Confessions of a Startup Founder's Wife
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
My startup is bootstrapped but reading this article I couldn't help but think: "I should talk to investors, I mean they gave money to this guy"
After reading this I can't get the image out of my mind. Whenever I see a ridiculous project being funded, I imagine "Steel Perlot". In my mind it has become something like a frou-frou art gallery losing money.
How much of the VC space is really like this? After awhile all I see are buzzword backup dancers ripping off willing fools.
Are these people a meme, is this story even real, and just what the fuck in general? This article isn't even really about a failed startup but rather a pair of messed up people on both sides who now expose their infant to their insanity.
What a pair of foul individuals.
edit: This is very relevant to me because the very same thing happened to me as a kid. One of our family dogs bit me in the face because I was tugging on her tail (like in a painful way). It was completely my fault, no one blamed anyone else than me and no, we didn’t kill the dog. We kept her and I have many happy memories of her.
Not our circus, not our problem.
I’ve been around dogs for 4 decades, I’ve never seen one bite a child’s face.
Even ones that really, really would have deserved it.
Could it happen? Sure.
However, I have seen dogs that were deranged and dangerous to themselves and others bite people before, and owners try to defend them as being okay though. Multiple times.
One the police had to put down after its 4th attack on an innocent bystander, while the owner cried and blamed the police.
One incident, in which the human was arguably at least partly at fault (and in which the adult humans who run the house are at fault--see below), is not "a history".
The article says they have had the dog for six years. And now they want to euthanize him over one incident, in which the kid turned out to be OK? That's not something I would even think of. They should be thinking about how to help the dog coexist with their kid--and asking themselves why they weren't thinking about that before they brought the kid into their household that already had the dog. At the very most, if they are simply incapable of managing both the dog and the kid, they should be looking for another owner to take the dog. Killing the dog should not be on the table at all.
(Frankly, I would question the competence of a vet that would agree to euthanize a pet for this, instead of advising the people to find another owner if they can't work it out themselves. Every vet we have had has told us explicitly that they never recommend euthanasia except as an absolute last resort for a pet that is terminally ill and suffering. We would stop taking our dogs to any vet that said otherwise.)
If someone was arrested for beating their spouse, you’d have no issues saying they had a ‘history of domestic violence’, no?
And plenty of folks would argue they would be irresponsible and abusive to their kid to not do it.
Maybe there would be better ways to handle it, maybe not. Maybe there were things they could have done to prevent it (probably), maybe not. Not our circus, not our problem.
Guilt aside, the civil liability from a second potential attack (for any owner) can be family destroying.
If they are really worried about their kid, they can find the dog another home. Either a friend or neighbor, or take him to a shelter. Not kill him.
As for "fool me", they were the ones who fooled the dog, by having him in their home for six years and gaining his trust, and then proposing to kill him over something that was really their fault. Bringing a kid into a home where a dog already lives is, as I have already pointed out elsewhere in this thread, stressful for a dog no matter what breed. It was their responsibility to manage that situation. They failed. And now they want the dog to pay for their mistake.
Right! They should transfer the liability to someone else! So that new, possibly unaware owner can get their pants sued off if the dog attacks someone in the future with a demonstrable past of injuring people. Clearly, risking the financial well-being of the new owner and a possible future second child's life is the compassionate, responsible choice. /s
I love dogs. I own one, and I will rub her belly in 15 minutes when I get home. But if she went apeshit on a kid I would thank the stars for the umbrella policy we carry. Then I would euthanize my dog.
As I've already said in the post you responded to, if they can't find a friend or neighbor who will take the dog (and that might well be the case, I get that), they can take the dog to a shelter, whose job is to find suitable homes for pets. And who would be expected to do a better job of that than these people did. That is what I would do if I owned a dog that I realized I could not keep in my home.
That is so grossly irresponsible, I’m glad to hear that you seem to have never had a dog.
No shelter is going to take a dog with a history of attacking people, let alone a kid.
At the point a dog is doing that, regardless of nature vs nurture, or who is ‘at fault’, it’s too late. They are an active hazard to everyone around them.
