Sending Your Kids Off To College | Jeff Fritz (Dad of 2, Microsoft)

[00:00:00] Jeff: I wanted to make sure that I supported the school activities, the after school activities that my kids wanted to get engaged with didn't matter what it was. You want to get engaged with something as long as it was something productive, engaged with or around the school. And it wasn't something that was in any way, shape or form, just out of our price range.

I will support you with every fiber of my body.

[00:00:30] Adam: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. Having your kids leave the house and go off to college introduces a whole world of adjustment. To get some perspective on this, I sat down with Jeff Fritz.

Jeff is Principal Program Manager at Microsoft, where he leads production for one of Microsoft's largest developer events. He's also super active in the developer community as a live coding Twitch streamer, YouTuber, and podcast host, a lifelong developer who got his start working on his family's Commodore 64.

He's also a husband, the father of two daughters, and a recent seasonal empty nester. In our conversation, we spoke about how to make the most of your time with your kids when they're young, preparing both your kids and yourself for the big changes that come with high school and college. What it's like when your kids leave the house for the first time, the modern day college admissions process and helping your kids establish good decision making frameworks from a young age in a lower stakes environment. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Jeff Fritz.

[00:01:49] Adam: Welcome Jeff Fritz to the Startup Dad podcast. Jeff, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited for this conversation.

[00:02:00] Jeff: Happy to be here. Happy to talk about dad things. I feel like after a while being in this industry, you get older and there's a point where we start becoming the dad of the team and you're not the young guy anymore. And it's like, all right, now it's my turn to pass on advice. 

[00:02:18] Adam: At some point I'll be headed in that direction. I think I'm just a touch younger than you.

[00:02:22] Jeff: It happens when you get the colorful beard.

[00:02:25] Adam: Yeah, it's starting to happen to me. I mean, there's like little bits of white, like an occasional white hair, you know, getting in there. I know it's happening.

Jeff, you write code on the internet, and people watch you do it. And you stream it, you do a podcast. You also, I think still work for Microsoft. Is that right? Okay, cool. So tell me a little bit more about all of that stuff.

I'm very curious about that package.

[00:02:53] Jeff: I started working for Microsoft about 10 years ago. I was working as a developer advocate for another company in the tech ecosystem, and I kept running into Microsoft folks at various conferences, building, writing content help promote my company's products, and more or less said, Hey, you're doing a good job on that stuff.

Why don't you come help us out doing the same thing? So I slid into a similar developer advocate community relations role, speaking to developers, teaching them about all the things right? You've seen developer influencers out there. So between writing blog posts, writing demos, tutorials, slide decks. That was my gig for the first few years I was working at Microsoft.

And quite frankly, I got really frustrated with blog posts because blog posts, you either hit on a blog post or you're going to write something out there and it's just crickets. Nobody replies to it. There's no comments. There's no social media traffic. You'll look at the number of views and it's not growing.

You kind of poke it with a message out to a mailing list or something, and wonder why the heck aren't people talking about this great blog post you spend a couple of days writing and tweaking and tuning and at that point, I had some friends say to me you've got a little bit of a voice.

Why don't you try doing a podcast? And I thought that was a fantastic idea. I had listened to a couple of podcasts in the tech space that I really enjoyed, wanted to give it a try. And I'm talking to folks at a couple of regional conferences, regional tech conferences on the east coast of the states.

And. Overwhelmingly they all agreed, go for it. But a friend of mine Susan, said to me, why don't you try live streaming? What do you mean? She said, well, when you do a podcast, you run into that same scenario where you do the podcast and people will reply on YouTube or in a forum somewhere and it's that disconnected interaction.

But if you do it as a live stream, you get immediate feedback. And I tried it one Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Black Friday. Hey, let's try this. And I ran a stream for an hour or two, and I was hooked, Adam, just absolutely hooked. And I completely dove into the Twitch ecosystem. And I jumped in with the MO of I'm going to write code live, but do it AMA style so that it's developer talk radio.

If folks are in chat asking questions, I'll find a sensible place to pause. We'll answer questions. We'll talk about things, we'll put together demos on the fly in the middle of stuff, or we'll research something and answer questions, pause for 10 to 15 minutes, and then get back into the project and writing code.

It's worked very well for me. I publish my videos to YouTube. I've come back around on the podcast idea and I, I have a podcast that I do weekly now. That kind of summarizes some of those questions and interesting puzzles that I hit along the way. When I'm live streaming, but then I still do blog posts every now and again.

I still do tutorials and demos from Microsoft, but doing the live streaming has really picked up and given me a great way to connect with other developers and talk about all the different things that are going on in the tech community.

[00:06:18] Adam: Very cool. And when you're doing the live streaming, do you have like an ongoing project that you're coding for or you just wake up one day and you're like, I want to hack away at this for a while?

[00:06:29] Jeff: It's a little bit of both. So I've done long term projects. I've had three or four different long term projects over the course of about seven years that I've been live streaming. The current project that we're working on is a content management system that's heavily inspired by WordPress.

But it has 100 percent less lawyers. And can I say that? I think we can say,

[00:06:51] Adam: You can say that.

[00:06:53] Jeff: So that's a thing. And at the same time, we can pause every so often and say, you know what, there's something going on or there's a feature or there's something that's just scratching my brain that I think would be really cool for us to take a look at.

And we'll try that for a live stream and come back to the ongoing project. You know, a day or two later and resume working on that. It's been a lot of fun and working on a project like that as an open source project that not only can you watch and learn about the technology that we're building with, but you can also download the source code, tinker with it.

You know, break it, try something new with it. If you saw something you like that you want to use in your project, go ahead and lift a copy of it. It's open source. It's MIT licensed. Take a copy of that block of source code and try it out in your project. It's free for you to do. And I hope you learn something from it and it benefits you.

[00:07:47] Adam: Cool, you know, we will get to the. The meat of this podcast, which is, you know, parenting and kids and all that stuff. But I have one more question for you because I'm curious, have you started incorporating any AI tooling in your work? Are you using co pilot? Like Microsoft is pretty big into this space, obviously now.

