The Ultimate Guide to Finance for Parents | Adam Nash (Dad of 4, Daffy, Wealthfront, LinkedIn)

Nash: I have a rule, you know, in my household, which is that, once they reach the age of 10, it's kind of my rough number. I no longer obfuscate financial decisions. they can ask about an investment decision, they can ask about, you know, money, a house, real estate, friend bought a house, that sort of thing.

I talk about that with them very openly and honestly about how money works.

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. In today's conversation, I sat down with Adam Nash. Adam is a long time Silicon Valley executive. Investor and advisor. He was the president and CEO of Wealthfront, a product executive at Dropbox and LinkedIn, and teaches a course on personal finance for engineers at Stanford.

He is currently the co-founder and CEO of Daffy, the donor advised fund for you and a champion of charitable giving. In addition to his long and successful career, he's also a husband and the father of four kids. In our conversation today, we spoke about finance for parents, how to raise financially literate kids, how to think about the question of, am I financially ready for children and how to teach your kids about charitable giving and philanthropy.

We also discussed the challenges of starting a company as a parent, the concept of superpowers at work and at home, and how he talks about money with his wife and kids. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Adam Nash.

Fishman: I would like to welcome Adam Nash to the Startup Dad podcast. Adam it is a pleasure having you here with me today. You have a fantastic first name, so I'm glad that you could join me on the show.

Nash: I'm glad to be here, but I, can't take credit for the name. My parents kind of did that one.

Fishman: All right, well, I've been really excited about this conversation for a long time because I have wanted to have someone on the show who could really credibly speak to the financial concerns of parents, and you are probably the best possible person that I could think of for this task.

So we're going to talk a lot about kids and finances and the scary stuff about how to plan for the future. But yeah, I'm just so excited and just so appreciative that you could take the time to join me today.

Nash: No, very excited to be here. It's a great set of topics.

Fishman: So you have started and invested and worked with just so many financial technology companies, Daffy is the latest one where you started Daffy, and we'll get into a little bit about that and what that concept is. And Wealthfront, I would say, is probably one of the better known ones which you were the leader of for several years.

How did you develop your particular passion for finance and financial literacy?

Nash: Steve Jobs gave a graduation speech, commencement speech almost 20 years ago at Stanford which is where I went. And he talked about connecting the dots of your life when you look backwards, it makes more sense. And so I, I think that when it comes to personal finance it makes sense now looking backwards, but it's not something I set out to do.

Although the traces are there, you know, even at a young age my brother and I would walk around the neighborhood with a wagon full of lemons from our tree selling them for 10 cents each. And, you know, like collecting, see how much money we made. And one of my senior projects at Stanford computer science was to do a better version of Quicken.

Right. So, so when you look back and you're like, well, he wasn't totally normal. That kind of makes sense. But it was always a passion for me. And I think part of it was listen, I've been, you know, very successful from an educational standpoint, always did well on tests, classes, schools. And so I'm always struck by things that I wasn't very good at initially.

And it actually turned out personal finance was one of them. It's not taught in schools, or at least it wasn't taught in my school. And I even, you know, now I'm going on my eighth year teaching personal for engineers at Stanford. And I do it every year because I thought that class needed to exist, right?

It's not about IQ. You know, there's plenty of smart people out there, good people trying to do the right things. Who have a terrible time with money and it causes immense stress in their lives. And so I think I always felt like it was an important topic. I think I personally felt like I wasn't taught it as well as I could.

I was fortunate. My grandmother retired you know, when I was young and loved the topic. And so I spent a lot of time teaching me about certificates of deposits and that sort of thing when I was in college. So I think it's just a passion of mine. And, you know, one of the joys of working in technology is, technology isn't about an app or a service to me, technology is talking about, you know, better tools and systems to do things that we need to do, solve problems that we have. And so technology has gone into every area. And so I think about 15 years ago, when it looked like technology was finally moving into personal finance, we call it FinTech now. It just seemed natural.

And so, I feel lucky to have been in an industry where I could have an impact on at least a large number of people's lives, hopefully for the better financially. And it continues to be a passion of mine.

Fishman: Well, then you are definitely the right person for this episode. So. We're going to talk about your family in a little bit because this is a podcast for parents, but specifically I wanted to jump right in and ask you about a topic that I think is in fact very daunting for a lot of parents, and that is do you know when you're financially ready to have children?

And how do you think about saving for a future with children? You know, you have four kids. I'm sure you've wrestled with this, and you probably talk about this with lots of people. What's your advice on knowing if you're actually financially ready and then thinking about saving for a future with kids?

Nash: I've never actually been asked this question before. So it's a great one.

Fishman: First time always on this show for many things.

Nash: Well, so you're going to get a little bit of my personal view on it, crossed with like what probably is the right kind of academic answer. This may sound counterintuitive, but I really do believe that money, right,

your finances, are a means to an end. They're not the end. Most people's goal. There are some people who just want to run up the score. So don't get me wrong. They've decided that life's a game. That's the score. They want to run up the score. But for most people, their goals in life aren't about money.

They want to live a certain life. I often talk about, you know, people's financial lives, even when I was at LinkedIn, you know, talking about workplace and jobs and careers, it was about your professional life, not about, you know, your job or your salary, et cetera. And so that question,well intended, I actually would probably recommend that people not think of children that way. Right. I get in this argument with my wife all the time about travel. She loves to plan everything in advance but a lot of life can't be fully planned for. A lot of it requires the confidence that there's unknowns out there. There are uncertainties. But you are capable of dealing with them.

And more importantly, you have the motivation. And the will and the determination to push it through. So, you know, if children are important to you if family is a part of your life, to me, there are so many more important dimensions to those decisions. Right. Relationship, stability, et cetera. Then finance.

But I guess if you look back at, you know, for myself personally, I don't want to be hypocritical. Like, what was I thinking? And obviously my wife and I were fairly traditional about it, we didn't get married until we felt like our lives were going to be stability. We kind of roughly knew what we were going to do with our careers we roughly had an idea of where we might live. We had an apartment together after we got married for a couple of years and saved up. We actually bought a house. We already had two dogs. We got the dogs, the house, and then we started having children.

But in all seriousness. A lot of people I see in a lot of young people in particular seem very preoccupied with what do I have to save up? What do I have to have to have children? Having children is so expensive. College is so expensive, a bigger house, the right school district. There's all these dimensions.

And my fear with that is that, you know, one of the things you learn from behavioral science, is that loss aversion is a big thing, right? Like no matter how risk seeking people in technology say they are, and in general, people think they are when they are young. Actually, when it comes to money and life, when you talk about things that matter, people can get surprisingly risk averse and I think lining up the next 20 or 30 years of responsibilities and trying to back into a financial plan that would meet all of those needs.

I mean, I understand why people want to do it and I would never be against anyone who wanted to plan, et cetera, but I would argue that having a family is more important to figuring out. So I think you have, you know, some idea of what you're going to do to make a living. You have an idea of the life you want to lead.

You believe that those two things match, and then you have to have some confidence in that you are going to navigate and do the right thing for yourself and your family and make those decisions because having a family is a big responsibility.

Fishman: Yea. I remember having this conversation, I think when I was probably in my twenties and we had kids around the late twenties, early thirties. And I was having this conversation with a financial advisor planner and I was like, how do I think about the next you know, several decades, like, how do I know when I'm going to retire and all these sorts of things?

And he was like, so much is going to change in your life over the next 20 years. Like your financial situation is going to change. Like all of these things are going to change. So anything we build today is going to be horribly inaccurate five years from now.

