Startup Dad

Aakash Gupta is a creator, product advisor, author, and the host of one of the most popular newsletters, podcasts, and social accounts for product managers and AI builders. He built a following of over 350,000 people on LinkedIn through six years of daily posting and now uses AI to create leverage across his work and family life. He’s also a dad of two who stepped away from a VP of Product role to...

Ankit Gupta is the Founder of Bicycle Health , a company he built and led for nearly nine years before handing over the CEO role and becoming a stay-at-home dad. Before Bicycle, Ankit co-founded Pulse while at Stanford, a news app that caught the attention of Steve Jobs, was famously pulled from the App Store later that same day, and was eventually acquired by LinkedIn. He’s also a dad of one, wit...

Brad Harrington is the former Executive Director of the Boston College Center for Work & Family and spent nearly two decades at Hewlett-Packard , earning his PhD along the way. He walked away from corporate America and took a  75% pay cut to become one of the leading researchers on fatherhood, caregiving, and work-family integration. Now retired, Brad is a happily married dad of three who has...

Adam Grenier is the Founder of AI Matey , a growth and product advisor, longtime startup operator, and the creator of DadBench , an AI evaluation system built around one deceptively difficult challenge, teaching a model to write a good dad joke. He’s also a dad of three and one of the very first guests to appear on Startup Dad (#2 in fact!). Three years later, Adam is back to talk about what has c...

Jackie Nesi, PhD is a clinical psychologist, researcher, and associate professor at Brown University . She is also the creator of Techno Sapiens , a weekly Substack newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers dedicated to translating the latest research on kids, technology, and mental health into practical advice for parents. Beyond her academic work and her testimony before the U.S. Senate on social...

Harry Roegiers is the founder of Stuntpony; a live call coach for B2B salespeople. He’s spent the last decade working in sales performance, growth, and revenue strategy, helping teams improve how they sell and scale. He’s also a father of three whose journey into parenthood started with a surprise. Just days after proposing to his wife Hannelore in Paris, they found out they were expecting their f...

Dirk Doebler is the Founder and CEO at Parento Leave , a company dedicated to helping organizations build better parental leave programs. He lives with his wife and 3-year-old son. Dirk and his wife spent serious time before becoming parents asking a fundamental question: Do we even want kids? And if so, how would we raise them without giving up our own dreams and lives? What emerged from that pro...

Matt Fairbanks is the Chief Marketing Officer of the enterprise browser and platform company, Island . He built a highly successful career as a tech executive in Silicon Valley, navigating the demanding, fast-paced culture of the tech industry before making the bold decision to pull up roots and relocate his family to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for a much-needed reset. He’s married to Trish, and toget...

Kevin Maguire is the former Head of Strategy for Consumer Apps at Google and is now the author of The New Fatherhood and creator of the newsletter of the same name , a community read by over 23,000 dads. Before writing the book Kevin  moved his family from the UK to San Francisco and eventually left the Bay Area for Barcelona, where he now lives with his wife, an and their two kids. He's also a co...

Ghazi Masood is the Chief Revenue Officer at Replit , where he leads revenue for one of the fastest growing AI coding platforms in the world. He’s also a father of two teenage boys, a husband of nearly 25 years, and a pilot who spends much of his free time flying on nonprofit humanitarian missions. I reached out to Ghazi after a LinkedIn post he wrote about why teenagers should spend more time bui...

Matt Korn is a Partner at Pierson Ferdinand LLP and the founder of Dad, Esquire , an online community dedicated to supporting fatherhood within the legal profession. He built the community after spending years in Big Law, navigating the demanding culture of corporate legal practice while striving to be an emotionally present father to his four children. He’s married to Haley, and together they are...

Zach Jaffe is an M&A professional at Create Music Group , where he focuses on independent record label acquisitions. After years in the LA music industry and startup world, Zach became the first in his friend group to have a child, which meant navigating early fatherhood without much of a roadmap or many people around him who could truly relate. He’s also a dad to one three-year-old daughter a...

Jamie Kaler is a former Naval Officer turned actor, stand-up comedian and stay-at-home dad. He is best known for his role on TBS's "My Boys" and decades of work across television and commercials, from Friends and Will & Grace to How I Met Your Mother and The Family Stone. He spent five years as a U.S. Navy officer before moving to LA at 30 with no connections to pursue acting, eventually becom...

