Every working parent’s nightmare: getting laid off while out on leave. Now imagine this happens to you, only you’re out on leave with your second set of twins. That’s exactly what happened to @aarondfrancis and he joined me on Startup Dad to talk about it. He’s the co-founder of Try Hard Studios and makes incredible, developer-education videos. Mind-blowingly incredible. He’s also been an analyst, a developer and started his career as a Big 4 Accountant. Not exactly a traditional path to making videos for developers. “At the time my wife and I had two 2-year olds and we had just had a second set of twins. We had four kids under the age of three. I was set to go back to work on Friday and I got the call on a Wednesday. It was one of those moments where professionally it was the best time to go out on my own, but personally it was absolutely the worst time. Hear our entire conversation about: 🔹 Navigating a loss of one of their triplets during the first pregnancy 🔹 Life with two sets of twins 🔹 How he and his wife managed after he was laid off on paternity leave 🔹 The challenges of starting a business with newborns 🔹 How to stay present with all the pings from an extremely online life 🔹 Parenting each of his four kids differently 🔹 Finding ways to focus on only what matters at this stage of life 🔹 Hilarious and fascinating stories: falling asleep in a chair at the gym, building a non-traditional office space, and celebrating a birthday with a solo-staycation. If you’ve ever gone to the gym to take a nap (or wanted to) or celebrated a birthday with a solo, stay-cation at a local hotel... you’ll love this conversation. One of my favorite takeaways: I see two opposing sides online often, which is like becoming a parent is wonderful and therefore it's easy and everyone should do it. And then the other side is, becoming a parent is very hard, and you should only do it if you're a thousand percent sure... the reality is, there are days, there are minutes in a day, where you will go from, this is a wonderful, amazing, and this is incredibly hard, and I don't want to do it. And I think you just need to be prepared to experience all of that in a day. Watch our conversation on Youtube or listen in your favorite podcast player.