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Adam Fishman (author of a top business newsletter on Substack with 11K+ subscribers) interviews executives, entrepreneurs, and company leaders in technology companies who are also fathers. They discuss the tough aspects of work, parenting, family, the mistakes made and lessons learned along the way. All episodes at www.startupdadpod.com.
[00:00:00] David Reich: Time is your most precious resource. That’s what we have the least of and every minute matters. And this is the big thing for me and part of my own life journey and growth is just I want to be present for the moment that I’m in. I don’t want the gears grinding. I don’t want to be multitasking all the time. That happens in your meetings, right? Someone’s typing about something else and you’re trying to talk to them. It happens in your personal life where your kid’s trying to tell you about their day and you’re thinking about something else or writing that email in your head and it’s just not fair to anybody.
[00:00:29] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, a podcast where we dive deep into lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I’m your host, Adam Fishman. Today I’m joined by David Reich, founder and CEO of Fambot, a company that operates at the fascinating intersection of AI and parenting. David has been building consumer apps and marketplaces for years, but it was his own experience as a busy parent that led him to create what he calls the perfect chief of staff for every parent. He’s married to Sacha, who’s a marketing executive at Airbnb and together they’re raising three kids ages 13, 11, and eight. What makes David’s story compelling is that he identified a problem that every modern parent faces, the overwhelming administrative burden of keeping up with dozens of emails, WhatsApp groups, and apps that come with having kids in today’s digital world. In our conversation today, we talked about why he believes parents have inadvertently become full-time administrators rather than quality time spenders with their kids.
[00:01:33] Adam Fishman: How AI can proactively manage the chaos of school newsletters and activity coordination without parents having to ask it to do anything. The concept of information asymmetry between two working parents and how technology can solve the coordination problem, why he thinks current parenting apps take the wrong reactive approach instead of being proactive, how his product learns family patterns and gets smarter over time and the future of AI-powered parenting assistance. We also discuss the social coordination challenges that still need to be solved and his vision for how technology can give parents back precious time with their children. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. You’ll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation with David Reich. Welcome David to Startup Dad. My absolute pleasure having you here today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:26] David Reich: Yeah, thanks so much, Adam. I’m excited to be here.
[00:02:28] Adam Fishman: We’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics right now, which is AI and parenting. To set the stage, I wanted to ask you about your company, which is basically operates at the intersection of those two things. The company is Fambot. Now, this is not designed as a sales pitch for your company, but I do have some experience in building some, I would call rudimentary, that might be actually quite generous. Rudimentary workflows that attempt to do what your product does. So I wanted to start with two questions for you. One is why did you start this company? What inspired you to start Fambot?
[00:03:04] David Reich: Yeah, no, it’s a great question and a great place to start. So I’ve been building consumer apps and marketplaces for a really long time and worked at some very intensive jobs. My wife also works as an exec. And when I got into the parenting business, I always imagined you get home from a long day at work, you get to sit with your kids, read a book, play a board game, do some homework together. And then what it actually turned out to be was that I became an administrator. Besides being the cook and the Uber driver, I spent an hour a day oftentimes reading through all these emails and WhatsApp groups and apps. I have three kids and in any given week, I skipped something like 40 emails coming in related to kids stuff, multiple newsletters from multiple schools that are often 12 pages long. The WhatsApp is dinging all day long when I’m trying to get some work done.
[00:03:55] David Reich: There’s an app for soccer, there’s an app for HopKeto. There’s two apps for Girl Scouts, an extra one during cooking song even. And so it’s amazing that everything’s gone digital, but it’s become impossible to keep up with everything. And so had the realization that I needed help. Unlike a lot of your guests, I don’t think I’m perfect at any of this stuff and I miss things and when I miss them or my wife does, we just feel bad about it. We’re letting down our kids, we’re letting down our spouse, we’re lending down our classmates. And so realize that AI could really jump in to solve the problem and wanted to build that perfect cheapest staff for every parent that you could really rely on so that it could take care of the admin side of being a parent so that you don’t have to and you can get that time back to really have more quality time with your
[00:04:44] Adam Fishman: Kids. Yeah. You just rattled off 50 things there. Girls, I didn’t even appreciate the Girl Scouts complexity. Of course, we need two apps when it’s cookie season. How could you ever do everything in one app? You have to have a cookie selling app. The other thing that we didn’t even talk about is it’s also you and I recording this, it’s the month of May, which for any parent knows that that craziness that you just described goes on absolute overdrive in the month of May because you also have the end of year for everything school, recitals, sports like every day is teacher appreciation day or staff appreciation this, very few parent appreciation days in all of this. So we’re like in the midst of Maycember right now as they call it. Okay. So tell me now, I understand why you started it. So how does it make parents’ lives easier?
[00:05:40] Adam Fishman: Does it just sort of reign in the chaos that’s happening all around you with all these different apps and how does it practically work for you and your wife, Sacha?
[00:05:48] David Reich: I tried every product on the market and I hope something would solve my problem. I really did and I appreciate there’s a number of folks out there trying to build things for parents now and a lot more in the last couple years since everyone can be an engineer. But we really have taken the stance that for this to work for every parent in America, it needs to be proactive instead of reactive. So instead of waiting for you to say, put this on my calendar and then it does it or tell me to do something, we want to take the opposite approach where you could sign up in a couple minutes, you connect it to your data sources and right now that’s email and calendar and then it just reads everything for you and it tells you as the parent, here’s what you need to know, here’s what you need to do, here’s what you need to decide.
[00:06:30] David Reich: And if you give me the go ahead, I’ll go ahead and do it for you. And so that’s a really big change in the model in terms of how assistance can work. And we’ve sort of looked at the parenting life as an anthropologist would. We all have those friends that are a year or two older than us and you go to them with those tough questions, what it’s going to be like when I have to go and apply to middle school. How do I find the right one? When am I supposed to start? But we’re kind of gathering all that knowledge into Fambot so that it could tell you, “Hey, this is the right time to start planning your spring break trip in December. Let’s not wait until it’s first half of March and everything’s sold out that you want and it’s twice too expensive.” But it could be thinking twenty four seven as if you would if you had all of your time to spend on this as if you wanted to spend all your time on that.
[00:07:16] David Reich: By plugging into the data streams, we could really sift through it, pull out what’s family related without even needing to forward us a single email and then understand what’s in page seven of that newsletter that you need to know and then we just put it on your calendar and just give you a little to- do to do it at just the right moment. And so there’s a lot of really complicated engineering that goes into it, but the end result is apparent is that it just tells you what you need to do and you wouldn’t have to waste all that time. And so for us in our day-to-day, we used to spend 30 to 60 minutes every day just going through a coma through the emails, did you read this? Did you read that? What’d you pull out? It’s like our job has become copy paste into calendar invites and then it’s even more complicated if you invite the rest of the soccer team.
[00:08:01] David Reich: And so it just kind of takes care of that for us where we could kind of know we get a text message every night that tells us what we have to do for the day ahead and then it could take a lot of the tasks on for you, which just saves a ton of time and it just feels like you have that personal assistant at the ready who’s two steps ahead of what I’m at least capable of doing.
[00:08:23] Adam Fishman: And I imagine too, it helps solve what I would call the information asymmetry problem, which is like you and your wife are both executives.You’re founder of a company, your CEO, and your wife is a marketing executive at a publicly traded company, Airbnb. Those jobs are no slouch. There’s no joke there. And so she’s getting emails from this group and you’re getting emails and messages from this group and coordination cost is super high. So imagine you can hook it up in on central place and it just sort of pulls in all the things so that it doesn’t need to know what lives in your head or your inbox or your wife’s inbox, but it just sort of like it’s one shared repository of stuff. Is that right or is that what you’re working towards?
