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Comment by seibelj | Hacker News Reader

What is it with executives who feel above showing up to work? I worked at a company where the CEO worked 2 half days a week and the other execs were on cruise control, then they got angry that all the employees weren’t killing it (“this is startup! Work like one!”). Hard to enforce that culture when no one is ever there.

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> "Palihapitiya in February filed for divorce from his wife Brigette Lau, a partner with Social Capital and co-owner of its management company. Soon he began showing up less often to the office, ..."

The disadvantage to not having a boundary between your personal life and work life, I suppose.

What are the advantages? Seems like a terrible idea all around.

Some husband and wife startups are both very successful financially and greatly enjoyable for the couple. Voicestream for example.

YCombo as another.

Houzz as well

Definitely not a "startup" CEO, nor do we have employees yet, but my wife and I own a small business together and we really enjoy spending all of our time together. It's a giant advantage for us to be able to casually discuss business when we want, and for us to both have the same schedule around big launches or industry event type things.

When we both had our own jobs, we felt like we hardly saw each other and like we had nothing in common. Now that we have kids, it's much easier to have the kids around while we're working because we can both do more or less as the kids need us.

Obviously if we got divorced it would be a disaster, but that doesn't negate that these are currently very real advantages.

It's great... until it isn't. Then it's terrible.

You like your coworker, you have a shared interest with your spouse, you succeed together

An incredible amount of small businesses have female owners to due tax benefits. So husband-wife pairs are not uncommon.

What are the tax benefits?

I don't know about tax benefits, but I know it is pretty common around DC for a husband to have his wife be the legal owner of his business for contract bidding purposes. The govt has to award a certain amount of contracts per year to smaller groups, so making the wife the owner allows the business to legally be a "woman owned, small business", even though the wife has no actual role in the company.

It's also very common for these contractors to sub-contract all of their contracts to the big companies who actually do the work. So the government contracts to a one-man Veteran Alaskan Native owned "company", who has a pre-arranged agreement to sub all incoming work out to the actual contractor. The prime contractor's only job is to be the prime contractor and forward communication back and forth. He can do that from home without even going into an office. Sweet gig, and on the taxpayer's dime!

Tax benefits for female owners?

I'm a founder working with my fiance who is CEO.

Advantages: Complete trust. We have a lot of experience with difficult conversations. We have complementary skills and personality traits. We have both bet our future on this company and thus are equally dedicated. We're also aligned on motivation to succeed.

If you are willing to entangle your life with someone financially, romantically, and domestically, you may as well start a business with them :)

If you can make it work then all the $$ stays in the family

We have replaced Lords with Executives in the modern world.

Lords stuck around until, if ever, violently deposed. Executives are accountable for producing something people will part with money to get.

Lords were responsible for defending the land and raising an army. Executives probably delegate way more than lords did.

I am always flabbergasted on how Marxist-minded people find solace in feudalism.

How do you know the CEO was not working the other times they were out of the office?

He wasn’t, mostly yachting and partying, very wealthy man. But the company was lighting VC dollars on fire. Someday I’ll write an expose of that place, such an odd culture. We had a burn of something like $2mil a month, 75 employees, and no product or customers to speak of.

Sounds like a B2B startup I worked for in the late 90's. The CEO had "rockstar" qualities, raised a bunch of cash, over-hired, delegated everything... It didn't end well.

Nice if you're the one partying. Pretty sad for everyone else though. Life's not fair. Lots of talented people out there who could build a business and turn a profit, and instead the VC money always chases the smooth talking B-school bro's with Ivy League pedigree, and other big-network phonies.

> delegated everything

Did one thing correctly.

Wealthy family or self-made?

Facebook

Self made from previous IPO

Do you happen to know the name of the Italian pharma exec he is dating?

Why would this be relevant in this conversation? Sounds more like gossip than prime HN material to me.

We call those idiots.

They're executives, dude. All the hard work has been delegated, so they just need to check in from the yacht once a week. /s

The 4-Hour Workweek

To be fair, if a CEO of a startup is sitting in her office 5 days a week, she's not doing her job properly. She should be out there finding funding or finding customers.

It was beach house and yacht trips, considering we had zero customers (B2B).

What does "out there" mean? Walking down the street in SF and giving out leaflets? I'm having a bit of trouble imagining how this out there looks like for most of those startup companies - especially considering how a lot of CEOs in larger companies work as long-distance communicators.

> What does "out there" mean?

Asking your network for introductions, cold emailing, et cetera. If you can’t do this you shouldn’t be a start-up CEO.

All of which happens in your office...

> All of which happens in your office

Not necessarily. Particularly when it comes to early stage work, a lot of trust building must happen face to face.

In any case, "out there" means being "out" in the awareness of the people on whose radars you want to be. (Versus twittering about in a corner unnoticed.)

Meeting with clients and investors often but not always involves travel.

In the offices of your clients, suppliers, partners, and regulators.

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