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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] Walter Velazquez Taboada: When we were playing with, I don’t know, in a dollhouse and we make up stories and make up a plot and I start applying these things like labeling or mirroring and she goes like me, whatever. And I go like, whatever. I’m just mirroring and mirroring or labeling. And I can see her mind kind of like she’s just making up her own story. I’m just like mirroring and labeling. At some point she picks up on it and she goes like, “You just repeat the same thing that I’m saying.
[00:00:30] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the 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 Walter Velazquez, an operations leader and consultant who brings a truly international perspective to parenting. Walter grew up in Cuba, spent his teenage years in Mexico, completed his education in Spain, and has lived around the world ever since. He’s married to his wife, who is also from Cuba, and together they’re raising two children with a significant age gap, an eight-year-old daughter and a seven-month-old son. In our conversation today, we talked about the unique experience of parenting with such a large age gap and how it feels like raising kids in two completely different families. The cross-cultural parenting perspective that comes from their Cuban heritage and international background, how they approach unified parenting despite never having formal discussions about parenting philosophy.
[00:01:28] Adam Fishman: The FBI hostage negotiation techniques he’s learned to use with his strong-willed eight-year-old daughter, how professional growth and fatherhood have evolved together over the years and why he believes children serve as mirrors reflecting back our own behaviors and attitudes. We also discuss some unforgettable family moments, including a traumatic Disney rollercoaster experience that may have ended his daughter’s thrill-seeking career forever. 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 Walter Velazquez. Welcome Walter Velazquez to Startup Dad. It’s my pleasure having you on the show today. Thanks for joining me.
[00:02:12] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Thanks for having me, Adam. Appreciate it.
[00:02:14] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, you have three wild stories from being a dad that I’m going to come back to and ask you to tell me throughout this conversation. We’re going to drip them out. I find that that’s a good retention strategy for listeners, but I did want to start with one right now just to give people a taste of what they’re getting into. So tell me about your Disney and the rollercoaster story. What’s the story behind that?
[00:02:37] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So we kind of bribed our eight year old into helping on the rollercoaster. This is Disney Paris. Two years ago, she was six back then and she didn’t want to go on the rollercoaster. She was like, “No, I don’t want to go there.” And we said, my wife and I, we both wanted to go. And so we were like, “Look, honey, if you go with us, it’s going to be okay and whatnot and we’re going to buy a present.” And she wanted this little stage whatever. And so we convinced her to go into the rollercoaster and it wasn’t a small one. It was kind of like you go into the mining cart and then you go the tunnels and so on. And so she accepts reluctantly and then the moment the thing takes off, her face goes like … This is the first time that she’s in a roller coaster.
[00:03:26] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And she goes so scared. And my wife tells her, “You can scream. It’s okay.” And she just starts screaming and crying and crying. And she goes all the way.
[00:03:39] Adam Fishman: The entire ride.
[00:03:40] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The entire ride, which is not a lot on the roller coaster take a few seconds. For her, it felt like damn the world. And then when she goes down, she’s like, “I hate Disney.” But we wanted to go so bad. You go to this place and then you get to do anything of the fun stuff. You just go to the little kid thing and you’re like, “Well, let’s try. Let’s give it a try.”
[00:04:06] Adam Fishman: So is that the end of her rollercoaster career? Is she over it now or?
[00:04:10] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Pretty much. Yeah, pretty much. We managed to traumatize her.
[00:04:17] Adam Fishman: All right. Well, parents take note. That is maybe what not to do. I don’t know. I do feel like what these theme parks would benefit from is a 20 minute babysitter at the front of the line where you could basically hire somebody. This is a business I need to start. You could basically hire somebody that would watch your kid for the 20 minutes while you’re loading onto the ride, riding, and then pick your kid up afterwards. Yeah,
[00:04:39] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I know. That’s a great idea. I’ll write it down.
[00:04:43] Adam Fishman: We’re starting business ideas here on the pod.That’s the future of this show. Okay. Well, that’s an awesome story. We’ve got two more coming later in the show. The thing that I wanted to touch on really quickly is folks may be able to tell this by your name despite my terrible pronunciation or your accent, but you are not from the same place that I’m from. And so I would love to hear where did you grow up and where are you now?
[00:05:08] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, so I’m originally from Cuba. I grew up there until I was eight years old. And then after that, my family moved to Spain and we lived a long time in Mexico. So my teenager years, I spent them in Mexico. And then when I was about to graduate from high school, we moved back to Spain. So I started college in Spain and then I lived abroad during the university in China and whatnot. So mostly Cuba and Mexico and Spain. And my wife, she’s from Cuba too, so we met there. But yeah, I’ll let you steer the conversation wherever you want to go.
[00:05:51] Adam Fishman: It’s funny, whenever I hear somebody who lives in the United States, whenever I hear Cuba, I always think, oh God, impossible to get to. But that’s really only in the US and everywhere else in the world is like, “Yeah, it’s just Cuba. It’s fine. We come and go. It’s no big deal.”
[00:06:09] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, kind of. Well, it’s hot in the press these days, right? But yeah, it’s hard. It’s not as easy. It’s easier now than it was 20 years ago, but it’s still very challenging political environment there. Very challenging. Yeah.
[00:06:23] Adam Fishman: I imagine. And how often do you make it back there? Because you mentioned you still have some family in Cuba.
[00:06:28] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We used to go a lot until two years ago. Our seven month hasn’t gone to Cuba. And part of the reason is that in 2022, the US with some sanctions. So if he goes, he wouldn’t be able to get the electronic visa. And a few other things, but our eight year old, she went a lot. I feel like that was a life changing experience for her because she got to go pretty often. And the reality there is very different than what she lives in her day-to-day. So she gets to confer and contrast experiences. So that’s interesting. So we used to go a lot once per year, maybe my wife would go twice per year and then over the past two years, we’re not back since then.
[00:07:15] Adam Fishman: I gotcha. Well, hopefully you can get there again, get your seven-month-old, the electronic visa, and then maybe that problem goes away. Okay. So for folks who are listening who’ve made it this far, you have an eight-year-old and a seven-month-old and we’re going to talk about that age gap here in a second, but you and your wife, you got married at a pretty young age. I think 22 and 23 is what you told me. And then you had your first kid pretty quickly thereafter, right? So what was the decision like to start a family or was it more of a happy accident, so to speak?