[00:09:06] David Reich: For sure. And perfect example is like Maddox, my middle one was doing Boy Scouts. I could not get on the email distribution for anything only like Sacha. And so I would miss this off and why weren’t you there? And so yeah, just by merging the two accounts in a way that still is careful about privacy and security is something that we’re launching later this month, actually. So we have some people testing it right now, we’re getting it just right. But yeah, it solves a lot of problems. It’s been one of the top requested features and we’re excited that it’s in development right now.
[00:09:39] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And I mentioned I had started some rudimentary workflows here. Again, rudimentary is doing a lot of work in that sentence. So I was like, let me just start with … I have two kids. Let me just start with the email newsletter that comes in. Now every week we get one from each of the schools that’s like an overall school newsletter and then we get a classroom level one for our elementary school students. So right there, there’s like two things. And then you also get the superintendent’s newsletter because we’re very communicative district. Maybe you get another communication that’s like a district-wide thing. Okay. So right there you got like four emails. Each one of them sends you to a different system to read the communication. We’ve sort of zeroed in on this small product here that a lot … It’s like a newsletter thing, but I tried to build this to go to that URL and like whatever and it couldn’t … So this is why I think a thing like Fambot is so much better than every individual parent hacking this together.
[00:10:39] Adam Fishman: I was like, all right, I’ll have it parse my email and find the link and then go and read the link and whatever. And it was like, well, actually the Google API doesn’t actually give you the links in the email. It just lets you read the email, but I can’t follow this link. And I was like, “Well, but all the information is in the link so I need you to click on that link.” It’s like, “Oh, sorry, I can’t do that. Can’t click on a link. Can you identify the pattern of the URL?” And I was like, “No, it’s a different URL every time. You dummy.” So I imagine that a company that’s devoted to this is constantly fighting these fires and solving these problems so that Hacker Adam doesn’t have to build and rebuild and rebuild constantly. And that alone sounds like a huge time saving for me, even though I did this out of intellectual curiosity, but it failed miserably multiple times in a row.
[00:11:34] David Reich: Kudos to you for going for it though. And you keep with it and the models keep advancing, it might work, but this is oddly one of the hardest problems we’ve had to solve is the newsletters. Just getting it right where it picks out the right ones and then some parents want the PTA one also decoded.
[00:11:52] Adam Fishman: Oh, I forgot about that one, classroom parent newsletter, which says most of the same stuff that the other ones say, but not entirely. And sometimes there’s differences.
[00:12:02] David Reich: Yeah. And that’s the magic, right? It could piece together the ones that came from three different sources to give you the right answer and you could just chat with it and ask. And am I supposed to bring something to the potluck and when is it? And it just puts it all together and it’s got a cute little voice and it’s got some personality, but it just does that and updates it as it comes in. But sometimes it comes from a different sender. There could be two parents that are the class parents, right?
[00:12:27] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh yeah.
[00:12:28] David Reich: So this is almost patentable stuff to figure this out consistently and then having it so that it’s customizable so you could tell us what you care about and what you don’t and then it gets smarter over time.
[00:12:40] Adam Fishman: That is cool. That’s the thing I was wondering about is how, because a lot of these companies are trying this stuff and what you really want is to be able to give it feedback and be like, “You did that wrong, this is what I care about. “ But be able to just tell it instead of having to write code, then you write the code.
[00:12:55] David Reich: The great thing about AI, it has endles patience and memory. So it could just do these tedious things that none of us want to do, but we’re forced into it and it’s just not always signed up for. So just let your Fambot do it and then it gets done and it just gets better and it gets to know your family over time. Yeah. It’s just really kind of amazing what AI in general is able to do and just how quickly it’s done in the last year.
[00:13:20] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So I want to talk about that for a second because you mentioned like, hey, the models are constantly improving. And I mean, gosh, the pace of progress is insane right now what these things can do. The voice ones that dropped last week are just even more impressive than the previous round. It’s bananas. So I wanted to ask you, if we took today as a snapshot, what are some problems that you wish that you could solve with Fambot that are just not quite possible where you’re like, “Man, we’re building for this because we know once the model gets there, it’s going to be solved in Fambot.” So after the busy work of parenting that you just described, what’s left? What still needs to be solved?
[00:14:00] David Reich: So it’s all coordination layer in terms of just when you have multiple parents planning different things and there’s a very social element to being a parent and you’re on the sidelines of the soccer game in the morning and then you’re at the birthday party in the afternoon and you didn’t realize that your neighbor around the corner was going to the same birthday party and the same soccer game and you could have gotten three hours back if you had just talked to each other and coordinated. And so I think there’s a level of that that honestly you could do with the models today that’s kind of a very fascinating direction that a lot of these products can go. And then if you really want to go off in the future, I would love a robot in the house that could do the pitches and fold the laundry and take care of the rest.
[00:14:43] David Reich: So just depends on what your time span is, but I think it starts with really understanding just your family and understanding where you need the support and then helping to just get it done for you and feeling like you could trust it. It’s just moving so fast. I think that’s what’s exciting for any company in the application layer right now is that you could pick and choose and combine together all these different models to get the best of all these worlds to make something that really feels magical from the parents’ perspective.
[00:15:11] Adam Fishman: I love what you’re talking about there with the coordination in the real world because I’ve always thought that my solution will be when the robots come in or when Waymo can come and pick up my kid for something. But what you talked about there with neighboring households that are going to the same place, all your kids are probably in the same activities with other kids that they go to school with and you know those parents. And so that’s when the network effects of this product come into play, which is like, yeah, it works inside your household and you’ve multiplayer between the two parents, then you could get into multi-household. And I do feel like what’s interesting is with carpooling, it’s harder now than it seems like it used to be to get people that want to carpool because their kids are running around to so many things.
[00:15:54] Adam Fishman: I’m like, “Man, we’ve lost something when we have all this digital technology and we still can’t coordinate a frigging carpool. If this could solve that for you, that would be … Well, I understand people have these crazy spreadsheets going. We have not done that, but just wild carpooling like ninjitsu that’s happening. And so I can imagine a world where Fambot gets into this and it’s just a matter of you haven’t built the feature yet, but that’s very cool.
[00:16:18] David Reich: And in our very local community, my wife is the spreadsheet wizard. So I have an in- house coach that’s helping us to design this product, but it’s basically how we do our summer camp planning is like we have 10 other families that we share the spreadsheet with and we’ll choose weeks and try to get weeks where we go to the same place. But again, this is clear Fambot territory to help make that process a lot more seamless and extending your network a little bit. And so yeah, I think the potential is pretty amazing. It’s possible now just to give everybody access to one of these AIs to really just make their non-work life better. And that was part of the attraction of this and maybe we’ll talk about it more later, but just for my work life, everything at my fingertips. I don’t have to take notes anymore.
[00:17:12] David Reich: I don’t have to analyze data anymore, but who’s doing that for your personal life, your family life and your kids hasn’t come around yet. And so we really feel like that’s what we exist to do is just to be that AI for families and parents.
[00:17:27] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Love that so much. Okay. I said this wasn’t going to be a sales pitch for Fambot. I have to temper my enthusiasm here. Everyone go check out Fambot. It’s still free while it’s in beta, but I want to pivot and talk a little bit about you and your family and your parenting principles and things that you’ve learned. So the first thing is this is not the first company that you’ve founded. You were a founder and CEO when your first kid was born, which was like 12, 13 years ago. Your wife had a serious career, then two still does. What was the decision like for you and your wife, Sacha, to start a family when you had two young companies and you both had demanding careers and then you went on to have two more kids while continuing to found companies and climb the executive ladder?
[00:18:17] Adam Fishman: It’s like what were you thinking?
