This is a personal essay about my hypothesis — and lived experience — that founding a startup while actively sharing parenting and household responsibilities will become, if it isn't already, entirely normal. I intended to write something brief. It got long.

I started 10X while living the "remote-from-parents, both parents working full-time, young children" reality — and have been somehow managing both company and family ever since.

The Current Landscape of Founders and Parenting

Around the time I founded the company in 2017, I was starting to see a few people around me in similar situations — full-time dual income, young children — but it wasn't common. I think it's going to become far more so. Let me quickly sketch the macro picture.

The following well-known chart shows that 68% of currently married working-age households in Japan are dual-income. (Source: Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications Labor Force Survey)

Next, the average age of founders in Japan has been rising consistently, and now stands at 49.7 years (Source: Small and Medium Enterprise Agency research).

Connecting these two data points too casually would be sloppy — I acknowledge that. But this seems like a reasonably compelling hypothesis: if founders are older on average, the background of more of them will include families and dual-income households.

In my social circle at least, the vast majority of peers in my generation have reached an arrangement where both partners continue working after marriage and children, and household responsibilities are shared rationally. The word "ikumen" (a portmanteau of "ikuji" — childcare — and "men," used in Japan for active-fathering men) is becoming a relic. Not because it's no longer valued, but because it's no longer remarkable.

If this is the social substrate forming under new entrepreneurship, then founders who carry a dual-income household while parenting young children will increasingly be in the majority.

Looking at the generation of founders a bit older than me: overwhelmingly male, and their partners typically have more flexibility to accommodate the demands of a startup. The generation just below mine, by contrast, will increasingly look like: dual-income household, parenting, founding a startup — all running in parallel, split between two people.

The Honest Tension

I carry real tension with this. A team member once casually asked me to talk about "tips for balancing work and parenting." I thought about it afterward, and honestly — there aren't any.

People often say COVID made it harder to go out and socialize freely. But for people in situations like mine, "freely available, unplanned time" was already rare long before COVID. Some find ways to squeeze in socializing in the margins. But many are fighting a "loneliness" that lives in the gap between work and parenting.

As a founder — already in a situation where "not many people share my circumstances" — this isolation can be even sharper.

The Daily Friction

Evenings bring a familiar low-level stress: I have to cut off work or mid-discussion to hit the pickup time at daycare.

Rushing from the office to the daycare, watching the clock, running through traffic — that is daily life.

Leaving work behind in my head, shifting fully to being present for the kids — that takes active effort.

After dinner: "Did you do tomorrow's homework?" "Did you pack your bag?" Scrambling to close out the day.

I'm obsessed with operational efficiency, but there's genuinely not much more efficiency I can squeeze out of this particular system.

The fact that I shifted hard to being an extreme morning person came directly from this constraint — morning is the only real personal time available.

What Remote Work Changed

One thing did dramatically reduce this burden: remote work. COVID forced us to try it, and the gains were real.

Cutting commute time gave me more schedulable hours plus lower psychological risk — the anxiety of "what if I have to leave suddenly?" shrinks when you're already home. The reassurance of being able to run straight to the kids if needed — even if I never actually need to — changes everything.

My partner also went full remote, and together we talk often about how much this has changed our daily parenting experience.

Individual and Organizational Performance

How is an individual's performance measured or understood?

For managers and executives, organizational performance is a major ongoing concern. The natural instinct is to measure people, understand their performance, and create conditions to improve it — through benefits, culture, HR systems.

But this will never be the whole picture. Problems in someone's private life will depress their performance. That's what I've experienced firsthand.

When my partner and I fight, I can't concentrate on work. When my son runs a fever, work stops. When a serious illness is discovered, staying functional for the months of treatment while "handling both" is the ceiling.

Since having children, the number of "problems I can't solve myself" has multiplied, and the weight that private life puts on performance has grown.

Even so — seven years in, somehow.

Some of it gets easier over time. Much of it doesn't. In a dual-income household, the routine — pickups, dinners, baths, bedtimes — is a shared weekly project, not an occasional thing. My calendar still has two to three "solo parent" blocks every week.

The point: optimizing only what happens inside company walls will never be enough to improve individual performance. Private life matters. But it's not the company's place to intrude.

So the benefits I design for 10X are built to be risk mitigation tools that each person can deploy themselves when needed.

Children are one example — but childbirth, caregiving, illness, injury: life has plenty of moments that collide with work. I don't want to impose a solution or a philosophy. But at minimum, I want to expand the options available to each person when those moments arrive.

I believe that loops back to organizational performance. I'm betting on it.