So I'm wondering how that's like creeping into your, to your workflows.

[00:08:08] Jeff: There's a couple different things I do with AI. Of course I work on the dot net team at Microsoft. So using Copilot kind of comes along with it, right? Use Visual Studio, use Visual Studio code, use copilot, show off how those features work, benefit us as we're building and working on our projects together.

Additionally we've written a tool and it's open source. You can find it on my GitHub repository. We've written a tool that helps to feed. I have a hat problem. I don't know if you know this, Adam. I have a hat problem.

[00:08:43] Adam: I didn't know this.

[00:08:45] Jeff: So, I really like hats, right? And I'm sure many of us out there that work in the tech space, you sit in a Team's call or a Zoom call or what have you, right?

And this is all people see. You live in this square. And it's one thing to have a t- shirt on. It's one thing to have on cool socks, but let's face it, this is all folks are seeing, right? And Lord help you if they're seeing your socks when you're in the box here, but what people do see is your hat.

And I've always had a thing for hats. And as I got into more and more of live streaming and YouTube video, I thought it'd be fun to get more interesting and curious tech related and pop culture hats. And one thing led to another and this collection grew from 1520 hats to 50 hats to now more than 200 hats.

And here's the thing, folks look at what's on your noggin and they're gonna say, if they don't recognize it, if they don't get the reference, they're gonna, what is that thing? You got a bell with stars on your hat. What is that? And it's one thing for me to pause during a live stream and say, Oh, gosh, this is my Philadelphia Phillies City Connect hat from the 2024 season, blah, blah, blah, and explain all of that. So come back around. Wouldn't it be great if the AI would take a picture from the live stream, isolate this section of the video and analyze what that hat is and tell you. And that was a lesson that we learned live on stream. Publish the source code. It hooks up to Azure Open A I. Or it'll work with regular openAI, chat G. P. T. Connect and it just takes that little screenshot and analyzes and I ask you to put three sentences into chat. Here's what it is. And then finally, some sort of a salute. Give me some sort of sign off that's appropriate for whatever that theme is. So I've got a number of Marvel hats, so it'll sign off appropriately with, you know, a Captain America salute or something, or, you know, I wear a Penn State hat, you know, for my university I went to, and our cheer that we have at Penn State is we are in Penn State, so it'll sign off with we are Penn State, stuff like that, fun stuff to do, it's writing, building something like that to the question of AI.

It makes it a little bit easier to comprehend what the tech is and is interactive enough that folks have fun with it because since it's AI, it's non deterministic. So it might not always come back with the same thing. If I'm wearing a Dr. Strange Aya Vagamoto hat, Right. That it's got the gold symbol of the necklace that Dr. Strange wears in the Marvel movies or in the comic books, it might not always recognize that as the same thing. So folks will play with that on stream. It's just interactive enough. And I like to say it's just dumb enough that they get entertained by it. And they like to play with that on stream.

[00:11:48] Adam: Oh that’s pretty fun. And also, by the way, congratulations to the Eagles. I'm sure you mentioned the Phillies. You must be an Eagles fan.

[00:11:55] Jeff: Oh, indeed. Yes. I've put away the championship gear for a little bit here. Like that was fine through the rest of February. We're into March now. Let's move into baseball season.

[00:12:06] Adam: yeah. Well in basketball too, you could wear a Penn state, you know, basketball hat for March madness or something. I don't know how their basketball team is this year.

[00:12:13] Jeff: Penn state basketball. No,

[00:12:15] Adam: My alma mater, also big 10 Michigan doing quite well these days.

[00:12:21] Jeff: Michigan's usually doing pretty well in basketball. Penn State basketball. Hockey this year? Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.

[00:12:31] Adam: Yeah. All right.

Well, I want to hit the time machine and ask you a little bit about your life as a kid. So what were you like as a kid? Was code, obviously Twitch was not a thing. But was coding something that you were into or got into at an early age?

[00:12:45] Jeff: Absolutely. When I was six, seven years old, it was the early eighties. My father bought a Commodore 64. He was working in tech working on mainframes, Unix was starting to become a thing that, the insurance company that he was working at, they were starting to get access to, and he bought a Commodore 64 to bring home and learn a little bit about BASIC, and I took to that like a fish in water, so interested in it and writing code in BASIC, and saving it to a floppy disk and having that experience I must have read the basic manual at the back of the Commodore 64 book a dozen times between first and fifth grade.

Oh my gosh, it was something I had an absolute joy working with. There's a fun point of notoriety that I shared with my father, my father's yesterday was his 75th birthday and I realized that we're time shifting recordings here, but when my father taught me basic as my first programming language that made a big deal to me, and of course, C sharp is part of my screen name now but as part of my role that we mentioned earlier at Microsoft, I was writing blog posts and as dot net, the T net ecosystem evolved, including basic and visual Basic and Visual Basic became available to work on Unix machines as part of dot net core, now, dot net nine at the time of the recording here. That was a big deal. And I got to write the blog post announcing that visual basic worked on Unix machines.

So Adam, look at this throwback that I got to experience. My dad taught me basic back in the eighties and he wasn't using that machine that technology because he was working on Unix and here I am, right? 30, 40 years later. And I get to do the announcement that basic now works on Unix machines that my father was working on at the time when he taught me, Oh my gosh.

[00:14:48] Adam: This is very meta by the way. But did you go to your dad and like, be like, look at this. Be proud.

[00:14:54] Jeff: Like, you know, dad, thank you so much for, giving me that opportunity to get started and for me to turn around and thank him and pay it forward to the next generation of developers. Absolutely. There's even a post on my blog with a throwback picture from the eighties of the two of us sitting at the dining room table, trying out the Commodore 64 and yea.

[00:15:17] Adam: Amazing. Very cool. All right. Well, I want to transition and talk about being a dad. And we'll dip back into the technology stuff a little bit later. I'm sure of it. But you as far as I know, you have a partner and you have a couple of kids, your kids are recently out of the house, like both of them. And so you are approaching or are empty nester territory right now. Is that right?

