Life in the Third Oikos: Jesse Genet

From founder to homeschooling mom of 7: how ambition translates

Life in The Third Oikos: Jesse Genet

I’ve been stewing on the idea of “ambitious homemaking.” I see it as overlapping with parenting, but a different discipline. When I was 18, I worked in various people’s households. The people I worked for that I admired the most were very intentional in pulling me into their household. They understood that this relationship was a good thing for me too; a two-way street, not just a financial transaction. They celebrated my birthday and talked through my life problems with me at the same time as they asked if I could possibly drive their 8-year-old to school.

They saw my need and recognized it. They understood that their household was a type of real wealth that, wielded correctly, was a landing place for so many people. A place of wisdom, comfort, and community. In turn, their household being a landing place for so many meant they also had extra hands around — to read to a child, to drive someone somewhere, to do all the constant one-off tasks that households need to survive.

Historically, it seems to me that we understood this about households much more instinctively. That investing in maintaining the social fabric around us, in our neighborhoods, our homes, our families, was an ambitious discipline worthy of cultivation and intellectual focus. I’m not sure where this went, but we are endeavoring to do all of these things in a uniquely challenging social and technological time.

In this project, I want to study ambitious modern homemakers and community builders, so I gave Jesse Genet a call. Before I had any conception of this interview series, several people mentioned I should chat with her. Jesse’s past isn’t necessarily what comes to mind as the stereotype of a traditional homemaker. She founded several companies starting at the age of 16, went off to design school against her family’s wishes, and ultimately took one company, Lumi, through the startup accelerator Y-Combinator, and Lumi was acquired later on. While raising 5 children, she was still working at her acquirer’s company full time. Today she’s expecting their 7th, homeschools, manages several small family businesses, and supports her husband’s nascent startup. Today, Jesse sees her large, blended family as another ambitious project — an evolution of the same drive that fueled her companies.

The Identity Shift: Ambitious Parenting and Homemaking

Jesse: I had this identity attribute of “I am an entrepreneur, this is what I do.” Self-identifying what I do as an ambitious, crazy thing. I think that a key shift for me was that having 5, 6, 7 kids is also an ambitious, crazy thing. There was a morphing of the way that I view myself.

I’m not working full-time professionally on anything right now. I always dabble in some side projects, but being pregnant with my fourth, number 7 total, I feel very comfortable with saying I’m not starting a new company tomorrow. Maybe sometime in the future. But it took me a little while to get to that place. So the biggest change has been being comfortable letting go of who I am as this nonstop entrepreneur person, because that was part of my identity for so long.

But at the same time, I’ve managed to do the mental gymnastics of, “I’m still the exact same person.” We’re homeschooling the little kids, and we do a lot of very intensive things that take a lot of my mental and intellectual efforts. It actually feels quite similar to me on a daily basis at this point. Socially, it’s different. Socially… it’s quite different.

Tips for corporate and household management

It’s hard for me to imagine being a housewife or stay-at-home mom without my entrepreneurial background. I’m using these skills day in and day out.

Nicole: I like to joke on Twitter that you can transfer a lot of VC ideas about ambition to the household. Specifically, your “customer relationship management (CRM) software” can be used instead to get to know your neighbors, remember their names, and what’s going on in their life. What overlaps do you see from managing a company and those mental frameworks? Organizational systems, hiring, people management?

J: We’re fortunate enough to be able to afford to live on this little ranch. It’s really horse property near LA, for people’s imaginations. Things here are constantly in need of maintenance and we’re trying to grow this huge garden. My mom lives here, there’s this micro community here, and a lot of people are involved. I need to hire and fire folks to help with all the things that we do. Tending to different animals, gardening, landscaping, working with the electrician, the plumber, and all sorts of different crazy maintenance stuff. And we’re on our own, almost completely off-grid, so we have to do things like haul our own trash out.

Spotting talent

We’re very lucky to have one full-time household helper: you could call her a nanny, but she does a lot of other things. She helps with grocery shopping, running the household while I’m homeschooling, putting in other loads of laundry, and on-going maintenance issues. We have a whole shared document to track ongoing issues we’re working on together in the household.