[00:07:47] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, yeah. Well, we both wanted kids. We were just not planning in a very disciplined way. And so we were 26, I think. And that was our first one. Yeah, it wasn’t planned. It was desire, but not plan. So then we just roll with it and here we are
[00:08:06] Adam Fishman: There’s been a lot of polarizing discussion on this show about, oh, you should have your kids really young or no, you should maybe wait and have them when you’re more mature and your life is more stable and things like that. Obviously, you kind of actually have both experiences because you had one when you were 25 and then you just had your second kid eight years later. And so I’m curious, I guess what have you realized are sort of the benefits and drawbacks of the young parent, young family or the later family?
[00:08:39] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, I think it’s a great topic of discussion. I have this friend plans and has checklists and so on. We’re not that at all. The age gap in our case was more to, right after our first one was born, my wife’s dad has a very severe health condition, basically sucked her energy and time and college and everything. So she was completely incapable of thinking about having another kid. And then right after not long ago, basically her father passed away and then right after that it was like psychologically now that chapter is closed. Shortly after that, we had our second one. So again, we probably wouldn’t have had that gap if we could have decided. So that was a bit of the context. Now when it comes down to the experience of having an eight-year-old and then a seven-month, it’s just like we talk about this.
[00:09:39] Walter Velazquez Taboada: It’s like the new one is being born into a whole different family. It’s a different family. We are very different relationship is different. The fact that he has an older sister, a house full of toys, you mentioned maturity and you mentioned stability that has a financial aspect as well. We never suffered that with our first one. It was just like we tried to live a simple life and it wasn’t like, oh, we can’t go in to a month three to wherever. We were just enjoying that so much that there’s just so much that you can do. And then you’re still trying to develop your career or do whatever. And now the new one is like, and you don’t have to worry about a bunch of things that you would’ve worried with the first one. But also I feel like for example, the dumb things, if you’re not really fit physically fit, you do feel at all when you’re carrying a 20 pound or 25 pound around that something.
[00:10:40] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And then if you’re starting at 35 or 40, well, you better be ready.
[00:10:47] Adam Fishman: You better go out and do some burpees and some jumping jacks to get yourself ready. Yeah,
[00:10:52] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Before you go, for sure. So yeah, it’s a different experience. It’s like different family. And then there’s so many things that you don’t know how to do with the first one, like basic stuff because you just don’t know. The other day, for example, the seven month, he was in this bouncy chair and I didn’t strap him and he fell off. It was like, okay. And he just fell off in his face. I turned around. I was like, it was one second. I turned around, I was cooking something and then I just felt like plaf. And he was like this. And he was crying for four hours straight. Oh no. And I had a meal the day, so I had to go out. And if that had happened with the first one, we would’ve run to the hospital and my wife would’ve been freaking out and this time I was like, okay, it happens.
[00:11:43] Adam Fishman: Well, we’ll give it one more hour and see if he stops crying. Oh, I think we did. Okay, we’re good. We’re fine.
[00:11:49] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Exactly. So little things.
[00:11:52] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Did you find, because the gap is so big there, this is one of the reasons when I talked to my wife about a long time ago about, do we have a third kid? I was like, “Well, but the diapers are gone. We’re sleeping great at night.” I was like, “Don’t drag me back into the dark ages. We can’t do that. “ So are there some things that you just forgot about like, “Oh yeah, this is what it’s like to be the parent of a newborn kid or a seven-month-old.”
[00:12:22] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The joy, it’s so much bigger than the … I used to be there. I used to tell my wife, “Hey, let’s have another one. Let’s have another one.” She just wasn’t ready. And then at some point in that eight-year gap, I was like, “I’m out. I’m not going to go back to changing diapers and blah, blah.” I’m also not fixated. I was like, whatever. If it happens, it happens. I always wanted to have more kids and then it happened and then it’s just lack of sleep and my wife takes the biggest toll on that. But it’s amazing the 24 hours of the day, have you seen these videos where they fill the jar with rocks and then they put some pills and then they put sand and then they put water. It’s just like the whole thing changes throughout the day. In some magic way, ours just show up and you’re like, “Well, I’m not living a drastically different life.
[00:13:14] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We’re just being more efficient.” And then we just have so much fun with the baby and not having some of the worry from the first one and so on that it’s a good experience. It’s a good experience.
[00:13:26] Adam Fishman: Very cool. Very cool. I love that. And I like how you talk about, I think about things in terms of ROI, return on investment. So you’re like, the return on investment is very high from the kid, even if there’s some cost.
[00:13:38] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Exactly, exactly.
[00:13:39] Adam Fishman: Love that. So one of the things is when you get married and you start a family at a really young age, you might not have had the chance to discuss all of the approaches to parenthood with your partner the way that some people do. They talk about it for years and they’re like, “Let’s get on the same page and stuff.” And so I’m curious, was that true for you and where are some of the places that the two of you have discovered over the years since you had your first kid that you differ as parents? Where are the two of you still kind of working out on the edges?
[00:14:13] Walter Velazquez Taboada: No, we didn’t have any discussions of, oh, here’s how we want to raise our kids. And we have a set of common values and we both bring very, very different things to the relationship. And so we didn’t discuss any of that. Even in the early days of our relationship, I have a very different standpoint. My wife, she likes more to read about it and like to consult even with today’s ChatGPT and so on, I’m just rolling with it. I don’t want to hear when the next crisis is because there’s going to be next month it’s like, oh, she texted me today, there is an eight month crisis because we felt that the seven month was becoming very attached and we put it on the floor and he would start crying, which she didn’t do it before, but we just came over a long trip that he was always with people running.
[00:15:05] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And so she searched and she was like, “Oh, there is an eight month crisis.” And I just remember it was like, “Oh, this is going to be like this for the next four years.”
[00:15:13] Adam Fishman: Right. Every month. Every month there’s a new crisis.
[00:15:16] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And then 10 month crisis, then 15 month crisis. So I don’t want to know, I’m bad in that sense. Maybe should do more research and learn more about the approaches. But here’s the funny story that you may have not read about in that guide. One day we had this book, we have a few books, we just haven’t read any of them. There is one that is called Discipline Without Tears. Maybe you’ve heard about it.
