<i>If startups require intense amounts of time and focus to succeed, how do founders with kids make it work? Children, no matter how lovable and cute, take up a lot of these scarce resources.</i><p>I can't speak to startups specifically, but my parents founded Seliger + Associates, the grant writing firm I'm now part of, when my siblings and I were kids. They and especially my Dad spent absurd hours getting the business started, but that's because they absolutely had to. If they didn't, the outcomes would be very bad—like not having a place to live, or food to eat. Desperation motivates. Look at what people who used to live on farms had to do: backbreaking labor from dawn to dusk, often for ten or twelve hours a day.<p>They did it, and they did it with their kids, because they had no viable alternative, at least until manufacturing came along and sucked much of the workforce out of farming.<p>In the case of my parents, they worked from home (which meant my siblings and I could entertain ourselves, as long as no one was dying or actively bleeding).<p>I think the real answer is that you can think of your life as having three possible properties (there are more of course, but I'm going to reduce them for the sake of simplicity): startup, kids, social / relaxation life. Choose two. Sometimes life chooses for you.<p>EDIT: I've now read through the other stories, and I'm struck by the fact that I don't think any of the people profiled have startups that have been tremendous successes—ones that, say, are valued north of $100 million. By now pretty much everyone understands that startups follow power-laws, and the biggest returns are concentrated in a small number of huge winners. It would be interesting to see how startups in general compare to huge-winner startups.