The Making Of Explor.AI

March 16. The day they closed school and daycare because of COVID-19. The day I [started / was supposed t0 start] working full time for explor.ai. I ended up at home, with four kids (below 8!), all the way to September 2020...

Being a full time [CEO / DAD]

Launching a company is hard. It takes time. It takes a lot of efforts. Innumerable hours.

Taking care of children is hard. It takes all of your time. It takes a lot of efforts. You can never really put enough time into it.

See a pattern? How can one person do both? Let me say I had a hard time finding equilibrium. Here is what worked for me...

Do one at a time, never both.

Doing both completely drained me.

I would try to write down a grant while piloting an activity for the kids. I may get half an hour of work done, but it would cost me all my energy for the day. When that happened I would end up grumpy, and just unfun to be with.

So, lesson learned, I would be with the kids from 7am to 3pm, with very few exceptions (30min meetings). The rest of the day was for explor.ai (typically my wife would come back from work and take the shift).

The cost of missing opportunities

Every hour I can put on the business development of explor.ai brings more opportunities, more business, drives more revenues. Accordingly, every hour missed has a "price tag".

When I started hiring and building the AI experts community, I was ashamed of not growing the company fast enough to bring them projects. It was a lot of [negative] pressure! It took a while before this feeling got away.

Has I was enjoying time with my kids, I started to realize that they were appreciating it. They would comment on their great day, or they would tell me they were looking forward for the next day. By the end of summer, I would start seeing things differently : I would look at the revenues lost (the hourly price tag) as a per-hour investment in my family.

Then the shame finally disappeared.

Next up : A [un]typical summer schedule