[00:15:42] Adam Fishman: I think I’ve heard of that. Yeah,
[00:15:44] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah. Maybe I’m just doing a literal translation.
[00:15:46] Adam Fishman: Yeah, I think it’s like the no cry. I know what you’re talking about. We’ll link to it in the show notes.
[00:15:51] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I’m sure the translation is different. So we had it around just wishing that we would learn through Osmo since. And then one day I see my daughter sitting in the couch reading the book and then something happens the next day or whatever and she starts crying and I was like, “Why are you crying so much? It wasn’t a big deal.” And she was, “Because I read in the book that when this happens, you have to do A, B, and C and you don’t do it. “ And I was like, “Okay, we’re going to get rid of that book right now.”
[00:16:29] Adam Fishman: Just throw that book right out the window. It’s gone. We don’t have the book anymore. That’s funny.
[00:16:35] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So that’s funny. Yeah. So we didn’t prepare a lot for it. So we’re just going with the flow. I’m not sure that’s the right way to do it. It’s just the way we’ve done it. You learn things along the way and I’m sure at the beginning of my parenthood, I felt very assured and maybe this is just back to your point about age. Oh, we’re doing things that we can and that’s just the way it is. And then as I grow older, you look back and you go like, oh shoot.
[00:17:09] Adam Fishman: Mess that up.
[00:17:12] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Exactly. But I feel like it’s that way with everything in life. You look back and it’s like, oh, so easy, right? Once you’ve gone through it, it feels easy. But then when you’re in the middle of the battle, so to say, it’s a bit harder.
[00:17:26] Adam Fishman: There are three things that you mentioned you and your wife are still kind of sorting through screen time, hygiene and risk tolerance. So tell me about those three things.
[00:17:38] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We’re both on the low screen kind of team, but I’m extreme. If it were my choice, they would get little to no screen and my wife is a bit more tolerant. So we kind of meet somewhere in between. She’s the one that, she’s like full-time mom.
[00:17:57] Adam Fishman: She needs a break sometimes.
[00:18:00] Walter Velazquez Taboada: If I wanted to enforce my purview, then I would have to like, okay, you want no screen? Great. Then take care of them for three hours in a row and then you tell me. So that’s one. And then hygiene is just basic stuff I think that has to do with our own nature, touching thing from the ground or putting their fingers back. I’m like, whatever, he’s not going to die. And my wife’s just going, playing the hand and fine. I think that’s pretty common. And then the last one is risk tolerance. I do things with them like play and games that are more risky than probably she would. Sometimes she would get scared and I go like, “It’s fine. It’ll be fine.” And sometimes she’s right and like out of bed. There is this theory that Egyptians, one way the rocks stack so well is because I think it was Egyptians or romance, I don’t remember, but they would hang a stone on top of the other, very close, very, very, very close and then you swing it.
[00:19:06] Walter Velazquez Taboada: That friction would create a very smooth surface between those two rocks. So they would just swing it slowly, slowly, slowly one time after the other, one time with water and whatnot. And so they match perfect.
[00:19:24] Walter Velazquez Taboada: They’re like day-to-day small points where you go, you just know the game and you’re like, “Fine, you’re flexible here, flexible there.” So those are three areas that we continue to debate and sometimes are a good bit about.
[00:19:39] Adam Fishman: Yeah. You have received some advice in the past that partners should have, I think you called it a unified front, I’m doing air quotes here, a unified front in your parenting practice. Is that something that you and your wife have talked about or is that something that you find makes sense or maybe hasn’t made sense for you?
[00:19:57] Walter Velazquez Taboada: It’s like this advice of like, “Oh, never go to sleep if you fought.” It’s very late and you’re dead and you’re like, “Oh my God, I need to sleep.” And it’s like, bad advice, bad advice. Go get your sleep and then you talk, you’re calm. Okay. I feel like it’s kind of like same thing, got to respect the other side views and be empathetic. We experience that in some areas of our life that are very, very core to how we see the world. There are a bunch of others where we don’t. And then to me, the question is, and again, I haven’t researched this or anything. It’s just a hunch or how I see things and I trust my kids. I really trust them. I think that’s a big component of trusting that they will overcome your bad decisions, your own kind of biases and evol into something better through their own unfolding throughout life.
[00:20:52] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So I’m like, okay, if they grow up observing different perspectives for a given situation or a given problem, there are two potential outcomes. One is they get totally traumatized and they go like, “Oh, I have these two figures of authority and trust and they’re telling me different things, so who do I trust?” Or they get to develop some sense of discrimination and understanding over time. So I think my hunch is that short term there is that, well, what’s going on in here? I’m expecting the same thing from both of them, but if you do it with love and explaining why and they get to see that dynamic play out a couple of times with different outcomes, one and the other, they would go like, “Okay, and my daughter has shown me that she has a great read on us.” She knows perfectly who we are and what to ask us and what to hide.
[00:21:53] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And I just think that’s the point of view where I go, it’s just not possible. If you try to do it, so two options, like either you pick a partner that is very much like you and that also has negative consequences because there is no diversity or you go down the, okay, we have different point of views and one day it’s going to go one path and another time it’s going to go another path and it’s going to be okay. So I don’t know. I don’t have the answer. Maybe we do this podcast again in 20 years and I’ll let you know. You’ll
[00:22:22] Adam Fishman: Have five kids then. You’ll be having your next seven month old in 20 years. Yeah. Well, I think it’s a good perspective and the answer is like we don’t really know, but people tend to speak about it very emphatically like they do know. And so I appreciate you saying we don’t really know. So that’s good. Okay. So I said I would revisit three stories that you had. We already talked about the Disneyland, the traumatizing your daughter with the Disneyland rollercoaster. The second story you have from fatherhood is the lost soccer ball story. So what is the lost soccer ball story?
[00:22:58] Walter Velazquez Taboada: This is an interesting one because I actually asked her about this and it was very interesting because I would’ve never guessed that that was a story that stuck in her mind.
[00:23:09] Adam Fishman: And this is your daughter? This is stuck in your daughter’s mind. Yeah. Okay.
