lightning round is way more fun when the person just responds, so
[00:41:48] Adam Fishman: I would agree. Also, no one is ever truly ready for lightning round, so here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:41:57] Rishabh Jain: Oh my God. The bum brush. The bum brush. I’ve never heard of this.
[00:42:01] Adam Fishman: Tell me about
[00:42:01] Rishabh Jain: It. It’s like a little spatula to put butt cream on your baby’s butt.
[00:42:08] Adam Fishman: I love this. I can’t wait to link to that.
[00:42:11] Rishabh Jain: It’s like the number one thing we gift to people too because it’s so random, and then everyone who we’ve given it to just like, oh my God, I would not have expected this to be so useful.
[00:42:22] Adam Fishman: That’s amazing, man. I should go buy stock. What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:42:28] Rishabh Jain: Oh my god, dude. Okay, so this is probably just because my wife is very good at nursing our kids, but I think we bought seven different versions of nursing pillows and use zero of them.
[00:42:42] Adam Fishman: Okay, so maybe stick to one version or just borrow one? Try it out, see if you use it.
[00:42:48] Rishabh Jain: Exactly. Yeah.
[00:42:49] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the weirdest thing you’ve ever found in one of your kids’ pockets or in the washing machine?
[00:42:56] Rishabh Jain: Oh my God. Okay. We have put a diaper in the washing machine, and let me tell you, this is the most painful thing to put into a washing machine because the amount of stuff you have to clean after a diaper accidentally goes into the washing machine is super annoying. Yes.
[00:43:14] Adam Fishman: It turns out there’s a lot that make up a diaper and it’s technology and construction and it’s not compatible with a washing machine. Correct. I am so sorry for you. Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load the dishwasher.
[00:43:30] Rishabh Jain: Oh my God. You’re going to kill me. True.
[00:43:33] Adam Fishman: I’m not going to kill you. I
[00:43:35] Rishabh Jain: Agree. No, you’re going to get me killed. I’m going to get killed. Sorry. You’re get me
[00:43:39] Adam Fishman: Killed. Quick follow up, is that your way of loading the dishwasher is the one correct way?
[00:43:46] Rishabh Jain: I am close to the one correct way.
[00:43:48] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:43:49] Rishabh Jain: I know that I am not yet there. There’s a Japanese master somewhere of that. I’m confident. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m close. Yeah.
[00:43:58] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[00:44:01] Rishabh Jain: I would have to say it is fast snack prep or fast meal prep.
[00:44:06] Adam Fishman: That’s a good one. Very important. Aside from cleaning diapers out of the washing machine, what is your least favorite parenting task?
[00:44:14] Rishabh Jain: I don’t have one yet. I’m not going to lie.
[00:44:17] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:44:18] Rishabh Jain: I don’t have one yet. I wish I was just saying that for the sake of saying it.
[00:44:23] Adam Fishman: That’s okay. Good lesson. Good life lesson here. There isn’t yet one. There isn’t
[00:44:29] Rishabh Jain: Yet one. Yeah.
[00:44:30] Adam Fishman: I think I know the answer to this, but 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
[00:44:37] Rishabh Jain: Six to 8:00 PM Ah. Yes. It’s insane.
[00:44:41] Adam Fishman: I’ll bet. The ideal day with your kids involves what? One activity
[00:44:46] Rishabh Jain: Either scootering to the park nearby or I think we were talking about this, the dance party, so I try to do almost every day a family dance party basically. Love
[00:44:59] Adam Fishman: That. If your kids had to describe you in one word, what would that be?
[00:45:04] Rishabh Jain: I’m pretty physical with them, so at this point I think they would say I do a lot of throwing and swinging and things like that, so I think that that’s what they would describe.
[00:45:16] Adam Fishman: Awesome. How many parenting books do you have in your house?
[00:45:19] Rishabh Jain: I have six unopened parenting books.
[00:45:21] Adam Fishman: That answers my next question, which is how many of them have you read cover to cover and zero?
[00:45:27] Rishabh Jain: I read only one. I literally read only what to expect when you’re expecting.
[00:45:30] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:45:31] Rishabh Jain: What? My wife was pregnant the first time and then all of the parenting books that I bought for the dad version of it I didn’t touch.
[00:45:38] Adam Fishman: Okay, great. Great. Good to
[00:45:40] Rishabh Jain: Know. It turns out being a supportive husband was the only thing that mattered
[00:45:44] Adam Fishman: Basically. I would agree. Yeah. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[00:45:50] Rishabh Jain: I’m trying to increase my game. I am okay with a high failure rate and being CEO means that other people need to deal with you telling bad jokes. I love it. I get two benefits as CEO. I get to pick where the office is, which is next to my house, and I get to tell how many ever jokes I want no matter how bad they are, and people will tell me that they’re bad or not.