Nash: Well, and that's because all these decisions involve trade offs, but those trade offs have to be evaluated personally, right? Like you don't have infinite money. Or at least I don't want to assume every listener doesn't, but sorry, sorry to billionaires out there who might be listening. But you know, in general, we don't have infinite money and you have to make trade offs, but trying to figure out what trade offs you're going to want to make in 10 years.

 And by the way, how your value shift and your priority shift when you have children and they're growing up, some things are just too hard to predict. And by the way, I think even counterproductive. And so I, I do believe, like I said, like, I think it's very reasonable for people to want to have some confidence about their income and their career, like what they're doing for a living.

But I actually, you know, I've always loved economic statistics and that's one of my, I know not everyone does for a good reason, but I really do. But, you know, it's funny, but statistics actually give you balance. If you think of like, for example, you live in the United States. And, you know, if you think if you know what the average household makes and, you know, the cost of living in your area and how many children people have and that sort of thing, it can give you relative confidence that, wow, if millions of other people can do this, I can do this.

It may involve hard choices, right? Like that choice, you know, am I going to spend money for less house in a better school district, rent versus own, how much you travel, like all these different, I mean, there, I don't want to pretend there aren't real trade offs there are. But you have to have some confidence, I think, navigating your own financial life and journey in, in the idea that your financial life is just a part of the life you want to build.We only get one shot,

Fishman: Yeah.

Nash: So when I hear that question. I almost always want to change the subject a little bit to, you know, why, like, you know, why do you want to have a family and those type of questions? And that's where you get to the heart of it. You get to the life you want to live.

I know that my wife and I, one of the things that we aligned with very early dating, embarrassingly early, was it turned out both of us were from fairly large families and wanted to have a larger family. And so for us, it was much less of can we afford it? It was more like, that's the goal.

That's actually what we're trying to do. Although we had some rules about when we talked about having more children.

Fishman: Oh, I can't wait to get into that. That's gonna be really, really exciting. So I want to hit the time machine real quick. And you mentioned going around the neighborhood and selling lemons with your brother. So you know, you've always had that kind of entrepreneurial spirit, but was in financial literacy, was that something that was discussed or was part of life? Were you sitting around the kitchen table talking with your parents about I don't know how to balance a checkbook back in the day or anything like that. Or was that just something that you didn't get a lot of exposure to, and you just kind of figured out on your own?

Nash: You know, there were little touches here and there. I already mentioned my grandmother on my mother's side was a teacher.

Fishman: Mm.

Nash: And I remember, you know, little things like she used to get those stamps from the store. And the books, the, this guy, et cetera. And I would actually come over sometimes and I would like the stamps and do the whole thing.

And so there are all these little touch points. I always loved math. And so money related to math, play with things, but my parents didn't discuss budgets directly with us, but there were things that I paid attention to and they were very open and discuss things with each other. And they're not always as quiet as you might think.

So, you know, like I remember the discussions about, you know, moving when I was about 10 years old my sister was about to be born. I'm the first of four. What house could afford some of that discussion. So some ambient real estate knowledge, my father's a doctor.

I remember him moving offices, actually a fun, crazy story is because I learned computers early there was a point where my father was actually trying to produce statements about this mortgage. And he's explaining to me, I'm like 10, 11 years old, you know, but I'm the one who can work a spreadsheet kind of to, to make the whole thing.

And so I'm learning the math on how to generate a mortgage. So, you know, in a funny way, I look back at these points and go like, yeah, that's not normal. And you had all these different exposures. By the way, my grandfather on my father's side was a very successful businessman and he used to love to talk to me about how to think about the returns on business, et cetera.

So I did have a lot of advantages there. No question. But no, you know, when I think about how I'm raising my children and how I was brought up, I have a strong point of view now about being more open and honest about money with children. in the camp that says we probably do a bad thing for good reasons when we hide money from our children.

It’s a soft lie. But, you know, pretending that the world doesn't involve financial decisions, right? You know, the reason that child can't get what they want at the store because it's a bad idea to buy it? Is it because it's not healthy? Or is it because you have a budget? When you fib about those things or you gloss over it, it's not true.

And children are smart. They figure these things out. We underestimate children all the time. We forget how we were trying to figure out the world. And so I think that, you know, you can't do it with a, obviously there's an age where it's appropriate and there's age appropriate topics. But I'm probably even more open about money with my children and my family than, than I was raised to be.

Although I had all those advantages.

Fishman: Well, let's talk about your family for a little bit. So, you have a partner wife, Carolyn, you mentioned. You have four kids. Tell me about the ages of your four kids.

Nash: They're a little older now. They're a real force of nature. So my oldest is 19. So I have a 19 year old, a 17 year old, a 15 year old and a 12 year old.

Fishman: Awesome. And, you know, you mentioned earlier, you and Carolyn had a discussion or series of discussions around the time to start a family and that there was A timetable for that, or when you could talk about it. So tell me about that decision. What was the decision like for the two of you to start a family?

Nash: I wouldn't describe as a timetable, but yeah, it started early. Like I said, even when we were dating I think one of, the things that my wife and I talked about, but agreed on early was, you know, was how much we were looking for someone to build a life together. And so we were always very open talking about that life and that life for both of us involved family.

So I think that, you know, we didn't have a plan very young, on our first date, you know, I was only 22. You know, but we talked about it in the future and we weren't afraid to talk about it. So it was a goal, but there was no timetable. And so it was a little bit one step at a time, you know, for things, you know, figuring out the relationship, figuring out each other, figuring out to get married, like I said, you know, buying out like all these different decisions we made together, so when we talked about things, it was a little bit, is it, is now the right time,

Fishman: Mmhmm

Nash: But you're right. I mean, when you, think you might want a large family, if you want that option, that does come back from the future to the, into the present, right? I think about my, current role in technology, a lot of, you know, doing roadmaps and software and planning and that sort of thing some lessons that back into there, but you know, our role is actually not to think about the whole plan, we never had a number of children or a size of the family that was the goal. In fact, one of our explicit rules was; first year after having a child there are no discussions about more children. Going to give that a year. Nothing wrong with giving that a year.

It's a big commitment, et cetera. And so we kind of did it that way. And actually think that way about careers. at LinkedIn, you know, working with Reed Hoffman, et cetera, and we talked about careers. Reed talks about tours of duty and thinking about, you know, you know, you have these goals a few years out, you think about like five years out, where do you want to be?

What are the one or two jobs or roles you could do in the next five years that would qualify you for that dream job, et cetera. getting back to, I, I'm not a big believer in trying to plan out the whole thing, but we took that same approach with the family. And of course we were very fortunate to end up with four beautiful children.

 Although I wish more people had warned me, I did receive the warning from one friend. That they start small, they get quite large. I, sometimes I look around the house and I go like, wow, it's like. What do we have? Six, 700 pounds of children. It's a lot. It's a big breed.

Fishman: There's a lot of, you need an extra fridge. There's a lot of humans in that house.

Nash: Oh yeah. The three teenage boys in the house is definitely denting the grocery budget. There's no, no question.

Fishman: So I wanted to ask you too. You technically you have a fifth kid, which is Daffy, the company that you've started. I've had a lot of founders on the show and even some, couples describe, their company as like the fifth child in the family. Cause it kind of is, starting a company can be really all consuming.

And I did the math on the ages of your kids. And I think you started Daffy when your kids were probably like on the low end, seven or eight through maybe 15 or 16. So, you know, because it was about four years ago. When you think about the idea of a company being kind of all consuming, how do you manage that with the needs of a family?