Does that suck? Yes.
Does pretending it’s not the case make it better? No, it compounds the damage and makes everything worse.
Legally, you are correct, they are the owners and the dog is at their mercy. But I feel sorry for the dog who is at the mercy of these people.
> plenty of folks would argue they would be irresponsible and abusive to their kid to not do it
The irresponsibility was theirs, for not handling the situation properly when they brought a kid into their home where the dog had already been for, by my count, three years.
To make the dog pay with his life for their irresponsibility does not strike me as a good choice.
If they can't handle having the dog in the house, and don't have a friend or neighbor who will take him, they can take him to a shelter who will find him another home. He would still be paying for their irresponsibility, but at least he would get a chance to be with better people.
I agree that they should explored other options to see if the dog could have been given to another owner in an environment better suited for a pitbull. I don't know that one exists, but if you choose to own a pitbull, you hold that responsibility when you decide to disown it.
Generalizations like this are not reliable. Dogs reflect the treatment they get from their owners.
But in any case, we don't need to generalize about this pit bull, because the article tells us that they have had him for six years and he has had no problems. This looks to me like a simple case of owners bringing a kid into a household that already has a dog, and not putting enough thought into how to manage that situation, which is going to be stressful for any dog, regardless of breed. That is on the owners, not the dog.
Dogs are bread to have specific traits - every dog breed. Pit bulls were bred for a specific purpose, to fight until death. How you can completely ignore that to create the narrative you wish were true is another story.
You're reasoning about why the dog bit the kid, without recognizing the lethality of pit bulls when they attack. That kid is very lucky, because that dog could have tore her head off her neck. You can keep ignoring the evidence and reality if you want, but statistics do not lie - pit bulls make up 6% of all dogs and they are responsible for 67% of all fatal dog attacks. It's not how they're raised, it's literally in their genetics to fight until death. Dangerous breeds are called "dangerous breeds" for a reason - because they're dangerous. Don't take it from me, many countries have banned pit bulls because they are dangerous.
I think you need to learn more about pit bulls. Even Wikipedia [1] recognizes that the reality is more complicated than your simplistic narrative.
As for the kid, I have already pointed out in multiple posts elsewhere in this thread that if these people are worried about their kid, they should find the dog another home. If there isn't a friend or neighbor who will take him, they can take him to a shelter. It's their fault that they brought a kid into their home where the dog had already lived for three years (which, as I have also pointed out elsewhere in this thread, is stressful for any dog, no matter what breed) and didn't manage the situation properly. Instead of making the dog pay for their mistake, they should let him have another chance in another home.
>I think you need to learn more about pit bulls.
What part of "Pit bulls were bred for a specific purpose, to fight until death." don't you understand?
>As for the kid, I have already pointed out in multiple posts elsewhere in this thread that if these people are worried about their kid, they should find the dog another home.
"We're trying to rehome this sweet widdle pibble that bit our kid in the face after living with her for 3 years" - sure, that's going to go well.
>It's their fault that they brought a kid into their home where the dog had already lived for three years (which, as I have also pointed out elsewhere in this thread, is stressful for any dog, no matter what breed) and didn't manage the situation properly.
You're making up in your head that the parents "didn't manage the situation properly" - there was nothing to suggest that in the story. And again, and again, and again: That kid is lucky to be alive because it was a pitbull. If it were a small breed that wasn't bred to fight until death, the girl wouldn't have been in nearly as much danger. I commend the parents for waking up and realizing the real danger this dog breed is well known for, and doing the right thing.
But you're right that the parents should have gotten rid of that murder-dog before the kid was born, but really they should have picked another breed to begin with. r/banpitbulls
I understood what you said perfectly well. I just don't believe it's correct, and I gave a reference to support my belief. What part of "I disagree with you and here's a reference explaining why" don't you understand?
> You're making up in your head that the parents "didn't manage the situation properly" - there was nothing to suggest that in the story.
