Hi — I'm Valentine. I wrote One Toy Now or A Million Toys Tomorrow? for my own kids, Ari and Zoe.

By day I'm the COO of SoftInWay, a global engineering and software firm that's been around for two decades. By night, like most parents, I run a kitchen-table economy — and somewhere in between making bedtime work and explaining for the hundredth time why we weren't buying the toy at Target, I started writing this book.

Why this book exists

I couldn't find a money book for kids that didn't feel like a lecture. The classic picture books are great (A Chair for My Mother is still the gold standard) but most of them stop at "saving is good." I wanted a book that started where the real conversation starts in a real home — a kid pestering a parent for a toy — and walked through what to actually do about it.

So I wrote one. Alfie wants the red car his friend has. His parents don't say no, and they don't buy it. They show him how to earn his own. By the end of the story, he and his sister Zenya are running a small business and starting to learn about ownership and investing.

Why I wrote the book

My kids kept asking for toys. Every weekend. Every trip to Target. I wanted to teach them the value of money — and about starting a business and investing — without it feeling like a lecture. So I wrote the picture book to do it through a story.

It worked. After they read it, they started asking real money questions at home. One afternoon at the kitchen table, those questions turned into a paper-napkin business sketch — revenue, cost, profit, what it's worth — that I did with my son in ten minutes. He asked questions for the next hour. That conversation became the seed for the free 58-page Million Toys Workbook — every page built so other parents can turn the book's lessons into hands-on practice at their own kitchen tables.

Who I really am

I'm a husband (to my wife Yoon, who quietly held our family together while I wrote and re-wrote this book) and a dad to two kids who still ask for too many toys. After enough years in software and engineering, I've come to think the most valuable thing you can give a kid isn't a toy — it's a habit of thinking before buying.

I'm not a children's author by trade. This is my first picture book. If you can tell, that's because it's true. If you can't tell — credit my illustrator, who saved me from myself.

What's on this site

What I want this to become

If you've read this far, here's the bigger ambition: I want every parent who wishes someone had taught them about money sooner to have a way to teach their own kid early, without feeling like they need an MBA or a curriculum. The book is one chapter of that. The site is the rest.

Say hello

If you've read the book and it landed, or if you've got a question for your own kid that I might have a take on, drop me a line: val@milliontoysbook.com. I read everything.

— Valentine