How did you meet your YC app team?
College?
Prior collaborations?
Pure randomness?
Perhaps someone can answer this for me: Would the wife-as-a-partner thing have a negative impact on our chances at YC?
Well it sort of depends on the makeup of the team. Imagine your on the Starship Enterprise and you have to beam down to an unknown planet. Who do you want on your team? Well you want Kirk, probably a science officer (Spock) maybe the medical officer (Bones McCoy) , possibly the Coms officer (Uhura) and a maybe a RedShirt to get blasted away if you come across some real nasty situation. [0]
So lets assume you are Kirk. The leader, human in touch with his emotions instincts and has the ability to make decisions but passionate and aggressive. Lets assume your other partner is Spock. Total nerd. At best unable to read human nuance, emotion at worst totally miss the poker move Kirk thinks up to save the day. At best he/she coolly out-logics the best Roumlan, Klingon or Borg enemies they face. Then there is Bones. Bones is also all empathy, human and the thinking conscience always trying to get out of sticky situations with the least harm. [1]
For each episode all three at some times came into conflict to resolve a difficult situation. Sometimes it was Spock and Bones butting heads over the most direct decision compared to the decision that caused least harm. Another time it's Spock advising Kirk not to take such rash action as trying to remove all the Tribbles as they do sooth the crew and saved the day as in "The Trouble with Tribbles" [2]
I guess what I'm trying to say is your wife may have the latent skills you need in your team that has to be identified. Identify her character skills. Is it all logical and calm like Spock? Passionate, rash and gambler and decision maker like Kirk? Or is she able to read into people and situations that baffle both Kirk and Spock as Bones can?
You need all three character types to succeed in any Starship (I mean startup) adventure, and YC interviews can also be included. Each personality contribute to produce a successful outcome. Choose the wrong combo and you'll be just another RedShirt in the application process.
PS My experience is that if you can determine this you can work to plug the gaps. Not all people are creators interested in building. But they may be logical analytical and empathetic at the same time.
[0] You can substitute these "old-skool" trekky characters with NexGen Pikard for Kirk, Warf/Data for Spock and maybe Troi for Bones ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series
I'm sure she'll understand (and appreciate) your anecdote much more than I ever will. She's a big time trekie, and me? Not so much...
However, this still leaves my original question somewhat unanswered. While the three of us may be a great team, I've known many people who believe that couples should not work/do business together as they feel it will inevitably lead to conflict and result in the breakup of the company, relationship, or both. I'm sure that they have some personal experiences, but how does YC generally look at this type of situation. Will they see it as additional (and unnecessary) risk? Are there any examples of husband/wife teams in successful startups?
Sure, Trotts of MT & SixApart ~ http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/
"... but how does YC generally look at this type of situation ..."
Who cares? ... More to the point it's unethical if your team is discriminated against because of marriage. Look, yc play the good guys of the VC world ( read here http://ycombinator.com/about.html and here why ~ http://ycombinator.com/about.html )
I'd worry about the basics of how you build things and all the other things that go to build a startup before worrying about this issue. Instead worry about ....
- this http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
- and this http://paulgraham.com/die.html
Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, Flickr.
It was a different website than now, though.
unless you find the exact entrepreneur looking to do the exact same thing, you're screwed.
i've tried hackrmatchr, etc. it's all guys who have a startup already and want you to work on it... not guys who are open to coming up with something together.