
Dating? Wives? Relationship balance? - jdavid
just curious how many of you are dating someone or married to someone?<p>and if applicable how has your startup affected your relationship?<p>how do you balance the jealousy between the start up and your significant other, and vice versa?
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gibsonf1
I am married with a 3.75 year old daughter (she insists on the .75).

The two main issues (of course) are money and time.

The money side is "easy": the key to success is to have enough money to cover
the time spent on the startup. If money gets tight, the startup will be one of
the targets of much negative emotion by your s.o., yourself being the other
main target. This is not a comfortable situation.

The time side is _hard_! I wish I knew the answer to this. Talking about the
startup when you're not feverishly working on it can be a bad thing when
patience wears thin on time spent on the startup. What is helping alot is
total focus on s.o./family when not working, and then working at times unseen.
(My recent strategy has been getting up pretty early to get in extra work
before everyone wakes up.) What has also been very helpful is getting
finished. An almost finished startup is much easier to imagine succeeding than
lines of code on a screen. So launch ASAP.

Good luck, and don't do the startup unless you absolutely have to do it -
thats my excuse.

~~~
nostrademons
Your daughter's good at math. I didn't learn fractions & decimals until I was
about 7.

~~~
bluishgreen
I am still having trouble at 27 :(

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tipjoy
Married. My husband is my co-founder. Working together is tons of fun & we
live and breathe our startup. I highly recommend marrying your co-founder, or
co-founding with your husband/wife.

~~~
eru
Hooray for same sex relationships.

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bouncingsoul
Make sure she understands what a startup means, and that it's a serious
endeavor. No one wants to be pushed aside for someone's hobby.

That said, your relationship probably has to be serious too. Sometimes you're
not going to have time for her. She has to understand that you can still be
"working" even though your day job ended four hours ago.

Don't keep her in the dark. Show her the things you're working on. If she
starts snoring don't assume it's because she isn't your audience: maybe what
you're doing is genuinely boring.

Start joking about the things you'll buy when you're millionaires.

I'm in a serious relationship. I haven't started a startup yet. But the same
issues have come up as I learn how to hack.

*I'm still looking for a hacker friend in Kansas City (are you one? dgouch at gmail.com)

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davidw
Married, and it's the best thing I ever did. Money, companies, and everything
else comes and goes, but it's important to have someone who will always be
there.

That said, it affects your ability to do a startup, because you have something
that's more important. Oh well, I wouldn't trade it for anything!

~~~
staunch
> Oh well, I wouldn't trade it for anything!

I wouldn't either, but being really honest, I'm not as sure as you are about
it. Being a successful entrepreneur, being independently wealthy, and being
free to spend my life how I see fit has been a dream of mine since before I
liked girls (and that was quite early). My wife is aware of how I feel and I
picked a good one, so I'm fairly certain I can have my cake and eat it too. It
remains to be seen if that's true.

~~~
davidw
I view being married to the right person as a more fundamental building block
in "the life I want" than being rich, which is sort of a crap shoot in any
case. At Linuxcare, we were probably a month or two away from an IPO on the
heels of VA Linux (I was probably looking at good 100's of thousands, if not a
million or two, had the market remained at those levels). Then the market
turned, and the company folded (partially because they did some other things
wrong, like hire some really slimy individuals). Easy come, easy go, as they
say.

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hello_moto
I don't mean to give a negative comment but hey, this is life.

1) You can't get everything you want

2) In every situation, decision has to be made because there are choices
(either you've become a good father, or a good CEO). You simply can't be good
at both. Maybe once in a while you saw your CEO as both good CEO and good
father because from the outside, his family looks happy. But you'll never know
what happen inside.

~~~
eru
But you know?