Davis Smith is the Founder and Chairman of Cotopaxi , an outdoor gear brand built around fighting poverty and doing good in the world. Before stepping back as CEO after a decade of leading the company, Davis grew Cotopaxi at 85% CAGR into one of the most purpose-driven brands in the outdoor industry. He left and moved with his wife and four kids to be a mission president for his church in Brazil,...

Matt Pasternack is the co-founder and CEO of Once , a science of reading-based software that teaches children ages three to seven how to read. He built the company after watching his wife teach their daughter to read in just 15 minutes a day during the pandemic, and realizing every parent could do the same. He's also a father of three, with kids ages six, eight, and ten. His parenting journey has...

David Reich is the Founder and CEO of Fambot , an AI-powered assistant built to help parents manage the overwhelming admin work that comes with modern family life. Previously, David was President at UnitedMasters, a Director at Uber, and the founder of Assured Labor, a marketplace for blue collar jobs across Latin America. He’s also a dad of three, married to an executive at Airbnb, and together t...

Richard Petts is a Professor of Sociology and Associate Dean of the College of Sciences and Humanities at Ball State University. He’s also the author of Father Involvement and Gender Equality in the United States , a book that explores how fatherhood is viewed today, why dads still aren’t more involved at home, and what it will take to change that. He’s a husband and father of two kids, ages 13 an...

Ben Norment is the Founder and CEO of Stork Exchange , a company helping parents access high quality baby gear at more affordable prices by working with retailers and manufacturers to resell returned products. He started building the company right as he and his wife, Cyndal, were expecting their first child. He’s also a father of three, with kids ages five, four, and seven months. His parenting jo...

Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist, professor at USC, and one of the few researchers in the world studying how men’s brains change when they become fathers. She is also the author of Dad Brain: The New Science of Fatherhood and How It Shapes Men’s Lives , a book that explores the neuroscience, hormones, mental health, relationships, and social shifts that come with becoming a dad. She’s also a...

Walter Velazquez Taboada is a consultant and former operations leader at Winning by Design , where he helps executive teams navigate complex decisions and organizational change. Originally from Cuba, Walter has lived across Spain, Mexico, and China, bringing a global perspective to both work and family life. He’s also a father of two, navigating parenting with an 8-year-old daughter and a seven-mo...

Nate Quigley is the co-founder of Chatbooks , the photo book company that helps families preserve their memories from Instagram photos. He started the company after a wave of nostalgia hit as his oldest child approached leaving home, only to spend years building a product nobody wanted. Then his wife Vanessa stepped in, suggested they simply print Instagram, and became the accidental co-founder wh...

Gabe Larsen is the CRO of Atonom , an AI company building always-on AI agents. He has spent his career leading go-to-market teams at high-growth companies, including Kustomer, Meta, and InsideSales.com. He’s also a father of five boys, ranging from six months to 14 years old, along with his wife Carolyn. In this conversation, Gabe shares why he believes fatherhood doesn’t slow down ambition, it sh...

Jonathan Stull is the President and COO of Handshake , the career platform connecting students and recent grads with employers that recently made a massive pivot into scaling an AI product. He’s spent the last decade helping build the company from a seed stage startup working out of a house in Palo Alto into a massive platform serving millions of students, universities, and employers. He’s also a...

Ashish Kundra is the CEO of Conceptual , a growth agency that helps companies like Cursor, Perplexity, Superhuman, Fenty Beauty, GPTZero, and dozens more. Prior to that, he led growth at DuckDuckGo and founded two other companies. He’s also a husband and the father of a four-year-old son. In this episode, Ashish shares why starting a company when his son was one made sense for his family, how bein...

Robert Whitney is the Co-Founder and CTO of Hapiko , the company that invented Stickerbox , an AI powered product helping kids create and play in more imaginative ways. Before starting Stickerbox, he helped scale New York Times Games, Grailed  and spent time at Anthropic thinking deeply about the future of AI and how it will shape the next generation. He’s also a co-parent to a four-and-a-half-yea...