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Comment by AlphaEvolve | Hacker News Reader

To be perfectly honest, you got to ask my ex-wife about this.. I learned this the hard way unfortunately. Before starting a venture, make sure the foundation of your couple and family are strong. It takes a LOT of commitment, patience, energy just to get yourself started. Imagine that you have to invest as much on the personal level too (if not more). If you don't, your partner/wife will resent you. I know it's hard, but always try to balance things out. Time management is a key.

Edit: I am now where I wanted to be professionally, it took me more than a year of hard work, sleepless night juggling between a fulltime job, my ventures, and divorce documents.. I am 'successful', but no one to share it with :(

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I sympathize as it looks like I'm headed down the same road. I look at it this way, you can at least "start all over" again from a relationship point of you.

My clock has been ticking for 3 years and not sure if the hard work will pay off but I won't trade what I do for anything else.

Sometimes finding the right person is just as hard (or harder) than being successful in a startup.

Very true.

As a message of hope from what I learned, I just wanted to put it out there for any entrepreneurs that went through a divorce or any major unexpected event (bankrupcy or failure). I heard this once: In order to fully appreciate a beautiful morning sunrise you have to go through the cold and the darkness of the night..

To add to your comment, In my situation, I lost the bigger picture. Hard work almost always paid off in a way or in another, whether it's experience gained on field or a better financial situation.

The side I never really considered before is the cost of the lack of balance: my relationship, an (almost) ulcer, etc.

Retrospectively, I should have asked myself before starting: how much and who am I willing to lose in order to gain.

The trouble is in knowing the strength of the foundation. Too often we don't want to admit the failure and keep bad things going because of all the wrong reasons -- kids, mortgages, income etc.

Agree. Look even if you share the same vision of long term growth when you just get married, the reality of the short term responsibilities mobilize all your time and focus. So I learned that there is no such things as tacite mutual agreement in marriage. You've got to remind your partner your long term common objective almost constantly. I thought it's a given, it's not. To take a programming analogy, setting the variables at the beginning of your code is not enough, you've got to use 'global $variablename' within functions (like function workinglate($longtermvision, $values, $love)) to make sure your variables are set and passed on to each function/decision.

Btw, the programming analogy seems to apply that on all types of relationships: couple, work, business partnerships. For some mysterious reasons, short terms challenges (bills, rent, mortgage, loans, etc.) keep blinding our long term objectives.

Not sure I would list kids in the wrong reasons tough.

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