Sometimes a resume doesn’t tell the full story of a father, even one filled with amble markers of success.
Sean MacMannis, our Lead Dad of the Week from San Francisco, has a sterling educational pedigree – Dartmouth undergrad, Haas business school – and had startup success in tech and later blockchain. There was even a break to travel with his first wife and year-old baby in a refurbished AirStream, with a TV crew in tow.
These were all-consuming jobs. And while he liked them and thrived at them, he realized he didn’t like missing out on being a father. He became a dad at age 30, just as he and his first wife were having plenty of career success.
“I felt a pretty big transformation from the moment I became a dad,” he said. “I did it kind of young because it was a priority for me. I had a great relationship with my dad. I thought it was the best job in the world, and it turned out it was. It also raised the bar on making my time feel more precious.”
But in the San Francisco tech scene a balanced life required some thinking outside the box – at least to stay on the road to success.
“I spent a lot of time resisting that and feeling torn between trying to go all in again – working for fast growing startups, which I really enjoyed – vs the other part of me that wanted to have something more flexible and own my own time.”
When his first marriage ended in 2020, Sean spent time rethinking how he was living. “I decided I was just going to accept that I am the way I am. I live life life-first and not work-first. I’ve needed to construct a life that worked around that.”
Now remarried, with a one-year-old and his two older children, 11 and 8, half the time, Sean is a fractional chief marketing officer to startups and a career coach to entrepreneurs. He’s able to be fully involved in the lives of his older children, whose school is close to where he lives, and be a father and supportive husband to his wife Cat, who works for Serena & Lilly.
It’s not all sunshine and rainbows – there’s a balance, he said, from taking on too much work and not having enough of it. He also acknowledges his wife’s health insurance removes a big stressor.
“I’d rather have the ability to be fully independent in my decision making,” he said. “It goes back to the most important job for me is being a parent. No one owns me. That’s really important to me. I stepped off the career ladder and onto a winding trail. At times the work and earnings are uneven—but the views, the freedom, the possibility are well worth it.”
And along that path, he has time to be a fully involved father. Welcome, Sean, to The Company of Dads!
