283 – Dan Feshbach of Sausalito, CA, Serial Entrepreneur, CEO of Multiple & Father Of Twins, Including A Son With Autism

Transcript:

Tom Couch: [00:00:00] Special thanks to Horizon Therapeutics for sponsoring the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast, working tirelessly to research, develop, and bring forward medicines for people living with rare and rheumatic diseases. Discover more about Horizon Therapeutics’ mission at HorizonTherapeutics. com.

Dan Feshback: I would love to see his horizons expanded as his dad. Frankly, he’s in a pretty fortunate situation. A mother that takes great care of him, lives with her. He’s got a great sister. He’s got great services. And yet I can see the need for much more one-on-one for him.

Tom Couch: That’s our guest this week, Dan Feshbach, a serial entrepreneur and CEO of Multiple, impacting the lives of people with autism. Dan is also the father of Reed, 30, who’s autistic. We’ll hear the story of Dan’s many innovations in the tech universe on this Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. Now say hello to the founder of the Special Fathers [00:01:00] Network and host of the Dad to Dad Podcast, David Hirsch.

David Hirsch: Hi, and thanks for listening to the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast, presented by the Special Fathers Network, a dad to dad mentoring program for fathers raising children with special needs.

The Special Fathers Network Mastermind Group Experience is the most comprehensive program the 21st Century Dads Foundation offers. Dads raising children with special needs meet virtually on a weekly basis and form meaningful relationships while sharing weekly wins, discussing books, and sharing heartfelt challenges. One of the highlights of the year is attending an in-person weekend retreat. We’re launching 10 new SFN Mastermind Groups in January 2024 with 10 dads per group. That means we’re only looking for 10 like-minded dads in each of the following locations: Anchorage, Alaska; Bellevue, Nebraska; Chicago, Illinois; Denver, Colorado; Georgetown, Grand Cayman; Houston, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; London, England; Nashville, Tennessee; and Reykjavik, Iceland. If you’re a dad [00:02:00] raising a child with special needs in one of these cities, we hope you’ll join the local SFN Mastermind Group and make the investment to become the best version of yourself. For more information, please see the show notes or simply go to 21stCenturyDads. com.

Tom Couch: Now, let’s hear this intriguing conversation between Dan Feshbach and David Hirsch.

David Hirsch: I’m thrilled to be talking today with Dan Feshbach of Sausalito, California, a serial entrepreneur who is currently CEO of Multiple, a non-profit innovation platform for the autism community, as well as part of an organizing team for the Autism Impact Fund. He is the past founder of MeasureOne, TeachTown, BlueUmbrella, as well as the Oak Hill School of California. Dan is also the father of 30-year-old twins, one of which has autism. Dan, thank you for taking the time to do a podcast interview for the Special Fathers Network.

Dan Feshback: Excited to engage and engage with your audience too.

David Hirsch: You and your ex-wife were married for 35 years and are the proud parents of 30-year-old twins, Emma and Reed, who is [00:03:00] autistic. Let’s start with some background. Where did you grow up? Tell me something about your family.

Dan Feshback: I grew up in Palo Alto, really. Palo Alto area. I was born in upstate New York. I had a short stint in Iowa, all of which was driven by my dad’s efforts to make money, make it work for our family. So he was an entrepreneur himself. Very creative man.

David Hirsch: So out of curiosity, what did your dad do for a living?

Dan Feshback: He had a very… he ended up raising money and doing deals in the oil and gas industry, and sometimes tried to do things outside of that. But he started as a dress salesman, he was a car salesman, then he was a stockbroker, and then he became a deal maker. And then he pretty much was — as he would like to describe it — one Jew working out of an apartment. He had quite a fan base and following and he was really a great guy. Maybe my biggest, if not one of my biggest, backers and someone I learned a lot from.

David Hirsch: Yeah, that’s pretty remarkable from selling dresses to selling cars to selling stocks and bonds and then just outright deal making. It sounds like [00:04:00] he had quite a trajectory to his career.