[00:23:12] Walter Velazquez Taboada: My daughter. I asked her and she told, this is the first one she told me and I’m like, “What?” So I just decided to include it. So we live next to this thing called. In Mexico, they’re like small legoons where it has underwater that flows up. Some of them are always clean depending on what you have around and the trees that you have around. So we live right next to one and there are a few crocodiles there. When it rains, the whole land around it gets filled with water and the crocs just come out. It’s not like every day, but you see them in the road and they come out to the beach. So we see them. It’s just like, we know we’ve seen them, neighbors take pictures and-
[00:23:52] Adam Fishman: And are these pretty big? These are pretty big crack ones?
[00:23:56] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, the big ones, really big ones.
[00:23:59] Adam Fishman: The kind that will eat an eight-year-old or a seven-month-old. Yeah,
[00:24:02] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, good point. That’s the one.
[00:24:06] Adam Fishman: Okay. Well, I’m getting a sense of size here.
[00:24:09] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, exactly. So we were playing soccer, her and I, just the two of us, there is a fence between our condo and that senoti. So we were playing and then I just kicked the ball and it goes out and goes to the land where that gets filled in with water when it rains a lot and where crocolas go through. So it was getting dark. So I told my daughter, “Let’s go get the ball.” And she was like, “No way. I’m not going there. The crocolas are going to eat us.” I was like, “Look, this is not rainy seasons. The crocolas are in their cenoty and it’s fine.” And she was like, “No, no, no, no, no.” So I said, “Okay, fine. We’re not going today.” But I really wanted to … And she said, “You know what? We’ll buy another one.” And that really triggers me because I’m like, no, that’s not the solution.
[00:24:59] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So I said, “You know what? We’ll go tomorrow.” And then she forgets about it because she’s a kid and then the next day where we’re going to go down and walk the dog. So I convinced her to come down and walk the dog. Then when we’re done, I tell her, let’s go get the ball. And she goes like, “What?
[00:25:19] Walter Velazquez Taboada: No.” So I convinced her to just, let’s get close. There is a little street that hasn’t any pavement. It’s just dirt. And we go walking because I didn’t know where the ball was. I kind of knew where it was, but not really. And so we just go walk in there and I told her, “It’s right there. Let me just go through the bushes and the trees and I’ll get it and you wait for me here.” So she had to wait alone in the middle of the track where crocolas go by to when the water rains a lot. So she’s like, “No, I don’t want. “ And I told her, “You know what? Let’s do something. I’ll go in and I’m going to do this every time. And then when I do this, you do … “ I don’t remember if I told her to clap
[00:26:00] Adam Fishman: Or- Yeah, you make a noise back.
[00:26:02] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah. So every five seconds I would do that and she would reply. So I start walking and she just sees me disappear into the bushes, but she keeps hearing the sound. I keep doing the sound and she keeps replying. And I was a bit scared too because I was like, okay, she’s there. So we keep doing this and then I go through the bushes and I find the ball, I take it and then we just go out. So I think for her it was like this, I don’t know, in the kid’s mind, to me it was just like we’re getting the ball. And for her, it was like we went through the jungle where the crocodiles live and we rescued something. It seems like for a reason it really stuck in her mind.
[00:26:41] Adam Fishman: Okay. Okay. And did you see any crocodiles on
[00:26:45] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The spot? No, no, no, no, no. It’s very hard. It has to be the right time of the year and we were not in the right time. As you see in Openheimer when they go, there’s like 99.995 that this goes well. And they were like, “What? There’s a 0.001 chance that we destroy the world okay.” So it kind of like that. There’s 0.001 that a crocodile eats us, but we’re going to take the risk.
[00:27:10] Adam Fishman: But it probably would just eat one of you so at least the other one would be safe.
[00:27:13] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, yeah. After he’s done with me, he wouldn’t care for my daughter
[00:27:18] Adam Fishman: These are things that like when I kick the ball over the fence, these are things that I don’t have to be concerned about is in my neighborhood, is a crocodile going to eat me or my kid? But when you live in Cancun, that’s-
[00:27:30] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah. If you live in a golf course in Miami, there are videos all the time of … It happens all the time.
[00:27:37] Adam Fishman: Yeah. This is why I don’t play golf. It stays far away from those crocodiles. You’re
[00:27:41] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Getting them, you save money is perfect.
[00:27:42] Adam Fishman: Exactly, exactly. Okay. I love that story. We’ve got one more that we’ll get to in the future here. What are some of the more surprising things that you’ve discovered as a dad?
[00:27:54] Walter Velazquez Taboada: In a way, it’s been a mirror of you see yourself, especially when they start picking on stuff that you do without knowing and you are like, “Oh, that’s just us. It’s my wife or it’s me. “ It’s really propelling to change some things because most of them you go like, “Or we’re not aware, maybe it’s something you do subconsciously.” So finding some stuff about youth through your kids, it’s really humbling and eye-opening experience. And then just the purity of the heart during, I don’t know, four years or so where there’s just so much forgiveness, they just don’t hold anything, all your screw-ups and they don’t hold anything back at least during maybe the Disney thing they hold back. But for the most part, they’re just so loving and forgiving and you’re like, “I just want to be like that. “ I remember this is not my daughter was a child, a friend child, but this time my daughter was six, so she was already old.
[00:28:56] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And for that moment, that experience of you carry them and they use their legs to secure the position and it doesn’t matter anywhere that you take them, they’re fine as long as you’re fine, they’re happy and of course there are physiological needs, but you put them on a bouncy chair or whatever and they’re going to last just so much. But if they’re with you, you can do anything. You can cook, you can clean, send an email and they’re just happy because they’re with you. When you extrapolate that to your own life, maybe a spiritual life, you go like, “Oh, that’s really amazing.” It’s kind of like the way we should go along. So that’s some of the big ones. I don’t know if you’re after the smaller, more a funny one, but those have been really, really great experiences with the kids.
[00:29:50] Adam Fishman: Yeah. No, that’s great. And so what I heard there is one of the biggest things for you is the kids’ ability to read you and then that they end up being a Mirror to what you are. So they play back a lot of your own mannerisms and behaviors and are very observant in a way that you might not expect.
