An update on recent life. May 5, 2023 — Children's Day in Japan — is a date I'll never forget. Our first daughter was born. Easy to remember.

That day, my second son developed a fever around noon, and I reluctantly had to decline being present at the delivery to stay home and take care of him. (This later evolved into a full household influenza outbreak...) A few hours after that, our long-awaited daughter arrived.

It had been six years since there was a baby in our home. The sight of her older brothers, who had grown so much without my fully realizing it, joining in on caring for her — it's almost impossibly precious. My camera roll and iPhone storage were claimed almost immediately.

Parental Leave for a Founder?

Since our daughter arrived, I've been working in an unusual way for about two months: one fully working day per week, and everything else as an on-call responder via Slack and Google Meet. A kind of "special parental leave."

There's no statutory parental leave or public support system for company directors, so this is a custom arrangement. Since I'm only partially fulfilling my CEO responsibilities, I've also returned two months of my executive compensation.

Japan's support system for founders and executives around childbirth is essentially nonexistent. I believe it should be a central pillar of startup support policy — there are many founders and executives of childbearing age in the startup ecosystem.

As of writing this, about a month and a half has passed. The time has been irreplaceably precious, and being with family is the best thing. But two months is too short. Making it longer brings enormous dilemmas, and I genuinely struggle with it.

This is my third time taking some form of parental leave personally. Looking back, I somehow managed to start a company during both previous ones. With our first, I was writing MVP code and doing sales calls to recruit vendors, all while running on disrupted sleep and blending childcare with work. Those were chaotic days.

At the time I was a 20-something burning with the anxiety of "I'm nobody yet, I have no track record, I have no power." Two posts document those early startup days.

Looking back now — starting a company right around a newborn was honestly crazy. My wife bore a huge amount of the weight, and I feel genuine remorse about it.

I was living in a constant state of urgency, trying and sometimes failing to balance family and work. My memories of the early years with my first two children are full of gaps — like leaves stripped from a branch.

Receiving Life's Hope

Our family often looks through みてね (Mitene — a family photo-sharing app) together, scrolling through photos of the boys as newborns — what little gestures they had, what quirks, what moments were hard. My wife remembers all of it clearly; I don't, and our conversations often don't quite connect.

But the fragments that remain — the photos that bring memories rushing back — are stored as "the happiest memories of my life, incomparable to anything else" and "the happiness that sustains me."

I'd thought our third child might be our last. So this time, every day I hold her I say out loud, "I don't want to forget this moment."

I'm not raising my children. I'm receiving life's hope from them. They give me far more than I give them. I'm being raised more than I'm raising. (Literally.)

My wife, having witnessed the previous two times, had apparently been expecting me to "go somewhere again even while on parental leave" — but this time gave me the assessment that "you've been a real contributor, and now I'm honestly a little scared you're about to disappear again." Roughly the same self-assessment here. Yes.

Windows Only Open When They're Open

Meanwhile, at 10X, several important windows are simultaneously open right now — windows that will likely determine the company's direction for the next year or several years — and I'm diving through them.

They're situations that genuinely require my time and attention, but the tension with family time creates real psychological weight. "A window can only be entered when it's open" is a metaphor I use often inside the company.

(It's actually something DCM's Honda-san asked me in our first one-hour meeting back in summer 2018, and it's stayed with me ever since.)

Operating at one day a week means many things have to be cut. In a sense, I'm able to focus exclusively on the "windows" that determine the company's fate.

The reason we can even manage this at all is largely due to the organizational foundation we've built over the past three years: the ability to perform remotely and in person, a culture of asynchronous documentation-driven communication, and meaningful delegation of authority to the next layer of leadership. The organization's operational maturity is doing the heavy lifting.

Looking back, if this window had appeared three years ago, we simply couldn't have made the attempt. I'm seeing clearly how much 10X has grown.

Testing Myself Fully

Having our third child has become a milestone, and a prompt to look at myself again.

Six years into the company, I ask myself: why did I start this? Why do I keep going?

The "founding story" I've told publicly isn't false, but I've realized my true motivation lies somewhere else.

When I strip it down: my drive is "I was given this life — I want to find out what I'm capable of." And I remain very far from feeling like I've found out. I'm not done yet, I can still push further, I'm still not satisfied. That karma is still alive in me.

This is work that demands relentless mental and physical energy. But the reason I don't break under it, the reason I keep going, is that psychology: I haven't seen the ceiling of my own potential yet.

I want to keep growing to keep up with this company's growth.