Dan Feshback: He did.

David Hirsch: When you think about your dad, I’m wondering how would you characterize or describe your relationship with him?

Dan Feshback: It was generally conflictual. A lot of love and a lot of conflict. He was a very demanding guy and he had his share of challenges. He fought in World War II. And towards the end of his life, I realized by talking to nurses that were caring for him at the Vets Hospital that he probably suffered from PTSD. We had a very up and down relationship. But I did learn at his footsteps. He did introduce me to my first investors and my first company, which was Mortgage Data Company. And he was a big fan of mine, but we had continuous fighting. It’s hard to describe. I have a lot of respect for my dad, a lot of love for my dad and a lot of tough memories.

David Hirsch: Is your dad still alive?

Dan Feshback: No, my dad passed in 2017 on Valentine’s day.

David Hirsch: Oh my. Sorry to hear about the ups and downs, but maybe one of the things that you mentioned that he was very demanding, maybe had some high expectations for himself [00:05:00] and for you and your brothers that propelled you to do a lot of the things that you’ve done.

Dan Feshback: Oh, for sure. Yeah. He was willing to go into what he would always describe as the gray area. He was a big risk taker. I’ve had to learn how to moderate my risk taking. He took a lot of risks. A lot of them paid off, and some of them didn’t really pay off too well for him. And he was a very persistent, very hard working, very creative man.

David Hirsch: Excellent. Thank you for sharing. Were there any important takeaways, a lesson learned or two, that come to mind when you think about your dad?

Dan Feshback: Oh my God, so many. I would have to say that persistence trumps everything, and sometimes that can result in you pushing rocks up hills. I think everybody knows that. And then I think he was a very creative deal maker, and he really wasn’t somebody that could work for anybody else. And I think that’s very true for me and my brothers. None of us have really worked for anybody. I went to college, went to graduate school at Cal and city and regional planning and health care planning. I had a short career, but I was not somebody that was a very good employee, and I don’t think my dad was [00:06:00] that kind of guy. I think we’re all very idiosyncratic and very much like to be in charge.

David Hirsch: Ok, that’s a good thing to recognize, the earlier the better. But what I did hear you say that persistence is really important. Perhaps you learned that from your dad.

Dan Feshback: For sure.

David Hirsch: He was very creative. And he exercised his risk muscle, if I can call it that.

Dan Feshback: Oh my god, yeah. He had a… sometimes I don’t know that he understood the scope of all the risks he took. And I think it’s taken me a long time to sometimes understand the scope of risks that I take.

David Hirsch: Nothing risked, nothing gained. I guess that’s one way to think about it.

Dan Feshback: For sure.

David Hirsch: So I’m thinking about other father influencers, and I’m wondering what, if any, role did your grandfathers play, first on your dad’s side?

Dan Feshback: Oh my gosh. My grandparents were immigrants, and my grandfather started out as a Labor organizer, at least this is the memory I have, and ended up becoming a furrier and then ended up becoming a clothing manufacturer. All of his kids got, except for my father actually got, had college [00:07:00] degrees. And my dad’s eldest brother is a very famous physicist, Herman Feshbach. And his youngest brother, Sidney, was a James Joyce scholar and his sister, Florence was very smart, got a good college degree, and my dad never did get a college degree. I don’t think he really had a lot of respect for the college degree in some respects. I’m the only brother of mine that has a college degree, and they have all done well in their lives.

But, just to give you another sense of my dad, he went from a dress salesman, I forgot to mention, he also took a shot at being a Jewish hog farmer. In Iowa, my mom’s from Iowa. Going back to my grandparents, my grandfather died when I was probably 3, 4, 5. I have fond memories of him. My grandmother, my dad’s mom, was a real sweet woman and always would fly to California. We’d meet her at the airport and she’d have a big bag of all sorts of baked goods that she’d baked from blintzes to cookies to everything. So I have a, my dad had a real warm side too, very [00:08:00] warm man. And so I think I get a lot of my warmth from her. And my mom. Yeah.