[00:18:19] David Reich: This is one of those funny things where I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Idiocracy,
[00:18:25] David Reich: But you have those parents that are just overachievers, PhDs, I got to get the house before I have kids, I got to pay off the mortgage, I got to get this promotion. I’m just a big believer that you should put your life first in a lot of situations. Zosh and I knew since early in dating they wanted to have kids and that was just a thing. And so when we were ready as human beings to have kids, we went and had kids and I think that we made the rest of our life work around that. And I really think for other aspiring parents, that’s just kind of the right thing to do is just not overthink it. People have been having kids since the dawn of time and they’re dodging woolly mammoths and other things and they just make it work. And so in our cushy world here, you could do it and if you have a job even better, you could do it.
[00:19:22] David Reich: And I think that it’s more about having that candid conversation with your team if you’re a founder or your managers and your coworkers and your company, if you’re working at a job, especially an intense job and just explain this is your reality and be valuable enough that they want you anyhow and find ways to be super productive and effective with the time that you could put into anything. And I have a lot of methods for really trying to be present in the things that I do. I think at the beginning it was just we were just ready and like sure, I had a young startup that was a global international company, but it was just time. And then we made some decisions. I was traveling back and forth with my first company. It was called Assured Labor. It was a marketplace for blue collar jobs that got really big in Latin America.
[00:20:11] David Reich: So I opened up offices in Mexico City, Sao Paulo and Rio in addition to New York where we were headquartered. And it was kind of a conversation where I could either be gone for three weeks of the month at my offices or we could all just make a move down to Mexico City together so I could be closer to my customers and my operations. And that’s the decision we made because it was the right thing for the family. And my second kid was born in Mexico City, which was honestly way better than having a baby in New York.
[00:20:44] Adam Fishman: Well, I do love Mexico City. That’s a great, great town. So hold on that though for one second because I want to come back to this. I really want to talk about the decision to raise family in other parts of the world. And I think that’s actually a really good and interesting trade-off that you made, which is like, I can be on the road for three out of four or five weeks of the month or we can just move and I cannot be on the road because I’m home with my customers who are in the same place where I live and I don’t have to travel. I can see my kids regularly a lot more than if I were on an airplane. But hold that though for one second. So one of the things you mentioned was as a founder, when you’re getting ready to start a family or to expand your family, having a candid conversation with your team around what that means and expectations and things like that.
[00:21:37] Adam Fishman: And so I’m curious for the startup dads, for the founders who are parenting curious or for the parents who are starting a company, what do you tell your team about what it means for you to have one foot in both of these worlds at the same time? How do you manage expectations with your team around, I have a family and a life outside of work and also this company is incredibly important in my life
[00:22:07] David Reich: To be clear, you’re telling them after your wife is already pregnant, right?
[00:22:13] Adam Fishman: Right. Yes. Yes. Here’s
[00:22:14] David Reich: What I’m thinking about during tonight. No, it’s got to be-
[00:22:17] Adam Fishman: Yeah, no, no, the ship has sailed.
[00:22:19] David Reich: Leading up to it, right?
[00:22:21] Adam Fishman: Yeah.
[00:22:21] David Reich: And so I think that it’s just about being just candid with everybody about what’s going to happen and this is coming. We got to prepare and we got to develop the systems and processes that make sense for it. There’s different ways to do it and there’s not one perfect way. But I think with my first company, they’re kind of in the process. They saw Sacha getting bigger and they saw that baby a lot. I used to have dinners with my team over and bring the baby to the office and it was just part of the experience. They all love my kids because I grew up with my kids. I think that in a lot of corporate environments, people build this wall between themselves and their coworkers, themselves and their manager. And I just think they’re doing everybody a disservice when you do that. When you could connect with people as real human beings that have a life outside of work, you can connect in a much more genuine way and you start giving people the benefit of the doubt.
[00:23:23] David Reich: If I miss a call, which I never do without a warning almost ever, but people get, you’ve probably got something going on over there and I know where these kids are like, and I wouldn’t want to piss off Coco because she’s not going to take that well. So I just think that it’s important that you make a plan that works for everybody. You talk about paternity leave. In a startup environment, you’re not taking four months off. It’s just unfortunately not going to be possible. Maybe for some late stage startups or people have figured out better than me, that’s possible. But if you’re going to take a week, two weeks, and then like most founders, if someone’s burning down, I still want to know. I’m going to feel worse not knowing than to take a couple messages or a quick call a week afterwards just to help them deal with it than just not having it dealt with and coming back to a bigger mess when I get back.
[00:24:15] Adam Fishman: Or like a bankrupt company or something like that.
[00:24:19] David Reich: So I think though if you have a solid team and you really have a close relationship where you actually care about each other, then these things happen and it’s a two-way street. I think some of the best things I’ve done in my career have been just being happy for my employees when they’ve told me that they’re pregnant and they’re having a baby. I love that and I want them to have that life and I want them to have those experiences and I want them to be good at it. And I don’t want to be in my deathbed feeling like I ruined a bunch of kids’ lives because I made their parents work too much at the wrong times. That’s not all I’m here for. And so I think you just have those conversations and then you got to figure out your system to make it all work once you have those kids and once they’re growing up and especially when they’re little babies.
[00:25:06] David Reich: I just think you just got to do what’s right for your life and the job, the career is an important piece of that life, but it’s not the whole thing. And if you’re looking at that, you’re going to miss out on what really matters.
[00:25:17] Adam Fishman: I want to stay on this thread and then I’m going to go back to the countries and companies that you’ve worked at and what you’ve learned there. So you have this belief that managers, and you said this, that managers should bring their kids to work pretty frequently and not just on bring your kid to Workday. Obviously it’s a practice that you do. It’s helped your employees build empathy with your situation and see you as a human being. How do you encourage your team members to do this and what do you find the benefits to be for people broadly who are bringing their kids to the office and more involved in getting their kids more involved in work?
[00:25:51] David Reich: You could go to a happy hour with your team to get to know them or you could bring your kid in the office and you’re going to see a very different person from each and every one of them when your kid is at the office. It just kind of brings out the best in people. Just like bringing a dog to the office, just break down those walls and get a little cuddly and cute all of a sudden and especially from people you don’t expect it just build those bonds and it builds trust and it builds empathy and you just get each other as humans better, which again, is something that’s just going away with remote work, it’s going away. With AI, it’s going away. But I think that that’s how you build great companies is by being real with each other. And I think for the kids, it’s also great because they get to see what dad or mom is doing all day.
[00:26:35] David Reich: Why are you gone? Why are you working so hard? Why are you taking that call at the middle of the night? They don’t get it unless they’ve seen it, plus they want the snacks.
[00:26:45] Adam Fishman: Well, that’s the kicker, right? The snacks. Yeah,
[00:26:47] David Reich: They get some hot chocolate and Uber had a freezer full of itsits all the time. And so they want to come to the office. And so even now though, when my daughter has a random day off for parent-teacher conferences or whatever, she’ll come in with me. She’s riding back my bike, come in, she’ll do some homework. I’ll have her five code, a video game or something. She’ll drink the hot chocolate and give me feedback at the end of the day sometimes on how I interacted with my team, which is also more valuable than the feedback I’m going to get from any of my coworkers.
[00:27:24] Adam Fishman: You love that. You get a performance review from your kid at the end of the day. Very candid.
[00:27:30] David Reich: That is tough love. I just think it’s really good for the team members to just be in these different environments and it just builds a much deeper level of understanding. And it’s really good for the kids to just understand what’s going on in your life and what you actually do and why you work so hard. And those people you’re always talking about at home like, oh yeah, of course I knew who they are. And my daughter loves my iOS engineer because he brought in this cake that is the best cake you’ve ever had in your life and she can’t get over it. So she’s always like, “How’s Ray? Is he coming in this week?”
[00:28:05] Adam Fishman: Is he bringing a cake again? Yeah.
[00:28:07] David Reich: Yeah.