She was actually previously an office manager at my past company, and we had to let her go from the company because that job was completely gone in Covid, but I really enjoyed working with her, so I offered her work in our house. Around the time I gave birth to my first baby, she naturally became so helpful with the baby that she became a full-time part of our household.

N: That’s so interesting. One of the skills I admired in women who are managing a bigger household is how they find and identify talent. Specifically, how they find people around them who have a moment of flexibility or an interest in taking on more work, and how these women identify and invite in people who have a few extra hours and happen to really like doing X or Y in the household. When I’ve observed this, these people share some level of trust, knowledge, and work style. Then sometimes it expands to people who will help with kid logistics in a very big household with small children. [I’ve interviewed my mother-in-law about finding homeschool tutors in day-to-day life.]

It seems like spotting talent and being a good manager of people at home is a key to scaling family life.

J: Something I pull from my entrepreneurial experience is the mental flexibility of spotting talent, and being a good manager of other human beings, which is a big deal, because it’s hard to run a household where you don’t scale past just being one node, yourself. Some women just do everything themselves (and I have immense respect for that), but usually there’s some need to scale various parts — even if it’s very part-time workers or babysitters, etc.

You do need to manage people. That means setting expectations with them. Weekly, I create a spreadsheet of our calendar, note all of the pieces that change, and each of the needs such as rides or other logistics. I then communicate to our nanny, the kids, and homeschool parents, what the needs are for the week and what everyone’s schedules are so I’m able to begin to plan on a more granular level.

N: And you mentioned you also have an art teacher who used to be your nanny - how did you find and hire her?

J: She’s the only person I found more traditionally — I posted an ad for someone to work with babies on care.com. After working with her for a little, I realized she loves art. Over time, she moved into doing art with all the homeschool co-op kids after we finish our lessons, as well as helping with the toddler during lessons if she needs a nap. I’ll often text her what I’m teaching them in science and she incorporates that into her art. But she’s not an art teacher, she’s just a person who has this talent!

N: Yes, totally, this is one of the main things I’ve heard from women beyond me in life that I’m always trying to contextualize for my own friends. It’s hard to find childcare, especially if you’re looking for a full-time nanny who has full-time context on your household operations, or if you pay full benefits.

But, the people I’ve seen that scale families really well, and have the bandwidth to help others have this constant mental Rolodex/CRM, in the background. They’re thinking of everyone’s needs and skills — the 16-year-old who has free time and could be a mother’s helper, and the Latin teacher who feels bored at their high school or college and wants to teach a fun, less structured co-op class.

I chatted with a friend recently who mentioned she wanted to host a 3-day long event with her friends that she’d been hosting since before her or her friends had kids. Now, they needed some childcare for everyone to be able to attend, so they hired a neighborhood girl who was a great babysitter, but they also paid her to “project manage” and hire several other babysitters, so they didn’t have to think about it. I think that’s such a beautiful skill — and this ability to spot talent, to spot needs, and to hire and manage effectively in a flexible and creative way is such an important skill for household management.

J: Yes, this is a skill that you must have as an entrepreneur. You must be willing to go out and say we need funding or I know I have zero customers now, but I need you to be customer number one, and here’s why that’s going to work. There’s this brazenness you get from living that life that I’ve taken into motherhood.

One example is that there’s a website for finding adult tutors and coaches, especially for adult professionals. I thought it would be cool to do a gymnastics class at our house, so I went on this site and messaged them, “I have a 2- and 3-year-old, will you come to my house?” We were definitely not the target customer, but a woman who does college level gymnastics at USC took us up on it.

