What a Failed Business Taught Us About Parenting
Read time: 4 minutes
Welcome to issue #035 of Unicorn Parents. Each week, I share practical insights and reflections to help you build a profitable business without missing the magic at home. If you’re serious about winning at work while raising great kids, you’ve come to the right place. This is a community built for ambitious parents who want both.
Merry Christmas!
I hope this week gives you a little more margin—at work, at home, and in the moments that matter most.
Editorial Note
Most stories about ambition end in success.
This one doesn’t.
In this issue of Unicorn Parents, we follow a Vietnamese family whose dream of building a children’s playground became an unexpected lesson in love, risk, and discernment.
Drawn from the real experiences of Pham Phuc’s family, this story isn’t really about a business that failed.
It’s about a question parents everywhere face—especially those raising gifted, driven children:
When do you keep believing…
and when is it time to let go?
The Empty Playground
On most evenings, the playground was quiet enough to hear the air conditioner hum.
Five tickets a day, on average.
Barely enough to cover the lights—let alone the rent.
Inside sat a bright ball pit, a bounce house, and a father who had once had a stable office job and a simple dream:
“I’ll build a place where kids can play, and my wife can run it from home.”
What began as a tender, family-centered plan slowly became a financial free fall.
Savings disappeared into rent.
Into equipment.
Into hope.
On paper, it looked like a business story.
For the family living it, it felt like something else entirely:
How far loving adults will go for an idea they believe will give children a better life.
The Dream Behind the Business
The playground was never just about tickets.
It was about identity.
A father who had spent years behind a desk wanted to build something real—something children could see and touch.
A mother wanted work that kept her close to home.
Close to her own kids.
A different kind of “career ladder,” built around family rhythms instead of corporate calendars.
If you’re raising a gifted or driven child, this part may feel uncomfortably familiar.
Because if you squint, you can see a pattern many families know well:
• A desire to create the perfect environment
• A belief that sacrifice unlocks potential
• A quiet hope that this will be the thing that makes it all click
But environments are not magic wands.
And love—on its own—doesn’t change math.
The rent was $1000 a month.
Revenue hovered around $12 a day.
No amount of belief could close that gap.
When Grit Becomes a Trap
When the numbers didn’t work, the family did what many persistent, high-achieving people do.
They doubled down.
Pool tables—for parents.
A fried chicken stall.
Milk tea.
Each new idea added complexity.
Each “fix” added cost.
Weekday traffic stayed thin.
Weekends were unpredictable.
Free alternatives—parks, malls—were always a short ride away.
Psychologists call this the sunk cost fallacy:
The more you’ve invested,
the harder it becomes to walk away,
even when walking away is the wisest choice.
In gifted education, a quieter version shows up when:
A child pushes through an activity they no longer love because “we already paid for the season”
Parents keep funding competitions, coaching, or lessons long after interest has shifted
Quitting feels like failure instead of feedback
In both cases, grit (so often celebrated) can quietly turn into a trap.
Especially when it’s no longer anchored to honest feedback or present-moment reality.
Lessons for Unicorn Parents
This family’s playground loss was painful.
But for parents raising gifted kids, it carries real wisdom.
1. Love the child more than the project
The father loved his idea so deeply that it became hard to see clearly that it wasn’t working.
With gifted children, it’s easy to fall in love with the image:
The prodigy.
The young founder.
The future champion.
And harder to stay attuned to the child who may be tired, bored, or quietly longing for something else.
2. Decide using future value, not past investment
One question the family struggled to ask was simple:
“Knowing what we know now—would we still choose this today?”
That question applies directly to parenting decisions:
If the only reason to continue is “we’ve already spent so much,” it may be time to pause.
3. Teach kids that quitting can be wise, not weak
When ventures finally shut down, families often lose more than money.
They lose time.
Energy.
Emotional bandwidth.
Children who watch adults course-correct (grieve, learn, and pivot) absorb a powerful lesson:
Courage isn’t just holding on.
Sometimes it’s choosing to let go.
4. Model reflective risk-taking
The original leap wasn’t the problem.
The absence of guardrails was.
For gifted and driven kids, families can model healthier experiments:
Clear time frames
Defined budgets
Pre-agreed check-ins
Moments where everyone has permission to say:
“This isn’t working. What did we learn?”
Gifts Beyond Success
When the playground finally closed, the family didn’t get their savings back.
Financially, the investment was gone.
What remained was quieter. Deeper:
An understanding of limits.
Of the difference between perseverance and denial.
Of how love expressed through sacrifice can still misfire if it refuses to listen to reality.
For families raising gifted and talented children, that understanding is itself a gift.
The ability to notice when a dream is nourishing growth,
and when it’s simply draining the family’s joy.
Learning to honor both beginnings and endings
may be one of the most important things we pass on.
Sometimes the greatest lesson isn’t how to win.
It’s how to listen, adjust,
and begin again.
This article has caused me to finally get the Substack App. I hate the politics and what SubStack has enabled and supported, but I love the DIY publishing and empowerment features. Typical a16z investment.
All my kids are grown, and now I'm “watching” my grandkids being raised. There is a strict 100% ban on any posting of photos in any social media on my grandkids.
Your lessons and issues raised are typical David Yi: insightful, pause to ponder, rejoice in enlightenment based! With each new day, I discover something new coming out of you!
Here we are on Xmas day, and I assumed that from your family first approach, you'd be opening presents, drinking egg nog, playing with the kids and acting like any other good Christian on this day of the Savior’s birth.
But instead, I'm reading lessons on parenting, and applying those lessons - after the fact - on my 35 years of married life and my upcoming start of family 3.0.
I am in awe of your energy, vision and focus. Quite inspiring. As I read about the Gifted Children playground evolution and failure, what my conscious mind focused on was - business model, pivots, packaging with content, meat space vs cyberspace - and all the other subjects my 40+ year entrepreneurial mind brought me. But instead, you bring in the value added insights of - learning from mistakes, understanding what you’re doing to your kids and the ultimate goals and reason for parenting in the first place - raising healthy human beings who will need to think and choose and decide for themselves.
This article allowed me to look back on what my life has accomplished - 5 productive members of society. Yes, we all have issues, but on this Xmas day, can I ask “who doesn't have issues?”
Certainly baby Jesus was born with expectations and issues to bear, which would carry with him his whole life. But Mary and Joseph did a pretty good job. They had help, like the three Kings of “the Orient”, who traveled far, just to be at that birth.