The Coffee Chat (#41)
My conversation with An Nguyen - tech advisor, tech-exec, ex-management consultant and dad to the world's cutest little one!
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Hi there 👋🏽
I am excited to be back in your inbox this weekend. The last few months have been very busy and for now I am just glad to get a bit of a breather.
One thing I am certain about though is that the “deferred life plan” doesn't work which means I need to do a better job of creating moments of rest and rejuvenation amidst moments of immense learning, growth and pressure.
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
Meet An Nguyen
About 10 months back An wrote a very long LinkedIn post exploring the … “cultural rut on paternity leave with it still being unusual and less supported for dads to step away from their careers to be the primary caregiver.” and articulating how he arrived at the decision to take significant time off from his career and focus on being a dad “The real clincher for me in why I decided to take a break in three words - "deathbed regret minimisation". That is, I believe that when I'm on my deathbed, I simply will not regret temporarily stepping away from work to focus on my newest family member. I also believe the vice-versa is true, and that I would have significant deathbed regret if I simply kept on working and did not take this special time out with my daughter. That's it really. A simple but powerful reframing that turns a seemingly irrational decision (i.e. taking a break during my "working prime") into one that makes a lot of sense.”
The topics An was exploring and thinking through were exactly the ones I have been exploring so we got talking. I had an absolutely wonderful time chatting with An and getting a peek into how he thinks. I am so excited to share this chat with the rest of the world.
Below is my conversation with An…
Please tell us a little bit about yourself and your family
In terms of family, it's myself, my wife, and we have a daughter who is almost 14 months now! I am currently on sabbatical, advising a few companies but really focused on being an engaging dad to the world's cutest little one.
Prior to this I was working as COO, in a VC backed tech company Koru Kids, which is in the childcare space. Child care in London and the UK is super dysfunctional. So I was trying to solve that problem. And then before that role I was a CTO at a micro finance company, which was also VC backed. And prior to that I was at BCG doing consulting, which actually I really enjoyed.
My partner is a lawyer and works in the payments space. She started her own company right about the time that she got pregnant. So in terms of timing it was not the best because she would not be able to take the full mat leave but it was great in terms of flexibility. So now she is running her own company doing a lot of advisory work for fintechs in Europe.
Interesting so you worked in the child care space before becoming a parent. At that point was it just an interesting problem to solve or did you say hey one day I will become a parent so may as well solve this now...
This problem for me really came to the forefront when I saw a lot of my friends who were becoming parents struggling with childcare. At BCG I had so many women colleagues who were very ambitious, high performing and career focused individuals who had to compromise on that aspect when they started a family because the childcare infrastructure just wasn't set up well to support some of these women.
I kind of knew from periphery that childcare was broken - it is very fragmented and I definitely knew that the gender norms around childcare were still very traditional. And so when I had coffee with Rachel, who was the CEO and had just founded Koru Kids, she was talking about how childcare was broken and super fragmented and to solve some of the issues in the sector it really needed an outsider to come in rethink how it should all work! And so I was drawn to the problem really and at that point thought that not being a parent was my superpower, because I would think about things in ways that maybe a parent wouldn't.
I guess maybe that did lead to some empathy specially on the challenges women face. Was this connected with your decision to take this prolonged leave of absence from the workforce? You were talking about societal norms and they exist across the world - where a lot of people assume the primary caregiver in most cases, or the person who's going to slow down their careers, is going to be the woman? I am curious how did you arrive at this decision of saying - Hey I'm gonna take all this time off to actually be the primary caregiving parent?
Ah good question! I think working in the childcare space definitely made me more aware of the norms and the challenges - at Koru Kids we did and still do a lot of user research and conversations with parents and that definitely made me aware of kind of the pressures that moms and dads face (they are different!).
I think me deciding to take a year off - I would not have done that had I not worked in Koru Kids because it's quite easy to just fall into the way things are normally done or the kind of traditional values that we were probably raised with. Example I have friends who met each other during their MBA and got married. They're all very progressive, smart and ambitious. But almost all of them followed the universal model of childcare where the wife took off a year or so and the fathers kept on working. And I thought, oh, that's quite interesting that probably my most progressive group of friends who are extremely educated are still doing this model which I think is quite old. And I wasn't sure why. And I think that if I hadn't worked in childcare, I probably would have done the same thing. Like that just becomes the only way you operate right?
Like you said, this is still not the norm - the dad taking a year off! At any point did you experience any pushback or had a debate on this with close friends, family, mentors, your partner or even yourself?
Yup I did have to fight with myself! Not really with my partner or with friends, whenever I mentioned my intention to people, everyone was very supportive. A lot of my friends said things like I've never really thought about even doing that or that's a really cool thing to do.
One of the biggest thing that I debated with myself about was the financial side of this decision - the the opportunity cost of working versus taking time out. One does take a financial hit. I was privileged enough where this was not a overwhelming consideration - instead I went in with the regret minimization framework - in the long run I would never regret it if I took time off to be with my child and form a great bond.