Are there boundaries that you establish guardrails that you put in place or anything like that?

Nash: Daffy is the first company I've been the founder of so doing that, I'm one of those founders who's later career little older. So I don't want to pretend it's the same experience for anyone. It's, you know, time of life, et cetera. And I've had enough success that, you know, the levels of risk are a little bit different, et cetera.

But you're right. When you start a company, it's an amazing commitment. I don't think it's the same commitment as having children, but even the successful case when you build a company, you're talking about a commitment that's measured in years over a decade, at least. I mean, I think the average venture backed company takes now 10 to 12 years to reach any sort of stability.

Fishman: Yep.

Nash: And scale, et cetera. And that's a successful case. So I think that's part of it. You have to be willing to do that. And I think that's in common with other big decisions. But you know, in terms of guardrails I would say that the rules I have around my company around Daffy startup are not significantly different.

Then the way most of my career around and I know that there's different points of view on work life balance and how people balance life. I've always had a fairly integrated life, you know, to me. It was not about tight segmentation of like I work nine to five on these days and I do this and I take these weeks.

It was much more of there's a certain percentage of my time that I'm going to spend on these different things. So it's not a guardrail per se, but I have a very integrated view of my life, personal, professional responsibilities, and that extends to the company. And I think what that does is it actually does push you into planning, right? You know, my whole company, when I run it we kick off the year with an offsite every year. We actually do it twice a year mid year as well. Every six months, I did this at Wealthfront. I do it at Daffy every six months. I kind of write up a document for the whole company about what we learned in the last six months, you know, does that change our strategy?

What our strategy is and what that means for our execution, what we need to get done in the next 12 months and how we're going to prioritize. And I do that every six months. I think that planning is a way for me to have a guardrail or control because I set up what can I do? What can I get done? But I also think there's some things that we naturally respond to in our personality.

I think a lot of people I played a lot of video games growing up. That may not surprise you. Yeah, I know it's, but you know, one of the things you learn playing a lot of video games is that there are different types of games, right? There are twitch games, which are many moves per second can you do right there?

There are strategy games. There are games that just take time to push through there that you build, et cetera. And so I think we all learn as kids, which games we’re good at, or that bring us joy and energy. And it turns out the types of games that I like are not twitch games. I've watched those guys playing Starcraft.

I remember I was like,

Fishman: Can't do it.

Nash: I mean, like never could. Like, I mean, it took me, I was funny. It was my my children now ask me this question. It's like, I was the guy that took me 42 attempts to beat Mike Tyson and Mike Tyson's punch out. Like it's like, did not do it the first few times. It took, so I'm not a Twitch player.

I'm a strategic player. I like games where it actually, you set things up. You know, some real time strategy games have that aspect. And it's funny that carries over to work. But it also carries over to family. I'm much more the type who tries to prioritize. What are the things that really matter?

What are the two or three things right now, today, this week, this month, this year, that when you look back you're going to say those are the most important things to get right. And what I do is I direct most of my energy towards the most important things. And I'm just very resilient to letting things go, right? The nice to haves, the of course I would have done that also and that would have been great but you can't do everything and so I do that I do change schedules and I do have a very interleaved life right sometimes my personal life affects work sometimes work affects personal life.

Scheduling priorities, et cetera. If it's a fundraising, if I know, like, you know, as I wealth front, I raised three different rounds of financing while I was at Wealthfront, I knew what financing entailed. I'd been in venture capital for a while. You know, I, I knew what that entailed.

And so you end up looking at things ahead of time. But that's part of the sport of having a great partner in your household is, if you can talk about these things and plan around these things, I've actually found that, you know, you pick up for your partner sometimes when they have a lot going on sometimes they pick up for you. And so I think in some ways, my response at work is just to plan and be very open and transparent with your partner about what's going on and they can be open and transparent with you, with what's going on in their life, with what they're doing and prioritizing and be flexible.

Fishman: You mentioned a couple things one good open communication with your partner and two you also mentioned the Daffy's the first company that you've officially been the founder of, co-founder, co-founder of when you decided or when you thought, Hey, I'm going to go start a company.

And it's the first time I've done this and we've got four kids and what was that conversation like with Carolyn?

Nash: it was very funny because I'm struggling with the decision because, seems like a positive, but it turns out having spent some time in venture capital, being an angel investor for more than a decade, having worked at some successful startups like LinkedIn, which is massively successful and that sort of thing.

You realize how hard it is by the way, how rare great businesses are, what venture class businesses, because there are millions and millions of good businesses out there. But a venture backed business is always a really high bar. You're talking about, could this be a billion dollar company?

That's a very rare and unusual thing. So you have this laundry list of all the things you have to do. So I'm sitting there thinking, I want to start a company when I left Dropbox, I was looking at my career going, I'm going to regret not taking a shot at building something that I think is new and important and with a little bit of hubris.

Might not have happened if I didn't do it. Right? That value that comes from it and so I'm sitting there toiling over it and you know, I'm talking and I'm there. I'm Carol. I'm always a big commitment. That's right. She looks at me and says. Oh I know you're going to do this.

Like you, you have to do this like you, and she talked to me about how many people wanted me to do this and the value, and she liked the idea. There's no question. And felt it was very authentic to my personality, my background and my values. But at the same time calling her supportive would be an understatement.

In some ways she just she almost thought it was like, well, I don't know why you're spending so much time debating the if, it's obvious you're going to do this, you know, what do you need to figure out? And what are the pieces have to come together? And so a lot of starting the company for me was just one foot after the other, right?

You can't solve all 1,000,000 problems at once. And you can't do all the miracles. But the company my first thing was to work the idea. And I actually had a lot of ideas. I'm not surprised. I think I had a Google doc with something like 82 ideas. I don't know if that's exact number. They were not all good, by the way. Some really special ones there.

Fishman: I bet.

Nash: If you want some of them, it's great. You can have them. But actually working with some close friends, you know, people I trust talking to landed on the idea that became Daffy and then you, my first step was like, well, I'm not going to do this alone. I need a co-founder.

And it turned out that I was very fortunate. Alejandro, he was one of my favorite engineers at LinkedIn, we'd kept in touch and I actually tried to hire him in Wealthfront and I could not. But we had talked about for over five years, starting a company and debating different ideas.

And it turned out he had done some work with DonorsChoose back in the day and he loved the idea of building an app and a platform to help people give, to support them, putting aside money for charity. And so once I had him saying, yes, I'm in that's a, really is a magic moment. Then it became like, how do I make this real?

Like, how do we take this vision, this idea? And it's, you know, it's humbling in some ways, like some of the things you're doing, it just, you know, registering the company, you know, setting up email, you know, like all these different things, but it was really wonderful. Really wonderful experience, but it couldn't have done it without actually Carolyn support in a number of ways.

And mostly just from her making me realize that this is the great thing about having a partner is that in some ways they know you better than you know yourself. Your neural net is doing a lot of different things. Sometimes it's clearer from the outside, whether the answer makes sense or not.

Fishman: Yeah. She gave you the push that you needed. She was your first board member, we're going to come back to donor advised funds and Daffy and talk about charitable giving but I wanted to ask you something that came up in the prep for this is this idea of superpowers and applying superpowers at work, applying them at home. Can you tell me more about the concept of superpowers? What does that mean to you?

Nash: You’re already getting the idea and I'm sure anyone listening is getting the idea already that I was in some ways a fairly typical Silicon Valley kid playing video games and, you know, love comic book characters and that sort of thing. So superpowers, though, is just an analogy that I actually started using at work.

