Threedy’s Founder Made the Same Mistake Twice: Starting Companies and Having Kids Simultaneously

Threedy’s Founder Made the Same Mistake Twice: Starting Companies and Having Kids Simultaneously

Some founders learn from their mistakes. Christian Stein is not one of them.

Four years ago, he was spinning out Threedy from the Fraunhofer research organization, transferring 20 employees, navigating complex legal restrictions, and suddenly becoming responsible for an actual company with real customers and serious obligations.

His wife was also about to give birth to their first child.

“I was actually becoming a father for the first time right at the same point in time,” Christian recalls in a recent episode of Category Visionaries. “So just overwhelming things to take care of and totally different from what you had expected, actually.”

Most founders would learn to separate major life events from major business milestones. Christian had other plans.

Fast forward to December 2023. Threedy is closing their Series A round after a brutal fundraising process through a deteriorating market. Christian is managing investor negotiations, restructuring the commercial side of the company, and trying to keep the business on track.

Two months earlier, his second daughter was born.

“I actually did the mistake twice,” he laughs, “because we raised the series A in December 2023 and two months before I got my second daughter. So I’m not learning from it.”

The Spinout That Became a Personal Crucible

To understand the chaos of Threedy’s founding, you need to appreciate what a research spinout actually entails. This wasn’t two founders leaving their jobs to start something new. This was extracting an entire department—20 people—from an established research institution with existing customer contracts, intellectual property agreements, and multiple stakeholders who all had opinions about how things should work.

“We start the company by transferring the full department of roughly 20 people into the company and then suddenly there are so many new things you need to take care of that previously the head organization had done,” Christian explains.

Think about what that means operationally. Payroll. Benefits. Legal structure. Insurance. Office space. Equipment. IT systems. All the infrastructure that a research organization provides suddenly becomes your responsibility. And you’re learning to be a CEO at the same time you’re learning all these operational details.

Now add sleep deprivation from a newborn.

“The first six months, I guess surprising. All the different things you need to take care of,” Christian reflects with the understatement that only comes from surviving the experience.

The Preparatory Phase That Can’t Prepare You

What makes the timing even more striking is that Threedy had a preparatory phase. This wasn’t a spontaneous decision. “There’s a few things that are very special about the company. So we had a preparatory phase where roughly four years, went through a lot of different programs before actually spinning out the company with all the, yeah, let’s say legal restrictions and all the different stakeholders that need to be satisfied.”

Four years of preparation. Programs designed to help research teams become companies. Legal frameworks to navigate. Stakeholder alignment to achieve. All the institutional support you could want.

And still, the reality of actually doing it while becoming a parent proved overwhelming in ways no preparation could address.

This is the gap that nobody talks about in founder stories. You can intellectually understand that starting a company is hard. You can read about the challenges, attend workshops, talk to other founders. But intellectual understanding doesn’t prepare you for the lived experience of being responsible for 20 people’s livelihoods while learning how to keep a newborn alive.

Why Founders Keep Making This “Mistake”

Here’s the thing about calling it a mistake: Christian knows it’s a mistake. He acknowledges it explicitly. He even jokes about not learning from it. So why do it twice?

The answer reveals something deeper about founder psychology and life timing. Major life events don’t pause for convenient business moments. If you wait for the “right time” to have kids or start a company, you might wait forever.

Christian was spinning out technology that had been developed over years at Fraunhofer. The market opportunity was real. They had paying customers. The timing for the business made sense—even if the personal timing was chaotic.

Similarly, the Series A had its own logic. They needed the capital. The process was already underway. And as Christian learned the hard way with their six-month fundraising delay, you can’t always control when these major business milestones happen.

So you make a choice: put major life events on hold indefinitely, or accept that sometimes everything happens simultaneously and figure out how to manage the chaos.

The Series A Sequel

If the company founding was overwhelming, the Series A added layers of complexity that only another parent-founder could fully appreciate.

Fundraising is already consuming. It takes over your calendar with investor meetings, due diligence calls, and endless pitch refinements. For Threedy, it was particularly brutal because they were raising after missing the metaverse hype cycle, navigating a deteriorating market, and trying to prove commercial maturity while the macro environment changed “quarter by quarter.”

Adding a two-month-old to this process means operating on fragmented sleep while making million-dollar decisions. It means taking investor calls while managing feedings and diaper changes. It means your partner handling more solo parenting duty precisely when they also need support with a new baby.

“We raised the series A in December 2023 and two months before I got my second daughter,” Christian shares. The timing wasn’t quite as tight as the first child—two months of buffer versus simultaneous—but it was still overlapping enough to recreate the chaos.

What the Portfolio Host Understands

When the podcast host, Brett, hears this story, his response comes from lived experience: “I guess I had our first child about seven months ago, and I had started a new company four months before that. I don’t advise that to anyone listening.”

There’s a particular knowing that comes through in this exchange. Not judgment, not disbelief—just recognition from someone who’s been through a similar crucible. “And I’m guessing you may have a similar position there that starting a company and starting a family or raising a kid is not easy to do,” Brett adds.

Christian’s response is immediate agreement but also acceptance: “Yeah, yeah.”

This isn’t a conversation about regret. It’s recognition that some paths are harder than they need to be, but that doesn’t make them wrong paths.

The Unspoken Trade-offs

What Christian doesn’t elaborate on—but what every parent-founder knows—are the specific, daily trade-offs this creates.

Missing bedtime routines because of investor dinners. Laptop open during the baby’s nap because that’s your only heads-down work time. Partner resentment that builds when you’re physically present but mentally in cap table calculations. The guilt of not being fully present for either the company or the family.

These aren’t dramatic failures. They’re death by a thousand small compromises. And they’re largely invisible in the polished founder narratives we usually hear.

The Pattern Recognition Problem

The self-aware humor in Christian’s admission—”So I’m not learning from it”—points to something interesting about founder behavior. Pattern recognition is supposed to be a core founder skill. You spot market patterns, customer behavior patterns, product-market fit signals.

But when it comes to personal life patterns, founders often struggle to apply the same analytical rigor. Or perhaps more accurately, they recognize the pattern but make a different calculation. The business opportunity doesn’t wait. The family timeline has its own logic. And the intersection of the two is often not optimal—but you do it anyway.

What This Actually Costs

The real cost of these overlapping major life events isn’t usually catastrophic failure. Threedy got founded. The Series A closed. Presumably, both daughters are healthy and thriving.

The cost is more subtle: sustained stress, reduced capacity, and the opportunity cost of not being able to fully focus on either domain when it matters most. Christian handled transferring 20 employees while learning to be a CEO and a father simultaneously. But what insights or opportunities did he miss because his attention was fractured?

Similarly with the Series A—they got it done, but navigating a difficult fundraising environment while managing a newborn meant operating at less than full capacity during a critical business moment.

The Honest Admission

What makes Christian’s framing valuable is the honesty. He’s not positioning this as some superhuman feat of founder endurance. He’s not claiming it made him stronger or more resilient. He’s calling it what it is: a mistake he made twice because life doesn’t always cooperate with optimal business timing.

“I actually did the mistake twice,” he says with a laugh. “So I’m not learning from it.”

That laugh carries a lot. It’s not regret, exactly. It’s the rueful acknowledgment that sometimes you know better and do it anyway. That major life events and major business events will collide, and you figure out how to navigate the collision rather than avoid it.

For founders weighing similar timing questions—whether to start that company while planning a family, whether to raise that round while major personal events loom—Christian’s story offers both warning and permission. Yes, it’s hard. Yes, you’ll be overwhelmed. Yes, it’s probably not optimal.

And sometimes you do it anyway.