It ended up being this fun break in her week and a convenient commute, and the whole thing was hilarious to her. So many parents are boxed in mentally to, “I want to do preschool for my kids,” and simply Google “preschool,” and the few preschools in their area come up. But the fact that I asked her, I made the pitch, she never posted, “I’m teaching a toddler gymnastics class” was a big breakthrough mentally, as well as realizing that I have a lot to impart to my children.

by: Lisa Sorgini

I don’t know where and when we decided that we aren’t supposed to teach our children. Yeah. And that teachers are supposed to teach our children. But if I, if there’s one thing I could rectify in like the minds of other moms, it would be like, where did you get that idea? These are your kids. You can teach them anything you want.

N: I 1000% agree. Even if it’s just hiring one person in your life to like, engage with your kid on something that they really enjoy or not even hire, you could provide them like a tea set and invite them over to talk about their undergraduate thesis on a book that your kid really loves or whatever else it may be.

J: I’m very non-dogmatic about “homeschool.” I’d love a larger brainstorm at some point about other terms for it, because “homeschool” does make it sound like you’re keeping your kid at home and there’s some divide between your family and like the rest of the world. Some people out there may do it that way, but I don’t think the majority of homeschoolers do. The closest thing I’ve come up with is “parent-driven education”: effectively a mindset that I’m gonna drive the education for them. That doesn’t mean I’ll do it all. If they have a subject they’re really interested in, I’ll find a solution for them to learn about that, or a workshop for them to attend. We probably won’t go full-time to another school environment; that’s all it means to me.

The concept that you’re not qualified to teach your own kid feels like a mind virus. Across political lines, most parents look at their child and go “this kid needs a teacher,” they don’t look at themselves in the mirror and go, “it could be me.” It’s a crisis of confidence: you have so much to give your child, and you’re the one who loves them the most. You have so much vested interest in what they know and what their value system is, so it feels squandered to act like, “I’m not a teacher, so I’ll need to leave it to the professionals.”

This is another good corollary to entrepreneur life. The weakest entrepreneurs are saying, “We’re trying to figure out a strategy, so we hired McKinsey to help us figure it out.” It’s the same thing. You couldn’t decide, you couldn’t take ownership over your choices, because when you take ownership, sometimes it goes poorly and you have to own this is the result I got, and you have to pivot or change.

But the same type of person who would hire a consultant to tell them what to do next in their startup is saying that they need an expert teacher to teach their child.

N: I think this is my broader parenting thesis: all of parenting is making choices about risk trade-offs. Avoiding all the risk is never an option on the table.

I did realize recently that I wouldn’t be qualified to teach daycare in DC because I don’t have a college degree.

J: I’m a college dropout too. Isn’t that so funny and also so irrelevant. I’m sure there are people out there who believe I’m going to create these ignorant children.

A day in Jesse’s life

A peek into the schedule and household management

• 6–7 AM: Wake-Up and Early Morning Prep

I wake up whenever the first child does: between 6 and 7 AM, unless things went wrong and it’s earlier. The morning is full of bathroom trips and endless snacks!

• 9:30 AM – 2:30 PM: Homeschool Co-op at Home

Other kids arrive around 9:30 AM. I teach lessons for the first two hours, and the co-op runs through 2:30 PM. It’s just two families; our 1.5-year-old sometimes joins, and our nanny helps with the baby if needed.

• 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM: Afternoon Arts and Learning

After lessons, our part-time sitter, who’s very artistic, leads art time.

• 3:30 PM – 5 PM: Family Admin and Reset

Once the co-op wraps, I tackle lingering tasks. I manage our finances, manage a few small family ventures, and tackle household maintenance.

• 5 PM – Evening: Dinner and Homekeeping

Dinner is simple: usually grilled chicken or steak and one vegetable from the garden. Grilling outside means fewer dishes, and the kids love picking what they grew.

• Throughout the Day: Laundry and Systems

Our household runs nonstop: two dishwashers, two laundry stacks. Ingrid, our helper, runs loads all day. The kids handle their own clothes: even our 1.5-year-old puts her dish in the dishwasher. The younger ones have drawers right in the laundry room and get dressed there.

