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?
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.
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)
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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:)
but if you have as great of a gal as many of these guys on here you will be in good hands.