[00:15:43] Jeff: Temporary empty nesting, right? When kids are in college, two daughters in college and it's like temporary empty nesting because we're about to go into spring break here. So they're both going to come home. So we're going to have a week where there's two extra people in the house that haven't been here for the last two months and it's going to be like.

What the hell are you doing in my house? Don't you remember how to clean the bathroom up after yourself? What the heck? So it has been quite the change. My wife, she works during the day. I work from home. So during the day typically it's just me here in the rectangle that is the camera working and whatnot.

And there's two extra people. What the heck is this? Yes, it's not a culture shift. It's a mindset shift, right? Because for 20 some years. My older daughter's 21, younger daughter's 18, for 20 some years, were an extra set of small feet running around the house and calling out and interrupting me, dad, I need help with, or, and I feel like this is the success moment for us as parents, right?

You work on parenting and teaching them and pointing their feet in the right direction to socialize and learn and when they finish high school and they're ready to move on to, whether it's college, it's the military, it's post secondary education of some sort, right? This is our success as parents, right?

This is what we've been training them for, for the last 18 years. And you're hoping that they're making good choices here. And my older daughter made some great choices, good decisions, absolutely killing it at college. The other daughter, we're working on, we're a couple of months in here, we're working on.

[00:17:32] Adam: Yeah.

[00:17:34] Jeff: And we're constantly learning and it's the mind shift that, that happens and you got to get ready for it. Because it sneaks up on you, man. Oh.

[00:17:47] Adam: Do your daughters know about your live coding persona and that work that you do? What do they think about dad being on Twitch? I mean, they are kind of the Twitch generation, right? So, yeah. So what do they think about dad being on Twitch?

[00:18:01] Jeff: When I was awarded Twitch partner, right? That's a level of notoriety in the Twitch community, right? You're committed. You're at a level of engagement with the Twitch platform. Suddenly they think that you have access to be able to go and meet up with some of these other famous streamers.

Oh my gosh. You know, you're going to TwitchCon. Are you going to, are you going to see so and so? And hey, can you talk to them? Can you get them to sign something for me? I'm like, hang on that's not too much of a thing here. I can't just pick up the phone and suddenly have, you know, that person on the phone, that doesn't work.

So they were initially really impressed, and this is a thing that just happens with kids right in their early to mid teens, like they kind of get impressed when you accomplish something like that, especially something that has that pop culture tie, like live streaming or YouTube, and then the thing happens where they get into their mid teens, 15, 16, and then they get embarrassed by it. Doesn't matter what you're doing. It does it right. It, It happens to be live streaming for me, but it could be whatever it is. You're driving them, dropping them off at afterschool sports or band or whatever. And it's

[00:19:12] Adam: anything.

[00:19:13] Jeff: dad, can you please get, can you just drop me off and drive away as fast as possible? I don't want, I don't want my friends to see you like, are you kidding?

I don't know what you're talking about. So they went through this time in their early teens where, Hey, my dad's on Twitch. And like they pointed to and said, Hey, look, dad's over here. Isn't that great? Isn't that cool? And then they get into their teens. They're like, dad, were you really dressed up as a squirrel on a live stream last week?

My friends saw you dressed up, what were you doing? Like, yeah, I did something. And what do you mean that's embarrassing? I don't understand. And, yeah, so, it's a weird two-sided thing, but I think as dads, as parents, it's incumbent on us to embarrass our kids as much as possible. Like, that's kind of, like, my dad did that to me, it's my job to do it to my kids too.

You know?

[00:20:07] Adam: Right. It's a rite of passage in many ways.

[00:20:09] Jeff: Absolutely.

[00:20:10] Adam: I'm working on this with my 12 year old daughter. This is, we're in the early embarrassment stages right now. So saying hi to her in public when she's with her friends, you know, all those things.

[00:20:20] Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. And so, and at some point, I don't know if it's like just before they turn 10 or 11, especially with the boys. So I didn't have this too much with the daughters. There's a point with the boys where they get into this pride thing where it's like, my dad can beat up your dad. And I'm like,

[00:20:34] Adam: Mhm.

[00:20:35] Jeff: Tha’ts not a thing. Like, this isn't

[00:20:39] Adam: Yeah. Dads aren't walking around getting into fights with other dads. Most of us.

[00:20:44] Jeff: No! Right, right. Oh, gosh.

[00:20:47] Adam: okay. So it's to know that there's a cycle of embarrassment or pride and then into embarrassment, maybe.

[00:20:52] Jeff: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And especially with the daughters, when they get into the late teens, there's a, especially with the mothers, there is a, a, a fighting engagement thing there where mom sees that they're starting to turn out like her and they're seeing that mom's recognizing that and they don't want to turn out like mom.

They want different from mom. So there are collisions happening there.

[00:21:16] Adam: Mm hmm. So I want to talk about being an empty nester. Uh, And this isn't, you know, this is a new experience for you. As you mentioned, you're kind of temporary. You've got your youngest is just off to college. What has that experience been like for you and what has it taught you or caused you to reflect on as a dad?

[00:21:36] Jeff: It's made me realize that my relationship with my wife changed over the last 20 years because there were two sets of small feet that were wandering around all the time and they would interrupt at the worst times. They would want your attention. They would need help with something.

You had to take them for afterschool activities at this, that, and the other time. It's given us an opportunity to almost reinvent our relationship, right? Like when you get married, you decide to have a family, like your relationship changes while the kids are around like it's just different.

That's just the way it is. You have to be mom. You have to be dad. Like having that relationship is different in front of them. You have to be very deliberate about scheduling and figuring out date night. When you're in college before the first kid came along, you could just pick up and say, you know what?

Let's go out for dinner and a movie and off you went, you know what, Hey, wouldn't it be great. Let's go over to the bar, listen to some music, grab a couple of drinks, have a good time. And just relax tonight. You, you can't just pick up and do that when you've got nine and 10 year olds around. Because the next morning is going to come and dad, I want some toast for breakfast. Can you help me make it some french toast or pancakes or whatever it might be? So we've hit this point where we're reinventing our relationship, right? It's the throwback to what was it like 20 years ago?