So one of the interesting things about my career is I've ended up having most of the roles at a software company, when I was in college, I actually worked at Stanford bookstore and I sold computers and I fixed them as well. You know, I've been in, in service roles and support roles.

Obviously started my career as an engineer, moved into design, moved into product, obviously became a manager went to business school finance. So I've done these roles and I will tell you. I have not found a role in software one, where there aren't incredibly brilliant, motivated people creating amazing value in that role and two, a role that wasn't actually necessary, or at least competitively you weren't at a huge disadvantage if you didn't know how to do that well. And so superpowers became my language when I was running teams. I would talk about and I still talk about this belief that software is a team sport. I played volleyball in high school and you know, when you play volleyball, you play a team sport.

You realize it's yes, individual skill matters a lot, but it's how you coordinate. It's what you see the communication, the coordination, the execution. And so you have to have everyone working together. And so superpowers became my language of that every function has superpowers. Um, and I use this a little bit as career motivation as I became a manager of having people think.

So many engineers I meet love being engineers, but they think that's not the path to success. How do I become a product manager? And somehow in their head, they think that's the path to better success for them. It might be, it was for me. But for many it's not and recognizing what you're giving up, what success looks like in that role.

This is why I ended up working at LinkedIn. I think too few schools actually prepare people for navigating their professional lives. And so when it comes to family, I think it's the same thing. It's a little bit of we all have not just strengths or weaknesses. We have activities that give us energy.

It's not about whether they're hard or not. Turns out humans actually do a lot of very difficult things. Sometimes unnecessarily. Let's be clear. We're not always very rational about, but we do a lot of very difficult things. And we do it because they give us energy. We actually like the challenge.

I mean, this is about product. We like the constraints. We like the challenge. That's why all these questions like, how do you fit it all in? That's a constraint. You don't, you have to make choices. You have to have priorities. And so for me, the idea of superpowers, I would talk about, you know, The superpower of a designer is, it's very obvious.

Most humans are very visual. It's where we consume a lot of our information. You could talk, the end of the day, you could write up a thousand pages of documentation and it will not be as impactful to a group of people as a single image that shows them what could be. And I always, you know, want designers to remember that's one of their superpowers, right?

They can control decisions by just framing them visually for people, which is not a skill most people have. Engineers have the power, the superpower to end the debate about whether something is or isn't possible. So many smart people, brilliant people, what they end up fighting forever about is not whether something is or isn't a good idea, it's whether it is or isn't possible and get done engineer can take that off the table in an evening, can go home, come back the next day and say, well, listen, I got this working.

So like, I still don't know if it's a good idea, but it's not a question of whether we can do it. We can, and I never forget those superpowers. And so I think that extends life too, right? Like I think of, you know. In a personal life, you know, all these different areas, started to infect the way that I thought looking at people was that everyone has superpower.

Everyone you meet, you sit in a coffee shop, everyone, you're walking down the street, all walks of life, what they're doing, there are things they are great at, by the way, that you can also learn from if you actually talk to people about what they do. And so that's how I tend to think about things, but it did come from work and I still talk about it in the software world.

And partially it's because I really do think that teams work better when they actually have some respect for the importance and the capabilities of all these roles. I'm not a big fan of cultures that elevate a single function as the function, the most important function, et cetera. I think that misses the point that actually all these things have to come together to do something great.

Fishman: Well, we're going to talk about financial literacy in a second before that, I wanted to ask you one more question about parenting, which is. If you could hit the time machine, you could rewind the clock almost 20 years to right before you had your first kid and you bump into Adam 20 years ago. What advice would you give the younger version of yourself about family, about, about having kids?

Nash: I have to be a little difficult here. I apologize. Because actually you get all this question on top. Like, what would you change? What would you do in your life? You know, what would you tell your 20 year old self? And the truth is, I get very nervous about that question.

And maybe it is because I've consumed too much science

Fishman: Mm hmm.

Nash: I actually don’t want to mess with how my kids are or who they are. I don't know what that butterfly effect does. I don't know. You know, in some ways the journey is the reward and some hard things you just have to go through.

I'm just gonna put that on the table as, you know, in general love my children, love where they are, et cetera. And I'd be very nervous about pulling any thread that could possibly impact who they are and where they are and what they're going to be. When I think about, you know, what I would tell myself now if I could just forget that whole complexity, multiverse stuff, et cetera I mean, everyone says some of the same things. The time is precious. I joked before about how big my children are, you know, the proxy, the older etcetera. And it's wonderful. I often get asked, you know, what's your favorite phase or, what age is your favorite etcetera. But that's a hard question for me because there's magic in every age.

And so some of the advice is a little bit trite. But that idea of just, just loving the challenges, right? That, that, that actually is part of the journey, right? You know, everything, the good, the bad, the ugly, et cetera, the stress, the strain. One thing that has really impacted me with my children, et cetera, is that thinking of them a little bit as people figuring out the world. Right. And thinking about how from their point of view, how they're going to remember and reflect on things. You know, once they get older, everything becomes a teachable moment in some ways. Every experience, you know, you might be bored of doing something because you did it a lot when you were a teenager and you don't need to do it anymore, right?

But you're not going to make that decision for them and you want them to have that experience, right? It was good for you, formative, et cetera. So, that reflection of what you want to do, some intentionality of the life you want to create for them, I think is really valuable. But, you know, we are going to talk about financial pieces.

We already talked about that question a little bit. It's very hard not to feel the pressure and the stress and the strain, you know, the economic pressure of providing the life you want. Inevitably money plays a role in that. And so, the message I would give is just that confidence of like millions and millions of people before you have figured this out you have the capabilities and willpower to do this.

If it's important to you, you'll do it. Because I do think parents need that push sometimes. Sometimes it just feels so difficult. And so I would give my younger self just that confidence push. I mean, I don't have to imagine this because it turns out I had some family members who said very similar things.

You know, my, my grandparents were very much and actually that's why multi generational connections are always so valuable. Because actually you realize how much better in so many ways our generation has it than does the challenges that, you know, your grandparents, your great grandparents had to go through the limited resources, the uncertainty in the world, et cetera.

You know, it gives you at least a little perspective that not pretending that anything going on isn't difficult or novel but it rhymes. History rhymes.

Fishman: Now, what about 180 degrees in the opposite direction? So you came from a big family, you grandparents, multi generation, you probably got a lot of advice. People were like dispensing it left and right to you as you're having multiple kids, anything that you would go back and tell yourself, Hey, younger Adam, Just ignore this.

It's not going to be all that helpful. It's going to get you wound up.

Nash: I mean, a lot of that does come down to career. Would say that one of the hardest things about navigating careers is that combination of uncertainty. And if you're the type of person that invests your own ego in your career and your success, whether it's financial, some people measure it that way or by titles or by impact.

That stress and that strain of that career of those in but it's very hard to get away from it what's going on this week this month and there are big disappointments jobs work out. They don't work out. You don't get the promotion. There's so many issues. And I think it's so hard to compartmentalize that emotionally.

And then it leaks out in all your other relationships, all those other conversations. And I don't just mean the stress and the strain of the time commitment, but how you react to things. How short is your fuse when something frustrating happens? You know, what happens when you're working on that tense thing and the six year old comes in and broke something that they weren't supposed to break, so I think the advice I would give a little bit as much as possible is realize that there is a lot of uncertainty, et cetera. But you know, for family, if your children, I used to joke about this at LinkedIn, one of the reasons I was so confident in LinkedIn as an idea was I believe that we had different sides to our life.