[00:28:08] Adam Fishman: I love that. Okay. Now I said we would get back to this, so I want to get back to it, which is you’ve raised your kids in a bunch of different countries and also through a bunch of different companies. So I want to start with countries. You’ve raised your kids in New York, Mexico City, and now SF, San Francisco. You mentioned having a kid and raising a kid in Mexico City was better than New York. So what have you learned about these three different environments in raising your kids?
[00:28:39] David Reich: Yeah, so they all have a city they could claim as their own. So my oldest was born in New York, my middle one was born in Mexico City and then my youngest in San Francisco where we are now. And the way I always talk about it is I remember when Sage was a little baby, probably five, six months old, we brought her in the stroller. We lived in the East Village to some trendy brunch fraud and we had these people looking at us and they’re like, “Oh, they like the baby.” They literally asked to have their table changed because they didn’t have to sit next to the baby. They want nothing to do with this baby. This was not what they were trying to do for brunch. And then we moved when she was eight months old. It’s the first weekend we go out to a trendy brunch place in Mexico City and we get seated next to these tough looking guys with all these tattoos and piercings and they start looking at the baby and we’re like, “Here it goes again.” And then they start making these goo-goo eyes at the baby.
[00:29:35] David Reich: They want to hold her. They could not get enough for her the whole time. And these were tough-looking guys, but isn’t the culture is so different in Latin America specifically, but also in a lot of places where they just love kids. And then even on my startup salary, you could just live in such a better way with having all this help. We haven’t ever had the fortune of live And close to family. So we’ve depended on nannies and au pairs and a lot of other people for support, especially with three kids. But yeah, you just lived it up. And then in terms of just where they were born, the hospital that Maddox was born in Mexico City, there was a guy playing a piano in the lobby. We had this beautiful suite whereas when Sage was born, it was right after Hurricane Sandy and they shut down NY Hospital and we got stuffed in.
[00:30:30] David Reich: Sad and I had to share a room. It was such a different experience there. Just culturally we had a lot of support and friends were all just going so out of their way to help. And it’s not like they weren’t like that in the US, but just to a different level. And I think it really exposed the kids to a lot of different experiences. All of our kids speak Spanish. We’ve kept that up with Spanish immersion schools since we were back. They have this cultural tie to Latin America and I think it’s a really special thing to grow up with.
[00:31:03] Adam Fishman: Oh, that’s awesome. All right. Now maybe a little contrast here. I want to talk about the difference between companies. So you’ve raised kids as a founder, CEO at small company and then other company that got pretty big. You’ve also been a big company executive and I am curious how it is similar and how it is different. And then maybe we can talk about Uber too as part of this, because you were pretty senior at Uber for a while.
[00:31:33] David Reich: Yeah, I think you know a bit about the rideshare industry.
[00:31:36] Adam Fishman: I know a thing or two about it, yes.
[00:31:39] David Reich: Yeah. So I think that there’s two types of companies out there. There’s the type of company where the CEO or the founder has had a baby and there’s the kind of company where they have it. I don’t think that it’s meant as a slight to the parents when they haven’t had a kid, but they just create different policies. A lot of people saw Meta, Facebook. Everything changed when Zuck had a kid all of a sudden. And Uber, when my kid was born there, I think that they didn’t have a executive team that had a lot of kids. So they just didn’t get it. I don’t know if it specific to there or just a big company, but when you’re managing very large teams and you have a very intensive position in that environment and you’re not the founder, CEO, there’s just certain things that you have to do.
[00:32:28] David Reich: And I think that the people successful at these companies like me, we acted like entrepreneurs. We really cured. We acted, went into work every day like it was our own company and did everything or hard to make it great. We wanted everyone to do well. And I think that the best managers understand that you really work for your team and not the other way around and you want to be there for everybody. But I think I had some funny experiences where my manager who was not a parent was calling me up the day after my child was born and had some important stuff going on and wanted me in the office the very next Monday. And to be fair, there was a big reorg going on. I was helping with that process and teams that I was managing were being impacted. So I wanted to be there, but at the same time, I wanted to be there for my wife and baby and the other kids.
[00:33:17] David Reich: So there’s been so much responsibility that it’s tough to be in all of these places. And I think the lessons for me are just like even if you don’t have kids, you should really talk to parents and understand them and what they’re going through and have that empathy so that you can make sure you’re taking care of everybody in the full self way and not asking for things that you just shouldn’t because of the situation. And I love Uber. I love the experience that I had there, but I think that they got way better. Now they have an amazing paternity policy along with the maternity policy. It’s become a much more mature company that was way back in the day and I bet it was like that at Lish too early on where the policy was quite different before they professionalized them and they had to based on what was going on.
[00:34:05] Adam Fishman: I was the first person to have a kid at Lyft ever in the company’s history because we were very small and we didn’t actually get an official parental leave policy until our general counsel had a baby, Kristen. And then she was like, oh, probably we should have a policy because I’m about to become a mom and we don’t have anything here and we should. But that was years after me. And so anyways, it happens. Your point is very valid. It’s not like people are trying to slight you or be spiteful or anything. They just don’t necessarily know. They don’t have the perspective. So lesson to founders out there as you’re building your company, try to have a little perspective and understand the multiple lifestyles of the parents, of the people that work for you.
[00:34:49] David Reich: Yeah. It’s like they say that you never truly appreciate your parents until you’ve had a kid of your
[00:34:55] Adam Fishman: Own. Yeah. Okay. So you’ve lived and your kids have lived in a bunch of different places. You said three cities. Each one of them gets a claim to a city. How do you raise kids that appreciate that diversity and then take pride in their own diversity? This is something that you mentioned was important to you.
[00:35:15] David Reich: Yeah. So my wife is Trinidadian and so she grew up in a very different way. She also lived internationally as a kid too. So she grew up in the Philippines and Saudi Arabia until she was nine years old. And then us spending a good chunk of our lives in Mexico City, me traveling internationally for work like crazy. I really think it’s important for kids to have a broad understanding of the world around them and also where they come from and their heritage and really take pride in that and understand it. And so there’s a lot of important learnings, I think, in understanding the world and we love to travel with the kids, but I think it’s language is an important thing and that’s been something we’ve invested a lot in. It was really tough for me to learn Spanish and Portuguese when I started spending time in Latin America.
[00:35:58] David Reich: And if we could just have that built in as a gift for them, I think that’s important. And just understand diversity because it’s part of their life, whether they like it or not. They love to ask questions. They love to show up and learn and talk to real people and real places. And I think it’s just a critical skill in this age of AI, what really matters? What do you need your kids to learn and care about to be successful in the next 20 years? And I think having that empathy and that understanding of the global perspective is critical. For me, while I was at Uber, I was leading growth and product for 60 countries. So I had to go all over the world and understand how we change what it means to Uber to adress the local market needs and compete against local competitors that might be completely different than who we’re competing against in the US.
[00:36:48] David Reich: And I think that that curiosity and understanding is something that they have to learn and that’s about understanding their own diversity and also just the socioeconomic diversity. In San Francisco, and part of why we’ve chosen to stay in the city itself is letting them see what it’s like for people that are suffering. When my kids were in preschool, the way the route worked, my wife had dropped me and Sage Maddox off two blocks from the preschool that was on Market Street and we’d have to just wind our way around homeless people and that was just something they were exposed to from very early age. Or I remember when that stage was like, or she wanted to go camping and she’s like, “Tady, can we go camping?” And I’m like, “Yeah, yeah, of course.” She’s like, “But does that mean we have to give out our house if we go camping under the bridge?
