Husband and Wife Startups
5 tips on making it work
From the sunny beaches of San Diego, my wife Jenny and I are deep in the trenches of building our first startup together, called Loveseat. It’s an elegantly simple marketplace for stylish furniture in your city.
This isn’t our first startup experience, but it’s our first together. Prior to Loveseat, I founded TicketLeap, a Philly-based DIY ticketing platform and grew it to over $70m in gross annual sales before moving to San Diego. Jenny was a key early engineer at Venmo, a social p2p payments platform, and she was with them all the way until they were purchased by Braintree.
Building a seed-stage company is much easier the second time around, but doing it as a married couple is a bit tricky — especially since it’s our first time together. There are lots of great articles out there on later stage husband and wife startups, like Susan & Eric Koger of Modcloth & my personal frenemies Julia & Kevin Hartz of Eventbrite. And there are even more articles on why investors won’t invest in husband and wife teams — like here, here, and here.
But we thought the world could use some words on the seed stage of a married startup in real time. So, here are 5 tips to making your company and your marriage/partnership a success. Good luck.
1) Honor your different working styles
It’s easy to let your guard down with workplace etiquette when you are working with your spouse. Since you know each other better than anyone, it’s easy to assume that you’ll be able to work together in perfect harmony. It took us a little while to realize that we work completely differently — and it took us even longer to stop trying to change each other.
Respecting each other’s working style is essential. For instance, Jenny likes to work in short intense bursts (under 5 hours). During this time, interrupting her will result in some sinister looks or worse. I work less intensely, but I’m always working. I am most effective when I can jump between multiple tasks and brainstorming the whole time. Trying to get me to work in a non-ADD manner will result in an irritated non-productive Chris.
We now work much more harmoniously because we let ourselves be individuals during work hours.
2) Create non-work time
This one is a lot harder for me because I like to work all the time. But, maintaining a marriage can’t be solely built on burndown charts and pull requests. You need to actively stop working (including talking about work) and just enjoy time together. We try to carve out most of the weekend for couple time and it’s actually helped us to be more productive.
3) Know your roles
The idea for Loveseat was mine and Jenny started building it while I was still CEO of TicketLeap. The original plan was for this to be her startup. When things changed and we decided to start working together on it, it took us some time to learn our roles. We are now co-CEOs, but we’ve taken a divide and conquer approach. Jenny does the majority of the engineering, I am doing the majority of the marketing and traction strategy. We both work on product vision together.
Having this clear division of work enables us to have our own focus areas where one is the boss and the other the employee. That said, we both know exactly what the other is doing and no one is working on anything with the other in the dark. This lets us brainstorm together and create a superior product than we could individually.
4) Work arguments will become real-life arguments
This is a big one. When starting a company it’s natural to be extremely passionate about even the tiniest details. In fact, without intensity I’d question your commitment to your vision. If you are taking it seriously, it’s definitely worth arguing about. But, when you argue intensely about company details as a married startup team, it doesn’t take much to turn this into a personal argument.
How to resolve this is very simple. Stop arguing when you start. Take a step back. Hug.
When everything has calmed down, get back to the discussion at hand. We find that taking a few minutes to reconnect during these tense moments not only helps us as a couple, but it also helps us to see the right answer for the question we were debating.
5) Enjoy the process
This is one you can only understand if you’ve done it before and it doesn’t just apply to husband and wife startups. Some of my fondest memories from TicketLeap were the few years when it was just me and Iqram — former TicketLeap head of technology and now cofounder of Venmo. We worked insane hours and were always focused on getting to the next level. As the company grew to 10, 20, 30 employees I started missing the early days. And you can’t get them back.
Even though we’re still in the early stages of Loveseat, I can’t help but think that we’ll look back fondly on these times when it’s just the two of us banging out work in our apartment like mad scientists. With more work and some luck, soon we’ll have a bunch of happy customers, an office and a team of employees. But, you can never get back to the kitchen table startup without starting over again, so make sure you enjoy the unique trip together.
p.s. — The photo at the top of this was the best we could find to symbolize working together. It was directly after getting interviewed by Paul Graham and team for YCombinator. We got the dreaded rejection email later that day.