How are things different? How are things updated? How do we reconnect? We found that she finishes work early, 3:30, 4 o'clock, I work for a company based on the West Coast, I don't get done till about 5 o'clock, but have dinner, and then there's that, that time after dinner where we would have been helping kids with homework, we would have been checking out after school activities and whatnot, picking up and juggling, driving to this, that, and the other that isn't happening anymore, that we can just unwind and almost have like an evening date night almost every night now, you know, so it feels refreshing, a new freedom that we have in our relationship to rediscover what we've had to kind of, you know, keep bottled up except for that, that one Saturday night a month that we could because the kids had this, that and the other, particularly during high school.

During high school, say goodbye to your free time. Oh my gosh. Until they get cars, once they get cars, okay. You get the free time back, but you don't have a car in the driveway.

[00:24:19] Adam: Right? Can't leave the house.

[00:24:22] Jeff: They took the car. Dad. I'm taking the keys and I'm taking the credit card. Wait, what? And that's a thing. And, oh my gosh, Apple wallet helped a lot with that. Like you're not taking my credit card, but I'll text you 20 bucks.

So you can buy a ticket to the movies or whatever it is. So it's been a great revisit, yeah, to, to stuff that we haven't done since, yeah, before the kids were born. And we're in that interesting place where my wife and I, we went to the same university. The kids are both now going to the same university.

So Penn State, we get into football season and we can go back. We've got. We've got adult money now we can go back for football games and have season tickets and we can do the football weekends as it's not a family weekend anymore, but it's now date weekend in the fall, go have a blast. And if we happen to visit and spend time with the kids for an hour or two, take them to dinner one night while we're there.

Fantastic. They're happy to see us.

[00:25:27] Adam: Yeah, they're stoked because they get a good meal.

[00:25:29] Jeff: Oh gosh, yes. Oh

[00:25:31] Adam: That's your role now. Dad, can we

[00:25:34] Jeff: Take us to the steak, take us to the steakhouse for dinner on Saturday night after the game. Let's go.

[00:25:39] Adam: if you think about like, let's say you're bumping into another parents on the street and they're like a few years behind you in terms of like their kids are getting into high school. You know, maybe somebody even like me who's I've got a middle schooler and I see line of sight to a time where she will not be in the house anymore.

What advice would you give to parents who are approaching this? Mhm. Place in their lives. Like what's, what are some big discoveries that you made here?

[00:26:08] Jeff: I wanted to make sure that I supported the school activities, the after school activities that my kids wanted to get engaged with didn't matter what it was. You want to get engaged with something as long as it was something productive engaged with or around the school. And it wasn't something that was in any way, shape or form, just out of our price range.

I will support you with every fiber of my body. So, when my kids were in middle school, they really got interested in riding horses and they wanted to start riding, jumping competitively with a middle school aged teen at the local barn. Okay. How much does that cost? All right. We can afford that.

Let's go. Let's get engaged. Let's do that. Let's have a good time and I will support you. No questions asked. It's not my cup of tea. That's not something I'm interested in. But you want to do this? Let's go. And I happily supported them. They brought home blue ribbons from shows and had a great time with it.

They learned a lot. And then when they got into high school, they got into band and I was one of, you know, three, four groups of parents that supported our band and I was there for every football game. I mean, our high school football team was awful, I mean…

[00:27:33] Adam: Not sending a lot of players to Penn state, apparently.

[00:27:35] Jeff: No, no. So between the two daughters, we had six years watching that football team minus a year in there for pandemic.

So we had about five years of watching that football team and three of those years they didn't win more than two games in a season. And one of those years they went 0-fer Okay, but I was there half hour before every game to watch that band to support them to cheer on my kids. I absolutely tell you, make sure you support your kids in their activities.

It shows them that you approve that they can come to you to talk about those things and that you support them and that they can rely on your support because as they start getting into things later in high school, 17, 18, 19, there's those adult conversations.

That we're all gonna have and they know they can trust you because you're there for them. You've shown them unwavering support in whatever that activity is. I had a rule, a rule with my kids, if you need money for something at school, I don't care what it is. need a book, you need materials for a project you want some money to buy a thing that, is going to be used at school.

No questions asked, you're covered. Got it. Right? And they knew they had that support. So when it came time for some of those harder discussions, 17-18 deciding where to go to college talking about their relationships, right? They knew that they could come to me. They could come to my wife.

And there was no judgment. There was only love from us as parents to support them, to guide them and make sure that they got the support they needed to get into situations that they wanted to be engaged with. And also to get out of situations that they weren't too happy with either. So.

[00:29:36] Adam: Your youngest just went off to college and your oldest has been there for a little bit. I imagine the college admissions process is significantly different than it was when I went to college and probably you too. So did you have to like relearn that or how involved were you in that process?

Cause I also hear that, sometimes kids are just like, I just go do my thing and then I come back and tell the parents what's up. But was that your experience or no?

[00:30:00] Jeff: No, we got very involved. So, like many of us in tech we're doing okay. We're doing okay financially. So the school goes through and starts putting together counseling process. We're going to start filling out all of our documentation for the federal aid process, and this and that, and how we go through and send out applications to schools, and what schools would you like to apply for, what are you interested in.

The counselors did a great job of getting that process started. But here's the thing, right? Like some of us that work in tech, we're doing okay. And some of those federal aid forms come back and they're like, you make too much money for us to give you a grant. And that didn't make the counselors happy that they got this type of information coming back.

And as my daughters are going through the research and process to decide where they want to go, what they want to apply to. They had several ideas and because we had done things like have tickets to our college football games, they knew the campus at Penn State very well. And they knew that was one of the schools they wanted to apply to.