David Hirsch: Yeah thanks for mentioning you grew up in this rather very hardworking immigrant family. That’s what I think I heard you say.

Dan Feshback: Oh, yeah.

David Hirsch: Where did the family immigrate from, out of curiosity?

Dan Feshback: Russian Romania. They came over on a boat. And my grandmother’s sister was turned back because she had pink eye. So part of the family ended up in Russia and different areas. But yeah.

David Hirsch: Thanks for sharing. Are there any other father figures, any other men that played an important role in your life either as a young person or perhaps as a young adult?

Dan Feshback: I was really lucky to have great mentors as I evolved my own business skills. So I had two really substantial mentors that really influenced me at the beginning of my first company called LoanPerformance. So I’ve had the benefit of intentionally surrounding myself with really smart people that they could give me feedback and coach me.

David Hirsch: Anybody you want to call out?

Dan Feshback: There are two people. Mac McQuown, who’s a very well known, pretty much famous financial innovator. [00:09:00] He put the first index funds in the world together. He was a really important mentor. And then a guy with deep tech that went to MIT that knew my uncle from MIT, I think took a course and his name is Dave Kaplan. Both of those men were really exceptional in their feedback and support. And Mac pretty much wrote my first business plan. So yeah. I met him indirectly through my dad. My dad had a great network and long story short, lots of things that my dad did for me ended up really helping me. I was very fortunate that way.

David Hirsch: Yeah there’s a certain truth to it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And I think that’s what you were emphasizing, that you have to be smart, you have to have a good work ethic, there has to be a certain level of persistence, but you do have to surround yourself, like you were saying, with people who are talented and that maybe can make things happen. And it sounds like Mac and Dave were two of those individuals that helped you compel your career at an earlier age.

Dan Feshback: My dad was a [00:10:00] connector. I think I’m a good connector for people. I think that’s another gift that I got. He loved to make connections.

David Hirsch: So my recollection was you went to UC Berkeley, took a master’s in healthcare and planning, city and regional planning. You have not taken a traditional career path, like you were saying. You have been very creative. You had mentioned that the first business that you had for about a decade was LoanPerformance. And just briefly, what was that business?

Dan Feshback: Think of it as a data aggregator. Now it would be possibly considered an AI company because we did build predictive models. Mac’s background was in designing and building the first index funds. You have to have modeling. LoanPerformance aggregated pretty much 90 percent of all the mortgage data in the country. And then we provided benchmarking and we provided predictive models on where risk was going to go in the mortgage market. At the beginning of the thing, people would say, what about… there’s no mortgage risk. There’s never been defaults on mortgages. This is when we started in probably ’97, ’98. I can’t remember the exact years. Actually, it was probably even as early as ’89.

But in [00:11:00] any event, for many years, we just ground on it and big banks would contribute data and then get benchmarking data back. And then of course, things started to grow in the mortgage market, particularly the subprime market. What was called Alt A, which is still people that don’t have full A credit, so to speak. And when the mortgage market started to show cracks in it we could tell when the fissures happened in the sidewalk before the earthquake happened, right? Because we had so much data. We could track what was called a vintage of mortgages, and we could see. It was like in 2004 and 5, you started to see early payment defaults out of our database. And as people started to go long and short the mortgage market, we were the source of data. So our data was in the big short, the concept of our data. And most of the companies that were in the big short that were going short the market, Deutsche Bank being one of the famous ones were users of our data. So that company was really what my early claim to fame [00:12:00] was in terms of, I call it a mini brand. I’m not particularly well known in any particular industry. But we built that up and we got fortunate and we sold it to a large public company called CoreLogic.

David Hirsch: So that takes you from about ’89 to ’09 from a career standpoint. And then starting in 2010, you are the founder and CEO of MeasureOne. What is that?