[00:37:41] David Reich: And could she seen that so much?” But it brings about these important conversations about why is the world like it is and why is that person in that situation and what can we do to make that situation better? I grew up in a suburban environment. I didn’t see a lot of things as a kid and I think that there’s pros and cons to it, but I think it’s really important that kids understand the broader world for what it really is and not just have the blinders on and just think that this little bubble that we’re living in is the broader reality. And so really try to give them opportunities to see the bigger picture and see other places and understand how other people live so that they could help make things better in whatever way is meaningful to them.
[00:38:28] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, that’s great. And you’ve also lived in some places that kind of allow you to give your kids a cultural melting pot. I mean, Mexico City is also an incredibly diverse city, New York, San Francisco, but yeah, that’s really interesting. And the common thread seems to be language and sort of cultural appreciation through that and things like that, which is great. So I wanted to ask you a bit about how you make it all work. Three kids, your wife’s an executive at Airbnb, you’re a founder. Before that, you were the president of United Masters, which is a very cool company, by the way. I worked at Patreon for a long time, so I’m very familiar with United Masters and you were director at Uber. Aside from Fambot, what are the various systems and processes that you’ve put in place probably with your wife as well for being great at your job and being great parents and also dog owners, by the way.
[00:39:21] Adam Fishman: If it weren’t enough, you were also the owner of at least one dog
[00:39:25] David Reich: And a fish.
[00:39:26] Adam Fishman: And a fish. Oh, fish owners. So what kind of systems do you have in place? Obviously Fambot aside, I’m sure you use the heck out of that product, but what do you do with a 13, 11 and eight year old and two hard driving careers?
[00:39:45] David Reich: Yeah, no, it’s a lot and we don’t get a lot of dyname, which is just territory. I’m sure with two, it’s the same for you and I’m pretty sure they’re similar ages. So it’s about optimization and prioritization. And I am definitely an efficiency nerd. My undergraduate career is in supply chain management. I
[00:40:06] Adam Fishman: Think- Oh, love that. …
[00:40:07] David Reich: About systems and processes. And I also believe that just time is your most precious resource. That’s what we have the least of and every minute matters. And so whenever we do just about any big thing, we try to think about it in advance and really figure out how can we optimize things so that we can just … And this is the big thing for me and part of my own journey and growth is just I want to be present for the moment that I’m in. I don’t want the gears grinding. I don’t want to be multitasking all the time. That happens in your meetings, right? Someone’s typing about something else when you’re trying to talk to them. It happens in your personal life where your kid’s trying to tell you about their day and you’re thinking about something else or writing that email in your head and it’s just not fair to anybody.
[00:40:51] David Reich: And so first and foremost, we really think about logistics a lot about where do we live and what do we do and how do we make that work for efficiency? And again, it goes back to why we chose to live in the city itself. Again, some of this is a luxury that we have, but I do think there’s been times where we’ve taken the smaller place to be in the right location. And I think that that’s a good trade-off to make because if your commute is 15 minutes on the bike like it is for me instead of 45 minutes in the car, I just saved an hour a day and that’s an hour a day I can spend on things that matter to me more. Our kids have gone to public elementary school and when our oldest got into the school, we moved right next to the school and we knew we were going to have their kids go through the school.
[00:41:39] David Reich: And so their community time is walking up a hill. It’s really not a lot of time at all, which also lets them sleep a litle bit longer than they would if we had a long commute for that, which matters a lot. And then the activities we’ve chosen, my kids are brown belts and hop keto. This is an obscure Korean martial art.
[00:41:59] Adam Fishman: I’ve heard of it. Yeah,
[00:42:02] David Reich: It’s really useful for self-defense and confidence and it has great morals around it, but we weren’t seeking that out. That was the place we could walk to from where we live and where the school is. And so they’ve been doing that for years and years, but I think we really try to think about keeping things in our community and keeping them close. And then when I was ready to get back into shape and doing more working out, I wasn’t looking for CrossFit, but they happened to have a gym right by Hobkito where the time was exactly the same. So I could drop the kids off and then I could go do my workout and then I could pick them up. And I think when you could double book, triple book things, you could get that efficiency where sitting in the back on my laptop in their Havkita class is not quality time for them or for me.
[00:42:50] David Reich: So we prioritize those things and we just try to make it work in a really efficient way so that we can do as much of these things as possible. And my team understands there’s a certain time between 7:00 and 90 that I’m going to be upline. I’m going to be with my kids. We’re going to be cooking dinner, we’re going to be hanging out, I’m going to be reading books with them, I’m going to put them to bed and I’ll get online later. And that’s one of those trade-offs is just like 9:30 to 10:30 is a very important hour of my workday and that’s when it has to be as a founder at this moment. But I think that if you plan your time and you really optimize the logistics, you get so much more done in a way where when you are spending time with your kids, you could really be there and be present.
[00:43:32] David Reich: And when you’re working, you could really be there and be present. And I think that that’s just a better way for me to try and max out and do it all.
[00:43:40] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, so I want to stay on this topic and talk about some principles and frameworks that you have. So you’re an optimization guy, right? Clearly that’s pretty obvious. I would consider myself to also be an efficiency and optimization person. And I’m curious, you said a lot of the ways that that’s beneficial. I’m curious if this ever blows up in your face. I’ll give you an example for me because I’m such an efficiency and optimization person, I notice when things are inefficient and it bothers me to no end. Now this is a me thing, I got to deal with that, but it’s hard to not notice it and to not be bothered by it because I’m like, oh God, this is such inefficient use of time right now. I don’t know if you have the same experience or if there’s other scenarios where this is blown up where you’re like you’ve overoptimized, you’re too efficient and you don’t stop and smell the roses or something like that.
[00:44:36] David Reich: This is one of the things that I am always aspiring to get better at, which is just not getting ready when that happens. I could have this perfect plan for how we’re going to spend the day. We’re going to get to the soccer game on time, we’re going to get to the scouts, we’re going to make those plans with the brands and then it takes 45 minutes for the kids to put their shoes on. I don’t know why. I don’t know why. It always just takes 45 minutes to put the shoes on and it’s like everything blows up. I think the most important thing I’m learning is what I just don’t say and that says a spouse, that is as a parent and that is as a manager is just you just don’t say anything. I have an old school paper subscription to The Economist and I’ll just sit there and I’ll read.
[00:45:17] David Reich: It’s just at some point the swirl’s going to happen and I just try to make that a me moment. Why not? Because they’re not going to listen anyhow. It doesn’t matter. I could put the shoes on their feet and somehow they’ll be gone before they get in the car and they have to figure it out at some point. And so yeah, it blows up all the time. There’s certain things I can control and certain things I can’t. Like this week my wife is traveling for work. So we call it Daddy Bootcamp when she’s gone because I make sure they have their bags out the night before with the hop kitto or the soccer gear or the piano gear or whatever it is. It’s like Pampa told me, “This is what you have to do for tomorrow.” But still they might be late for school tomorrow.
[00:45:57] David Reich: I don’t know how they’ll get woken up at the right time, but they’ll find a way and I’ll just deal with it. And Daddy Boopa usually holds with ice cream Sundays at the end and a lot of McDonald’s that she wouldn’t let us get. So it’s a good thing, but we just run a little different.
[00:46:11] Adam Fishman: I get it. I get it. That’s awesome. My wife also traveling this week and last week. So we’re kindred spirits, you and me. There’s another principle that you have, which is you believe in being real with your kids. What does it mean to be real with your kids?
[00:46:26] David Reich: I touched on them a little bit with just exposing them to the real world. I think that there’s a lot of parents these days that just want their kids to only see the PG movie to only see what you wish life looked like and to surround themselves with all these people that have everything without the messy part of life. And my view’s kind of the opposite is just since early days, I want them to understand what’s really happening in the world, not in a scary way, but just an open-minded way where you can interact with people from different backgrounds and different places and different cultures and different languages and se what’s working and see what’s not. I always have this natural problem solving way of approaching things and we talk about real things happening in the news. They will read that economist with me sometimes and they’ll read about wars and famines and see pictures.
