In the mythology of company leadership, founders are expected to trade stability for scale. Long hours, constant travel, personal sacrifice. Family life is often framed as something to be balanced later, once the company is big enough to afford it.
This week, I spoke to Zack Levine from Checkout.com, who tells a different story.
Levine leads Checkout.com’s North American and Israel operations and moved to Israel two years ago from the United States. Today, he is preparing to return to the United States, this time to Dallas, Texas, ahead of the birth of his second child, another son.
We spoke about family and how he sees it not as a constraint on leadership, but as the condition that makes leadership possible. His recent decision, he explained, was driven less by ambition than by a belief that professional performance depends on personal grounding.
“If I feel good about where things are in my family life, in my personal life, my outcomes at work are way better,” he said. “Family comes first for me. Making sure that my wife and my kid are feeling good and happy. That’s the most important. And then from there, I can build the best professional version of myself.”
Checkout.com is a fintech company that provides payment processing services for enterprise clients in the media, technology, and e-commerce space. The company is growing fast, with thousands of employees across more than 20 countries. Levine’s role demands constant travel between offices in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. So when it came to leaving Israel, many elements came into consideration.
“I need the security and stability in my personal life in order to create the best work outcomes and for my kids to have a chance to be raised next to their grandparents,” he explained. This proximity to extended family and being in a manageable travel hub were not personal luxuries. They were operational requirements.
I found that this framing runs counter to how leadership decisions are often discussed. Moves are explained, especially from Israel to North America, as market access opportunities or strategic positioning. The personal lives and the support systems that allow leaders to function rarely make it into public narratives. But our discussion made them explicit.
Parenthood, in particular, reshaped his understanding of leadership - something I could understand on a personal level, too. Running a venture while navigating young children and distance from family forced a recalibration of his priorities. It’s only natural.
The lesson I gleaned from our chat is not that every manager needs to move closer to family, or that ambition should be softened. But it made me think about how performance can depend on the foundations behind the scenes that are rarely visible to outsiders. Travel schedules and support networks matter as much as strategy decks and growth targets.
For Levine, family stability is not something he protects from work. It is what allows the work to function at all.