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rickcecil
My wife of 10 years is pregnant with our first child and I have finally
screwed up my courage to its sticking place and am making the leap with my own
startup. I am continuing to work my day job--which can suck up 50-60 hours a
week while working on the startup another 16-20 hours a week. Both suck a lot
of time away from her. I am definitely concerned about this--especially with a
child on the way. But, I have a wonderful wife who understands why I want to
start my own company and is nothing but supportive. (Plus, she understands
that the path to wealth in the US is not through working for someone else so
if she wants to be rich, she has to be willing to take the risk of starting a
company.)

A lot of people will tell you that a spouse and children will make it more
difficult to start, but that is only true if you let it be true. I'm not
saying they don't complicate matters, they do. I'm saying turn your weaknesses
into your strengths: family can be a great source of source of support (as
other posters have mentioned).

Also, when I think about the lessons I want to teach my son, "work hard making
someone else a lot of money" is not something I want him to learn, which means
I need to get off my ass and practice what I preach.

Regarding how your SO feels about your startup, I think it's gonna really
depend on where you are in the relationship. Is it new and you want to spend a
lot of time together? Or, is it a more mature relationship where you don't
have to be near each other every waking second.

Also, on the SO front, if the your SO wants you to give up your dreams, there
are deeper problems with the relationship that you should consider. Just
because your married or in a relationship doesn't mean your desires have been
sublimated for the sake of the relationship.

Bottom line: I see a lot of people telling you why you shouldn't start, and
they are right--unless it's just in you to start, and then nothing can stop
you.

~~~
gibsonf1
_BEWARE_ of month number 1 with the baby. It is impossible to comprehend until
you have a baby, and month 1 (especially week 1) will require more time than
you can imagine. I was in the midst of multiple all-nighters on an
architecture project around the time of birth (though I took the first week
off) and I will never hear the end of my inability to help as much as I should
have when the wife was as thoroughly exhausted as me. Life changes totally
once you have a child. Once you understand what it means to have a different
life as a family (which took me about a year), it is really a great thing. The
transition from romance to family, though, is not easy, but that is a
completely different topic.

~~~
rickcecil
Thanks for the advice!

I'm taking the first two weeks off from work, and my mother-in-law will be
here, so I'm hoping that I can really spend more time with my wife and new
baby without sacrificing on the startup. Plus, the project's schedule should
be such that my role during that time will be diminished somewhat and my
partners will be working a bit more.

I don't want to say that I'm completely prepared for LAB (life after baby),
but I'm as prepared as I can get.

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Mistone
theres a post on my blog that may provide a good laugh.

Honestly, being recently married and suddenly not producing any income is
hard. In the Bay Area at least, most woman drive super nice new cars and have
a lot of disposable income, so its tough when your living on sacrifice street.
That said, wives are awesome when your down and give you something besides
yourself to work your ass off for.

link: [http://www.rephoria.com/blog/2007/05/25/five-reasons-why-
sta...](http://www.rephoria.com/blog/2007/05/25/five-reasons-why-starting-a-
startup-could-improve-your-marriage/)

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nickb
Startups tend to destroy relationships... no matter how understanding you
think your spouse will be, the human nature is hard to beat. Tread carefully
:(

~~~
huherto
Could be, if it fails, she will dump you. if you succeed you will dump her.
Just a thought.

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rokhayakebe
If she truly loves you, then she can help you when you think about giving up,
or need her to handle bills while you build your ladder. If she does not, or
is selfish, then keep liking here and keep loving your startup.

~~~
eru
I would not abuse my s.o. for the bills. At least offer terms your s.o. would
accept with a random investment.

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steve
1\. Yes

2\. Adversely.

3\. Balance? What balance? Well mine is in another country until winter. This
wasn't exactly by choice though, so the decision itself was easy.

Good luck, and don't do the relationship unless you absolutely have to do it -
my advice:)

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gommm
I went the easy way, my girlfriend is my cofounder! But of course we are both
worried about what the stress of creating a startup will do to our
relationship...

~~~
jdavid
the stress will probably improve your sex life, the money and attention might
break you up.

but if you have as great of a gal as many of these guys on here you will be in
good hands.