[00:47:22] David Reich: Not anything too bad, but my youngest loves the comic and the economist. And then I’ll start a great question, why does he look like that? Or why are there all those guns in that picture? And I try to help them understand why the world is as it is because we’re all stepping into this society that someone else built for us. We play our parts in it and we can make a dent in it if we really put our minds to it, but this has been here before us. It’ll be here after us and we have to think a lot about what our part is in this world. And so I have conversations about why things cost so much. Why is gas this much? Tad, that’s $100 a pump What’s going on? I spent an hour driving with my daughter when she was eight to pick up my brother in Reno.
[00:48:07] David Reich: We were going from Tahoe and we talked about state income tax and she was like, why is anybody living in Nevada? And we just went down this rabbit hole, but no eight-year-old needs to know that, but why not understand that? And just have these real conversations so that they’re approaching everything with curiosity and trying to understand the world around them and not naive to how much more improvement there’s to be done in the world that we’re living in.
[00:48:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, I don’t think I knew about state income tax differences until I was an adult. So this is impressive that your daughter was learning at eight or nine years old and very valuable thing to know about. I don’t disagree with that. All right, maybe not surprising that there’s a last thing framework here that, or just I guess belief that you hold, but you think very strongly that communication, planning and transparency is super critical between partners, so you and your wife and imagine you and your co-founders and things like that too. How did you develop that perspective? Was it like stepping on a bunch of rakes or were you just always wired this way or did somebody have to teach you?
[00:49:13] David Reich: I make so many mistakes. I mean, I do try to learn from them. It sometimes takes a while, but I think that we’ve kind of figured out as a couple that there’s only so much time in the day we want to be there as parents, we want to be there as partners, we want to be there in our jobs. And so we need to talk it through. My most important meeting over the week is Sunday night, sitting on the couch folded the laundry and figuring out how we’re going to get the kids for the different things and home from school and get that thing in time. Yeah, I’ve literally built the companies to make this work better for all the parents out there like us that are just pressed for time and want to show up better. But I think it’s also important that she has time for the stuff that she cares about and me too.
[00:50:02] David Reich: And so it just takes a lot of communication to make it work for everybody and understand what’s on each other’s mind. And same thing with my co-founders. We have a lot of heart to hearts and what’s most important to me is that obviously the company’s successful, but that they know I care about them at the end of the day as people. One of my co-founders worked with me at Uber and we were friends there. My other co-founder’s been a friend of mine for almost 20 years. And so we have these relationships and I think any founder or VC will tell you, if the relationship’s not working with the founders, then the company’s not going to work. And so we spend the time. We get breakfast together every Thursday and even with the three kids and the dog and the fish, we still find time for date nights with my wife because you got to prioritize night stuff and otherwise it won’t happen.
[00:50:53] David Reich: I think it’s really important to have communication to have a plan that works for both of you and just to make it work for everybody.
[00:51:02] Adam Fishman: Speaking of date nights with your wife, I wanted to ask you something, especially for the parents who have really young kids that may not see the light at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to ask you, are date nights easier to come by because the need for a babysitter is less with a teenager and aging kids? Or is it actually more complicated because there’s so many more activities happening now that you’ve got three sports age and activity aged kids? I don’t know. What do you find to be the benefit and drawback, I guess?
[00:51:31] David Reich: For any of the parents out there with zero to four-year-olds, you’re in it. It gets easier. It does.
[00:51:38] Adam Fishman: Yes, it does.
[00:51:39] David Reich: There’s no pretending. Our life is crazy busy, but it’s amazing. And we had a talent show for my youngest the other night and was three hours long.
[00:51:51] Adam Fishman: Of course, because it’s May. It’s May, so you got to have a talent show. Yeah.
[00:51:55] David Reich: It’s so stinking cute. And I think that having a 13-year-old who’s a really great, responsible kid, she can babysit. She doesn’t always want to. Sometimes they don’t always get along as long as you’d hope, but it’s definitely easier. But I do think even in earlier days you need to have that babysitter on speed dial or that grandparent or the O-parent or whatever it takes to be able to get some time for yourself because you need that to connect. And as individuals, you need your time, otherwise you’re not going to show up in your best sort of way for anybody. So in a three-kid environment, it’s not as much as it would be with no kids, obviously, but I think we all realize this. If you’re not getting enough sleep, if you’re not getting exercise, if you’re not having time to pursue your passions outside of work, then you’re not going to be as good of a parent or partner.
[00:52:47] David Reich: And so you just got to find a way to make it work.
[00:52:50] Adam Fishman: I want to stay on this topic because communication, planning, transparency between partners, super critical as you’ve said, but what I didn’t hear you say was that complete agreement is super critical. And I love to ask people this question, I’m going to ask you, you are not absolved. Where do you and Sacha have different opinions when it comes to parenting still? Where do you still not quite see eye to eye on things?
[00:53:17] David Reich: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot areas that were not totally aligned. I’m a big believer that kids need to make little mistakes and feel the repercussions so that they learn from them because it’s a lot better to make a mistake and forget the violin and have to sit out of class when you’re 11 years old and when you’re an adult and you tune out your laptop
[00:53:39] Adam Fishman: Or forget to pay your credit card bill or something.
[00:53:41] David Reich: She’s a little more forgiving with me. She’ll make that run back to the school when I would definitely not do it. So I think there’s that a little bit. I also really like wind down time at the end of the night after 8:30, just quiet books, no digital devices. She sometimes likes to find projects in the late evenings that need to get done that night because she’s just a harder worker than me. She just always has that energy and it’s amazing and I appreciate it so much, but the kids sometimes pick up on that and then the bedtimes get missed by an hour or two. So there’s other things. And I mean, there’s hundreds of things that I’m sure she wished that I’d do better, but I think at the end of the day, it’s like you do your best. And then like I mentioned, when one of us is traveling, we could do however we want and then report back.
[00:54:31] David Reich: It’s sort of like an A/B test. And sometimes it works, sometimes it totally doesn’t work. But all in, you make it work and I think it’s good to have a different philosophy because the kids also get the exposure of different ways and seeing what they like better and what they respond better to.
[00:54:50] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. I love the idea of projects late at night, which I feel like you and I are kindred spirits on this one with our spouses. Okay. So a couple other things here and then I want to get to lightning round because that’s going to be fun. So you believe in being really deliberate in what you prioritize. You told me this. What does it mean and how does this impact your parenting decisions?
[00:55:18] David Reich: I’m strategic to a fault, you might say. I used to walk around with a five-year plan on a sticky note in my wallet and I was like, all right, here’s where I want to be at five years. So here’s what I have to do working backwards if I want to achieve that in that time zone. And I think that life is filled with surprises, it’s filled with opportunities, it’s filled with bad news too. Just things happen that are outside of your control. But I do think it’s really important that you think about where you want to be and then you work backwards to figure out how you want to get there. I think if I hadn’t done that throughout my career, I think I would’ve undersold where I ended up many times over because I would’ve just taken that thing that showed up. But I think if you know you want to get somewhere, whether it’s a certain company or a certain type of company you want to work with, a certain role you want to get to, you got to really think about what’s the work I have to do to get there and then how can I just work my butt off to make it happen and achieve what I want to and end up where I want to be?
[00:56:19] David Reich: I think it’s similar in parenting. We wanted to have a big family, First San Francisco standards with three. We knew that and we knew the different things we’d have to pull together to make that happen. It takes a village and it takes a lot of support and it takes a number of other things. And so we really thought about that and had those conversations and then made it happen. As a parent and as a professional, you want to set those targets and aim high and then you’ll have those surprises come and you might change your mind and what you really want to do, but if you don’t set a huge goal, then you’re not going to accomplish big things. And I think it’s unfortunate when I see people kind of settle and they’re like, “Oh yeah, this came along so I did it, but is that really what you wanted to be doing?
