What if you were running an investor-backed start-up and you told your investors, your clients and your employees that you were committed to being an involved father and supportive spouse above all else?
Tech bros be mocking you for sure.
But that’s what our Lead Dad of the Week, Dirk Doebler, founder of Parento, a fintech that enables companies to offer paid parental leave, is doing. His company and his family are thriving for it.
Dirk started a parental leave company before he had kids, driven by the inequity he saw at companies he’d worked for. So many talented women quit their jobs when they had children because of a lack of adequate parental leave – let alone childcare later on. He saw companies using disability insurance to cover shorter parental leaves, which didn’t make sense to him.
“No one cares about disability insurance,” he said. “You’re not joining a firm for that. You’re not getting any ROI on that spend. If they offered real paid parental leave, people were going to be more loyal and more likely to return after having children.”
He launched the company at the end of 2020. He became a father in 2024. He took parental leave. His wife, a computer engineer, left her job at Cockroach Labs because of a lack of parental leave and an in-office policy; she’s now working at DBT Labs, which allows her to work remotely.
How they manage demanding jobs without after-school childcare comes down to communication and calendaring. They make sure each other knows when they have work calls when their son is home and when one of them needs to travel.
“It’s about prioritizing the key things each of us can’t miss,” he said. “I normally take the morning shift and get him ready to go and take him to school. Then typically she puts him down to bed. We both do the cooking.”
He schedules his own meetings after 10am, knowing that things with kids can go sideways in the morning. And he is understanding when things come up with employees who all work remotely.
“We’re mission driven,” he said. “From a product standpoint, we’d have a worst product if we only hired people who worked 80 hours a week. Also, I don’t want to have built this thing and be a sh@tty dad. That will have been a failure.”
Well said, Dirk. Welcome to The Company of Dads!