I mean, a lot of people don't remember but, you know, 15, 20 years ago, there was a lot of debate. Mark Zuckerberg believed that there would only be one social profile, right? That you were one person, so you would have one identity online. To me, that never rang true. And I think Mark knows that now.

I think everyone knows that now. Which is, no, we have different sides to ourselves. You know, who we are at work isn't necessarily who we are at home and I used to joke, I went to one of Jacob's you know, little league games, I didn't even have a name, right? I might be now, you know, I don't have CEO of, you know, Daffy or, you know, whatever, however I'm known or, you know, personally, et cetera, but, you know, at the little league game, I was Jacob's father.

I didn't have a name. That's who I was. And so remembering that these different parts of your life and different timeframes and that in the end, at least my personal view is those people closest to you, family, children, et cetera, they don't get to be six again, And recognizing that stress and that strain from work, et cetera, as much as possible of realizing that those relationships you're going to have with your children, Might be six now, but those are some of the most important and long live relationships you're going to have ever most meaningful.

And so I think a lot of parents hear that, but I don't think you can ever hear it enough.

Fishman: That's really great advice and anti advice. I would say good stuff. So let's talk about financial literacy in building that in kids. So we talked a bit about how you think about financial planning for families, but you know, you've got four kids. They're going to go out into the world.

They're going to make financial decisions themselves. How do you build financially literate children? Are there books, activities? Do you give them a wealth front account? How does that happen? Probably not by accident, I would imagine.

Nash: I don't think it happens by accident. I think you have to decide. This is one of those aspects. There's so many aspects to parenting where the real choice you're making is whether to be intentional about it or not, right? Like, you know, it's sometimes hard for us to have enough humility to just realize that we had a very unique and it's sometimes random experience in life. Not always, but the things happen, et cetera. You were influenced by conversations you overheard, things that weren't intended, et cetera. And by the way, if you're not intentional about things, you'll do the same thing with your children. Things will come out of your mouth.

You will get upset at different times. The chaos of life will come out and what you teach and what you don't teach. And then by the way, you know, my wife and I hit this as well. My oldest went to college last year, just finished his freshman year. You know, wait, there are all these things I didn't tell him. There's all these things I didn't teach him. Like you see all these things online where people make these lists of like, wait did I teach him how to, you know, shake hands the right way and, you know, look people in the eye, like all these, these basic things about life. So I do believe in some intentionality.

So I think you first, this is, you have to make a parent around money with your children. It's just that's important, but that's something you're actually going to teach them. And it doesn't mean you're going to teach them it when they're two. But it might mean that when you take them to the store that you do talk to them about calculating change or how that works, or thinking about how much money it makes sense, or you're purchasing decisions, very small children can understand, you know, oh, you see that one actually is bigger for the same price. That looks like a good deal. Like there are small things you can do. And it might actually affect, you know, that you actually do take your children on things that are economic activities, right? You know, I used to always have at least one of my children in tow doing almost any errand.

Just on principle, first of all, they don't obviously don't need more screen time or anything like that. But fundamentally you have to get them out there in life. So I think some of the fundamentals are not even about teaching them dollars and cents and money at all. It's just life and exposing your life to them, even when they're young.

And you'll be surprised what they pick up. But I have a rule, you know, my household, which is that, you know, once they reach 10, age of 10, it's kind of my rough number. I no longer obfuscate financial decisions. They ask about something, they can ask about an investment decision, they can ask about, you know, money, a house, real estate, someone, you know, friend bought a house, that sort of thing.

I talk about that with them very openly and honestly about how money works and these different things. They hear things in the news or they have questions about why, you know, why have prices gone up, right? Inflation's been a big topic the last few years. You know, actually talking to them about it and giving them a balanced view.

So I actually am a big believer of not trying to do it all at once. It's not a class. It's kind of a life experience. But I am very transparent. I do pay my kids an allowance as part of a way of getting them into making some financial decisions. Use Greenlight to do it for years, as it turns out, I'm not an investor in Greenlight.

They have a great feature where you can pay children allowance and actually you can give them your own interest rate. So I actually pay 10 percent a month on any money that they say, because if you're paying them an allowance, that looks like, you know, 10 right a week, and they save that money you know, if they save 10, you kind of want to say, oh, you get an extra dollar for that.

Although, unfortunately, one of my children kind of figured out that compounding thing goes to the moon and just, I had to cap, I had to cap the account size at one point, but no, I, little things like that, little systems, I think are big you know, I do believe in actually teaching kids about investing.

So, once my children reach 13 I do take some of that, those birthday gifts and the money they've saved and help them start a little brokerage account. I actually like children actually making their own decisions. So before you get to the advisory thing and the right way to do things, you know, letting them talk through and make decisions, some of which are mistakes you know, and some that pay off and then you get to talk about them.

You know, I remember talking with my oldest. He had decided that he thought Tesla was a big deal, not surprisingly in the area he grew up in where he started seeing Teslas all around, but, you know, believe, et cetera. And then of course it led to all these other decisions. Wait, why is it worth so much? You know, does that, you know, when should I sell? What are, there's taxes? What are taxes? And you're talking, you know, and so I think that if I guess my philosophy with children is, actions speak louder than words. I mean, I built it into the Daffy product, one of our biggest differentiating features for Daffy, which is a, the donor advised fund for you.

Is that when you put money in this account for charity, we actually let you add your children to it. You can also add your parents, siblings, etc. But what that means is every time you make a donation, your kids get a notification.

Fishman: Mhm.

Nash: And then that's a conversation. Why? Why did we donate to the Monterey Bay Aquarium?

Like, why do we support that? how do we think about giving and how much to give and when we give, etc. And so, I think that's true for everything. I think that's true for spending. I think that's true for saving. I think that's true for investing. And I think that's true for giving.

Fishman: Well, let's talk about giving for a second. So, I'm very curious, and you started to get into this, how to teach your kids about the importance of charitable giving. And certainly, you know, You know, if you're in a position to give to charity, that's a, you know, privileged position to be in not everybody is, but mean, I'm in my 40s, and I think I've only recently learned about what a donor advised fund is, or a DAF you started a company around this, so, for the folks who don't know, or haven't heard of this concept, what is a donor advised fund?

Nash: Yeah. So donor advised funds have been around for a very long time. I mean, we're getting close to a hundred years, right? Like 70, 80 years. But most people haven't heard of them. Actually, I'm impressed that you have because the truth is, if you don't have a high end accountant or financial advisor, you probably haven't heard about it.

But the way I explain it to most people is that a donor advised fund is another tax advantaged account. That exists, you know, we know 401ks and IRAs for retirement. We know 529 plans for college savings. And it turns out a donor advised fund is an account for charity. And it, it has these amazing properties.

It lets you put money aside for charity. You get the immediate tax deduction for putting money aside for charity, which is valuable. And then that money is invested tax free. And so anytime you actually want that money to go to an operating charity. You just tell the donor advised fund where to send it and assuming it's one of the charities they support, they send it off.

And so I thought this was a fantastic type of account. I mean, almost 60 million Americans give to charity every year and a lot, millions and millions of people giving is not just something they do transactionally giving is actually something that they think is important, right? Most of us were raised with this idea that life isn't meant to be completely selfish.

Right? That there are people less fortunate than yourself and that you should put some money aside for them and this comes out in different forms. And so Daffy was based on this idea of like, why isn't there an app for that? The problem with most don't advise funds is that because historically they focused mostly on the wealthy.

The technology is actually terrible.

Fishman: I would agree.

Nash: Right? When we launched Daffy in 2021, we were actually the first fully functional donor advised fund in the app store. I know that's hard to believe, but that is true in 2021. And so I think that when most people hear about donor advised fund, they say, that's too good to be true.

That's fantastic, right? So you're telling me I have this account. I can put aside money every month, every quarter, every year that money's invested tax free and I can give it to any charity that, that seems fantastic. Wait, I get the tax deduction. Like when I put the money aside, it just seems fantastic.

And so, I think, you know, Daffy, you know, a little bit is, it's a little bit about that financial education. Like I, I personally think it's a problem that most people don't know that they can do this. I don't think this should only be for the wealthy. And then when it comes to actually integrating, giving your life so much of what we learned about how to help people hit their goals around retirement, saving up to buy a house, you know, sending your kids to college, it applies to giving too, and there's actually academic research, it turns out that if you set a goal for your giving, whatever that goal is it turns out that pre commitment, people who do that give 32 percent more. And I would argue that, you know, most of the people I've talked to, and I've done a lot of research, you know, a lot of research went into Daffy. Most of the people I talked to, they echo what the academic research says. Most people don't think they give enough. They are a little bit, I don't want to say a shame, but they feel a little guilty life is busy It gets in the way work is busy family's busy. anxiety, etc And so when you ask them how much did you give to charity last year for a lot of people, whatever their bar was they didn't quite hit it. And so Daffy's really built, you know, I set the mission for the organization to be to help people be more generous more often.

And it's a wonderful, I always, sorry, a little bit of a proud father thing going on here, so I apologize but, but it's a wonderful product. It's so wonderful to have an app in your pocket where you've put money aside and when something strikes you, someone asks you your, kid's school is raising money for something.

A friend is raising money for something. There's a national event. Et cetera. The ability to open up, you know, just take your phone out, open up an app and actually do something. 

Fishman: Mm hmm.

Nash: Is amazingly powerful. And I mean, we were talking about parenting, but we all know actions speak louder than words. It feels good to do something rather than just talk about it.

Fishman: I think that's been one of the most interesting things for me and in using donor advised fund. I mean, certainly you know, you mentioned there's a transactional element to it. The tax benefit and that's all good. But the simplicity with which you can then say, oh, I'd like to support this, couple of clicks or taps, it's done versus like, got to get out the checkbook, got to write, need to get a receipt from some like it's so much more streamlined. And so you do it more often.

Nash: When I looked at giving initially, I was thinking about Daffy, it was very obvious. That giving involves not one but two hard problems. One is how much money can I afford to give? And the second problem is who do I give it to?

Each of those problems is actually very difficult for people. And if you have both of those at once, which is what happens when someone says, hey, can you donate to this cause? Ah, you have to do both problems at once. It's just very difficult. And so this is what we, I mean, can you imagine none of us would save well for retirement if we had to, like, just get asked to write a check, you know, like, there's a reason why it's useful to have money come out of your paycheck automatically into a 401k or retirement account.

It's not because 401ks or retirement accounts are perfect. It's because the value is paying yourself first, having that money go aside towards that goal. Takes that first problem off the table. And so it turns out that's true for giving too, right? If you put money aside, like you, all you have to do is just ask yourself the question, how much did you gift to charity last year?

Right. You know, most of us give to three, four, five charities. How much did you give? Whatever that number is, it should be in your budget, right? Let's not pretend that doesn't happen and didn't happen. And it wasn't important. If you decide that giving to charity sometimes as a goal for you, put a number on it and then divide that number by 12 and just have that money come out every month and have it put aside so that it's available when you need it.

And you hit the nail on the head. The magic of it is that then you get to focus on the decision that really matters. Which is, who do you give it to, right? And so by taking that financial piece off the table, I mean, that's a lot of the core of what we built at Daffy and what we hear from our members is the most valuable piece is just the ability to act when you want to act and not have the stress and strain of like, wait, what bills do I have to pay?

What else is going on in my life? And, you know, we always have a hundred things going on, you know, any given day. So.

Fishman: I want to bring this back to family and your family for a second, which is, do you and your family do philanthropic endeavors together and what have you seen as the impact of doing charitable giving and talking to your kids about this? What impact does this had on them?

Nash: Obviously I mean, I've said earlier, you know, actions speak louder than words. And I think as a parent, you just have to remember that, right? can talk to your blue in the face. Old joke with one of my children is the ears painted on a little bit, you know, it's a little bit of that action, but fundamentally, action speak louder.

There's, they're watching you. They're listening to you. And not always when you want them to, you know, so, so you have to live the life that you want to live. And I think giving as a part of that, I think when you give, when you volunteer, you know, I've been on the board of several charities.

I mean, that by itself sends a message. They know where you're spending your time. I mean, the truth is. Your children love your time desperate for it. They know how precious it is. They want more of it. And so when they see you spending time on something, it sends a message that's important. And I think that's amazingly important when it comes to giving.

And like I said earlier, that's why we designed it into the Daffy product. Because I think when they see you give, they're learning a lesson just without saying anything. About how important that is to you, but I do think there's ways you incorporate that into your parenting and into your life.

You talk about it. I think it's a good way to talk about why people give, why people volunteer, why people care talk about what things get taken care of by different organizations. So many organizations do so many valuable things that would not happen without those organizations, but that can be invisible if you don't talk about it or experience it.

And so, you know, I am a big fan of incorporating giving. And I think for families that are religious it's a little bit easier in some ways because you have this kind of regular reminder. Cause you know, religious giving is obviously a big category in the U S. But you know, everyone goes to a school and they raise money for different things.

There's a lot of teachable moments. Actually, there's a lot of ways that nonprofits touch our lives. If you think about it and so there's all these opportunities to talk to your children about why you support different things and how you think about it. And I would just encourage parents to take advantage of those opportunities when they present themselves.

Fishman: Okay. Well, I wanted to end with just a couple more questions about partnership and family. So you mentioned before we started recording that you have an annual budgeting tradition or sort of a financial review that you do with your wife. I found this to be fascinating. So tell me about this process.

It sounds like it's coming up soon. It's in August. So

Nash: Yeah, no, it's I'm happy to talk about it, but it does get to one of the big advice. So I teach this class at Stanford personal finance for engineers. And you might think, well, you have a class of undergraduates and grad students, they wouldn't want to talk about this, but it turns out talking about couples and money and the complexity there is a big deal, There is a reason why at the high end, right, of wealth management, people talk about family offices.

Fishman: sure.

Nash: They don't talk about your accounts are broken. They talk about your family, right? Right. There's a reason why actually, even in the government, because they talk about households many times. And so, you know, the number one mistake I think that couples make, et cetera, is not talking about money. That's part of your life. And by the way, marriage is an amazing, amazingly huge commitment in tying your finances together. Legally. And otherwise, right. You know, in terms of decisions that get made.

So, so talking about, you know, how big a transaction has to be before, you know, it makes you nervous or you want to talk about it or talking about your priorities. I think couples do not do enough of this. I think it's something that couples have to do and should do before they get married. I think they, they need to do it obviously while they're married and so my wife and I do have tradition around this which is something important, which is our lives got more and more complicated, you know, in the early days, it was simple. You know, you start out young and simple, but it gets more complicated. And so now every year, actually during the summer, when things are a little slower, we carve out some time where we actually get all the information together and I'm talking about all the information like assets, liabilities what big things happened in the past year, where we are this year versus last year, what we think is going to happen in the next year, talk a bit about our goals, you know, long term goals, et cetera but carving out time once a year to talk with your partner honestly about what's going on in your financial life.

Too many people avoid this opportunity. And I'm not saying that all the conversations are easy because there are some really hard choices you have to make sometimes, but can't imagine having a partnership that's functional without doing that. And, you know, financial advisors don't get enough credit for this.

You know, a lot of people will talk about financial advisors. They'll talk about them on investment returns, they'll talk about building a budget or a savings plan, and I'm not going to say these things can't have value, but I have a bias. I actually think there are wonderful tools and ways of doing that.

A lot of the value that financial advisors, the best financial advisors create is they actually do that integration. They talk to both partners, they talk to them together, they show them everything together, one picture of all your finances, et cetera. And so great financial advisors actually end up being a forcing function to force couples To actually face the realities of the decisions that they're making and talk through their feelings as well as the, you know, dollars and cents of what they're doing.

And so, my wife and I started doing this more than a decade ago. It's been fantastic. And I will tell you, like there's actually some great new apps and services that are happening now that are starting to focus on couples and households from day one. I think this is a wonderful area actually for innovation is helping couples and families get an honest appraisal of what's going on in their financial lives so they can make the right decisions for them and their children.

Fishman: Are there any particular apps that maybe you've invested in or you've been intrigued by you might recommend to, like, younger folks who are just starting out?

Nash: Well, yeah, I mean, I'm biased as it turns out. Because I am an active angel investor I mean, I'm invested in, you know, over 140 different companies, et cetera. And I spend a lot of time in FinTech, but you know, without, you know, being too biased, I would say, look, Acorns is a wonderful product and an amazing product and they now have family features and a family plan.

And I think that's a wonderful place to start at Acorns as a company dedicated to helping people up and coming deal with having a healthy financial life on a successful one. Obviously, you know, I'm the former CEO of Wealthfront. So I'm going to say that, you know, the phenomenal product there for around goal planning, et cetera, including college planning, which was always close to my heart.

But there is a new startup that I love. And I am an investor in called Plenty. Co founders are actually partners. Brilliant technology background, but they saw this same need and they've built a new automated service totally dedicated from day one for couples, right. And making those financial decisions. Everything from the savings piece to the investment piece, et cetera.

So, I think there are a lot of great products out there but those are at least three that you definitely should check out if you haven't.

Fishman: Awesome. I will, I'll link those in the show notes. Okay, last question for you what would you say is a mistake that you've made as a father? You've had a lot of reps as a dad, but what's something that you're like, hmm, wish I could have done that differently, or I've learned a lot from that one thing.

Nash: Oh This is going to sound so painfully obvious that I'm going to look a little ridiculous for having made this mistake.

Fishman: Oh, that's okay.

Nash: But it is actually, it can be painful in some ways. I mean, I, like I said I'm the oldest of four. I come from a larger family. It's so obvious when you have siblings that you're different. Siblings are different.

There's an amnesia that happens though when you become a parent, right? You're the same. Your partner's the same. You don't feel like you've changed. So there's this weird assumption that what you do for one child is going to work for the other which is just ludicrous to think about.

 But I made that mistake, right? Like, you know, as I, with our first, you know, the, some of the things I did and that work and activities, you want to do the same thing with the others. And I'm talking about trivial stuff, you know, extracurricular activities, sports, you know, engagement, but it actually is more fundamental.

It's how you talk to them, understanding what gives them energy, who they are. You know, so what I painfully had to get was it came to a breaking point at a couple of points where I'm trying to force my children to do things that I know the other children have done and are successful and love them.

And I think they're good experiences with them, et cetera. And you're just butting heads. This can be discipline. This can be education, et cetera. And so, you know, that it was a big mistake. And actually the turnaround for me was remembering something a friend had told me long ago about instead of thinking them purely as children and saying you know, time goes on, you know, forever, like in the future, you know, they're an adult, you're an adult, you have a relationship with this person. Like, how did that start? How did it go? How do you interact? And so for my children, I flipped around. This was probably ooh, a good eight to 10 years into my parenting journey, where all of a sudden I flip the problem around to more of, okay, who is my child? Like, what gives them energy? What makes them excited? We're not leaning into their excitement, definitely putting the guardrails around vulnerabilities and problems, but meeting each of them where they are, instead of trying to come up with the right recipe.

And I know that sounds obvious. But for me, at least my biggest mistake was, you know, Thinking that I was going to have one system, one way of doing things, one way of talking to them, encouragement that was going to work for all of them, you know, it's not the way it works and actually it can lead you to some pretty tough situations if you don't respect their individuality and who they are. They're not just Children. They're people.

Fishman: You know, you mentioned at the beginning of that, that it was going to seem painfully obvious, but I'm not sure that it is to a lot of people because I've actually heard other dads come on the show and say that exact thing, not with nearly as much clarity and conviction as you just said it. So, that was amazing.

Thank you. But I think it's something that a lot of parents have struggled with, especially parents who have multiple children. I hear it a lot in households of four or five. Some I've had a few people with six kids on the show. It's a miracle. But yeah, so thank you for sharing that Adam.

That was great. I want to get to rapid fire if we have a few extra minutes, but I wanted to end and just ask how can people follow along or be helpful to you? What's the best way to support you?

Nash: Oh, well, I mean, that's actually fairly simple. Obviously, I'm very easy, you know, as someone who helped in the early generations of social media, I'm very easy to find. I'm kind of Adam Nash everywhere. So if you're curious what I'm saying, you know, LinkedIn, Twitter, etcetera, I'm very easy to find and I can give you the handles for that for folks.

And I do write and so some of that content can be valuable and I, I have written quite a few articles about personal finance and financial decisions, et cetera. But obviously my current passion and love is Daffy, you know, so the, you know, the biggest thing I would encourage is, you know, we're talking a lot about family and we're talking a lot about, you know, financial goals, et cetera.

If you're someone who gives to charity on any sort of regular basis please check out daffy.org. it'll be meaningful to you. I think to put some money aside for charity, it obviously will be good for your taxes, but that's fine, but it'll feel good to put money aside for charity.

It'll be good for you to have control over that part of your life. And I think if you're a parent I would love to hear about your experience sharing that. You know, with the people you love, whether that's siblings, whether that's your parents or whether that's your children or all of them putting some money aside and making those decisions together can be wonderful.

You know, we have a promotion where when you join and you fund your account, we give you 25 to give to the charity of your choice. And I'm happy to give that benefit to everyone listening now.

Fishman: Awesome. I love that. We will definitely link to that. We'll find a way to get some more people to Daffy. So, do you have a few extra minutes to do a rapid fire around? I know we're butting up against time here, so I want to make sure and be respectful of your time. Okay. Well, rapid fire is very simple.

I ask you a quick question and you respond with the first thing that comes to mind, and then we move on. It's a judgment free zone, but possibly my favorite part of the pod. So. Here we go. No one's ever ready, but are you ready, Adam?

Nash: I am definitely not ready. Let's go.

Fishman: What is the most indispensable parenting product that you have ever purchased?

Nash: Apple watch. We specifically didn't want to give our children phones, smartphones until they're 13. But you have all these things, literally they have activities earlier. And so the Apple watch the ability to know where they are, by the way, it makes pickup amazingly easier.

GPS is good. But the fact that you have this comfort that they could text you, you could text them in a pinch. You could even do a phone call. Is just phenomenal. If you want your children to be raised to have a little bit of independence, you know, eight, nine, 10, et cetera. But still have the comfort and confidence that you can interact with them and you don't want them to have a phone.

So I love the Apple watch.

Fishman: All right. What about the opposite? What would you say is the most useless parenting product that you've ever purchased?

Nash: Oh, there's so many. I mean, it's actually an embarrassment. I mean, we went through the same thing a lot of parents, I can't tell you how many strollers we went through and all these things. But yeah, I think what comes to mind actually with parenting is not actually as much products as kind of like systems, et cetera.

I think the internet really pushes it like, oh, here's the right way to do certain things, et cetera. And people get really spun up about it. And they forget that actually it's just your life. You know, kids can make magic almost out of anything. And so this over investment and kind of like I want to create these perfect experiences for my children these days, these weekends, et cetera, turns out just going to the park, walking around can be some of the most meaningful things.

And by the way, when you're doing other things, all of a sudden the kids start talking. You hear about what's going on in their head and their minds and it's magic. And it's essential as a parent, if you want to understand how they see the world and actually be able to talk to them in ways.

Fishman: Finish this sentence for me. The ideal day with my kids involves this one activity.

Nash: This is going to be a recency bias. You know, one of the famous biases, but. Right now my children are older. And I go to the gym, I go to the gym regularly, exercise, et cetera. And I cannot tell you how wonderful it's been with each of them, kind of teaching them about fitness and different exercises, you know, the, actually, the gym we go to is at the Jewish Community Center is one of the non profits I was on the board of, support, etc. I get to talk about the community, get to talk about why we give and support things. But I love going to the gym with them, each of them and watching them grow.

And I will tell you as a fitness hack for all the parents out there, you may not need a personal trainer. You may just need to work out with a teenager.

Fishman: Awesome. What is your go to dad wardrobe?

Nash: Oh, yeah, I I thought this was clear. Like I grew up in Silicon Valley. I obviously don't know how to dress. I mean, I wear t-shirts. I, and much of the chagrin of my children, I wear jeans a lot which they now consider formal wear. I don't know when that happened, but they. It's like dress pants or jeans, but no, I'm typical dad. Shorts pockets.

Fishman: Awesome.

Nash: Pockets are useful.

Fishman:Got to have pockets.

Nash: Got to have pockets. It turns out that fashion has to give way to practicality sometimes.

Fishman: How many dad jokes do you tell on average each day?

Nash: Oh, I've been throttled a bit. I love dad jokes.

Fishman: Favorite one you could share with me?

Nash: Uhhh a recent one I've been doing. So, you know, that kids very into dinosaurs, that sort of thing, et cetera. So, you know, you know, why can't the dinosaurs hear when the pterosaur goes to the bathroom?

Fishman: Why?

Nash: Because the pee is silent, right? You know, I mean, so, so I've been throttled, so I, not every day, but it'd be a rare week that goes by that I don't tell one of the dad jokes, and I'm not afraid to tell the same one over and over again.

Fishman: Well, that is one of the definitions of a dad joke. So is the repetition of it. You have predominantly teenagers in your house. So the answer is probably everything to this next one, but what's the most embarrassing thing that you've ever done in front of your kids or that they would say is the most most embarrassing?

Nash: Oh, teenagers?

Fishman: Yeah.

Nash: Oh, they, I mean, they have opinions about everything. I mean, they, you know, you get notes. It's like Hollywood. Like you, you talk to anyone, you talk to a friend, et cetera. And they're just like, why did you say this? Like, oh, it's different things. Obviously the most embarrassing thing to them though is my behavior on discord.

Fishman: Oh,

Nash: And et cetera. You know, everything from like what handle I'm using emoji capital letters, punctuation. Yeah, no, they, they have opinions. They have opinions as it turns out.

Fishman: Do you have a favorite kids movie?

Nash: Oh, you know, that's right. Yeah. It's funny. For me, my favorite kids movies are associated with each child.

Fishman: Oh, that's interesting.

Nash: It's moments. I know the movie we went to first or the movie that they love the most. I mean, my oldest I don't want to embarrass him, but you know, he's almost 20 you know, like it's hard for me not to love Cars because he loved Cars.

Fishman: Yeah.

Nash: And now he's a man. But he was little once. So cute. Love that. And so, have a soft spot actually for almost all the Pixar movies. As it turns out

Fishman: Have you ever accidentally mixed up your kids names?

Nash: All the time. By the way, my wife and I did the thing where actually all the kids, the first letter of each of their name is it is the same.

Fishman: Oh God.

Nash: So like we, yeah, that's mixed up. Actually. It's funny. When you have a larger family I probably use numbers more than I should. But we actually have different texts you know, so we have all these names for pairs of them and the different groupings, right?

Like the bigs are, you know, the first two and the littles are the second two or the bookends. Bookends are the oldest and the youngest, Middles Odds and Evens. We have all, and these are all like text threads now, etc.

But yeah definitely have mixed up their names more times than I'd like to admit.

Fishman: Love that. What nostalgic movie can you not wait to force your kids to watch? Or maybe, what nostalgic movie were you really excited to watch with your kids?

Nash: I love movies and pop culture to some extent. So, I think like a lot of parents, I had like all these movies. And then what you realize as the children get older so many of your jokes, and a common experience you talk about actually referenced some of these things and they haven't seen them.

And so I think, you know, like a lot of people during the pandemic, we ended up watching a lot of movies that happened and we had these lists. It was actually very funny. My siblings all went through and had this whole thread about when my oldest was going to college what high school and college movies he had to watch.

You're talking about old ones that, you know, no one talks about anymore, you know, Real Genius or Back To School or Animal House or all these other movies. But no, I think, you know, my, my oldest, I mean, I'm a Silicon Valley nerd and that sort of thing.

So, I mean, I think Jacob was six when we watched a lot of Star Wars together, which led by the way, to some awkward moments, episode three, the younglings not perfect, not a perfect child experience. But no, for me, it's like, you know, actually the most rewarding one recently was I'll tell you last year it was just Back To The Future, they hadn't seen it so many memes, so many references, and it turns out that movie held up fantastically well.

It's painful as a parent because, you know, some of the movies you love as a child, like you watch, you haven't watched them in 30 years, and maybe it's not quite the way you remember it and watching it through their eyes, but Back To The Future was great was a lot of fun.

Fishman: Awesome. Well, the question that I love to end on. You have four kids. What's your take on minivans?

Nash: Oh, we are not only a pro minivan family, although we've outgrown it a little bit at this point. I mean, my wife was insistent on getting a minivan when we were ready to have our second. So she was a little early. It wasn't objectively necessary, but the practicality was important, but we're not only a minivan family, but we even have pins.

In Silicon Valley, there's always this argument between parents. It's usually the Sienna, Toyota Sienna versus the Honda Odyssey. And I mean, this is not like a Mac versus PC fight or Android versus iPhone. Like this gets emotional. Like people are in a camp and we were definitely in the Sienna, the Lexus of minivans,

Fishman:Team Sienna.

Nash:Team Sienna

Fishman: All right. Well, with that, we will wrap for today. Adam, this was awesome. Thank you so much for your advice on personal finance, talking to your kids about it and charitable giving. It's been fantastic. Really appreciate it.

Nash: Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Adam: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Adam Nash. 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. You can join a community of nearly 11,000 subscribers and stay up to date on my thoughts on growth, product, and parenting by subscribing to the Fishman AF newsletter at www.fishmanafnewsletter.com. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.