Ella

Note: A special thanks to my wife, Nikki, for guest-editing this post.

I’m out on parental leave, which is ironic because 1) I’m still writing this newsletter and 2) despite this being the third baby we’ve welcomed since starting the company, this is the first time I’m actually confident about taking leave.

Ella was born last week (there’s a picture below), and, for a few months before she was born, my wife and I used to wonder whether she would be more like Miles or Ari (her older brothers). It’s taken all of about seven days for us to be reminded that, no, Ella wouldn’t fall into their pre-established molds. Instead she would be uniquely herself – presenting unexpected challenges and joys that threw us third-time parents for a bit of a loop. 

Over the past week, I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on how much the growth of my family mirrors the growth of our company. My oldest, Miles, was born the same week we closed our seed funding.

When he was born, there were a ton of unknowns — in every facet of life. On the personal side, we hadn’t been parents before, and we didn’t know what to expect. What’s funny is how many of our friends were ready with advice that they were eager to impart from their own experiences. From the “ideal” nap schedule to the best way to feed our baby, there were no shortages of “rules” we were told to follow for ultimate success. But, as was with startup advice, it was often contradictory and largely colored by the advisors’ own personal experiences (even though it came with nothing but good intentions). You can read every blog out there, whether the topic is sleep training or fundraising, but at the end of the day you just need to figure out what works for you and your baby.

Ari was born 18 months later. We sort of knew what to expect in terms of caring for a newborn, but from the moment he entered the world, Ari was entirely different from his brother. The challenges we anticipated him having were non-issues while areas that we never broached with Miles became new arenas to become fast experts. Not to mention the fact that we had no idea how to parent two kids. The mistakes we made felt like they would make a bigger impact on our family of four- especially on our toddler who was becoming more impressionable by the day. 

Similarly, the challenges we faced at Intelligems in year one were starkly different to years 2 and 3 when we were no longer solely concerned with building an MVP product and now responsible for setting a company culture and growing our market share in a way that would facilitate growth. In both scenarios, the stakes and challenges seemed to multiply by a factor of more than just two. 

When Miles was born, Intelligems was a company of two — myself, Drew, and a couple of interns. When Ari was born, we were 12 people. We’re at 40 now. And as I become a dad of three kids and prepare to enter year 5 of Intelligems, I can fully acknowledge that while I am thoroughly enjoying both rides, I am far from an expert in either. 

I may not know exactly what’s waiting behind each turn and I can’t perfectly anticipate the challenges that lie ahead, but I do feel confident in the understanding that, throughout the years, I’ve gained perspective and built the skillset needed to assess a situation as its own unique entity. 

With parenting, striking “success” (if you can call it that) has been a small amount of reading up  on expert advice and sharing tips with fellow parents and  a large amount of tuning into the specific needs of each kid (which happen to shift nearly weekly). Similarly, some of our best product ideas and pivots haven’t come from startup bootcamps or investors (though we do love our investors), but from our customers themselves. 

And by taking all the advice, all the feedback, and our own intuitions and synthesizing it as best as we can, we’ve been tackling each new challenge as it presents itself, one day at a time. 

There’s something liberating about understanding that no two humans or companies are identical.