So now that you have spent all this time being a parent, what for you has been the hardest part of being a parent?
Umm in my experience it has actually been the opposite, You know there is this narrative that becoming a parent is gonna be really hard. That you are gonna lose a lot of freedom and you will be always exhausted. It is such a negative narrative.
I am having a great time. I think it's been really fun. It's been really engaging. I didn't find anything that hard. I don't know why the narrative is so negative, it kind of put me off kids. I do feel we need to make other adults understand that parenting is enjoyable and rewarding.
So glad you're trying to build a positive narrative around being a dad. What for you has been the most fun thing that you've enjoyed about being a dad?
She is super cute, very playful and very affectionate - so that's been really fun. To be honest it is really fun spending time with her as I find it quite meditative. When I'm with her I'm very very present. It has been so cool watching her grow and learn new skills.
And did you learn something new about yourself after you became a parent?
I think I learned how hard it is to do this alone. Back when my daughter was born in the UK the COVID lockdowns meant my parents who live in Australia could not come over to help us and so we had no family around for the first three months or so. And it was quite hard. Even though I was really enjoying it I didn't realize how nice it is to have help until she turned three months and we started putting her in nursery for three days a week!
And then when the UK COVID restrictions opened up and my parents visited it was just so amazing for all of us, specially my daughter, to have her grandparents around. I didn't realize how important that was until until my parents started getting involved. This is why multi generational families make sense. Having more adults to child ratio helps so much. Take for example this conversation - i can only do this because my mom offered to watch my daughter for an hour while my wife caught up on her sleep.
Given that we are on the topic of childcare I want to go back to how we started this conversation, you said childcare in London & the UK is broken. What does that even mean?
Yeah, so it's good question. It's a very fragmented market. And you have a lot of small child care providers on the supply side - maybe nannies or nurseries or childminders but they're all kind of mom and pop shops, or the nannies might work for an agency but it's just hyper fragmented on the supply side. And then the demand side is also hyper fragmented because it's just individual parents looking for childcare. And so the discovery between demand and supply and kind of matching them all up according to people's needs is is very inefficient and can lead to a lot of poor matches and also high prices because the discovery process is so inefficient.
The outcome of that is it's very hard to find the childcare that's right for you. As a parent you have to search and scroll through long lists like Craigslist, go through groups on social media etc. Parents spend endless hours going out there and trying to interview nannies or nurseries for the first time not really knowing what they want.
This is not even factoring in the expense component. I think now the stat is 55% of people spend more on childcare than on their mortgages.
Yup it is crazy and unfortunate that having babies is like luxury good and for a lot of couples it is like taking on a 2nd mortgage and so unfortunately people either have to completely step out of the workforce, or if you want to be in the workforce you've got to be making enough and more that you could kind of afford just to pay those high prices which in a way prices out so many people from just wanting to have a baby - it's a very strange conundrum that people find themselves in where unless you have family wealth or are in certain professions it really takes a significant hit on your savings and your lifestyle. And it usually the woman who makes a lot of the sacrifices.
Yes and this is why we need more men to understand these issues and as a society rethink the role of the dad and the concept of childcare.
It is important for men to consciously think through what kind of a husband and father they want to be vs kind of just inadvertently falling into a traditional role. It is important to have a deliberate conversation and kind of think about it and then come to the conclusion that actually I am going to work five days a week and my wife is gonna take off a year but it's very deliberate where you together explore alternatives. I would really hope more men consider the many different options in terms of how they want to support the family and the role they play in the family.
From the user research I have done and my conversations with a lot of women it doesn't feel like an option that they can get back to work after two months or three months because they feel like they just have to sit with the kid. This mental shackling also applies to dads as well where it feels like I need to be the provider for the family and I need to be the one who earns the income. Once men start recognizing that childcare is not a women's issue and we reframe it as a societal issue - thing of it as an infrastructure layer for society, I am hopeful things will change. And then I hope that my daughter is in an environment where it's a lot more normalized for both parents to be not equal partners... It's just more normal for her to not have to make sacrifices like the way that my mother would have had to...
Quick-fire questions:
What’s the best thing you have watched recently?
Arcane is an animated action-adventure series on Netflix
What’s the best thing you have read recently?
Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger it is a wonderful multidisciplinary exploration of wisdom.
What’s the best thing you have listened to recently?
Podcasts - Business breakdown and All in
🤓 Open tabs…
(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)
⭐ After my annus horribilis, I’m questioning the future of the nuclear family
The realization that sometimes the nuclear family is not enough!
⭐ Are ambitious parents bad parents?
Would I be a better parent if I worked less?
⭐Maternal Instinct Is a Myth That Men Created
The ‘parental brain’ is something that develops with experience – and anyone can get one!
I would love to hear from you, feedback is always welcome!
And if you happen to know an inspiring working parent who should be featured in a future edition (or if you yourself are one) - please do get in touch
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