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Ask HN: Co-founding with your significant other

3 points by vqc ↗ HN
Inspired by today's thread re: families/parenthood and work-life balance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8499285), I was hoping that people could share stories about founding companies with their significant others. What went wrong? What went right? What things were easier or harder? Unforeseen pitfalls?

JL started YC with PG (and other two letter humans) and that seemed to work out ok.

9 comments

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alttab
The quick answer is simply: don't do it. When one fails, it will impact the other. If one fails, you may not be able to untangle the other...
duncan_bayne
How do you see this as different from founding a startup while in a significant relationship? I.e., say, founding a company while married vs. founding a company with your husband or wife?
alttab
If your business fails, its not entangled with the relationship. You can't necessarily blame your husband or wife for the failures of the business. It leaves too much in the gray and too many things can go wrong.

Also, think about it this way: if you fail, there is a high likelyhood that you both will be feeling down, blaming each others shortcomings for the collective failure, and be stretched with no money and no jobs between the two of you. A highly stressful situation that only the best relationships will survive. Are you ready for that? The "If you start a business with your spouse, you're going to have a bad time" meme comes to mind here.

duncan_bayne
> If your business fails, its not entangled with the relationship

That is simply false, based on direct personal experience, and observations of other people close to me.

For example, I know a guy who co-founded a company. His co-founder got divorced, and his wife (not involved in the company in any way) got a slice of the company as partial divorce settlement.

My own experience was co-founding a company where my wife was not, on paper, 'involved'. But she was an invaluable source of support, advice and motivation.

Perhaps to ask this question differently: how do you think it's possible to have a significant relationship with someone, while completely excluding them from the other most important endeavour in your life?

duncan_bayne
Speaking from experience here: you will be co-founding with your significant other, regardless of whether you realise that or not.

If you're in a significant relationship, that person is your partner; major life decisions surrounding employment, business, balance between home & office, etc. etc. aren't made in a vacuum.

Consider also that in some jurisdictions, your partner may be entitled to a share of the company as part of a divorce or similar proceedings (happened to a colleague of a friend here in Australia).

Also speaking from experience: your significant other will likely be an invaluable source of support, motivation, opinion, experience, etc.

nmcfarl
I did this. We broke up within six months after 5 years together. The firm - though no longer a start up (the breakup juggled priorities and set us on the path of a bootstrapped traditional firm) is still run profitably, nearly 9 years later, by us as cofounders. Both of us are now married to wonderful spouses. We found out that we were much, much better as business partners than we were as life partners.

I don't know that I'd recommend it - but I love my life, and this is how I got here.

rachelandrew
I started my company in 2001 and then in 2006 was doing well enough for my husband to join as Director and 50% shareholder.

Since then we've launched a successful product (http://grabaperch.com) allowing us to move away from doing consultancy work, our second product launched yesterday.

It can be tough, we talk about work all of the time. However there are good points. We decided pretty much on a whim to relocate to somewhere we fancied living - as the company is just us two permanently we could do that.

It is a great thing to feel that as a partnership in all senses we are building our future together. The flip side of that is that when things are not going well we tend to end up going round in circles a bit as we only have each other to talk to on a work and personal level.