Avni Patel Thompson

I grab my phone.

What day is it?

What time is it?

Today's play rehearsal, right?

That should be at the big gym.

I head back to my email, looking through all of the rehearsal emails, costumes, volunteering, and there, on the schedule for today, at the bottom, oh, by the way, today's in the music room.

I text Rosa and tell her to head to the other side of the school, and I sit back, relieved, and my eyes fall on those unread emails.

And I think you know what happens next.

I finish that product doc, obviously.

Yeah, no.

I'd like to tell you that this is the exception, but I ended up creating an AI company because it wasn't.

Because with two kids, two jobs, and your modern family cocktail of crazy hair days and soccer tournaments and misplaced library books, I loved how full our life was, but I hated that somehow my brain had become the computer that ran my family.

And worse, it made collaboration nearly impossible, because everything was in my head, and the only way to get it out of there was to ask me.

At which point, I would look to my husband and say, when was it that I became his project manager?

Pro tip, not a very good way to handle human relationships.

But maybe it's because I've been a scientist and a product designer before I became a tech founder that next to that frustration, I also felt curiosity and opportunity.

I had honed my ability to find the tiniest bits of friction in everyday interactions and to build products that solved them, like packaging for an osteoporosis drug that was both child-resistant and accessible to arthritic hands, or designing a service for parents to connect to sitters and doing it over SMS because that's where they already are instead of sending them to another app.

And this?

Parenthood?

Well, this felt like the Friction Olympics.