What I'm Building for my Daughters Future ⚒️ 👨👨👧
She arrives in April. Here's what I'm building before she does.
I broke the news to the boys over morning coffee.
Not the business news. The baby news.
There is a specific kind of reaction that happens at a mastermind breakfast in Las Vegas when one of the founders at the table starts explaining semen retention before anyone has finished their first cup. Most of them started laughing, the kind of laugh that starts as disbelief and ends somewhere closer to genuine respect. The rest leaned in with the focused energy of people who recognized a serious research presentation when they saw one and had decided they were not going to waste it.
I laid out the full "God-Baby summoning" plan. Semen retention. Dopamine fasting. The science connecting a man's metabolic health to his partner's morning sickness severity.
The protocol I had put in place to ensure my contribution to this project was operating at absolute peak capacity. Optimized sleep, cleaned up diet, every habit that was costing me cellular energy I could not afford to spend on anything other than building a human being had been quietly retired weeks earlier. I had done the research the way I do all research, which is to say thoroughly, at unreasonable hours, until I understood not just what to do but exactly why each piece of it mattered.
For some reason, with absolute clarity, I told them the baby will be "made in Japan."
For quality purposes of course!
The reaction landed somewhere between disbelief, laughing out loud, mild concern, and the particular expression people make when they are not entirely surprised by someone but feel they should at least appear to be. It is a look I have received before. I have learned to take it as confirmation that the idea was compelling enough for a full range of reactions.
Almost 2 years after in Japan. 🇯🇵
It was a sweltering day in August. Okazaki (historic birthplace of Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shogun who unified Japan and established the Edo period). A fireworks festival during Jasmin's birthday, the air warm and loud and lit up in ways that made the whole evening feel slightly cinematic.
We watched some fireworks and, as one naturally does at a fireworks festival with your wife on her birthday in Japan, then we made some fireworks.
Loosely planned, naturally executed, which is honestly the only way anything meaningful in my life has ever come together. We were still in Japan, still riding the particular afterglow of a birthday in a country that takes festivals seriously, when we found out.
I have launched companies from a laptop in three different countries. I have closed deals, navigated bureaucracy across multiple continents, driven across Canada during a global pandemic, and once cured my own depression by arriving in Medellin unable to read a menu and being saved by biological hunger.
None of that, not a single moment of it, prepared me for standing in a hotel bathroom in Japan staring at two lines on a stick and feeling the specific and irreversible weight of something that cannot be undone, revised, A/B tested, or pivoted away from if the metrics come back unfavorable.
An overwhelming feeling of bliss went through my body, feeling like something you knew eventually came true, like a prediction that was meant to happen, like a new version of yourself is just waiting to be awakened. It felt like a new chapter waiting to be told.
This was not a product launch with a beta test and a feedback loop and a go-to-market plan.
This was shipping a live product, one build, no version two, straight to production. And no product manual.
She arrives in less than three to four weeks.
Here is the honest way I think about what is actually happening.
We are spawning a new player.
She arrives into the game completely fresh, no stats, no skills, no inventory, no prior save files, no accumulated knowledge from previous runs. Full character creation falls entirely to us.
Jasmin and I are sitting here in Playa del Carmen trying to assemble a user manual for a game that neither of us has fully figured out ourselves, written in a language our new player will not be able to read for at least three years, covering scenarios we have not personally encountered yet and are therefore documenting in real time as they happen to us.
The goal is not to engineer a perfect start. The goal is to give her the internal tools, the values, and the framework to handle whatever the game throws at her across the decades ahead. To build someone adaptable rather than fragile. Curious rather than afraid. Someone who reads the room deliberately and then decides how to move through it, rather than someone who simply reacts to whatever is loudest and calls that a life.
In other words, the opposite of playing life as an NPC.
What I have been thinking about most seriously in the weeks before she arrives is not the nursery setup or the gear list or the carefully researched developmental toys that allegedly give a child measurable advantages over children whose parents did not spend enough time in parenting rabbit holes at two in the morning.
Those things matter at the level they matter, which is to say not very much compared to the thing underneath all of them.
What I am actually building is inside myself.
Because here is the thing that took me a while to sit with clearly.
The child does not receive the version of you that you planned to be, the one you had in mind when you were reading about intentional parenting and conscious communication and all the frameworks that sound so clean in a book.
She receives the version of you that actually shows up on a Tuesday when something went sideways at work and dinner is not ready and she is crying for a reason she cannot explain yet.
Every unexamined pattern, every unresolved fear, every habit you kept meaning to address when you had more time, every way you respond under pressure when nobody important is watching. She gets all of it, in high definition, for years, and she absorbs it as the baseline of normal before she is old enough to evaluate whether it should be.
That is not a reason to panic.
It is a reason to do the work now, while there is still time to do it without an audience.