[00:57:05] David Reich: Is that really the company you wanted to be that? Is that really the manager you wanted to have? “ And so it’s important to pull a lot of though into it. And before I started Fambot, I really put a lot of thought into where I wanted to be in my career in five years and what I wanted to be doing because I’ve been a founder, CEO, I’ve been an executive at two big companies. I’ve been the right-hand man to a CEO who was a founder and it was time I wanted to go back to being a founder/CEO. I know the good and the bad that goes with that. I always wanted to start another company after I sold the first one, but I also wanted to see what great companies like Uber look like from the inside and learn from amazing leaders and managers and from terrible ones.
[00:57:45] David Reich: And so to really calibrate on what is my own style, I think that it was a delivered choice. I didn’t just fall into it. I just think those things to line up and then they did and then you take those risks and you go at it.
[00:57:58] Adam Fishman: As we wind down this conversation, you built a couple of companies and you’ve worked at arguably one of the most transformative technology companies of the last, I don’t know, 20 years in Uber. Your wife works at Airbnb also transformative, founding an AI-powered family planning product, basically family organization product. What is the relationship that you want your kids to have with technology as they come of age? The other second question that I would have on this same topic is you have an eight-year-old and a 13-year-old and you have one in the middle. Has your perspective on technology with your kids changed over the last, I don’t know, five years as they’ve gotten older?
[00:58:43] David Reich: Think about how all of our lives has changed since ChatGPT just a few years ago. I mean, it’s crazy. And I’ve spent a lot of my career in labor markets and just think a lot about what is this going to do to society. I think that we’re all underestimating how many jobs are going to disappear in the next five years and it’s a scary premise. I think a lot about what are my kids going to do for work when they come out into the workforce in 10 or 15 years or whatever it is. I think we’ve always been big believers that technology should enable their real lives to be better, not be their real life, if that makes sense. And just kind of on her own, my oldest one just didn’t like computers from the beginning. So when they handed out the laptops, she would ask the teacher to print stuff out for her and I love that.
[00:59:34] David Reich: It’s so old school to just use the pen and paper to learn things and now she’s ready to kill me because I haven’t let her get a cell phone yet when almost all of her friends have one, but I want her to learn how to ride the bus on her own and figure out what to do when it goes in the wrong direction. And this literally happened a few times now, but just like there’s a self-confidence that you build when You got to do it on your own and there’s no safety net. And I think that’s a really important skill for kids to learn and especially in this age of AI where people are starting to just outsource all the critical thinking to an AI that may hallucinate and they may not check its work. And I am really worried about people losing that critical thinking.
[01:00:24] David Reich: And so we really think with our kids about how we make sure they have those soft and hard skills. And the soft skills are probably even more valuable in the future. We have to really understand the world, you have to understand how to be empathetic and really understand human beings and how we interact with people when so much has already gone into social media and now this is kind of the next step towards digitizing everything. And so we really try to keep them off the devices as much as possible. For school, they all have laptops and all. They all use them. Obviously that’s going to happen and we’re supportive. One of my kids is teaching himself Python programming and I think it’s great and I’m trying to get the other ones to use these tools, but I really want them to look at it as an enabler of achieving what they want to achieve and not the meets the ends.
[01:01:09] David Reich: It is just a tool, just like the internet was a tool, just like mobile phones were a tool and they have to be able to develop their creativity and their empathy to figure out what they want to accomplish and then use these tools in the best way to make it happen, but not just use the tool because it’s there.
[01:01:26] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Well, speaking of that, so Fambot, obviously AI-powered tool, but you also have used AI, you told me, for having complex and complicated conversations with your kids. And I’m guessing, I’m making a leap here that maybe this is coaching you on how to broach topics or have a conversation or bring it to their level or something like that. Is that right? Or how are you using AI to have more complex and complicated conversations with your kids?
[01:01:56] David Reich: Yeah, so hopefully they won’t listen to this podcast on my secret skip one. But I think we all want to approach tough conversations or awkward conversations with our kids in the right way. We’ve all had those conversations with the parent, with the manager that would just all backwards, upside down, and you come out of it worse off than you were before. Sometimes when we have these conversations, I’m like, all right, we have to talk about this thing. What’s the best way to approach it? And plugging in some of the books that I like or some of the people that I think have good opinions on these things and then trying to suss out what’s the best way to approach this conversation in a way that the kid is going to feel good about it on the other side and not just cringey or worse off or having had it.
[01:02:43] David Reich: And I think as parents, most of us, myself included, especially professionals, we read all these business books. I went to business school. I have three kids. I did not go to parenting school. They’re like, “Why do you like that pamphlet on your way out the door? Go at it for 18, 20 something years.” I’ve read a couple books, but honestly, way more business books. And so I think it’s good that there’s a succinct context aware way to get a little bit of coaching for these awkward or tough conversations. I think it’s helped a little bit. We know how it’s going to go with the kids or what their perception is, but I think there’s ways that AI can offer all sorts of help to parents and it might become part of Fambot down the road. For now, that’s not the core purpose of it. But yeah, I think we all could use a little extra coaching.
[01:03:34] Adam Fishman: All right. Well, with that note, we won’t ask people to reach out to you and give you coaching advice on how to be a better parent, but I will ask, how can people follow along or be helpful to you?
[01:03:45] David Reich: We just took the waitlist on for Fambot and are having our beta right now. So I would love for parents to sign up, fambot.com, give it a try and give us feedback. And think about this where we began. You could get your Mac Mini and spin up seven open clause and it might go great, but it might go terribly wrong. Imagine you had a whole cracked engineering team that just existed to make your non-work life better. What would you want them to do? What would be helpful to you? And give us that feedback. Send it to support@fambot.com or one of our socials and we’d love to hear it because we’re building this for the parents out there and we’re building it for me and for you, Adam. And I think that it’s a pretty great product, but it’s just the beginning and we really want to get those ideas from folks and make sure it’s really serving the need.
[01:04:34] David Reich: So that’s the best way to stay in touch with us.
[01:04:37] Adam Fishman: Well, thank you very much. I will send everybody to Fambot to check it out and I myself will download it and check it out. All right, do you have a few minutes for lightning round?
[01:04:47] David Reich: Absolutely.
[01:04:48] Adam Fishman: Okay, here we go. What is the most indispensable parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[01:04:54] David Reich: I’m going to go with the coffee maker.
[01:04:57] Adam Fishman: I think I’ve heard that only one other time across 150 episodes, so that’s a good one.
[01:05:02] David Reich: Okay.
[01:05:02] Adam Fishman: No, I mean,
[01:05:03] David Reich: There’s no substitute for caffeine in
[01:05:06] Adam Fishman: The first one. A delicious cup of coffee. Got to start my day with it. Okay. What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[01:05:13] David Reich: I think it goes back to the baby days. I think we bought a baby wipe warmer. That thing just wasn’t necessary and I think it lost your kids to grow up soft.
[01:05:24] Adam Fishman: Yes. Okay. So
[01:05:26] David Reich: We didn’t keep that one for the second channel.
[01:05:29] Adam Fishman: Okay, awesome. All right. Given that you are an efficiency and optimization guy, I’m really excited for this next one. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[01:05:41] David Reich: So my wife would tell you yes, absolutely. And she would also tell you that I do not know what it is.
[01:05:47] Adam Fishman: Okay. This is
[01:05:49] David Reich: Where my efficiency skills break down completely.
[01:05:52] Adam Fishman: Awesome. All right. So the answer is yes, but you don’t know how to do it yet. So someday we can all dream. All right. What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[01:06:02] David Reich: It took some time, but I’d say deescalating situations. When you’re a dad at three, you sometimes have to be a hostage negotiator
[01:06:13] Adam Fishman: When Chris Boss style.