Of course there's not going to be anything in the story to suggest that, because the parents don't know that they made a mistake. But I'm not "making up in my head" the obvious fact that if you bring a baby into a house that has a dog, that will be stressful for the dog, no matter what breed it is, and the adult humans in the house have the responsibility to manage that.
> I commend the parents for waking up and realizing the real danger this dog breed is well known for, and doing the right thing.
Realizing that the dog can't coexist in their house with their kid is fine. But I do not agree that killing the dog because of the parents' failure to realize that earlier is the right thing. They should take the dog to a shelter if they can't find a friend or neighbor who will take him.
In practice, that’s likely just outsourcing the killing.
But even if the shelter were to end up euthanizing the dog, at least it would be a last resort because they were unable to find any suitable home for him. That's still better than doing it because of a single event that was really the humans' fault.
Border Collies are bred to herd cattle and sheep, and they are exceedingly good at that task, where other breeds are not, because Border Collies were bred for this task.
Humans have for centuries selected specific dogs for breeding for specific traits. But you don't seem to think that's a thing??
https://wagwalking.com/breed/top-working-dog-breeds
Your ignorance is truly astounding. Pit bulls were specifically bred to kill, to fight until death They are not good as house pets. It's like leaving a loaded handgun around the house as a toy or a decoration. Sure, most of the time it isn't shooting anyone, but when a mistake happens, the results are disastrous.
>Of course there's not going to be anything in the story to suggest that, because the parents don't know that they made a mistake. But I'm not "making up in my head" the obvious fact that if you bring a baby into a house that has a dog, that will be stressful for the dog, no matter what breed it is, and the adult humans in the house have the responsibility to manage that.
So here you're doubling down on making up in your own head what the situation was. You don't know anything more than what was in the story, but you're trying to convince me that you know something that you don't. Delusional.
> But I do not agree that killing the dog because of the parents' failure to realize that earlier is the right thing. They should take the dog to a shelter if they can't find a friend or neighbor who will take him.
All dog shelters everywhere are already maxed out, absolutely full of pit bulls that nobody wants because they are dangerous dogs. When someone finally realizes they invited a monster into their home, they will get rid of it, and unfortunately they dump them off at shelters where there simply is no more room for dogs that were bred for violence. And the dog in this story has bit a child in the face, so I'm not sure how you can reason that this dog can ever find a welcoming home. There are already far too many pit bulls in shelters. If someone really wants a pit bull, there is no shortage in shelters.
The parents in this story did the right thing by not making this murder-dog someone else's problem.
I made no such claim. You are attacking a straw man.
The rest of your post is simply repeating that you disagree with me. Ok, noted. I'm not going to bother arguing about your factual claims any more since you clearly live on a different planet than I do so we don't have any useful common ground for discussion.
Except we don't live on a different planet. That's nonsense, and a cowardly way to say you can't do enough mental gymnastics to support your position.
>> So you don't think that dogs can be bred for specific traits?
>I made no such claim. You are attacking a straw man.
Do you or do you not think that dogs can be bred for specific traits?
And do you or do you not recognize that pit bulls were specifically bred as fighting dogs, to maximize their "gameness" and to fight until death?
These are easy questions you could just answer, and then we'll have some common ground to discuss. But I bet you won't answer.
Look up the numbers on how many maulings of children are disproportionately done by this breed.
> watching starwars with the wife... in the bedroom
What's messed up about this?
> terrible startup ideas
I mean... aren't those the vast majority of startup ideas?
Agree about pit bull though. That part was wild.
These people are hype merchants.
Not sure if that was the best strategy, but it seemed like a decent one at the time. I suppose if I were single, maybe the decision to just quit and go full time would have been easier despite not having such a safety net.
It's tough when more than my own life is being affected by such decisions. I feel for the author and her husband. Who knows if my own marriage would have ended up in similar struggles if I had gone all in. I do feel like I'm probably making more money in the long run by just remaining an employee.
I dunno.. doesn’t sound like the “support” I’d want.