For some reason the high school is like, no, no, you're going to apply to a several different schools. And we're going to send out these applications. My daughter got accepted to Louisiana State University and I live in Pennsylvania. Don't get me wrong, LSU, Baton Rouge, it's an amazing school. It's a terrific place. I wasn't going to go on a tour there. I wasn't going to fly there. It was a little bit outside the region that we were really considering seriously considering for our kids to go to, because a lot of the things that they have at schools outside of our state.

They've got it at schools inside our state. So going through that process was a bit of a challenge. So after, we had the LSU issue happen, we're like, let's go in and do some of this ourselves. Let's go drive and tour a couple of schools. So we went to various schools and my one daughter.

Diehard said, yes, I'm going to Penn state and went through the application process and submitted everything and did it all online and with the university and everything came back. And she even got a scholarship for part of her funding because she was a good student and music and this and that, and the high school was upset about how dare you go and do this without our handholding and going through our process and notifying and requesting things from us so much.

So Adam that they put a hold on sending her transcript out after she graduated. Like what is this? So there's a process. Make sure you're talking to your high school and that you're aware of it. Because while you can go off and do some stuff on your own, make sure that the folks at the high school are aware of it and know about some of your goals and things.

So they don't go off and start doing things that you're not interested in like applying to a school on the other half of the country that you have no intention of actually going and attending. Like it's one thing to apply to a school that's local that you might be interested in if the ones that you really want to go to don't work out it's a different process.

And because you can do it all online now, there's that temptation to say, you know what, I think I'm going to apply to Kansas state, but you don't live anywhere near Kansas. Yeah, but, you know, they're wildcats. I like the purple and silver. No! No! Don't do that! You're wasting their time. You're wasting your time.

[00:33:44] Adam: Yep.

[00:33:45] Jeff: Kansas State's a fine school. Big 12. They've got a terrific basketball program, football program. Why?

[00:33:53] Adam: But it’s in Kansas. 

Jeff: It's in Kansas! Is that?

Adam: And you live in Pennsylvania.

Jeff: And you live in Pennsylvania! If you lived in Kansas, if you've lived in Missouri, sure. Why not?

Adam: you know, when I was going to college, you had to fill out a paper application. You had to put it in an envelope. You had to like mail it off with a check attached to it. You know?

[00:34:14] Jeff: Yes.

[00:34:14] Adam: It's so much easier to just like check a box and apply to all these things.

[00:34:18] Jeff: It's not just check a box. It's check these boxes And then click the PayPal button to submit your admission payment. Like literally check, check, check. Yeah, sure. And $200 later, like

[00:34:32] Adam: Kansas state, Louisiana state.

[00:34:35] Jeff: Kansas State. Fine schools, absolutely fine schools, but they're not near me. And yeah.

[00:34:43] Adam: It also sounds like, you know, one of the things that I'm hearing in what you're saying is that. It's important to kind of align with your kids on like, what are the boundaries, like, we want to go to school in a vicinity that is in some proximity to the house, or we're going to prioritize in state versus out of state, or, you know, something like that.

So it's important to kind of like. Be on the same page as a family. Otherwise things can get away from you.

[00:35:14] Jeff: Absolutely. And you know what, there's some schools that you want to travel for the prestige. You want to go to Yale. You want to go to Harvard? There's prestige with those schools. Totally get it. If that's what you're interested in, I can absolutely see that you want to go to USC because you want to be in Southern California and get the exposure to what's going on there and you're interested in getting into film and television production.

USC, UCLA, totally makes sense. Absolutely. You want to go to Miami University in Florida because you want to talk about meteorology and be able to study hurricanes and those things make sense. Absolutely go for it, but my younger daughter initially was very interested in learning criminology.

She wanted to study pre law, get into criminology, look at all of that stuff and she was accepted to West Virginia university. She was accepted to West Virginia and Penn State, and they both have great programs on both of those. West Virginia happens to have a little bit of the FBI training facility there because of how close they are.

[00:36:19] Adam: The proximity. Yeah.

[00:36:20] Jeff: Yes. So, it's not too far, to your point, not too far out of range. And when you want to support your kids, well, let's look at these two side by side. And here's the thing. Penn State didn't accept her to main campus and she wanted to be in the marching band. So if she's not at main campus, she can't be in the marching band.

But West Virginia said, you're going to be at our main campus and you can be in the marching band. So she went to West Virginia for her first semester, and she was in the marching band as a freshman and marched at all these different football games, went to a couple away games. And she even marched in New York City as part of the Thanksgiving Macy's Day Parade.

Like, talk about pride. Proud dad moment when you get to see your kid, especially in music. And I'm sure there's a bunch of music dads out there watching. You get to see your kid marching a parade is one thing, but march down the middle of Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Like, holy smokes, right? That's a moment that you absolutely latch on to.

But it's those things that for us as parents, yes, get aligned with, measure those opportunities and when she got to the end of that fall semester at West Virginia to come back and come to what I was saying about high school and support your kids, mom, dad, West Virginia doesn't feel right to me. Outside of the kids in the band, I'm having a hard time with. The culture, the folks that are in West Virginia, the here in 2025, end of 2024, there was a lot of political shifting that happened and she wasn't comfortable with how that was changing in West Virginia and the connections that she made with folks in West Virginia, just weren't working for her and she wanted to go back to change schools.

And that's one of those discussions for us as parents, man, that's a hard discussion to have because now there's a big money part of that that's happening and whatnot. And having that trust with your kids that they can come to you and say, I don't want to disappoint you. We were on board with West Virginia and rah rah getting West Virginia spirit things and hats and t shirts and going to the football games and gosh, Penn State, West Virginia, that was the first game of the football season this past season.

And let me tell you, my wife and I didn't know who to cheer for. We had season tickets to West Virginia, we're sitting in the football stadium at West Virginia. Our one daughter is in the marching band on sitting on this side. Our other daughter is with Penn State and on the other side. 

[00:39:02] Adam: House divided.

