What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
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What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#2very well said.
when i was doing a startup in the 90s, my SO was in law school and she was working even longer hours than i was. so our conversations were often "i'm afraid i'm going to have to work late tonight." "bummer. me too, though, so it's probably just as well." we worked side by side a lot too, and both made it a point to be involved in what the other was doing: i'd quiz her about outlines to help study for tests, she gave a lot of feedback on what we were doing as a startup ... it worked out great.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#3A similar experience occurred for me.
My GF and I went to Vegas for halloween (we both used to live there, so we have many friends and family there) and on the day we were leaving we decided to have a Vietnamese lunch with her parents. I got "the call" from my co-founder that there was a bug and it was affecting many of the systems on both customer and employee facing functionality.
So I told my GF, "I'm going to have to fix this before we begin our four hour drive back to SD." She said, "Okay honey."
I sat there for two hours, programming furiously through lunch with her and her parents till I had it fixed to a point where I could leave it for the next 6 hours. Thank god my Nexus One has tethering support and my girlfriend was supportive. Her parents seemed indifferent but other patrons were looking at us strangely as my GF sat there playing with her phone while I went apeshit on my laptop.
Kudos to the author for being an awesome mate; and I second the advice of becoming "involved".
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#4I realized that shit usually hits the fans when you say you literally need to sleep with the computer instead of her. :) True story.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#5The worst thing for my wife I think, is when I'm away from the house with little connectivity, and I need to call her up and ask her to fix something.
"Open up my macbook, now open up this document, now open a terminal, type in ./deploy.sh" etc
I'm not patient giving instructions and she's not patient being on the receiving end of it. But she's been a life saver quite a few times now :)
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#6Meh. This is basically what it's like to be the SO of a student, or an academic, or a freelance blogger or writer or programmer, basically anyone who has an unstructured work environment. Both my SO and I will go to relatively nice restaurants with our laptops and work and ignore each other.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#7I forwarded this to my girlfriend. Thanks for providing an SO's perspective so that I can make the point that it's part of the game, and not just me.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#8The worst thing for my wife I think, is when I'm away from the house with little connectivity, and I need to call her up and ask her to fix something. "Open up my macbook, now open up this document, now open a terminal, type in ./deploy.sh" etc I'm not patient giving instructions and she's not patient being on the receiving end of it. But she's been a life saver quite a few times now :)
ssh on my phone has been a life saver quite a few times now, too.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#9My husband has been patient through years of on-call duty and pages at all hours of day, night and weekends. He's been patient through all night maintenance duties and when I'm away for conferences or customer visits few times a year.
I've been patient when his company adapted this agile practice that means a release until 4am every Wednesday.
One thing I'm wondering about is the "get involved" advice: I'm a pretty mean developer, but I work in languages and environments that are very different from what my husband is working on. Whenever I try to discuss his work problems, I end up asking lots of wrong questions and generally annoying him. There is very little I can do to actually help him work on problems. Thats with me having 15 years of coding experience.
There is simply no way a girlfriend who is just learning to code can help her startup SO work on his projects.
Re: What it's like to be the SO of a start-up founder.
#10I forwarded this to my girlfriend. Thanks for providing an SO's perspective so that I can make the point that it's part of the game, and not just me.
It is definitely a part of the game -- that's why it is so important to find someone that can understand. I've found the people that understand the most are people who are also ambitious and have the drive to succeed in whatever they do.