I think about my Lolo on the farm in Sayangan, working the cabbage rows in the dark before the rest of the world had decided to begin its day. He did not have a parenting philosophy or a conscious discipline framework or an app designed to gamify the raising of a child into something trackable and optimizable.
What he had was presence, the kind that does not announce itself or require acknowledgment, that simply shows up in the same place at the same time doing the same things until those things become the invisible architecture of how a child understands the world to work.
He never gave a speech about the importance of reliability. He was just there. Every morning. Before the sun. Without being asked and without expecting recognition for it.
My mother operated the same way, except her version of showing up looked like five years of paperwork and bureaucratic navigation and meetings that definitely did not make it into any official record, all of it done quietly on behalf of children who were not yet old enough to understand the full scale of what was being done for them.
What I received from both of them was not instruction. It was a template. A way of being in the world so deeply internalized that it expressed itself entirely through action, absorbed into me before I had language for it, and which I have been slowly unpacking and understanding ever since.
That is what I want to be for her. Not the parent who explains the right values loudly and clearly. The one whose presence makes those values feel like the natural shape of things.
I also need to be honest about what actually scares me, and it is not what most people would guess.
Not the sleeplessness, which I have been warned about by everyone who has ever had a child and wants to make sure you understand what you are walking into. Not the logistical reality of raising a child while running companies from a laptop across multiple countries and time zones. Not even the genuinely interesting question of which passport she leads with at customs, which at current count is going to require a conversation I am not fully prepared for but am looking forward to on behalf of its absurdity.
What scares me is simpler than any of that, and harder to solve.
I am afraid of not being loved by something that was made purely out of love.
That is the fear sitting underneath all of the preparation. Underneath the semen retention protocol and the Japan trip and the parenting frameworks and the two-in-the-morning research sessions.
The real question that none of the reading actually answers is not whether I can build the right environment for her, whether I can optimize the inputs and create the conditions and do all the things the evidence suggests produce good outcomes. It is whether who I actually am, once all the constructed and optimized versions fall away, will be someone she chooses to come toward rather than away from.
You can prepare for almost everything.
For now, I feel as if you can never be fully prepared for that.
What I can do is become someone worth choosing before she arrives, and I have more material to work with than I sometimes give myself credit for.
I came out of Colombia a fundamentally different person than the one who bought the one-way ticket. I came out of the Ottawa decade carrying things I could not have learned any other way, including a tolerance for cold that I no longer need but have kept anyway as a reminder.
I came out of years of living alone across foreign countries with a relationship to my own company that most people spend a lifetime trying to either find or escape, and I made peace with it in a way that turned out to matter more than I expected.
When I found Jasmin, I discovered that the fulfillment I had built inside myself over all those years did not diminish when I started sharing my life with her. It compounded in a way I had not anticipated and had not entirely believed was possible for someone who had spent as long alone as I had.
That surprised me genuinely. I want it to be the template.
My mother sacrificed things I am only beginning to fully understand now that I am weeks away from becoming a parent myself. The life she built in the Philippines before Canada was possible. The version of herself that existed before she became the person responsible for making a better future happen on behalf of people who could not yet understand or appreciate the full weight of what that required.
I could not see any of that when I was young, because children cannot afford to see their parents as complete and complicated people with their own losses and fears and versions of themselves they set aside. The stability requires the simplification. You need them to be solid so you can push against something real.
I see it now, clearly and without the filter of needing them to be only what I needed them to be. She was a person doing the best she could with what she had, in a place she chose deliberately on behalf of people who would spend years not fully understanding the choice. That realization does not arrive as an intellectual understanding.
It arrives somewhere around two in the morning when you are reading about infant sleep schedules and suddenly feel, with your whole body rather than just your mind, exactly what your parents actually did. The game has always been harder for the people running it on your behalf. I am about to find out what that feels like from the other side.
She arrives in less than three to four weeks.
(Time this post is published)
I still have the time I have, and I am using it, not to arrive at some finished and perfected version of myself before she gets here, because there is no realistic version of that story and I stopped telling it to myself weeks ago.
I am using it to become more genuinely who I want to be, so that the template she absorbs in those early years is built from something real rather than assembled from the leftover programming I never got around to examining. Because that is what The Long Game actually means as a way of thinking about fatherhood.
Not a sprint toward getting the first year right, not a checklist of things to accomplish before the due date. A decades-long project of showing up with intention, staying present when presence is inconvenient, and building something inside a human being that will outlast every company, every product, every campaign, and every version of myself that came before her.
Every company I have ever built will eventually be acquired, dissolved, or quietly made irrelevant by something newer.
She will never be..
The new player spawns in less than twenty-four days. I am as ready as someone can be who has never done this before, holding a user manual they are writing in real time, hoping she finds it useful somewhere around the age she stops thinking her dad is embarrassing.
Which I have been told takes a while.
I should have time.