The craft blanket

There’s always some point in the day where the kids are entertained by crafts but not directed by anyone. There’s a cabinet where we have scissors and all this stuff, and then I have a picnic blanket I pull out. The kids know that they’re only allowed to use markers and glue and things that can get really hairy on the picnic blanket. And this is so trained, they never take things off the picnic blanket — even the 1.5-year-old knows. I can just scoop it up and shake it out. But they’re probably doing picnic blanket crafting 1-2 hours a day as a way of keeping entertained when we’re making dinner or whatever else.

N: I bet the older kids habituating the 1.5-year-old helps a lot, she’s just brought into seeing what they’re doing.

J: Yes. And kids love being tyrants. If she tries to take a marker away, they’re like, you can’t do that.

Life in the third oikos

N: You think a lot about our modern technological environment. There’s pre-industrial revolution, post-industrial revolution, and now — a new era for the household, household economies, and social norms — post-COVID, post- remote work, post-LLM — the third oikos.

How do you think technological change forms your family? Even as you were mentioning your property, and family farming, I was thinking of a friend, Mackenzie Burnett, who founded this company, Ambrook, which builds farm accounting tools. Smaller family farms take advantage of all sorts of tax subsidies with modern accounting techniques and modern software. Ambrook has an excellent publication called Offrange that in part details how some of these farms, such old, timeless businesses use such modern technology, and how they’re adopting it.

How do you feel about the current technological era that your family is in? Have there been any specific changes related to remote work or Zoom norms?

Starlink

We’re out here, in the mountains, on a starlink connection which is the only way we can have internet. In a way, technology has empowered us to live physically further from society, which is a benefit people don’t think about as much.

Ryan doesn’t work fully remotely, he has a physical office, but there are some days where he’s here all day working and primarily having meetings, but the kids know he’s here and they love to see him and sit on his lap at lunch time. This type of family experience is definitely ideal for me, in a world where I’d otherwise feel very isolated out here without internet. To live a much more bucolic existence, where the kids are able to spend a certain quantity, even the majority, of their day outside is very ideal, and uniquely powered by the newer technology we have right now.

by: Lisa Sorgini

Household administration and financial management

In a world where I’m not working full-time at another job, I spend a minimum of a few hours a day on administrative things for our household.

We have several small businesses functioning out of the ranch. That may not be normal to everyone else. We have an admin layer, like an external part-time bookkeeper accounting firm, that I work with. Many families have an accounting firm to do their tax at the end of the year: we’re just in more regular contact with that person.

We do some different rentals of a couple things that we own; there are two or three small businesses that are part of our daily lives. They don’t take full-time effort, but someone needs to stay on top of them. And my husband has a full-time career as a startup CEO, running a company that he started a year and half ago. I try to let him focus on that versus our household businesses.

Bringing financial infrastructure into the home

There’s accounting, bookkeeping, paying bills, and I maintain SLAs (service level agreements) — this is where my entrepreneur starts showing. I firmly believe you get great results from people when you pay promptly. You get more TLC from vendors, it’s just human nature, and you’re going to have to pay anyway. These are lessons entrepreneur Jesse learned.

So in family life, I have SLAs, and we try to pay every bill within 24 hours. You gotta have all your payment methods queued up like Venmo, Zelle, PayPal, so I manage our banking and everything as a family. And that, for us, gets pretty complicated pretty fast.

iPad kids

When I get really into homeschooling rabbit holes, there’s some really cool tools that are digitally/iPad-based. I like some of these tools and love the creators behind them. But then I see our 3-year-old boy has a hangover after doing it for 30 minutes. I wouldn’t have expected to be as against technology for the little kids as I ended up being. But if I don’t introduce the iPad in a whole day, he never thinks about it. He ends up playing with the hose, or engineering a little boat out of wine corks.

When the iPad’s introduced to do 30 minutes of an educational thing, there’s a whole hangover period where he doesn’t wanna go outside and he’s debating it and asking for the iPad back. It does feel like the longer you can go before these tools become essential, the better. I love his physicality, he’s jumping and running around, and I feel like I’m interrupting the stream, I’m throwing a rock in that river.

