Hacker News Reader

Comment by smt88 | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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

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 :)

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

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

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com