[00:39:04] Jeff: Go football. Like, yeah, like, I didn't, I was wearing half yellow and half white in the stadium. Like, okay. And to say, I want to change, I want to go, having that relationship with our kids more than anything is so valuable because like, like I was saying just a little bit ago, that trust is so important that you have that so that they're open to having that discussion with us and that trust and all of the onboarding and enrollment stuff that we did over the spring and summer semester to get her into West Virginia. We did over three weeks in December and

[00:39:45] Adam: Yeah.

[00:39:47] Jeff: That's a big ask, but we got it done. Okay. So happy for her with that.

[00:39:53] Adam: It sounds like the other piece of this too is. You know, as your kids are growing up, they're going to make decisions, sometimes they're not going to like the result of those decisions. Just as that happens with us as full fledged adults too. And you have to, as a parent you know, take the temperature down a little bit and be prepared for some of those big changes or different decisions that are coming after your kid experiences the world a little bit. 

[00:40:25] Jeff: Yea, right? Lay out with them, what are the pros and cons of each one of these things? You want to make a big decision. Let's think this through. Let's talk it out. What are the pros? What are the cons and getting them to see them next to each other so that they can help make that decision. It also gives us as parents an opportunity to steer them a little bit, get them focused and point them in a direction that is either a little more financially easy for us to deal with or is something that's a little bit closer to home so that we can support them with.

Or puts them in a good situation that we know they're going to be successful with all good things that we can dial in to those discussions having that trust. Yeah, they're not going to be happy with things, but teaching them how to evaluate their decisions is another big step that happens there.

And it's one thing to go from decisions when they were younger as kids. Well, what instrument do you want to play in the band? Well, is it going to be the piccolo? Or is it going to be the saxophone? What are the pluses and minuses of each? Why do you want to choose each one of those, to, all right, we're changing universities.

Why do you want to do that? Let's look at it. Having that experience, she already had measured out. The pros and cons. She already had them written down. She already knew the pluses and minuses of both. And the fact that she was able to have that discussion with us and bring it to us. It was on one hand initially disappointing.

Oh, we're going to have to change things. All right. But then it was a proud moment that she recognized this wasn't working. And we made a educated, good decision about how to change things and make it better going forward. 

[00:42:12] Adam: Yea. It makes a ton of sense to me. And you were able to, when your kids were younger, trial some of this process in lower stakes decision making, right? Like, that's great. I wanted to ask you about technology. So you've built your entire career in technology. You've been, you know, from Commodore 64 onward in life.

Have your daughters followed in your footsteps with their interests or are they? Carving a different path in life so far?

[00:42:40] Jeff: They have zero interest in tech, like none. On one hand, that's kind of disappointing as a guy who works in influencing and educating folks. It's disappointing that they're not interested in that. It also means then that I have to really be tech support dad, like, Oh.

All right, right, because it right, they'll just come to us with the my phone's broken. Well, what do you mean it's broken. Well, I, I, nothing happens when I open the web browser. Well, are you connected to the network? Well, what do you mean connected to the network? So, right, but I'm happy with the paths that they've chosen.

My younger daughter's still working things out and wanting to do criminology and get into political science, whatever it might be. That's her bag. She's interested in it. I will support her. my older daughter is interested in art education. She's getting a degree so that she can be an art teacher.

Fantastic. There were times where they were younger in school where, right, they've got basic programming classes. Oh, we're going to build a little web page and we're going to put some text on the web page and some pictures, you know, and it was as somebody who teaches programming, it was such a proud moment to show them as kids that here's some of the tools that dad uses that dad works on to help make visual studio code, right?

I, I helped work on those products. And to show them those and to get that appreciation from them that, Oh, my gosh, look at this thing that dad and his team works on. That's really cool. But it didn't work out for us. And it initially it was disappointing, but I'm okay with that, right?

I've come to a point in, in their journey where, all right, I appreciate that. I'm okay with this, I'm proud of where they're going. My older daughter, she's about to graduate college. She's very successful with it. And you know, we'll see where they go and I'll be there to support them.

[00:44:42] Adam: That's great. So, drawing a parallel to my own life here. So I have a younger son, he's 10, and he is very interested in games, Fortnite, things like that. Loves watching YouTubers play Fortnite. He learns a lot about it, like cetera. Thinks that's what his career is going to be, that he's going to be a professional fortnight gamer and that's okay.

He's 10, you know, probably not, but What would your response have been if one of your daughters came to you and said, you know, dad, I'm going to be a professional Twitch streamer like you, how would that conversation have gone? What do you think about there's a huge influx of kids that want to go down that path.

Um, so, so yeah, how do you think about approaching that conversation?

[00:45:31] Jeff: They need to understand what all's involved. Just the time you see that streamer playing games on Twitch, he's not all that they're working on. And my kids have seen the other half. What happens when this camera turns off? There's work that's put into to put together the scenes to set up equipment to plan content, right?

Because it's not just, oh, we're going to sign in we're going to play Fortnite today. No, you're going to set up a collaboration with somebody so that there's two of you and you're telling jokes and and having a good time playing together, right? Setting up scenes and doing fun things together and using whatever the latest outfits are in Fortnite so that you can be silly and fun together on stream.

But then even after that, right, the video editing, the art production, the graphic arts work that goes into it is the next step that you need to be aware of, you need to be comfortable with. And you need to realize is more time than you're spending actually playing the game. You're playing the game for four to six hours and that's fun.

That's great. But you're going to spend another four to six hours editing video down to put on YouTube to turn into clips, to turn into Tik Toks, to share out there, to put some art around that and bring in some sound effects. And whatnot. There's a lot of work that goes into that part. And eventually you start developing a team that helps produce and do the creative work for you.

Well it turns into a job. It's not just the game and they've seen that production. I have a secondary set behind this green screen that I have behind me that is more of a standing set so I can do standing interactions whatever I'm teaching or if I'm playing games or whatnot, and they've used my home studio here to do some of those things.

It's home office slash studio that has a handful of cameras and whatnot here, and they've seen what's involved with that. And there was a time where my older daughter wanted to do speed drawing on YouTube.

