Building a company while raising a family

I keep a written life plan. I have done this every year since around 2010. It is a simple document where I rate five areas of my life out of ten: family and friends, health, finances, work, and personal time. If I look back at the spreadsheets from those early days, the numbers are grim reading. I had met Fredrik Bage years earlier when we were both working in sales at a PR agency on commission only, against the advice of everyone around me. Fredrik told me I would be good at sales, and we eventually co-founded Mediapilot in Stockholm. During those growth years, work was consistently pulling an eight or a nine on my sheet. Family, health, and personal time hovered dangerously around a three. I thought I just needed to work harder at balancing it all, perhaps buy a better planner or wake up an hour earlier. I was wrong. The truth is, I got this completely wrong for years.

The myth of balance

When people find out you are building a company and raising a family, they usually ask how you find balance. I'll be honest with you. You don't. Balance implies a static state where everything rests in perfect harmony, like scales holding equal weights. But growing Mediapilot took roughly seven years and eventually created more than a hundred jobs. There was nothing harmonious about it. I spent years feeling guilty when I was at the office because I was not with my kids, and guilty at home because I was not fixing a problem at work.

Before I started the company, I had travelled around the world for a stretch in my early thirties, largely disconnected. I was used to having the time and space to think. Building a business while raising children is the exact opposite of that freedom. You are tethered to two very demanding, very loud forces that both want everything you have. I tried to satisfy both simultaneously and ended up doing neither well. I would answer emails under the table during family dinners, or take quick calls while pushing a swing at the park. It was a miserable way to live. The maths simply doesn't work.

You cannot give one hundred per cent to your family and one hundred per cent to a startup, so you have to decide exactly which balls you are willing to drop.

Drawing the hard lines

The shift for me was abandoning the idea of balance and replacing it with non-negotiables. Instead of trying to be everywhere, I decided where I absolutely had to be. We moved our family from Sweden to Marbella in 2018. We meant to stay for two years and never left. The Spanish sunshine helps with your mood, but the real change for me was structural. I stopped trying to blend work and family into a grey mush. I set a few strict rules. First, the school run. I do it every morning, and my phone stays in my pocket. Second, no work calls after six in the evening. If something is actually on fire, someone will text me, but the casual evening catch-ups are dead. Finally, one full day a week where the laptop stays shut. Usually, this involves me playing tennis, badly and often, and enjoying a long lunch with good food and wine.

Setting these rules is easy. Defending them is hard. When I was working on the commercial side at Happeo, or even now while building Anchor and Substrat, there is always a very compelling reason to break the rule just this once. A time zone difference, a sudden server issue, an investor who wants to chat on a Saturday morning. I used to cave to all of it because I was afraid of missing out or letting people down. But I realised that if everything is an exception, you don't have rules. You just have suggestions. The moment I started saying no, I expected the sky to fall. It didn't. People adapt to the boundaries you set, and the business rarely suffers because you delayed a call by twelve hours.

What I still don't know

I am forty-five now, and I haven't got this entirely figured out. I look at my life plan every December, and I still don't achieve perfect scores across the board. I am building AI tools for alienated fathers with Anchor, and AI infrastructure with Substrat. It is demanding work. I also manage a small number of angel investments and some property. There are still weeks where I drop the ball, where I am physically at the dinner table but mentally staring at a spreadsheet or thinking about a product flaw.

The difference is that I catch myself faster now. I know that if work creeps up to a nine out of ten on my life plan, something else is paying the price. Usually, it is my own health or my personal time. I cannot change the fact that building things takes an unreasonable amount of time and energy. I still want to build. But I can make sure I am making the trade-offs on purpose, rather than letting them happen to me by accident. The perfect score of ten doesn't exist, and I finally know that is fine.