I guess I take it for granted knowing the dirtier underside to startups, the fact that the investment money isn't a slushfund (unless you commit multiple felonies). That the marketing and projection of the company is ludicrously overblown. And that the community is optimistic to a fault - going as far as to cargo-cult objectively bad solutions.
And finally of course that most startups fall on their face. That even many acquisitions can be a net-negative to both the team and product.
You'd have thought the Theranos/FTX stuff would cool the ideation but I guess not.
My suggestion to anyone in a serious relationship that is starting a business:
Cofounders often layout an operating agreement when they start a company. A founder and their spouse should do the same: layout your expectations (time, money, opportunity costs, life responsibilities) and frequently have open and transparent conversations about if each party is still comfortable with the arrangement.
Hearing the author see his pivots and realizing he would cut off his arm before folding the company (hyperbole, I know) signals he is probably crossing the line of what would have been put in the operating agreement.
A good technical founder is forgoing $500k+ a year in comp for a high-percentage chance of nothing. That has an immense effect on a relationship. Watching a spouse who is that committed and failing has to be absolute hell.
It's easy to make this SWAG on the opportunity cost , but I'm not sure it's true. I've known a lot of technical founders, and probably more than half of them were psychologically incapable of staying in a cushy mid-six comp position at a big company, even when they had the chops. It's part of what drove them to do something else. Others were more driven than technically talented, and sometimes that works well.
The "why be a founder when you can get rich at a FAANG" narrative is a bit too reductive, and misses out that people do these things for a broader range of reasons that EV.
Similarly, I've met technical people who are far stronger than the median FAANG engineer, but would never work there, because they can't self-identify as someone who would take that job. You can just as easily say: "why do you work at save-the-world-little-co for peanuts when you could be making 700k at BigTechCo?"
Sometimes people do these things mostly because that's who they are, or who they see themselves. If you are in a relationship with someone like that, it's part of the package. Totally agree you should have a clear understanding of what that means, going into such a venture.
This is an incredibly good point. I, myself, left BigCo to launch aforementioned startup, and mentally, I was accepting that if went to zero (it did) at least I was spending the prime of my career doing what felt like the most meaningful thing I could be doing. I did not, however, create my recommended operating agreement or get the buy-in of my wife.
That sounds like a hard learned lesson, sad to hear it. You definitely aren't alone in that.
While the EV for creating startups is incredibly high, but the median EV of the startup founder is very low.
Kind of a sad commentary on the tech industry and its orbiters, really.
The way I think about ideas is like the many-worlds interpretation. You want to have a superposition as broad as you can be and then narrow down into a single collapse outcome for your idea.
This means that every little move you make, you think about how to deliver on that successfully, but you are continously also thinking about where and how you could pivot without throwing everything away.
Ultimately, it boils down to the question of reversibility. So a pivot is not a backtrack, but a course correction from where you are now.
Trying a bunch of shit and seeing what sticks is the privilege of the wealthy.
A few examples of what I mean:
- TikTok games - did you explore adjacencies? What about a TikTok task list app? Instead of some pointless minigame, pull up the list of tasks from say GitHub issues / JIRA / Asana etc and surface that as a kind of focus-mode for your work.
- Chatbot -> webapp. Chatbot -> x is just a terrible idea in general. But maybe you could salvage this by thinking more about what 'x' is. But you really can't since whatever you think 'x' is, someone is already doing it. So maybe 'x' is a variable. OpenAI's GPTs is 'x' -> Chatbot. Maybe an inversion of this? It could even be simply a recommendation app. Like above Tiktok for x. Given a problem, it suggests steps / tools to use etc.
The best way to keep your chances of success high is to ensure your life is very fluid and open to change, and that there are no liabilities that can drag you down. If that is not possible, the only remedy is to be independently wealthy.
At the very least, having to explain and justify every choice and setback to a non-involved yet judgmental person sounds miserable.
They're involved in the same way that any of your kids would be involved. Of course your kids wouldn't be co-founders, but that wouldn't make them uninvolved parties to you taking large financial risks and dragging them down with yourself in the case of significant failure.
Founders are still human.