[01:06:15] David Reich: Yeah. Yeah. And I think that I’ve gotten much better at just stepping into huge situations, even if I’ve caused a huge situation and just getting people to calm down and whether it takes bribes or, oh my gosh, my kids, when they were little getting these tantrums and there were just these YouTube videos that somehow had this magical power. And that was my exception to the no iPad rule was those deep tantrums, just put it in front of them and all of a sudden they would come back to earth. And so yeah, I’d say I’ve gotten much better at
[01:06:49] Adam Fishman: Bringing
[01:06:49] David Reich: Down the temperature when it’s needed.
[01:06:51] Adam Fishman: Love that. Very critical. What is the most crazy and chaotic time of day? Is it 6:00 AM to 8:00 AM or 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM in your household?
[01:07:05] David Reich: Definitely 60 to 8:00 PM. Mornings, I could get up early before the kids. I could do some stuff or go for a run and then the breakfast and I love walking my kids to school every day. But evenings, because there’s so many activities, there’s so many. And just getting everyone to the right place or coordinating carpools or making the dinner or trying to sneak my own workout in, it’s total chaos.
[01:07:29] Adam Fishman: All right. The ideal day with your kids involves what one activity?
[01:07:33] David Reich: We love just taking the dog and going for a hike. That is, at least for me, my favorite, I think they would come up with others, but my daughter was asking for this dog every day for six years straight and we finally got it two years ago and it’s been fantastic. Adds a lot of love to the household, but it needs exercise.
[01:07:55] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the funniest thing that one of your kids has ever said in public?
[01:08:00] David Reich: This isn’t something they’ve said, but something it did. It was like the beginning of the pandemic and we had this whole long conversation with the kids about being really careful, not touching any class. No one knew what was going on. It was like beginning of the pandemic and we hadn’t left the house.
[01:08:14] Adam Fishman: Wash the groceries, the whole thing. Yeah.
[01:08:17] David Reich: Yeah. So we leave the house and as soon as we open the door, there’s this woman walking in front of the house and Co, my youngest, just runs at her and just gives her a huge hug and she just could not let go. And we’re like, “Wait, we just told you not to do any of this stuff.” And first person she saw as soon as the door was open. Yeah. So that was-
[01:08:39] Adam Fishman: It’s amazing. How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?
[01:08:43] David Reich: As many as possible.
[01:08:45] Adam Fishman: That is the only right answer to
[01:08:46] David Reich: The question.
[01:08:47] Adam Fishman: And
[01:08:47] David Reich: The more it annoys my kids, the more I enjoy it.
[01:08:50] Adam Fishman: Okay. Speaking of which, maybe this only applies to your teenager, what is the most embarrassing thing you’ve done in front of your kids? I’ve heard everything from breathing to walking down the stairs.
[01:09:06] David Reich: I got to go. I got to go away.
[01:09:08] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[01:09:09] David Reich: She just started middle school. We were like weekend. It’s also the longer walk, a walk to get there. She’s staring at me right now.
[01:09:18] Adam Fishman: This is in itself the most embarrassing thing. Yeah.
[01:09:21] David Reich: So on the walk to school, there was a group of girls. They looked similar age. I recognized at least one of them went to the same school and we’d been watching them a half a block ahead of us walk to the school also. I had the great idea that we should introduce Sage to these other girls. So they could just walk together. And walking her bowl, she was so furious with me. And first off, I didn’t actually do it. I just asked her if I could. God, those are seventh graders. You cannot talk to them. So I didn’t do it. It was a post call, but she was still mad at me for a week because I suggested it.
[01:09:59] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the most absurd thing that one of your kids has ever asked you to buy for them?
[01:10:04] David Reich: They always ask for an escalator for the block walk up the hill to get to school.
[01:10:10] Adam Fishman: Love that.
[01:10:11] David Reich: Yeah.
[01:10:12] Adam Fishman: All right. What is the most difficult kids’ TV show that you’ve ever had to sit through?
[01:10:17] David Reich: SpongeBob. I don’t know if you watch that. It’s just the colors,
[01:10:22] Adam Fishman: The drawing,
[01:10:22] David Reich: Tile, the voices, everything just is wrong to me.
[01:10:26] Adam Fishman: It’s all too much. What was or is the first nostalgic movie that you cannot wait to force your kids to watch with you?
[01:10:36] David Reich: So we’ve started on this journey and it’s been great. But Star Wars, I’m a huge sci-fi nerd and that was one I was really waiting for. And the old ones are less gory than the newer ones. So we started with the originals and gone through the first three right now and they like
[01:10:55] Adam Fishman: It. Cool. I watched part of episode five last night with my son. All
[01:10:59] David Reich: Right.
[01:11:00] Adam Fishman: Nice. This may bother you as an efficiency expert. What is the worst experience you’ve ever had asembling a kid’s toy or a piece of furniture?
[01:11:10] David Reich: I love putting stuff together in general and with my kids especially. So this has been something since they were two years old. I have them sitting next to me with the Ikea book and we just build things and I started fixing refrigerators and other stuff. They just love to build real things. I definitely was building some huge Armour thing once and put one of the key pieces in backwards so I had to break down the whole thing and redo. And they got to watch and bump and laugh at me a little bit.
[01:11:40] Adam Fishman: Yeah. All right. Three more for you. How often do you tell your kids back in my day stories?
[01:11:47] David Reich: I think my kids think I was born somewhere between 1950 and 1600. I’m not sure exactly where. They’re pretty sure I took the horse and buggy to get to school when I was young. So they think I’m way older than I actually am. But yeah, all the time.
[01:12:04] Adam Fishman: You certainly didn’t take an escalator to school, that’s for sure. All right. What’s your favorite dad hack for road trips or flights with three kids?
[01:12:14] David Reich: So the great thing about them not being allowed to use the iPads much is that when they’re on a flight, all bets are off.
[01:12:21] Adam Fishman: Not had time.
[01:12:22] David Reich: They’re not blinking with water streaming down their faces and they could fly around the world twice and not notice that it’s happened. That’s awesome. That’s great. And a recent one for the card trips, because we do like to take road trips, is just books on tape. Specifically Percy Jackson has been a road trip book and all of them, 13 to eight, me. We love it.
[01:12:46] Adam Fishman: Into it.
[01:12:46] David Reich: And man, the time flies by. So that’s been a great one for us lately.
[01:12:51] Adam Fishman: Okay. Last question, speaking of road trips, what’s your take on minivans?
[01:12:58] David Reich: So if I’m on a vacation, I do not mind renting a minivan. For my day-to-day, I just can’t do it. Even with the dog and all the kids, we have a three-row SUV. It’s the same reason my e-bike, because I take my e-bike everywhere. I didn’t get the double long one that’s the station wagon. It’s a bike that looks somewhat cool even if I’m only me on it. So it has a one seat on the back. And yeah, we have the cargo box and it is Tetris to load that thing up when we go anywhere, but I’m not going to cross that line.
[01:13:32] Adam Fishman: Not teammate event. Now, why is it okay on vacation? Is this because nobody knows you there?
[01:13:37] David Reich: No, I think they’re a great invention. And if you could stomach it, kudos to you. But yeah, on vacation, not seeing people that I know usually.
[01:13:48] Adam Fishman: Okay. All right. Well, with that, David, thank you so much for joining me today on Startup Dad. It’s been a pleasure having you here. Congratulations on Fambot. Everybody needs to go check it out and I wish you and your fam, not your Fambot, but also your Fambot and your wife all the best and success for this year and your companies. So thank you.
[01:14:09] David Reich: Great. Thanks so much, Adam. This was a lot of fun.
[01:14:11] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with David Reich. You could subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more. Browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.