Jonny Price
Jonny is the VP of Fundraising at Wefunder, a startup that helps founders raise capital from their customers and community, as well as rich people. Prior to Wefunder, Jonny founded the U.S. team at the non-profit Kiva.org. Jonny hails from England, but now lives in Nashville with his wife Ali, and their three children Felicity (6), Carlyle (4) and Margot (2).
What does your normal working day routine look like?
I wake up at 6am and get Felicity and Carlyle ready for school. Leave at 7.30am (usually running late!), drop them at 8am, and then head to work. Back home at 5.30pm, and then hang out with the kids until they go to bed around 8.30pm. I try to be pretty disciplined about being present during those 3 hours. I recently bought a lockbox for my phone, which has been an effective strategy! If I have the energy, I might do 2-3 hours of work after the kids are in bed.
For 6 months last year, I woke up at 4am, and got a couple of hours work done before the kids were awake. That was actually a nice life hack – although I’ve dropped off that train in 2023. I should probably bring it back – was an incredibly productive time!
Recently, I have started taking 1 night a week to do my own thing. I usually do dinner with friends I want to proactively prioritize building a relationship with. And oftentimes there’s an overlap here with founders / investors who it makes sense to build a relationship with from a Wefunder perspective. But I would highly recommend that busy parents take 1 night a week to invest in themselves / put themselves first.
What boundaries have you set around your work and how did you work with your colleagues to enable them?
I like the three hours each day from 5.30pm to 8.30pm. Sacrosanct is a strong word, but I’m pretty consistent about that. I haven’t explicitly set this boundary with my colleagues. But everyone knows I have kids, and is very respectful of that. I do think it’s hard for colleagues without kids to empathize with the sheer volume of responsibility and time (Laundry Mountain!!!) that goes into looking after three kids, but my Wefunder teammates are awesome humans, and I have never felt any pressure from them that would threaten the work-life balance I want to maintain.
What systems do you have in place to have a successful day?
Very few. I’m an ENFP on Myers-Briggs, and one of the most unstructured and disorganized people you will ever meet. I am incredibly good at going with the flow, rolling with the punches, and living in the moment. And the other side of that coin is that I am way too unstrategic and unstructured. And very aware of that :)
That being said, 2 hours at the start of every day to catch up on emails and admin is very valuable. And 1.5 hours at the end of every day. But of course, I’m an ENFP so if a founder can only talk during those times, then the block on my calendar easily gets overridden!
What productivity tools/processes do you use in your work?
Adopting Superhuman has been an incredible win for me. Given how many emails I send (Gmail tells me 41,631 since I joined Wefunder 5 years ago), it feels like it saves me an hour a day, which is priceless.
I work in Business Development, and we use HubSpot as our CRM. Slack for internal messaging (very few internal emails – which is awesome).
Right now I’m onboarding a Virtual Assistant, which I’m excited about. I have always been a little skeptical of the cost-benefit of a VA, but a couple of colleagues have recently pulled the trigger and raved about it, so I’m optimistic that that will help me stay on top of things more.
Switching to weekends, what are the most important things to get right to have an excellent weekend day?
I like to feel “on top of stuff” on the weekend. So if I wake up early and empty my inbox before the kids are awake, that puts me in a better mood. Leaving the phone at home (or in the lockbox) is very very powerful. I have started to do that some, and I should do it more.
I play in a ping pong league every other Saturday (don’t laugh!). I have always loved playing competitive sport, and for me, the exercise and competition are awesome for endorphins!
Weekend days are best when there’s a specific activity that you do with the kids. It could be a playdate, it could be a trip to the farmers market, or the zoo. It could be a treasure hunt around the yard (we actually have a yard now that we live in Nashville!).
I wrote down two lists on my iphone that I refer to a lot: (1) “external” things to do with the kids (i.e. get out of the house and do stuff); and (2) things to do with the kids at home (e.g. obstacle course in the house out of furniture; build a fort in the yard). The cognitive load of thinking of something to do on the fly can be hard. But if you’ve written down a list of things to do previously, then you can just easily pick something from the list – which increases the chance that you do something fun on a Saturday afternoon.
How do you "turn off work" and give the kids your full attention?
Lockbox for my iphone has been great. I got this one for $45. It’s probably the best $45 I’ve ever spent in my life. I wouldn’t say “discipline” is one of my strengths. This helps.
Do you have anything that works particularly well in your childcare situation?
Our nanny Kelsey is awesome. (And a literal rockstar – it’s Nashville!). We’ve had a few nannies down the years. There are a number of things you can optimize for. I like optimizing for fun and engaging. Our kids absolutely adore Kelsey. She’s Mary Poppins (but maybe less of a stickler lol).
What principles have served you best in your parenting?
Unconditional love. At times over the last 6.5 years, I have found myself getting impatient, and raising my voice. But I’ve now deliberately moved away from that. Disciplining the kids is obviously very important if they’re acting out, but I now do that in a calmer way, vs. doing that from an agitated / aggressive place.
One thing that we have done (which my wife Ali has really led) is to be relatively unconstrained by having kids when it comes to travel. A few months after our son Carlyle was born, we went to Australia for a month (we were both on parental leave). It was obviously a little logistically complex (and expensive!), but I think it was really cool to help us realize that having kids doesn’t condemn you to being a prisoner in your home (or even country). Last year, we went around Europe for six weeks (sabbatical) with all three kids. I think traveling like this is a great experience for the kids, but also empowering and uplifting for me and Ali.
Ali does way more work than me. The mental load imbalance is real. One exercise we did recently was to divide out these cards on a date night. It was very helpful. At the start of the night, Ali had approximately 99% of the cards. But at the end of the night, she only had 97% of the cards. Forward progress! (But one of those cards that changed hands was Laundry Mountain, so don’t have that much sympathy for her…)
What is your approach to screen time?
We limit it, but we’re not sticklers about it. I think there are some shows that are actually pretty awesome from a cognitive development perspective. Our 4-year-old Carlyle can now recite square numbers up to 144 thanks to Numberblocks – wtf?! The other day he came to me and said “64 is in Square Club and Cube Club”. I don’t think I even knew that?!
And honestly – how can you not love Bluey?!
I think active screen time is better than passive. For example, there’s a coding game for kids that Felicity and Carlyle play (called Tynker). I really enjoy playing it with them, and it definitely feels like it’s rotting their brain less. It also feels to me like watching a TV from a distance is better than watching an ipad from up-close – but I don’t know if there’s any science behind that!
We take long flights a lot (we usually get back to see my parents in the UK a couple of times per year), and we’re definitely not above screen time there!
How do you handle hard behaviour e.g. tantrums?
Thinking time has always been a staple. But that’s definitely an insufficient punishment!
Over time, we have come to make the punishments a little more draconian – e.g. “no toys for the rest of the day” or “no ice cream when everyone else is getting ice cream”.
One tactic I have – which I doubt has much empirical evidence to back it up(!) – is to try and make jokes when they’re in a bad mood. To try to get them to laugh to bring it out of it. It’s actually quite effective oftentimes – I just hope it’s not messing them up psychologically (nervous tittering).
How do you set and follow through with 'consequences'?
I think it’s very important to follow through with “consequences” – so don’t threaten the punishment unless you’re going to follow through with it. And be pretty rigid / disciplined here.
What parenting 'failure' did you learn the most from?
I wrote about this above, but not being present with my kids for the limited number of hours in the day that we spend together – is just dumb. It goes by so fast. And this is what life is about — not staying up-to-date on Slack that hour. I regress and slip back all the time, but this is at least a clear intent these days. And the lockbox has helped with commitment and implementation!
This applies to kids, but also other areas of life – but a lot of it is in your head. Maybe you had a long, exhausting day at work. You can show up tired for your kids and checked out. But to a large extent, you can just flip a switch in your head, and “turn it on”. I remember one time listening to a Jocko podcast, and he was talking about being a Navy Seal crawling through the mud in Vietnam. And basically “oh I’m sorry that you’re tired after a long day of work and you still have the washing up to do”. It was a great challenge. It’s in your mind.
Is there a primary parent in your household or do you split the parenting evenly?
I would not describe Ali as the “primary parent” — and I definitely think we split a bunch of stuff like bedtime, school runs, school lunches, extracurricular activities, playing, reading, cooking, etc. etc. But Ali definitely carries more of the mental load (doctor’s appointments, vacation planning, school admin, etc.).
As mentioned above, the Fair Play card game we played recently was a great practical tool for assessing the current breakdown of the workload, and then improving / rebalancing it. It was also honestly kind of fun. A relatively “low stress” way to approach this thorny issue.
What is your most life-changing parenting purchase under $100?
Lockbox for my iphone for sure.
How do you bring play and fun into your time with your children?
Corridor soccer. Kids at one end of the corridor with the doorway as a goal. Me at the other end with the other doorway as goal. Usually, first to 20 goals but one game was first to 100. Despite my glittering soccer career, remarkably the kids have never lost a game. Usually, the margin of victory is a single goal.
Just researching activities is a great way to spend 15 minutes. Then write down the best ones in a note on your phone. I looked up “science experiments” for kids, and found 5 good ones that were super easy to do.
Trying to make learning fun as well. I found a coding game on the iPad. We go through the alphabet and think of an animal for each letter, etc. etc.
What routines / games / practices do you have in your family to make your children feel loved?
We play “The Family Game”. We all go round the table, and say something we love about Felicity. Then we go round and say something we love about Carlyle, etc. etc.
What is something unusual or unique that you do in your family?
Not that unusual, but we still travel a lot. It’s easier to do than you might think. And super fun. Great experience for the kids. And a forcing function for you to make sure you’re packing your life with adventures and activities. When you stay in your home city, you don’t go to “museums” enough. But when you go on vacation to London for a week, every day is packed with Hamley’s, the Science Museum, or Buckingham Palace.