[00:30:10] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Very observant and also very absorbent. I don’t know if that’s the right word, but they suck everything in good and the bad and they’re watching you all the time.
[00:30:19] Adam Fishman: Yeah. For better or for worse. Sort of related to this, one of the more challenging aspects of parenting that you described to me is basically how to lead kids down their own path without letting your own experiences influence them. And I wanted to know one, how have you learned that? What’s happened in your life that you’ve learned this lesson? And then where have you had to catch yourself from falling into that pattern where you’re letting your experience kind of dictate or influence your kids and you’ve had to catch yourself and stop it from happening?
[00:30:55] Walter Velazquez Taboada: It’s a great question. The second I would have to think, let me see if something comes to my mind around the second part. But the first one of how did I come to that learning and making it a sticking point or letting them find their own path. It has to do with your understanding of life. You can really boil it down to that. If you take a huge step back and you ask some of the most fundamental existential questions that you can ask, there’s really almost like two options. We come into this world, nothing in our backpacks. For some reason it’s wired into the DNA. Even if kids, when they’re month old, you can already start seeing their character unfold. That exists. Some of them are more grumpy, let’s grumpy, more outgoing, introvert, extrovert, at least under some definitions of those two things. So there is these either everything is developed as we go or with a certain foundation that no one really knows, or there is some baggage that you carry with you even as you’re born.
[00:32:06] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So I’ve decided to adopt the, “Hey, you’re not born from zero with just DNA and that’s it. “ And then if you assume that path for a moment, then this individual has their own context. So you are working off an art piece that has already begun a long time ago. You think it’s a blank canvas, it’s not a blind canvas. You just don’t have the right lenses to look at the whole thing. So if you assume that’s the case, then you really have to be very observant around, well, what are they inclined to? What are they not inclined to? And this is very hard when they’re very young because you can pick up some things, but it’s not super easy. So to me, that’s the biggest challenge. If I knew, I would tell like, “Hey, you want to be a geologist? By all means, go and do that.
[00:33:06] Walter Velazquez Taboada: You want to be a monk, go and do that. “ I don’t care. I genuinely don’t care what they do with their lives. And even if they make mistakes, I’ll just be there to try to help them in whatever way I can. So if you start anchor on those principles, it becomes easy. And then again, I have an eight-year-old. I don’t know when we’re talking about what they want to study and whatnot, but that’s my guiding principle. And I’ve seen that another part of the question was what has happened in your own life? And I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. I wasn’t guided down some of those signals. I don’t hold anything back to my parents and they made many mistakes, but I’m like, whatever, I’m doing them too, and that’s just part of the ride. But the river finds its own path. So the more I can just help along the way, the better I’m continuously trying to be observant for the signals rather than thinking, well, how do I pave the way for them?
[00:34:12] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Well, I don’t know what the way is. So the first thing is finding the way and then we’ll figure it out together.
[00:34:18] Adam Fishman: And what about the second part of the question where have you ever had to catch yourself or have you ever been observant of the fact that you’re falling into this pattern of steering too much or trying to direct the river instead of letting the river direct itself?
[00:34:34] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, sometimes in subtle ways, not in drastic ways, not in, oh, I always wanted to be whatever, a basketball player, and so I’m going to sign you up in basketball. So not those things, but I think the way I talk a lot with, I spend a lot of time with my daughter, so we talk a lot. Sometimes we’ve tried to help her out of some problems in the way that it just wasn’t her. We actually had to course correct. It was a small kids thing in school, but again, we had to tackle it and we weren’t finding the way out of it. And the advice we were giving was just not something that she would do because of her nature. So we just had to again like, okay, this is what you would do, not what she would do. So you have to roll with it and of course, correct.
[00:35:26] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So I see myself sometimes talking her through things that I go like, maybe I’m just going to let her figure it out on her own.
[00:35:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And just be there as the backstop to support her and however she’s navigating it. Okay, that’s great. That’s super helpful. I’m really excited to ask you about frameworks because I talked to dads every dad on the show I always ask about parenting frameworks. And you told me that a lot of the principles that you’ve applied are from the FBI hostage negotiator, Chris Voss. He wrote a great book about this and his concept of the Black Swan. And so for folks who haven’t read that book or understand that concept, what is the Black Swan and how does that apply to parenting?
[00:36:11] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The whole methodology is about empathy, that’s the foundation. And the way they describe empathy is the ability to acknowledge, call out, put into words what someone else is, especially feeling. And that’s a watershed moment in anything, in a conversation, in relationship and in whatever. And the black song is when you’re able to find through empathy and other tactics they have an unknown unknown, just something that is going to drastically change the course of an event that you wouldn’t have gotten if you didn’t know. So that’s kind of the origin why it’s called the Black Swan. There’s always a Black Swan in anything, a deal, a negotiation, a problem. You just don’t know and you have to find it. So I read the book and it really changed the way I approach my work. And then just out of curiosity, when we were playing with, I don’t know, in a dollhouse or whatever with the little things and we make up stories and make up a plot and I start applying these things like labeling or mirroring and she goes, mini, whatever.
[00:37:19] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And I go like, whatever. And she goes like, “Ooh, have you read Black Swan?” I
[00:37:24] Adam Fishman: Have, yeah. Yeah.
[00:37:25] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So I just mirror and then I’m just mirroring and mirroring and mirroring or labeling and I can see her mind kind of like she’s just making up her own story. I’m just mirroring and labeling. That’s hilarious. And then what’s the funniest thing about that? At some point she picks up on it and she goes like, “Why don’t you just ask the last three … You just repeat the same thing that I’m
[00:37:53] Adam Fishman: Saying.” She caught up, she figured it out, she cracked the code.
[00:37:57] Walter Velazquez Taboada: She figured labeling is harder, but mirroring is pretty straightforward. My wife caught on it also, but then she forgot and now it’s fine.
[00:38:08] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Everything’s great unless they figure out your plan, right? But this actually gets back to the thing you were saying earlier, which is like kids are very observant. So you did this a few times and then your daughter’s like, “Wait a minute, what’s happening?”