Dan Feshback: It started out as an effort to replicate what we did in the mortgage market. Started out to be able to benchmark student loan performance across different servicers and originators. And it morphed into a company that realized the student loan data companies did not want to share data the way we were able to do in the mortgage market. Maybe it was because they saw that we built a very successful company on data sharing and they weren’t willing to give up the value of their data the way the mortgage market players were.

I think they made a mistake, but we morphed the company based on an idea of one of our customers who wanted to be able to understand and evaluate the credit risk of students based on their [00:13:00] academic data. Long story short, we started to figure out how to get students to contribute their data. Think of it as consumer contributed data. And now the company is more further and it’s a generic, consumer contributed data company. And it’s been a journey. Innovation in financial technology, you can come up with the best idea ever and it can take forever to make the market work.

David Hirsch: Let’s talk about special needs, first on a personal level and then beyond. So prior to Reed’s diagnosis, did you or your wife then have any connections to the disability or special needs community?

Dan Feshback: No, not at all.

David Hirsch: Okay. And what is Reed’s diagnosis and how did it come about?

Dan Feshback: He started out, in my opinion, fairly normal. Fairly social little gorgeous boy. He was talking a little bit with some words were coming out and all of a sudden, he stopped talking. And we went to the doctor and this is… parents still go through this today. Oh, it’s normal. He’s slow to start. Einstein was slow to talk, things like that, but it just didn’t make any sense. I think my father-in-law at first was starting to [00:14:00] suspect that he could have autism. He was a really wonderful guy. And he took it upon himself to do different types of web research and this and that.

We were concerned because he was absolutely an avaricious reader of books. He was a reader, meaning he would sit and look patiently at all sorts of storybooks, particularly Disney, Sesame Street, or even some of the old classics that were hardboard or whatever you would describe them. And he’s shy, and he’s really obviously got an aptitude, and it turned out he taught himself to read but he was just not speaking.

And it was getting concerning. And so when he was about… My father-in-law’s name is Dick Reed; my son is named after my wife’s family. His name is Reed. He was concerned and he brought it up and I was, it totally freaked me out. I didn’t even want to use the word autism. I thought it was a label. But we had him diagnosed here in Marin, and sure enough, he was on the spectrum. And sure enough, we started to do what you do. [00:15:00] You’ve got speech therapy, you’ve got different types of occupational therapy, and he got the benefit of a lot of services.

And he was given a really good prognosis for any child who’s diagnosed at two and a half. So he’s diagnosed early. And by the time he was four, four and a half, he was going to a integrated preschool with his sister. He had an aid and the aid would go with him to preschool. It was very clear that he was not going to make it in a normal school, even if it was developmental, even if it was sensitive, even if the people were open to him.

So he’s always had a challenge with language, complex language, processing issues. He still does. In my mind, he is classically autistic in the sense that he’s a reluctant speaker. He perseverates on a number of topics and he is a wonderful artist. And when you look at the autism spectrum and people like to say, when you’ve seen one child [00:16:00] with autism, you’ve seen one. And to a degree I agree with that, but to another degree I look at the world and I kind of group people with autism into three buckets. One is they’re going to be able to live independently. Two is they’re on the fence, we don’t know. And three is, yeah, they’re not going to be living independently.

Now that is considered a category called profound autism or severe autism. And I just point out, I don’t think people have really figured out the autism subtypes. That’s one of the biggest challenges that the autism community has is if we understand the different types of autism and then the co-occurring conditions, but we’re still a long way from knowing. If you don’t know the subtype, you don’t know what the intervention is that’s going to work.

I can tell you that it is a very complex condition, and in some respects, we just need the subtyping. There’s so much work that needs to be done. For all the billions of dollars that have been invested in research in autism we still don’t know really the cause, and [00:17:00] we certainly don’t know when people have a good outcome, why that group has a good outcome and someone else doesn’t.

Like my son has, I’m going to call it not a great outcome. He’s going to be dependent on support for his life. So this condition that people call autism is very complicated. And I think the good thing about the world today is that it’s much more positive psychology driven. People are trying to look at a strength-based approach. At the same time, for parents who have kids who have profound autism, we realize that the child that has autism and that got through a major university and has a brilliance that might put them in coding or programming or some other area. We’re talking about two very different humans.

