50 Second Hero

Greg Hoy
The Startup
Published in
5 min readJan 19, 2020

--

My wife and I have two young boys. Our older son loves (American) football. He knows more about the game than I ever did (the other day, he was quizzing me about Ed “Too Tall” Jones). And he’s constantly evaluating players for their speed, agility, and power. As soon as he’s off the school bus, he often sprints to grab his football and recreate plays he’s seen on TV or on “Madden NFL 20" — alone or with any combination of me, my wife, or his little brother. He often asks me to loft a pass to an arbitrary imaginary sideline so he can practice keeping his feet inbounds (he’ll throw a fake challenge flag if I don’t agree).

I travel for work. Not as much as I used to, but often enough. I was in Texas visiting with my coworkers. While at my desk, I received a push notification from the Nest Cam we have keeping an eye on our yard. This one arrived just after the school bus drops the kids off, so I was compelled to tune in and say hi (you can actually speak through the Nest Cam IQ, which sort of freaks everyone out).

This is what I saw:

--

--

Greg Hoy
The Startup

Enthusiastic dad. Technology and design consultant. Entrepreneur. Former Happy Cog and Bureau of Digital. BBQ enthusiast.