Restricting it does make my homeschooling journey harder. Instead of using the app to teach a math lesson, I just have to teach the math lesson. I would’ve preferred to be a little bit “lazy.”

There’s probably a tipping point around seven or eight where you can have a more rational conversation. Maybe we’re going to do this for an hour a day. We’re also not totally screen free: the kids watch movies and I think a lot about content diet. I’m pretty much against individual screens for little kids. When we watch things, we watch as a family.

N: I read a great book called Habits of the Household: they introduce the idea that the bigger the screen is, the more it leads to community consumption. And especially when you’re trying to apprentice young children into good uses of technology, into consuming media, into discussing it all — that big screen is going to be the most structurally helpful, because it invites people to watch and listen together. The bigger screen does feel more conducive to watching together and discussing.

J: …and their behavior is totally different around it! With a little screen, they shut down and get tunnel vision. With the big screen, they ask questions, they’re laughing, they’re coming up with their own storylines on the side.

When you have the pleasure of being able to spend lots of hours with your kids, I think you see it more poignantly: here’s how they are without screens, and here’s how they are with them. It makes me more willing to accept the difficulty of it.

I joked with someone that it’s not cheaper to have kids off screens! The amount of tape I go through is equal to the cost of an iPad per week. Or something. In a low-tech environment, I’m setting up these activity stations, and then wasting a roll of tape, and then going outside with a shovel. But the overall experience of their childhood and their brain developing feels worth it. Even if sometimes that was a lot of tape.

The third oikos and work

N: I’m curious specifically about the different businesses that you mentioned your family is running, and how you think about your and your husband’s work. There’s this throughline I see in big, beautiful families historically, where they see family business as one family enterprise that is everyone’s project in some way or another. Setups along those lines also seem to offer opportunities for kids or extended family members to be involved in the family’s work and day to day living in really purposeful, lovely ways.

J: In my social circles, many of my female friends are entrepreneurs or executives, it can be jarring to them that I would consider my husband’s work important to me. In this modern cultural framework, it’s supposed to be totally siloed. I’m supposed to care about my career and he’s supposed to care about his career. And the only overlap is that he’s in my house and so I ask him about work once in a while.

That’s strange if you think about it, and it really creates a weird culture for the children, and that wouldn’t have been my default anyways. It does take effort and creativity to think about the more expansive view of this. Ryan is the CEO of another young startup, and there’s all sorts of things we can do as a family to support him.

For example, we hosted a team retreat for Ryan’s whole company here at our house. It saved his company a ton of money rather than going to hotels. We had 30 people in and out of our house, staying in these glamping tents and we put on this really cool event. The kids and I prepped for this event, blew up these glamping tents, did all of these little things, and they had such a ball with all of that. They knew we’re all hosting something for daddy’s company. So I think this is an example where you can utilize whatever assets you have as a family to help your husband’s career.

The company still paid for all sorts of little things — I wasn’t making everyone home-cooked meals, we catered things. But I put on this event, did lots of “unpaid labor,” meaning the company didn’t contract me. I wanted to do this. We worked together. It took a lot of my skills as an entrepreneur. You have to be organized to put on a great event!

But the beautiful part was involving all the kids. All of these colleagues and teammates came to our home and saw him as a dad. The kids were sitting on his knee during dinner. All of that to me is how life could be. And it was very helpful to his company to host this offsite, it saved them tens of thousands of dollars in bills compared to hosting a similar event elsewhere.

That, to me, is how life should be. We are a team. Right now, the income-producing thing that this team is doing is mainly related to Ryan’s career.

I try to involve the kids in seeing that their dad has a career that I think is important, and that we as a family can also do things to support it. This is the mindset to be in: “We are supporting dad’s career.” Even in a modern career! Like, Ryan and I aren’t out there running a family farm right now; he’s building a startup.

Advice

N: “What would your advice be to people who are considering family? On getting married, how to approach finding a life partner, having kids — any advice to people who are thinking about their scope of ambition, in the realm of the Oikos broadly?