There’s underlying similarities, but we don’t really understand these things as a society in the US or in the world. And with all the technology that’s evolving so fast, that technology is going to be a key. There’s now many better tools for diagnosing autism. I believe that sometime in the [00:18:00] next little bit of time — I don’t know if it’s two years or five years — but we will figure some of the subtyping out, just like they have in other categories of chronic illness or chronic conditions.

So all of that, when we started Oak Hill School and when we started working on autism curriculum, you know I was still pretty naive. I thought this was… I thought you work hard enough and you’re gonna… this is going to be a good outcome. And it’s hard.

David Hirsch: So let’s just take a step back. You made reference to Oak Hill School a couple of times. What is it and what differentiates Oak Hill from others?

Dan Feshback: It’s a wonderful school in Marin. It serves about 75 kids. It started with four. It’s been around for almost 20 years and its claim to fame is being more than a school and also having a strong connection to UC Medical Center. And so it’s a wonderful jewel for the community. I’m no longer involved, but I love what the school is doing and the support it gives its students. Yeah.

David Hirsch: So that played an [00:19:00] instrumental role in Reed’s educational experience because he was one of the individuals at Oak Hill, right?

Dan Feshback: Oh, yeah, he was there on day one. I have pictures of him. He painted the first logo.

David Hirsch: Okay.

Dan Feshback: So it was when he was probably, gosh, maybe he was six years old and at that time it was considered a developmental, what’s called floor time, which is following the child’s lead. So a little bit of the opposite of ABA therapy, though those two things are emerging. So it’s a gorgeous campus. It’s gotten great support from the community. One of my best friends is on the board still — one of the founders, Scott Ferron. And it’s just doing really good work.

David Hirsch: Okay, and then the company that you’re most focused on now the last couple years is a company called Multiple. And what is that about?

Dan Feshback: That’s about changing the trajectory for people with autism through technology and life sciences innovations that in helping the very early stage companies get to market. Autism market is an emerging [00:20:00] market. It’s an emerging, you might even think of it as an asset class. It’s really undercapitalized and very fragmented and disorganized.

And when we were building LoanPerformance, we started to think through how to build digital educational curriculum for kids on the spectrum. My son was going to a school that I was a co-founder of. Basically this was in 2003, 4, 5, and autism was barely on the map then, and there was no curriculum, and my son was very responsive to a lot of digital products that were coming out on the Mac, digital storybooks and so on. So I thought how hard could it be?

Yeah, I knew something about building technology. I knew something about selling to bureaucracy called financial services institutions. I had been able to assemble a good team at LoanPerformance, and so I thought how hard could it be? It turned out to be really hard.

Tom Couch: We’ll be back with more of the conversation on the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast in just a few moments. But first, this quick message. Please help 21st Century Dads [00:21:00] gather research on families raising children with special needs by having them complete the Special Fathers Network Early Intervention Parents Survey. A link to the survey can be found in the show notes. As a token of our appreciation, each person, mom or dad, who completes the survey will receive a Great Dad Coin. Thank you. Now, back to the conversation.

Dan Feshback: It’s really hard to get good support and good services. What I mean by that is as he’s entered adulthood, it’s been very difficult to get the kind of services that an individual like my son needs. And I think, going back to this idea that the individuals with autism are unique in and of themselves, and it’s so true. My son’s very sensitive to noise, very much focused on what he’s interested in. Highly focused individual. And it’s hard to get him to try new things.

As I said, he does really gorgeous art. But he, a lot of times, he perseverates on the same style. I would love to see [00:22:00] his horizons expanded as his dad. Frankly, he’s in a pretty fortunate situation. Got a mother that takes great care of him, lives with her. He’s got a great sister. He’s got great services. And yet I can see the need for much more one-on-one for him. And the resources aren’t there. And the care, it’s very hard to get stable caregiving.