[00:38:22] Walter Velazquez Taboada: What’s happening here? What’s happening? And I also, back to your question, I also tried to show her how she could use that to get out of some difficult situations in school where they ask her something that she didn’t want to answer. But again, all of that is counterintuitive. It’s not just how we naturally operate. So you have to train yourself into that. And so that’s just what’s going to happen. But she did pick up on the pattern very quickly. She was like, “Why are you just repeating the last thing I
[00:38:52] Adam Fishman: Say?” So obviously that example of the dollhouse and playing and she leads her to making up her own story and things like that, that’s sort of one result, but what’s another result that you’ve seen from applying this approach to parenting.
[00:39:09] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Finding Black Swans, for example, she was having this issue at school where she had a longtime friend that started unfolding into a not so friendship. We were just seeing the danger from afar and we were just trying to encourage her to look for another set of friends and whatever and
[00:39:29] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We just couldn’t get through it. And then just talking, at some point I was like, “You’re afraid that if you stop playing with this person, you’re going to be left with no friends.” And she was like, “Yeah, that’s the thing.” So that was a huge leap into finding a path to that solution. We had tried different things and they hadn’t worked because we hadn’t gotten her to understand, “Hey, we know where you’re coming from. We understand you. So what we’re trying to do is in your benefit and we know that this is very important to you, that aspect of the situation.” So that’s an example. But yeah, beyond that, again, back to one of our earliest points, we don’t use that many frameworks. One day I have, this is not a framework, but it goes back to the partnership and so on.
[00:40:19] Adam Fishman: It’s
[00:40:19] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Like when you really start developing a degree of empathy or training yourself into this as a skill, not necessarily a, “Oh, are you empathetic or not as a person?” Then some things start to change in your own set of beliefs and motivations and desires. So when you get to a point where you can really crack what’s going on through the other person’s heart, something changes in yourself too. That’s kind of a recent relatively recent experience. I’m fascinated about it. It’s not just, oh, you’re exerting a change to get something that you want. It’s no, it’s actually exerting a change in what you want and the outcome is still better than what you thought you wanted. And that’s just like, whoa, this is just magic or something.
[00:41:16] Adam Fishman: Oh, I love that. It kind of is. So this is related to something I wanted to talk to you next, which is you’ve got an eight-year-old and a seven-month-old and we talked a litle bit about how your own parenting style has changed a bit from kid to kid. You’re a bit more relaxed, you worry a little less, your younger kid falls out of the bouncy seat and you’re like, “Oh, they’re probably fine. Let’s just let them cry for a while.” But I’m also very curious how that’s maybe changed you as a manager. So when you think about employees or team leadership, what’s happened … You work in consulting, so you work for yourself essentially. And so I’m curious what’s changed for you professionally as you’ve gone through the years of being a dad?
[00:41:59] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, it’s a good question. When my daughter was two years old, I think I was leading a large revenue operations team, let’s just say operations team, relatively large, like 40. And then after that it was a very big team of over 200 and I was very, very young. I’m still young, but I was very passionate and result driven and this needs to be done and very top down and enforcing and this is VC back. We don’t have time for parenting. I already do parenting.
[00:42:36] Adam Fishman: Yeah. This isn’t summer camp. Everybody get going.
[00:42:39] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Summer camp, exactly. This is not things, how you want it or how I want it. So it was very hammer style management. Then after that, I spent the last four years or so in consulting, which is like basically maybe you have a toothstick.
[00:43:01] Walter Velazquez Taboada: You’re consulting. You cannot do anything on there. You’re trying to exert change from outside with no credibility beyond a brand name. And so that has been very close, much closer to what parenting actually looks like. Because at the end of the day, you have some authority, but you don’t have authority in the inner world. You have authority to say, you can watch so much screen or you can watch, you can do this, you can go with that. But you don’t have any authority on how the inner workings of the feelings and the psychology is working. You have no clue.You’re throwing things into a black box and you have no idea what’s going to come out of it. In that regard, it’s much similar. And then you can start drawing some parallelism between both words because in my work, part of my job is to help group of executive and usually leaders to make their own way through complex decisions.
[00:44:09] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And this is something that this mode is something I copied from Dave who was in the podcast too. 100% alignment on a 70% solution is better than 70% alignment on 100% solution. And actually, one of the most recent projects was kind of like a memo for a strategy memo for a senior leadership team, a meeting for their annual planning. And that was the heading. I built a website, like a web-based app for them and it was like that phrase was the hero on the hero. But you have no say in what they’re going to decide. So they’re kind of shepherding and that’s it. So you cannot enforce, you cannot say, “This is it. “ Even if they’re walking the worst possible decision, there’s just so much you can do. So in that regard, it’s been eye-opening and self-fitting one and the other because they’re very, very close in that sense.
[00:45:07] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Now, I don’t think I’m going to do this for the rest of my life in terms of do just consulting. So I’m pretty sure that when I go back to leading a team, I’m going to be a totally different person than I was when my daughter was very young. That’s a theory. I still haven’t proven that.
[00:45:26] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I guess you’ll find out when you get back in the real pressure cooker. So that is interesting how you’ve developed this perspective that maybe the tops down mandate is not the right way to get people motivated to do a thing. I like that phrasing of the 70% solution with 100% alignment beats the opposite every single time. So that’s a good one. You said you learned that from Dave Boyce, right?
[00:45:53] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah, that’s right.
[00:45:54] Adam Fishman: Yeah. I’ll have to thank him for that, who’s also the reason that you and I met. Yeah, exactly. Very excited about that. Dave’s just been killing it with the guest referrals lately.
[00:46:04] Adam Fishman: So I will thank him today. Yeah. So I wanted to switch. We’re getting close to the end here and then we’re going to get to your final story, but I’m really curious with it partially because culturally Mexico is different than the United States and things like that. And you talked about you and your wife have slightly different perspectives on screen time, not vastly different, but just slightly different. So how have you guided your daughter through her immersion into the digital world? And I mean, she’s probably square in the midst of it right now. She’s not a teenager, but kids get bombarded by this at a pretty young age. And so I’m curious how you’ve been navigating that.