J: Life gets deeper and more purposeful and richer with more complexity. I would preach against the mindset that we’re always trying to simplify and find balance. I think that’s leading people to be overwhelmed by the question “Do I have space in my life for a partner? Do I have space in my life for kids?”

They’re thinking of this space as a pie, and there are slices being cut out. Work is a slice, working out is a slice. I’ve seen TikTok videos of people saying if you add up all these hours in a day — how am I supposed to work out and do this?

The reality is that framework will always lead to you deciding that you do not have time to have another human being like a partner to be added meaningfully to your life, and certainly not children. It just seems like the complexity is building to an unreachable height. I would just throw all of it out the window.

by: Lisa Sorgini

Consider: There is no perfect day

My background as an entrepreneur helped me see that there is no perfect day. There’s no day where you feel as though you achieved everything you wanted to, but the journey and doing something so hard: that is the meat of life. That is the fun part.

In that framework, more human complexity creates richness and you fill to meet it. Your ambition level literally blossoms with that complexity — you realize how much you can handle and it’s way more than you thought.

“I’m striving for simplicity. I’m cutting complexity outta my life.” To me, that mindset, at its most extreme, leads to you sitting in a perfectly clean one-bedroom apartment watching Netflix at night because you’ve cleaned everything else out. You finished the checklist, you’re done.

You can simplify your life into that, but I wouldn’t advise it.

N: I love and resonate with that so much. I’m hearing a little bit of “scale fast and see what breaks.” There’s a podcast I love that’s always echoing this — as a homemaker especially, you will never fully have arrived. But that also comes with the fact that your life just gets richer and deeper the whole time.

J: People think that personal growth will come from their wellbeing, which will arrive at the other end of simplifying and focusing on self, reading one more self-help book about clearing the clutter out of their lives, and cutting people out.

The true wellbeing is always in the additions. Yes, there’s chaos. I’m not perfectly organized. All these additions and the children and the family and the husband with other kids, so much mess, right? But for me, the wellbeing is on the other side of that.

N: Have you read Hannah’s Children? It’s an academic study of women with 5 or more children, about why they made that choice. The author, Catherine Pakaluk, is also a Harvard economist with 14 kids, some of whom are step-children. Another ambitious woman with a mixed family and a lot of children

J: Reading Hannah’s Children, there was something that’s striking to me. I grew up Methodist, Christian values, but mild religion. I didn’t attend church on my own accord as a young adult or anything like this.

All these interviews were women finding their peace and connection to humanity through having larger families from many different religious backgrounds. I would even throw my own hat into the ring and say, from a more a-religious background, you can find yourself in this path, that it is there, because I actually think some people view it as a religious choice. That: by definition having a lot of children is a religious choice.

N: Yes, I really appreciate Catherine’s methodology and her academic approach in this book and saying, “No, seriously, please tell me, how did you arrive here?” and studying, without the implicit assumptions, women’s reasoning.

Even when you ask my brilliant mother-in-law, who is religious, about a lot of her life choices as a mother of 5 and a homemaker, it’s “I found it deeply fulfilling” before anything else, and people want you to give another answer first.

J: I’ve been pulled aside and quizzed. People are like, ‘But maybe you’re Mormon?” I’ve been asked that upfront by a couple women. They’re like, ‘But secretly it’s a religious choice, right?’ And I’m like, “No!” I’ve been asked, in a hushed way, ‘Is Ryan basically making you have all these children? In order to be his wife you have to keep doing this?’ Or, ‘Are you actually way more religious in a closeted way and you’re just not telling people?’

They’re looking for the reason why I’m having these children — it can’t possibly be because I enjoy it. I just want to say, it actually is that enjoyable and that fun! You actually can do it just because it’s such a fulfilling path, not because a book somewhere told you to do it. There’s a parting thought: having all of these children really is a choice I am enjoying.

This is the first in an ongoing series of interviews with flourishing family and community builders. Within, they share what the good life looks like when technology is reshaping the household. If you have someone who who may be a good interviewee - please reach out.

This interview series is made possible by the Foundation for American Innovation and the Institute for Family Studies.