David Hirsch: Yeah. If I can paraphrase what you’ve said, Dan, he’s in a resource-rich environment, family and supporting organizations. And even though that’s a fact, there’s like a missing piece to the puzzle or two, right? And I think that’s what keeps you engaged at the level that you are, right? Trying to solve that puzzle, not just for Reed’s benefit, but for other families who find themselves with a son or a daughter in a similar situation to his. Being in, in your phrase, bucket number three, right? The ones that are not likely to live independently, maybe not being even on the fence, but are going to be [00:23:00] more dependent. And that’s the Rubik’s Cube here, right? And thank God that there’s people like you who are committed on a long term basis, right? Who do hard things and who like to lean in, right? And pull resources from different locations. I’m curious to know what impact Reed’s situation has had on his twin sister, or your extended family for that matter.

Dan Feshback: Well, she’s lovely and has a very successful career in tech as a 30-year-old. Runs a small team at a startup in the Bay Area. When she was young, he could embarrass the heck out of her by running across the soccer field. There were embarrassing things that happened, but she loves him to death and she and her husband are really kind and I’m good with him. But I think it’s hard when your brother… I wouldn’t say that she didn’t get attention as a kid at all. I think my ex-wife and I worked really hard to make sure it was balanced. It’s hard having that in your family, it’s hard. It’s a blessing, and it [00:24:00] also can be very challenging. You can be at dinner with Reed, and if the noise is too loud, he needs to go.

David Hirsch: Yeah, there’s abrupt changes that take place. I know we have a limited amount of time, and I want to talk about Multiple as well as this Autism Impact Fund. And I’m wondering, how would you characterize Multiple, the organization that you’re the CEO of?

Dan Feshback: Multiple is purpose built to help early stage companies in autism, in tech, get off the ground through essentially a very structured educational programming that are called an accelerator. There’s a 12-week program and companies apply and then we have the fortune of having a great community of mentors who join us, who aren’t unpaid. We have a small staff and they go through 12 weeks of, think of it as a long bootcamp. It’s purpose built to help these companies get to a point where they might be investable by a venture fund or they can be further successful, because some have raised money before they enter our program. But they get a specialized set of [00:25:00] resources that is autism-specific. So we differentiate ourselves in that we know autism. We have a lot of experience, and me in particular, in starting something from nothing in autism and creating something that now, TeachTown serves 270,000 students a week.

That’s what we aspire to do and we do that through our community, and we do that through data in the sense that we also track what are the companies around the world that are in the autism sector. And there’s some really brilliant companies, and most people don’t know much about them. So part of the challenge is educating these companies. And another thing is creating a conspiracy of optimism that there’s actually things happening in our community, And there are companies being formed and they’re formed by great entrepreneurs with really good ideas and the kind of persistence that’s needed. And so many people have no idea that there are all of these companies out there doing great work. And so part of our mission is to get the word out. We [00:26:00] call it discovery.

David Hirsch: Excellent. Just briefly, what is the Autism Impact Fund?

Dan Feshback: That is the first venture fund that specializes in autism and in many respects, it’s the only one that specializes in autism. There are a number of funds that have come together that focus on both disability, special needs, intellectual disability, but this one is purpose built to pick companies that can scale and that can have an impact. And I was involved with two other individuals, Sean O’Sullivan and Elizabeth Horne, and it was really through a convening that Elizabeth… that we were the last three people standing. There were 12 people around the table that she brought together to brainstorm how could a venture capital fund be created in autism? And Elizabeth and Sean and I hung in there and we eventually found Chris Male, who’s the the general partner. And Chris has really taken it to the next level and really turned it into something pretty special.

David Hirsch: I’m thinking about advice and I’m wondering what advice you can offer a parent, specifically a dad, [00:27:00] who has a child with special needs, not just autism.

