Thoughts on our 10 year wedding anniversary

Today is my 10 year wedding anniversary! Happy anniversary to my better half who goes by online alias John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt (JJJS)!

Photo credit: Earl Solis 

Something I’m thinking about today is that I feel so lucky. Namely, I’m glad that someone is willing to deal with me! Being together with an entrepreneur is really really difficult as many of you know. We started dating when I was 23 years old, and like for so many people, at 23, you just don’t quite know where you’re going in life. Years later, my career has taken both of us on a path of so many meanderings, ups and downs, and geographical relocations, and I’m so grateful that JJJS has been through it all with me. A few thoughts and anecdotes to share about all this:

10 years ago

When we got married 10 years ago, I had left my cushy job at Google just months before to become an entrepreneur. I had no idea what I was doing. And, I didn’t know how to make money. At that time, he was starting his post-doc.

On just a post-doc salary, we scrimped and saved like crazy. To make extra money, I did really bizarre side gigs. For example, one of those side gigs was a research study, where some lady from Xerox Parc followed me around for several days. She followed me to the grocery store — and even around in our apartment — literally everywhere and listened in on all conversations and took lots of notes! Other side gigs that I undertook included critiquing resumes for aspiring MBA students in Taiwan and categorizing whiskeys. Looking back, financially speaking, it was an incredibly stressful start, because I was making no money from my startup and the supplemental gigs came in weird ways. (This was before the rise of the gig economy.)

Career sacrifices

Lesser talked about amongst dual income households, in general, are all the sacrifices that are made in order for both people to work — specifically when you have children. When I was 23 with big aspirations, I didn’t think about rearing my future children. Questions like “Who is going to take care of them when I’m traveling?” Or “Who is going to do drop off and pick up?” never crossed my mind. A few years ago, when we had our first child, all of those questions suddenly came up. By complete luck, I picked the right partner, and all of those logistics have worked themselves out, because JJJS has made so many sacrifices to make our household functional. But this is not something that I had thought about at all when we first met.

When I was going through the acquisition process with my startup a few years ago, my baby was just a few months old. As so many of you know, being a parent to a very young child is incredibly draining — babies don’t sleep through the night and they constantly need to feed. So while I was traveling all around the country for meetings about my company, JJJS was holding down the fort at home, slogging through traffic to do all the drop offs and pickups at daycare, not sleeping and being the 24-7 solo parent. At that time, so many people commended me — “Wow, that is badass — YOU are running around doing all these business meetings and pumping in between meetings?  That’s amazing!” But, it’s often the spouse who has to hold down the fort outside of the company who is the unsung hero — for anyone who has ever had young children, wrangling your child is often even more challenging than running a company! (no joke…)

The article that I often refer to and think of that really hits close to home is this one by Andrew Moravcsik where he talks about the necessity of becoming a primary parent once his wife Anne Marie Slaughter’s career became really demanding.

JJJS has made a ton of sacrifices in his own career for mine even though he has big aspirations himself. For example, he left a unicorn synthetic biology startup with great culture and where he was employee #2 to trek across the country so that I could advance my own startup. He is the rock in our family who has taken on much more stable jobs throughout the years to pay the bills, while I’ve largely gone about taking on a lot of risk in building my startup(s) and now nascent VC practice. I know that so much of my own career is only possible because of all his support and sacrifices.

So here we are — 10 years in. Although I could not have predicted what life would look like when we got married, I’m incredibly grateful to JJJS for this journey we’ve been on. I love you, JJJS!