Dating? Wives? Relationship balance?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=53601

by jdavid • 19 years ago

18 25 19 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

just curious how many of you are dating someone or married to someone?

and if applicable how has your startup affected your relationship?

how do you balance the jealousy between the start up and your significant other, and vice versa?

gibsonf12• 19 years ago

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• 19 years ago

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

bluishgreen• 19 years ago

I am still having trouble at 27 :(

rokhayakebe• 19 years ago

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.

eru3• 19 years ago

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

steve• 19 years ago

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:)

bouncingsoul• 19 years ago

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)

nickb• 19 years ago

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• 19 years ago

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

tipjoy• 19 years ago

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.

eru3• 19 years ago

Hooray for same sex relationships.

Mistone• 19 years ago

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...

rickcecil3• 19 years ago

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.

rms• 19 years ago

Are you absolutely required to work that many hours a week? That's going to burn you out really fast. Can you work less, even with a pay cut?

rickcecil3• 19 years ago

Yeah, I'm already starting to feel it and am working on ways to cut back at work -- especially with baby coming.

gibsonf12• 19 years ago

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.

rickcecil3• 19 years ago

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.

hello_moto• 19 years ago

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.

eru3• 19 years ago

But you know?

davidw2• 19 years ago

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• 19 years ago

> 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.

davidw2• 19 years ago

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.

seren6ipity• 19 years ago

My bf is of your creed too. I've to vie with a laptop but both of us know his priorities. I guess understanding is all it takes.

gommm• 19 years ago

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• 19 years ago

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.

Dating? Wives? Relationship balance?

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