[00:47:40] Adam: I have seen these videos. Yes,

[00:47:42] Jeff: Totally a thing and she had a blast recording herself drawing and then speeding it up and doing the editing and she had so much fun doing that and I told her you can do that, but while you're a teen, no face on camera and.

She went through and put together maybe a half dozen videos and said, don't like putting together the video afterwards, the editing and the work and to make that look good, that's not my thing and she passed on it. So what I would tell any young person that wants to get involved with this is that they need to understand the entire production.

This camera is just one part of it. And learning how to address the microphone. It's a whole nother part of it, right? There’s an entire persona that you need to manage and how you address the microphone. What you talk about because there are things that you can share and talk about that you don't want to make available on the internet.

And like I said about no camera. With my daughter, for young folks, you’ve got to understand that once your face is out there, once your audio is out there, it's not going away and it's never going away, like I fully appreciate that there's thousands of hours of me out there live streaming on YouTube that my grandkids that my great grandkids that descendants of mine that I will never meet will see of me and they're going to wonder what the heck was great granddad doing. And that's a thing that you need to appreciate as somebody who does YouTubing, podcasting, live streaming. It's a muscle that you've got to learn how to work through. And it takes a long time to develop.

[00:49:33] Adam: I really like that perspective in talking to your kids and even showing them in your case because you can, what it takes to actually do the thing so that 30 minutes or an hour of being on camera. There's actually five hours of things that are happening outside of that, which is really a really interesting perspective.

Maybe I'll try that with my son. We’ll see.

[00:49:56] Jeff: Sure. Let's put together a half hour video of, you want to play Fortnite for a half an hour, let's put that together. Okay. Now that you played half hour is right in a battle Royale game like that. It's maybe three, four games. Okay. Now, what are we going to do with that video?

[00:50:13] Adam: Right,

[00:50:13] Jeff: Putting all that together?Oh.

[00:50:18] Adam: Yea it’s a lot of work, gotta love it. On that note, that is a good way to wrap up this conversation before we get to our lightning round. So I wanted to ask you. Jeff, how can people follow along or be helpful to you on your journey?

[00:50:35] Jeff: I'm on a lot of the social medias, right? Because at YouTubing live streaming, you're going to be on a lot of the social medias. So, I am C sharp Fritz. That's my screen name on just about all the things. So if it's YouTube, if it's Twitch, blue sky,mastodon, you can find me. I am C sharp Fritz.

It's also where my blog is, csharpfritz.com. You can find me in just about all those locations. I have a discord server. I think you have, that's kind of a thing. If you do live streaming, you need to have a discord server where folks hang out and chat. My source code is out on GitHub under csharpfritz.

So if folks want to talk, they want to catch up. Talk about parenting experiences growing in tech, starting your career in tech please reach out. I'm happy to talk about all of those things.

[00:51:22] Adam: Awesome. We will link to all of those places in the show notes. Okay. Lightning round. Here we go. There's very few rules for lightning round. The only rule in fact, is I ask you a question and you say the first thing that comes to mind and it's a judgment free zone.

But I cannot promise you that I will not laugh at some of your responses.

[00:51:45] Jeff: Completely fair. I don't mind that at all. Now the lights go down and we hear like the, who wants to be a millionaire music kick in at that point?

[00:51:53] Adam: No, I used to do the very first episodes of this podcast that I did. I had a drum roll that I would drop in, but no, no sound effects these days, that, so we'll just jump right into it. Okay.

True or false. There's only one correct way to load the dishwasher?

[00:52:09] Jeff: Oh, true. Oh my gosh. And my parents will argue with me about which way it is to load the dishwasher. Yes. There is one way to load the dishwasher. Mm. Hmm.

[00:52:19] Adam: And it's your way.

[00:52:20] Jeff: It's my way.

[00:52:22] Adam: What would your daughter say is your signature dad superpower?

[00:52:27] Jeff: Calming down mom. Because when they get into their late teens and I mentioned they start arguing with mom, like I can call mom down. Okay. All right. Here let's. Let's all calm down. Let's talk this through. Yes. I am the negotiator.

[00:52:45] Adam: Excellent. What is the most frustrating thing that has ever happened to you as a dad?

[00:52:51] Jeff: Ah dealing with cars, kids with cars. Let me tell you. And then dad, I need to put my car in for service. Okay. Now we need to juggle the cars and who gets a car. Oh, dealing with the cars. Yes. That's the frustrating thing.

[00:53:07] Adam: Cars. I'm just going to not do it. Kids. You walk everywhere. That's the deal.

[00:53:12] Jeff: There you go. Absolutely.

[00:53:13] Adam: I’m sure that'll go over. Great.

[00:53:15] Jeff: If you lived in a city, that's going to be sure. No problem. Give you, give them the Metro card and away they go.

[00:53:20] Adam: Yup. All right. What is your go to dad wardrobe?

[00:53:24] Jeff: A hoodie and sweatpants.

[00:53:26] Adam: Okay. Love that.

[00:53:28] Jeff: Like I had to go out of my way to put on a collared shirt because I was going to be appearing here. T-shirt, purple hoodie and sweatpants.

[00:53:35] Adam: All right. Well, the Startup Dad audience will appreciate you dressing up for this show, it's, you know, very judgmental audience. So, what is the most embarrassing thing that you've ever done in front of your kids besides everything?

[00:53:48] Jeff: My older daughter was dating a guy right after it was right after pandemic. And to do funny, weird things on live streams, I started acquiring, and part of it wasn't my choice. My viewers were sending me onesies of various barnyard animals. And she's on FaceTime with the new boyfriend and they're talking about this, that, and the other thing. And I come walking in the background and I'm dressed like a chicken. Just walked right into the bedroom. Hey, we're going to put together some lunch over here. And she's talking to the boyfriend and yeah. DAD!

[00:54:26] Adam: Dressed like a chicken. That might be a first for this podcast, but that's amazing. And I could see how that would be thoroughly embarrassing to a, to a teenager.

[00:54:36] Jeff: It was beautiful.

[00:54:40] Adam: Okay. What is your favorite kids movie?

[00:54:44] Jeff: Princess Diaries.