[00:46:11] Adam Fishman: Okay, great. What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?
[00:46:18] Rishabh Jain: I’m not sure this is a fair representation, but I had my daughter pick our car. Oh, my three-year-old pick our most recent car. Yeah.
[00:46:27] Adam Fishman: Okay. What were her criteria for selecting the car?
[00:46:31] Rishabh Jain: That’s what I’m saying. It’s not super fair. It’s like we bought a Tesla and it turns out there’s not many choices, which is the beauty of buying a Tesla. It you get to pick the color, you get to pick the whatever, and now she doesn’t like the color anymore, which is a separate issue, but she did pick Pick what car we bought. Yeah.
[00:46:50] Adam Fishman: You’re teaching her a valuable life lesson.
[00:46:52] Rishabh Jain: Okay.
[00:46:54] Adam Fishman: What is the most difficult kids TV show that you’ve had to sit through?
[00:46:58] Rishabh Jain: Actually, we don’t allow Coco Melon, and that’s the only thing we don’t allow. Once or twice, we let my older daughter watch it and the level to which it sucked her in scared the living hell out of me. I don’t think I’ve ever been more scared, actually. Yeah.
[00:47:18] Adam Fishman: Okay, so that’s a big no on Coco Melon
[00:47:21] Rishabh Jain: Big. No.
[00:47:21] Adam Fishman: You would also be in good company on this podcast. With that take, what is your favorite kid’s movie?
[00:47:28] Rishabh Jain: Oh, Zootopia.
[00:47:29] Adam Fishman: Okay. What nostalgic movie can you just not wait to force your kids to watch when they’re old enough?
[00:47:38] Rishabh Jain: My biggest one was Lion King, but we’ve already watched it so that what that used to be the go-to I am excited for. This is not real nostalgia, but I am excited for when my kid’s old enough to watch the first Ironman.
[00:47:53] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s a good one. Yeah. Okay. We’re in the home stretch. Got two left for you, what is the worst experience you’ve ever had? Assembling a kid’s toy or a piece of furniture?
[00:48:06] Rishabh Jain: We have this bed that has these shelves underneath it for extra storage. I got so irritated that my wife ended up building it.
[00:48:18] Adam Fishman: Love that. I have similar stories. Okay. Finally, you did mention the Tesla, but what is your take on minivans?
[00:48:28] Rishabh Jain: Oh, strong. Yes.
[00:48:29] Adam Fishman: Strong. Yes. On minivans?
[00:48:31] Rishabh Jain: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only reason we bought a Tesla is because my wife vetoed the Volkswagen bus. Oh, okay. I wanted to buy the new electric bus and she was not ready for the minivan slash bus life. The
[00:48:46] Adam Fishman: Van life. Yeah. Yeah. I saw one of those on the road the other day. It was quite slick, pretty cool
[00:48:51] Rishabh Jain: Looking. I don’t think there’s ever been a better third row made. I’m very excited about when I get the opportunity to switch to minivan.
[00:49:00] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:49:01] Rishabh Jain: What’s the current polling at? How many of the hundred or so people are minivan versus SUV? Oh, you’re in the minority,
[00:49:11] Adam Fishman: But no way. It’s not terrible. I would say it’s probably two-thirds anti one-third. One-third pro. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:49:22] Rishabh Jain: No way.
[00:49:23] Adam Fishman: Well, and that is also skewed by, that’s wild. That is skewed by the dads that I have on the show that have three or more kids, so they’re all pro minivan usually because they just need it. It’s like a lifeline. It’s a requirement, but yeah, not a big minivan crowd on the show.
[00:49:42] Rishabh Jain: Oh my God. Okay. Well, it’s okay. Up until this moment, I was excited for my wife to listen to this episode.
[00:49:49] Adam Fishman: Just kidding. We’re going to scrub that out in post everyone’s pro minivan and to your wife, you really need that electric VW bug a bus. Exactly. There we go. Yeah, definitely. Okay, cool. It’s cool. We’ll definitely fix this in the editing process for her. No, I’m going to leave this all in, actually. This is the best. Okay. Rishabh, thank you so much for joining me on Startup Dad today. This was a great conversation. I wish you, your kids, your wife and your company, all the best for the rest of the year, and I do hope that you get that electric bus someday.
[00:50:28] Rishabh Jain: Thank you. Yeah, this was super fun. Thanks for having me, Adam.
[00:50:31] Adam Fishman: Of course. Thank you for listening to today’s episode with Rishabh Jain. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening. See you next week.”