[00:46:49] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I would say that she’s not still into her journey. I think that’s about to begin. I need to make sure that I have an iron tight setup for her. She just watches TV. She doesn’t get tablet or play games. She plays some silly games that are not online or anything. She doesn’t get YouTube to explore, get lost on any path. So when I refer to screen time, it’s literally just TV, but I know that will change. She has some costs that live in Spain and have zero access to tablets. So she’s close to them. So we use that to anchor on, hey, not everyone is behind their tablet for X number of hours per week. So she really doesn’t have access to navigate the internet, like zero. She uses a tablet to do homework. They send her homework in a tablet, but that’s it. She’s not into the digital immersion yet.
[00:47:48] Walter Velazquez Taboada: So when that happens, I know a few things that I need to get right from a monitoring and security and bunch of stuff. And then there is a friend of mine, not a friend, but a guy I met from college, he actually founded this initiative called Pandora’s Way. That was right in the midst of when the AI was exploding. So I don’t know if they have pivoted, but we had some great time with data and they created this concept of I think their quests. The whole purpose is to guide kids into the digital world. I collaborated with that when they were researching and asking for input from parents. And so that’s one thing I plan to rely on. This is an area where I will spend time to really develop a method and not just like, “Hey, here’s a tablet and go figure it out.
[00:48:42] Walter Velazquez Taboada: “ So we’ve anchored the screen time, that’s a good thing. And then part of the plan is just swap in and that’s what we do today. “Hey, you want to use a tablet for basic stuff like games or whatever? Then you cannot watch the same amount of TV. “She’s familiar with this trade off. She’s not into it yet, but it will be something very thoughtful and monitored just so I know what the hell she’s doing. And then there is all AI. We play with the AI. Sometimes we put ChatGPT and I prompt her with a voice to be the crystal ball. So we ask her dumb things and then she will reply and my daughter loves that. But AI is just adding a lot of complexity to the immersion into the digital world. So yeah, I haven’t figured that one yet, but it’s top of mind for me.
[00:49:35] Adam Fishman: Yeah. What are some other interesting ways that you use AI as a parent today?
[00:49:41] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Sometimes I use it to take a picture of the books and develop study guides that are just right for her age and based on the content that she’s studying. And then a lot of research when she gets curious about something we ask Alexa or we just research. So she knows that there is this thing that can answer your questions. And then sometimes we double click and she’s kind of like, but nothing fancy. And part of that is because I just don’t want to go there too soon. I think there is enough life. Again, I haven’t seen any signal that she’s going to be a hacker or a genius IT programmer. So that’s not her thing. She’s a letters girl. She loves writing and books and poetry. So I’m like, okay, no rush for spoiling that and getting AI to write all your stuff in a not so great way or solving your homework.
[00:50:41] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We don’t have time for that.
[00:50:43] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Yeah. Sort of dabbling in AI. Good approach there. Okay. I promise we would get to three stories that you have. And so we’re getting to the last story now, which is the Mummy Halloween costume. So tell me the story of the Mummy Halloween costume. I know we’re well past Halloween as we’re recording this, but maybe I’ll drop this clip again at Halloween time. So tell me about the Money Halloween costume.
[00:51:10] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah. So it’s pretty self-explanatory. This is 2020. I think she was three or four, maybe four. So still not old enough that she know what’s going on and with some stuff. And there were a bunch of kids in the neighborhood back then. And my wife and I just put together a Halloween party for them. So we got one of these inflatable castles and I disguised myself as a movie, but it was a great custom. I was fully strapped and we got some makeup to make it look old and dusty. And someone found this remnants of wood when you cut woods and I put it all over. So it was good. It was a well-accomplished custom. And so they were there playing in the castle and then I just sneak into a, I think it was a box that was next to it and they’re all jumping and so on.
[00:52:05] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And then all of a sudden someone spots this coffin and I just pop out of it and they were terrified, terrified. They were screaming. And even the older ones were like, “What the hell is this? “ And I was chasing them and she was crying.
[00:52:25] Walter Velazquez Taboada: And I had so much fun. I had so much fun. I think I had more fun than all of them together. I was just chasing them and they were screaming. And then when they sear out that it was an adult, they would try to get me, but my daughter was just terrified. And then I just took out the costume and she looked at me like, “What’s going on? “ And it was so much fun that Halloween was so much fun.
[00:52:49] Adam Fishman: Oh my God. There’s a common thread between all three of these, which is basically you traumatizing your daughter in subtle ways. There’s the rollercoaster one, then there’s the crocodiles and then there’s this mummy story. There’s a common theme here.
[00:53:04] Walter Velazquez Taboada: You found a common theme.
[00:53:06] Adam Fishman: She’s going to be one tough kid, that’s for sure. Well, that’s a great story. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. And I’m glad that you had fun, even if the kids were terrified. It’s all about you. Okay. Well, to end, how can people follow along or be helpful to you?
[00:53:20] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I’m not super active, but always glad to connect, always glad to chat. Yeah, I think LinkedIn is the best place for us to connect. I can drop my link there so you can send it in the materials and whatnot.
[00:53:35] Adam Fishman: Everyone DM Walter and give him more ideas of ways he can traumatize his daughter.
[00:53:42] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Now it’s two, so now we need more.
[00:53:43] Adam Fishman: Oh yeah, you got to do it. You got it. Start I’m young. Start the seven month old right now. Okay, cool. Well, we will link to that in the show notes. So let’s get to Lightning Round, which is always a fan favorite. Are you ready for Lightning Round?
[00:53:56] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Oh yeah, let’s do it.
[00:53:57] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is the most indispensable parenting product that you’ve ever purchased?
[00:54:03] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Oh, the diaper genie
[00:54:05] Adam Fishman: Where you
[00:54:06] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Throw the diapers.
[00:54:07] Adam Fishman: All right. What is the most useless parenting product you’ve ever purchased?
[00:54:13] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The storylizer, the new sterilizer. Never
[00:54:16] Adam Fishman: Used it. Okay. Okay. What is the weirdest thing that you’ve ever found in your daughter’s pockets or in the washing machine?
[00:54:28] Walter Velazquez Taboada: A bunch of eraser, little pieces, little pieces of erasers. I was like, “What are you doing with these?” And it’s like, “No, we collect them at school.” So they chop the eraser off the pencils and then that’s their treasure.
