A Danish Tech Bro Millionaire Explains Fatherhood Better Than I Can

Happy Father’s Day from the country that’s forgotten how to have children

In 2005, as a skinny 20-year-old kid, I married a nineteen-year-old girl, and we dove headfirst into married life, beginning our journey into parenthood immediately.

We had five children in six years.

It was a really big life change.

It was really hard.

It was really expensive.

We were sometimes so poor we couldn’t afford more than one car.

I sometimes told people that we stopped having children because we couldn’t afford a car big enough to hold any more kids than we had.

I was only half-joking: at one point, we had a family van with five kid car seats in the back. All seven places were taken, and we had no room for any additional passengers.

In the 21 years since our wedding day, I’ve tried hard to love my wife well, raise my children well, and, really, just... focus on my own family.

One of the biggest challenges in being a father was ignoring all the loud opinions from everyone else we knew or met (whether they had kids or not).

When my wife and I were first married, MANY people told us we were too young to get married.

We ignored them.

When we announced our pregnancy, MANY people told us we were too young to have children.

We ignored them.

When we announced our subsequent pregnancies, MANY people told us we were having too many children.

We ignored them.

I’ve spent more than two decades fighting every day (and it really is a fight sometimes) to keep seven people alive, including myself, often with little fanfare, recognition, or understanding from people (including the very people I’m fighting to provide for and protect).

That’s fine. That’s being a parent in a nutshell:

“Welcome to parenthood! Your life is no longer about you! Congratulations!”

I don’t need fanfare or recognition. A little understanding would be nice, but it is what it is.

Despite the negative comments from critics along the way, I’ve found my own internal equilibrium, which, I think, helps me maintain a healthy outlook on life, marriage, parenting, and fatherhood.

But I’ve usually tried to be very quiet about it.

Some people I know are outspoken apologists for getting married and having children, and, sometimes, having LOTS of children. I don’t have a problem with that, and I support them. (Our son is on the cover of Love Another Child, a book by our good friends Chris and Wendy Jeub, who have 16 kids.)

But for whatever reason, I haven’t really made “fatherhood” a public part of my identity the way some people I know have. Perhaps it is because it seems too obvious coming from someone like me.

I’m one of nine children, raised in a Quiverfull family, homeschooled, of Swiss Mennonite and Irish Catholic descent, a conservative Christian by almost any standard.

Growing up, children were always spoken of as a blessing, and birth control was always spoken of as an evil intervention in God’s plan for your life.

After our first child was born, my wife and I took a “Natural Family Planning” (NFP) course at our local Roman Catholic Diocese.

Whether I still hold to all the beliefs I was raised with, considered, or studied, or not, of course, someone like me would be an advocate for marriage and parenting. People would probably think that is wholly unremarkable. Expected, even.

But here’s something I’ve noticed: a lot of the voices of the people who criticized us early on (“you’re too young to have kids”) or didn’t even believe in parenthood as a concept (“who would bring kids into this world?”) have started changing their tune.

In 2026, a whole bunch of people who had opinions bordering on anti-natalism are starting to sound like me, or even my big-family advocate friends.

Because they’ve gotten married and become parents.

AND I AM HERE FOR IT.

It’s a glorious thing.

I don’t even need to say “I told you so” — because I never did.

I just quietly chuckle as I notice people I would never have expected to sing the praises of marriage and parenting, doing so in both quiet, private moments and big, public ones.

To that end, last week I was clicking around the internet when I had the good fortune of stumbling upon one of the most amazing defenses of fatherhood I’ve ever heard, coming from one of the unlikeliest people I could imagine.

Imagine my surprise when I was four hours deep into a video of Lex Fridman’s six-hour interview with David Heinemeier Hansson, and the conversation about AI, web development, computer programming, and racecar driving turned to fatherhood.

I was so impressed that I’m posting it here today as a fitting tribute to fathers everywhere for Father’s Day.

For those who don’t know, David Heinemeier Hansson (“DHH”) is legendary in the web dev world: the creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, Le Mans race car finalist, and... a whole lot more.

For anyone who wants to hear what being a father is all about, and just how much it changes a man, you don’t have to listen to my friend Chris, a Quiverfull father of 16 kids, or even me, a conservative Christian father of (just) five kids.

Just listen to DHH, the Danish multi-millionaire tech-bro, who has lived the fast-moving life of Silicon Valley, replete with riches, exotic sports cars, and world travel, as he gives a full-throated defense for marriage and fatherhood from the perspective of someone who admittedly was a surprising candidate for marriage and fatherhood in the first place.

He does a better job than I ever could.

Of course, I don’t agree with everything he says here (especially about abortion), but that’s not the point. What’s remarkable to me is how many things we do agree on.

A few notable lines here really drove it home (heh) for me:

“You think your level of life satisfaction is on a scale from one to ten. Then the satisfaction of seeing your children understand something, accomplish something, learn something, do something, just be, goes like: ‘Oh my God, the scale doesn’t go from one to ten. It goes from one to one hundred!’”

…and…

“I’ve built software. I’ve built companies. I’ve raced cars. I’ve done all sorts of things, and I would trade all of it in a heartbeat for my kids.”

Toward the end, he drops a truth-bomb directed at me that I never saw coming:

“We’re constantly bombarded with reasons not to get married and not to have children. Those of us who’ve chosen to do the traditional thing have an obligation to talk it up a little bit.”

Okay, so at DHH's encouragement, I am now fulfilling my obligation to talk up parenting a bit. Thanks for the reminder, David, fellow internet entrepreneur, and now husband and father. Welcome to the club.

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