On a recent afternoon, George Arison and Dr. Robert Luo enjoyed a moment of downtime in their modern home in Portola Valley, Calif., a bucolic town east of Palo Alto. The couple, who married in March 2019, have two children, and since their wedding, have moved twice while Mr. Arison took two tech companies public.
They are seated at the dining table, each snuggling a 5-year-old child on his lap. Between bouts of cuddling with Mr. Arison, 47, and Dr. Luo, 46, the children head to the playroom to color and play with Legos. Joining them there is their nanny and Mr. Arison’s father, who after immigrating from his native Georgia in February 2021, is now an integral member of the family.
Mr. Arison and Dr. Luo met at a San Francisco pizzeria in 2015 and quickly bonded over a shared desire to become parents. When they wed four years later at San Francisco City Hall, they held up grainy sonograms of their unborn children as they exchanged tearful vows.
After their wedding, the couple began preparing in earnest for their “twiblings,” siblings conceived with two eggs from the same donor, pairing each man’s sperm with one egg, and carried by two separate surrogates. The process was chiefly overseen by Dr. Luo, who holds a medical degree and a master’s degree in public health.
In early September 2019, they answered a middle-of-the-night call from one of their surrogates, saying that labor had started. With Dr. Luo at the wheel, the couple set off at top speed for a four-hour drive to Redding, Calif., but their mad dash was interrupted by flashing lights. The police officer who pulled them over accepted their rushed explanation, and they were quickly back on the road, without a ticket. “I think he saw the panic in our faces,” Dr. Luo said.
Luka was born later that day, but because of a blood sugar issue he spent the next week in the neonatal intensive care unit, a time that the two remember as a crash course in infant care. “We were so grateful to the N.I.C.U. nurses,” Dr. Luo said. From the nurses, the men learned how to do things like change diapers and feed and burp their son.
The day after their son arrived home, the couple set off on another frenzied drive, this time four hours in the opposite direction, to Fresno, Calif. Emilia arrived nine days after her brother. With the assistance of a nanny, the men adjusted to life with two newborns.
“There were so many unexpected challenges,” said Mr. Arison, who was then the chief executive of Shift, an online marketplace for used cars. “The hardest thing was that I wanted to be with them all the time. I tried working halftime, but it’s just not my personality.”
Six months later, when the pandemic hit, the family hunkered down and both men enjoyed the additional time with the babies. During that time, Mr. Arison’s company thrived. In October 2020, he took it public. (He left the company in 2022 and the following year it filed for bankruptcy.)
After Shift’s initial public offering, Mr. Arison had planned to take time off from work, but in 2022, he was offered the opportunity to run Grindr, an online social networking and dating app for gay and bisexual men, a company he took public later that year. “I understood the user base, and before meeting Robert, had been a Grindr user myself,” Mr. Arison said.
“There are a lot of misconceptions around Grindr and gay culture in general,” Mr. Arison said. “There is still a lot of homophobia.”
Part of Grindr’s mission, he said, is to break misconceptions about both the product and the gay population in general. “It’s helpful to have a married gay dad be the primary face for the company — someone who has no trouble speaking to his life before marriage, but who also showcases a bit of where gay culture is going.”
Though Grindr has been doing health education about H.I.V. for years, such as promoting the use of pre-exposure prophylaxis (or PrEP), under Mr. Arison’s direction, Grindr recently partnered with the Centers for Disease Control to supply H.I.V. tests to those in high-risk populations. He recently implemented an employee benefit covering medical costs for fertility, surrogacy and adoption.
Mr. Arison now works 60-plus hours a week, which means Dr. Luo has been the primary caregiver. When the children arrived, he left his job with the World Health Organization as a diagnostic adviser and took six months off from work before returning part-time. “Sleep was always an issue,” he said of the parenting early years. He is now employed by Stanford in its QuestBridge program, which supports high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds. He continues to do the bulk of the children’s school drop-offs and scheduling.
Nightly dinners are attended by all, with Mr. Arison making a commitment to put down his phone from 5:30 p.m. until the children have gone to bed. (Then he’s typically up answering emails and working into the wee hours.)
Growing up in the Soviet Union, Mr. Arison said he was pushed hard academically, and though he credits the rigors of his education for paving a path to success, he hopes his children will be able to truly enjoy their childhoods. Dr. Luo, whose upbringing included a lot more free time, can imagine a future for the family that will likely include a move out of the Bay Area.
Both men hope their children grow up to contribute to making the world a better place.
“We want the kids to realize there are a lot of children that don’t have what they have,” Dr. Luo said, with Emilia seated on his lap. “Emilia understands there are people who sleep outside or in their cars,” he said, “and it makes her sad.”
It wouldn’t hurt, too, if they developed a passion for business like Mr. Arison, who recently self-published a children’s book, “Just Add Lemons,” that features AI illustrations with avatars of the children. The book tells of a brother and sister who started a lemonade stand. With guidance from Alexander Hamilton, Henry Ford and Muriel Siebert, the first woman to have a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, their venture becomes successful.
And if they don’t go into business? “I want lots of grandkids,” Mr. Arison said.
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