It will impact you as a founder, and you, in the startup and scaleup phase, ARE the company
Sounds like the accountability every founder could only dream of having. Good founders generally seek out others that will hold them accountable (accelerators, investors, peer groups). With a spouse you get one for free!
Others want to take a shot at the moon, and financial failure in this shape is just part of the deal. If you're in the latter category and you want to pursue that but your wife is in the former category there is going to be some strife. You can't give them the certainty they desire. Someone who is expecting the success case isn't really ready for this when they're considering framing post-its after your successful IPO.
As an example, I think most partners of founders I know are easier to talk to. It's not that they're all rah-rah "you're gonna do it!". It's just that you need support and a team. Someone to run ideas by who's a friend. And if you're married to the right person, that's your wife.
Do you have any references to back that? Because it sure does seem like older founders-- ones more likely to be married and have kids --yield outsized returns.[1]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kmehta/2022/08/23/older-entrepr...
There is no significant causation related to a founder's marital status.
> Don’t be fooled, older founders have considerably more assets and a wealth of connections in their industry, as well as older more independent children. This offsets the wife and family effects.
> No, because there are a lot less older founders than younger ones. So when you extrapolate from the data it will seem that having a wife and kids is a negative for a founder’s chances of success.
These are the the confounding variables you were looking for. Older founders _are_ more successful and it has to do with, among other things, the experience and connections they have, and that people are more risk-averse as they start families.
_Coincidentally_, the likelihood of being married increases as one's age increases, which is why you see fewer but more successful founders at the ages they are more likely to be married.
I'm in the partner and kid stage, and whilst I wasn't when I did my last startup - I was mostly single and could do literally what I want, when I want - which is in a lot of ways awesome if the company is the thing you wanna do...now I am more stable (routine wise?), more driven (for family, as well as wanting a win), more experienced (that's aside from being single or not I guess), but do have more responsibilities. I'm at the edge of starting something new. Wish me luck either way.
Either way I'm going for it though lol. I think I just need to figure out what the limits are with the fam explicitly.
Not only was the optionality I previously had a curse, but staying on task is much easier with a partner looking out for me, and for my part I find it easier to make good decisions when I'm thinking about this team of us over myself.
Plus there's just the fact that marrying another high-earner means you have a more stable income when the streams are diversified.
Of course every person is different and perhaps you perform better single, but my experience and what I observe of my friends is different here in our 30s.
Good partner -> better chance of a good outcome.
Bad partner -> good luck with staying sane from being surrounded in stress 24/7
Don't you think this is somewhat of an outlier?
I mean, most startups will fail. 99.9% will never be valued at a billion or more. If you're running a company you founded and it's worth over a billion, yeah, I'm sure the wife or family is just fine. Those (or that) friend(s) probably have enough equity to make it worth their while, and a wife sticking around because hubby is going to exit in a year or two with a few hundred million in liquid cash is a safe bet. It's a lot harder if your partner is running a startup that probably won't make it.
As it relates to this article, a $1B+ company generally has product market fit and the founder has taken $10M+ off the table, which is more than they would have made in a regular job over a ~10 year period. The authors concerns don't apply in that situation.
Wife actually had her own startup for a good bit in a non-technical field, she wound that down a few years ago, now she's doing the stay with the kids thing, while I'm working to bootstrap a company.
The big thing that helps is not overlapping, while simultaneously being understanding. My wife has been my biggest source of mental stability on this crazy journey. She's my editor-in-chief, and I run my harebrain ideas past her. When I set out doing this we talked for a long time as to what the exit and breaking points are.
Startups require a certain amount of personal pride, but too many founders make the startup their entire identity, which the article exemplifies beautifully. There are too many people that treat the founder title as a status symbol. And from the article, that seems to be the case for both the subject of the article, and the author.
For me, the simple reality is if my shop can't bring in a paycheck by X date to support the family, it doesn't matter how well the startup is going, I need to go out and get a job. If that means I have to go sling contract code, or get a corporate gig, or go down to the nearest city and tend bar on the weekends, then so be it. The only way to truly fail at this game is to not play.
The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain.