A couple years ago, I wrote about how risk is subjective. When I left Amazon during mass layoffs to start Platformr, people called it bold and risky. I didn’t see it that way. Risk depends on what you value—and I value my purpose in life, innovation, ownership, and the ability to create something from nothing more than I value a steady paycheck.
That framework made sense when I was the one taking the risks. It’s harder to live by when you’re watching your daughters take theirs.
Recently, I dropped Alexa off at California Baptist University. I drove 14 hours down to LA, and she dropped me off at the hotel and we said our goodbyes. I’ve made a lot of hard decisions in my life—starting and selling companies, making life decisions that affect a family and my employees—but watching your firstborn disappear as she drives away is a different kind of hard. You can’t control the outcome. You can only trust the foundation.
Now Morgan, my 17-year-old, is deep in college applications. She’s weighing options, writing essays, trying to figure out what she wants her life to look like. And Hadley, my 15-year-old, just learned to drive. I’m sitting in the passenger seat, foot hovering over an imaginary brake pedal, trying to coach without grabbing the wheel.
Here’s what I’m realizing: for years, my job was to protect my girls, protect my family, be a provider to my family. Now my job is to prepare them to take risks I can’t control.
That’s a brutal shift for a control freak like me. I’m the guy who likes a lot of responsibility, someone that can tell a fortune 100 what to do with millions of their money, someone who plans everything out to avoid risks. But fatherhood in this season isn’t about planning—it’s about releasing. It’s about trusting that the values we’ve instilled will guide my girls when I’m not there to guide them myself.
The timing isn’t lost on me. I just closed a funding round at Platformr to hire more staff. For two years, I’ve had my hands on everything—sales, product, architecture, customer success. Now I need to learn how to let go there too. Platformr will grow up, and so are my daughters. Both require me to trust the foundation I’ve built and accept that I can only watch and influence from a distance.
I think that’s where faith comes in. I’ve written before about God being there during cancer, near-bankruptcy, and years of infertility. But trusting Him with my own risks is one thing. Trusting Him with my kids’ risks is another. When Alexa is 800+ miles away making decisions I’ll never know about, I have to believe that the same God who carried me through my uncertainty will carry her through hers.
So what’s my job now? Not to protect them from risk, but to teach them how to evaluate it. Teach them that they need to focus on the one thing they value in life. To help them understand what they value and to bet on that—even when the world tells them it’s foolish. To show them that courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s knowing what’s worth risking for.
I just hope when they take their leaps, they’ll know I’m cheering from the passenger seat—foot off the brake, hands off the wheel.