Dan Feshback: Well, love, love your kid to death. Love them. Then as far as finding services, I think it’s a hopeful future. There’s a lot of work being done in special needs. There’s 10 or 11 accelerators around the world like us. I can get you the information about these other accelerators, but we’re actually an accelerator for accelerators that is for these kinds of companies that address investment. There’s a lot of effort around the world being done to bring solutions to market. So if your child has cerebral palsy, there’s something called Remarkable. There’s dedicated accelerators for people who have vision impairment. It goes on and on.

David Hirsch: Okay, I’m going to tap you for that information about these accelerators because I think it would be fascinating to put that information out there and make it more widely available.

So what I heard you say under the banner of advice is first of all, love your child, right? Typical or atypical, you just have to help support them in whatever way you can as a parent. [00:28:00] And then second, make yourself aware of other resources. And that’s what I think you meant by identifying these accelerators.

Dan Feshback: Yeah, I would think for parents with kids on the spectrum, we have a database that tracks what’s out there in the world today. It’s not ready for prime time. It’s not ready to deliver. Our goal is to make sure that all of these companies that are doing this great work and believe it or not, there’s almost 600 companies around the world, 40 percent outside the US that are doing work in autism, that are tech, or life sciences companies, not services companies. So there’s a lot of really great people doing that kind of work.

David Hirsch: But I did want to ask if there’s anything else you’d like to say before we wrapped up something important that we might not have covered.

Dan Feshback: No, I really appreciate your show. I really appreciate you doing this interview. I really look forward to the future. I think the future is bright for our kids, all of our kids. And I think I’m just lucky to be involved in a community. It’s really not about me. It’s about the people who volunteer and the entrepreneurs. It’s all about them.

David Hirsch: Yeah. I wrote down a phrase that you mentioned, [00:29:00] which is “the conspiracy of optimism.” So that’s very obvious that you’re a part of that conspiracy. And I think the best thing to do, Dan, would be to touch base in a year or two and see all that’s transpired. I’m hoping that you’ll be ready for primetime, if you will, by then.

Let’s give a special shout out to Sarah Glofcheskie, founder and CEO of BeMe and Special Fathers Network Dad Podcast #280 for helping connect us.

Dan Feshback: Thank you.

David Hirsch: If somebody wants to learn more about Multiple, the Autism Impact Fund, or contact you, what’s the best way to do that?

Dan Feshback: Dan@ multiplehub.org.

David Hirsch: Okay. I’ll be sure to include that in the show notes, as well as information on these other resources that we made reference to. Dan, thank you for your time and many insights. As a reminder, Dan is just one of the dads who’s part of the Special Fathers Network, a mentoring program for fathers raising a child with special needs. If you’d like to be a mentor father or are seeking advice from a mentor father with a similar situation to your own, please go to 21stCenturyDads.org.

Thank you for listening to the latest episode of the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as [00:30:00] much as I did. As you probably know, 21st Century Dads Foundation is a 501c3 not for profit organization, which means we need your help to keep our content free to all concerned. Would you please consider making a tax-deductible contribution? I would really appreciate your support. Dan, thanks again.

Dan Feshback: Thank you.

Tom Couch: And thank you for listening to the Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast. The Special Fathers Network is a dad to dad mentoring program for fathers raising children with special needs. Through our personalized matching process, new fathers with special needs children match up with mentor fathers in a similar situation. It’s a great way for dads to support other dads. To find out more, go to 21stCenturyDads.org.

David Hirsch: And if you’re a dad looking for help or would like to offer help, we would be honored to have you join our closed Facebook group. Please go to Facebook.com, groups, and search “dad to dad.” Lastly, we’re always looking to share interesting stories. If you’d like to share your story or [00:31:00] know of a compelling story, please send an email to David@ 21stCenturyDads.org.

Tom Couch: The Special Fathers Network Dad to Dad Podcast was produced by me, Tom Couch.

Thanks again to Horizon Therapeutics, who believe that science and compassion must work together to transform lives. That’s why they work tirelessly to research, develop, and bring forward medicines for people living with rare and rheumatic diseases. Discover more about Horizon Therapeutics at HorizonTherapeutics. com.