[00:54:45] Adam: Ooh, okay. Now, what nostalgic movie can you, or maybe you've already done this, can you just not wait to force your daughters to watch with you?

[00:54:56] Jeff: Rocky.

[00:54:57] Adam: Oh. And have, and you've done this? Or?

[00:55:00] Jeff: So they've seen bits and pieces of it. Like, right, like you flip through on the television and oh my gosh, look what movie is on and it's playing live right now. And we're just going to tune in and watch a bit of it from whatever point it is. And yes, right, we're going the training montage is on in Rocky.

We're going to watch this and the kids will look at it and go. Really? We're watching this? I'm like, no, no, you're from Philadelphia. You need to understand this. I know and like 5, 10 minutes. They're like, really? I don't want to watch sweaty boxing from the 70s. I'm like, no, no, you need to watch this.

And they evidently, you know, wander off and it's so like, like it's the bits and pieces of watching that nostalgic movie. And it's like, we will be sitting down and watching this.

[00:55:49] Adam: Yeah, you look girls, he's running up the stairs. It'shappening. 

Jeff: Yeah. you've been in that art museum and seeing the suits of armor and the Picasso paintings and all the things that are in there. Well, when we ran up those stairs, here's why you need to see this.

Adam: Yeah. Well, I know what you're doing over spring break then with your daughters. It's going to happen. So, how often do you tell your daughters back in my day stories?

[00:56:12] Jeff: So because my older daughter is at Penn State's main campus and my wife and I went there four years at main campus, literally every time we visit on campus, there's the, Hey, you know, this building back in my day was so and so yeah, when we lived in that dorm back in my day, so and so this, that, the other, you know, the ice cream that they served here back in my day, like all the time when we're on that campus.

[00:56:42] Adam: Yeah, I remember taking my kids to Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, where both my wife and I went and being like, look, kids, it's the Diag. This is so fun. Like, and they were like, lame. We don't care. And I was just so defeated. I guess I have many more years of looking forward to that in front of me.

[00:57:00] Jeff: Totally. Oh my gosh kids. You got to try out the pizza downtown. We used to go here. We'd grab a beer and sit and have pizza, you know on a Friday night and they're like dad It's pizza like no No Back in my day. No

[00:57:16] Adam: What is your favorite dad hack for road trips or flights? It's probably from when your kids were a little bit younger?

[00:57:26] Jeff: So, I mean, everybody now, like, you have the tablet that your kids are carrying with you on the planes and whatnot. So, what I had done from a long time ago, I use, I have a service that I installed on my little home server here called Plex, right? And I took all the Barbie DVDs and copied them over to Plex.

And I also made backups of the DVDs, right? Because back in the day you could copy DVDs

and in, in our van, it had a DVD player in the middle of the backseat. So the kids could watch whatever movie. We learned early on, don't play the original Barbie movie on the TV in the van, put the backup copy in there because the car's bouncing around as you're driving around and it'll scratch the disc

That turned into back up that disc to plex.

And then, on their tablets and phones and whatever, copy those movies over so that when you are on the flights or whatever, you don't have to worry about having any media or anything. It's all right there on it, and it's all their favorite movies and things. And of course you can write, you can download and copy these things, those things locally on your device.

But importantly, keep the media locally because when you get, right, when you get 30, 000 feet in the air. You can't connect out to Disney Plus at that point.

Copy it locally. And they will be silent the entire trip. Make sure they've got a good pair of headphones and silence. And they get the middle seat.

That's the other thing. They get the middle seat between mom and me.

[00:59:13] Adam: I love that. All right. Finally, you alluded to this in the answer to your last question. What is your take on minivans?

[00:59:21] Jeff: They are a magnificent invention, but I wouldn't go with just a minivan, go with the full size thing. Because at some point there's gonna be a dog that comes along, and you're gonna need room for the dog and the kids. So just go for the full size van, okay? And then you've got plenty of space for everybody to stretch out.

You've places for the books, the tablets for the cups, the sodas, what have you, plenty of space for all that stuff. Because when you're on that long trip, dear Lord they need to be occupied. They need to be entertained. And now I've entered like the next phase where they're okay, driving themselves to wherever that we want to go together.

So, so now, Adam, I'm into this phase where we bought a travel trailer, not an RV, not a motor home, but a travel trailer so that we can tow it, go wherever it is that we're going park. And now we can all go and just kind of hang out in there. And I feel like that's the next evolution of the minivan van experience is okay, we're going to go on a road trip. And when we get there, we need somewhere to do the entertaining, to put all your cups and things so you can have snacks and whatever, and having a trailer, having that RV, it is like the next evolution of that. So I'm a big fan of the minivan van SUV and now trailer experience, because particularly here in the States, there's so much to see and do and taking a plane everywhere, you're flying over so much. That's interesting. And that's amazing to see out there, but from between home and wherever it is, you're going. So a big fan of the road trip experience.

[01:01:02] Adam: Okay. So we're a fan of vans and all the attachments that could come with that.

[01:01:07] Jeff: Absolutely. Go through the, that evolutionary experience. Yes.

[01:01:13] Adam: Alright I love that perspective. It's the Maslow's hierarchy of needs of van of van

[01:01:17] Jeff: Yes.

[01:01:19] Adam: All right. Well, Jeff, this has been wonderful. I learned a ton in this conversation. Thank you so much. And I will make sure that you get a Startup Dad hat so that you can wear that on a future live stream.

That's it's a coveted, coveted item right there.

[01:01:34] Jeff: Very cool. Thank you.

[01:01:36] Adam: Yes. Thank you again for joining me. This has been fantastic.

[01:01:40] Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Jeff Fritz. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe, share, and leave me a review on Apple or Spotify.

It'll help other people find this podcast. Startup Dad is a Fishman AF production with editing support from Tommy Harron. If you're a startup founder, leader, or just want to get better at your job in tech as a growth practitioner, product manager, or executive, you can join a community of over 11, 000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth and product by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter. com. Thanks for listening and see you next week.