[00:54:42] Adam Fishman: Oh, okay. All right. They use it as currency. It’s like Prism. They’re exchanging cigarettes and erasers. Okay. True or false, there’s only one correct way to load a dishwasher.
[00:54:55] Walter Velazquez Taboada: True, true. The one my wife says.
[00:55:00] Adam Fishman: Common refrain amongst the startup dad community, I got to say.
[00:55:04] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Exactly.
[00:55:05] Adam Fishman: What is your signature dad’s superpower?
[00:55:08] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Playing all the time. We laugh a lot. We have a lot of fun.
[00:55:12] Adam Fishman: Okay. Aside from feeding your daughter to crocodiles, what is your favorite activity to do with her?
[00:55:18] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Outdoors. So love going skating with her, going to the beach. And also the reading time. The reading time is the great time that we spend together.
[00:55:26] Adam Fishman: That’s awesome. Okay. If she had to describe you in one word, what would it be?
[00:55:31] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Funny.
[00:55:32] Adam Fishman: Awesome. You kicked off the show talking about this, but how many parenting books do you have in your house?
[00:55:38] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Maybe two.
[00:55:39] Adam Fishman: Okay. How many of those have you read?
[00:55:42] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Zero.
[00:55:45] Adam Fishman: You say that with such a straight face, like, of course zero. Of course the answer is zero.
[00:55:48] Walter Velazquez Taboada: We
[00:55:49] Adam Fishman: Also have
[00:55:49] Walter Velazquez Taboada: A marriage book and we haven’t read it.
[00:55:54] Adam Fishman: Also sensing a pattern here. What is the most absurd thing that your daughter has ever asked you to buy for her?
[00:56:02] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I don’t know. Maybe a unicorn or something like that. When she was younger and then all sorts of weird things that other kids just repeat like, “Oh, I’m going to buy whatever, a house, wherever, or a plane or something like that. “ It’s just
[00:56:19] Adam Fishman: Like- Okay, cool. What is the most difficult kids TV show that you’ve had to sit and watch with your daughter?
[00:56:27] Walter Velazquez Taboada: The most difficult TV show. Oh, there is one recently. I don’t remember the name. It was
[00:56:35] Adam Fishman: Painful,
[00:56:35] Walter Velazquez Taboada: But I remember the name. It was just very painful.
[00:56:38] Adam Fishman: All right. What is your favorite kid’s movie?
[00:56:42] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I think Inside Out is a great one.
[00:56:45] Adam Fishman: That is a great one. Is there a nostalgic movie that you cannot wait to force your daughter to watch with you?
[00:56:54] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I just traumatized with real world experience. Movie traumaizing is not my thing. Okay.
[00:56:59] Adam Fishman: Okay,
[00:57:00] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Great. My dad, I love science fiction and he forced me to watch Alien when I was very young and I speak out so much. I had nightmares and so on. I don’t have any movie in my mind that I’m going to … Oh, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I convinced her to watch the first one because there was the recent one. So we read the book, then she watched the first one, then she watch the Johnny Depp one from 2000 and whatever, and then she watched the most recent one, but she didn’t want to watch the first one until she read the book. She loved the book because she was like, “Oh, I want to watch
[00:57:36] Adam Fishman: That. “ Okay. What is the worst experience you’ve ever had assembling a kid’s toy or a piece of children’s furniture?
[00:57:46] Walter Velazquez Taboada: I don’t remember.
[00:57:48] Adam Fishman: You blocked it from memory.
[00:57:50] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Yeah. Oh, well, you know these big dollhouses and I have an electric screwdriver now, the ones that have battery and that’s great. But the first one we had, I didn’t have any screwdriver. And so all those screws that you have to do it by hand and that was just so painful. It’s like every little piece. And again, it’s beautiful, but that was something.
[00:58:11] Adam Fishman: Okay.
[00:58:12] Walter Velazquez Taboada: You should get an electric screwdriver before you assemble a dollhouse for your daughter.
[00:58:16] Adam Fishman: That is actually the most indispensable parenting product is the electric screwdriver. Exactly. Saves your wrists. How often do you tell your daughter back in my day stories?
[00:58:26] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Not very often. Not
[00:58:27] Adam Fishman: Very often. Okay.start. Don’t worry. It’ll start. Do you have a favorite dad trick for road trips or flights? Maybe the flight to Cuba with your daughter? Anything you figured out that works really well on the flights?
[00:58:42] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Book flights that are in the late night so they sleep.
[00:58:45] Adam Fishman: Okay, great. That’s a good trick.
[00:58:49] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Just an assortment of things. It’s just one thing don’t get bored. You need variety over depth. You need breadth over death. So you
[00:58:57] Adam Fishman: Need
[00:58:58] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Just a bit, maybe you get one of these one games and then you bring a few drawing coloring pages, one of these conversation cards that they just ask and then you combine that with a few episodes, short episodes of the tablet that will do the trick. But if you book a late night flight, that makes all the difference because then they go differently. Yeah.
[00:59:23] Adam Fishman: Okay. And finally, what is your take on minivans?
[00:59:28] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Minivans?
[00:59:29] Adam Fishman: Minivans. Are you a big minivan guy or no?
[00:59:33] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Well, that’s kind of a debate in the family because we were just in Spain a couple of weeks ago and we actually rented a large van. It was like nine seats. My wife’s brother and her sister-in-law were traveling with us so we just didn’t fit in a small car and it was a great experience because you have all this space and you just leave the trolley car and you Ticket in there, you have to worry. So I’m leaning towards minivan fan. I think we’ll take that step sometime soon.
[01:00:10] Adam Fishman: Your wife may be a little bit more hesitant on the minivan? Oh yeah. Awesome. Okay. Well, we know where we stand on this one. Well, Walter, that just about does it for our recording today. Thank you so much for joining me. I wish you and your family all the best for the rest of this year and beyond. So thank you.
[01:00:32] Walter Velazquez Taboada: Thank you. Thank you. You’re great. Thank you for doing this and keep it on. It’s such a fun conversation and yeah, we get to learn from one another.
[01:00:42] Adam Fishman: Awesome. Thank you for listening to today’s conversation with Walter Velazquez. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. Thanks for listening and see you next week.