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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: Techstars
- Sprache: Englisch
Real life insights on what it takes to make it in a relationship with an entrepreneur Entrepreneurs are always on the go, looking for the next "startup" challenge. And while they lead very intensely rewarding lives, time is always short and relationships are often long-distant and stressed because of extended periods apart. Coping with these, and other obstacles, are critical if an entrepreneur and their partner intend on staying together--and staying happy. In Startup Life, Brad Feld--a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist--shares his own personal experiences with his wife Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his twenty years of experience in this field to addresses how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects. * Includes real-life examples of entrepreneurial couples who have had successful relationships and what works for them * Provides practical advice for adapting to change and overcoming the inevitable ups and downs associated with the entrepreneurial lifestyle * Written by Brad Feld, a thought-leader in this field who has been an early-stage investor and successful entrepreneur for more than twenty years While there's no "secret formula" to relationship success in the world of the entrepreneur, there are ways to making navigation of this territory easier. Startup Life is a well-rounded guide that has the insights and advice you need to succeed in both your personal and business life.
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Seitenzahl: 408
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter One: Introduction
Heteronormative Language and Partnerships
Our Panel of Experts
Chapter Two: Philosophy
Communication
Priorities
Motivation
Long-Term Relationship
Time Commitment
Uncertainty
Persistence
Happiness and the Power of Habits
The 97 Percent: Choosing What to Care About
Delegating
Is a Relationship Part of Your Vision of a Good Life?
What Do You Want Your Story to Be?
Chapter Three: Communication
Appointments
Four Minutes in the Morning
A Good-Morning and Good-Night Call
Life Dinner
Honesty and Respect
Language, Tone, and Fairness
Drama
Anger Management
Fighting Fair
Conflict Avoidance
Listen
Geez, Do We Have to Talk About Our Relationship Again?
Love Talk
Professional Help
Violence
Chapter Four: Startup Company Life
Startups are Hard
A Vision
A Rhythm
A Family
Incorporating Your Partner
Entrepreneurial Help
Chapter Five: Personality
Defining Initial Conditions
Introvert Versus Extrovert
Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation
Need for Achievement Versus Need for Independence
Risk Versus Safety
Male Versus Female
Engineer Versus Poet
Rigid Versus Resilient
Problem Solving Versus Empathy
Optimist Versus Pessimist
Public Versus Private
Online Versus Offline
Moderation Versus Maniac
Short Term Versus Long Term
Chapter Six: Values
Words Versus Actions
Alignment
Children or Child-Free
Humor
Trust
The Unforgivable
You Can Have it All, Just Not at The Same Time
Chapter Seven: Skills, Tactics, and Tools
Communication 101
Talk in A Way That Can Be Heard
Cosmo Quiz
How to Renegotiate
Life Dinner
QX Vacation
Mini-Break/Long Weekend/One Day
The Phone
The Computer
The TV
Silence
Walks
The Daily Hug, Kiss, “I Love You”
Apology and Forgiveness
If You are Already in Trouble
When to Seek Help
Fun
Chapter Eight: Common Issues and Conflicts
Workaholic
Time Management and Scheduling
No Means No
Travel
Gender Differences
Being on Time
Getting Ready to Go
Being Right or Being Happy
Decision Making
What Compatibility Really Means
Cheerleader Versus Critic
Together and Separate
His Shit, Her Shit, Your Shit Together
Shit Happens—Now What?
To Get Married or Not
Anxiety and Depression
Chapter Nine: Big Issues: Illness, Relationship Failure, and Divorce
Serious Illness or Accident
Failure—The Minimum Viable Relationship
Before You Get Married
Divorce
Chapter Ten: Money
Developing A Shared Frame of Reference
What’s The Money For?
Early On: Not Having Enough
Having Enough to be Comfortable
The First Big Exit
Sleep-at-Night Money
The Disorientation of Having Too Much
Reactions from Your Family
Investing
Angel Investing
Retirement
Philanthropy
Chapter Eleven: Children
Start With A Commitment to Each Other’s Dreams
Raising The Baby
Define Your Roles and Responsibilities Clearly
Managing Your Kids
Be Deliberate About Travel
The Stay-at-Home Dad
Chapter Twelve: Family
Being Married to the CEO
Working Together
Living Where You Want to Live
Go On Adventures Between Companies
Recognize That Life is A Marathon, Not A Sprint
Sibling Dynamics
The Sandwich Generation
Chapter Thirteen: Sex and Romance
Communication Around Sex
The Work of Romance
Goal Orientation
Conflict Around Sex
Keeping The Magic Alive
Chapter Fourteen: Enough
Go Slow
The 10 Percent Rule
Do You Have to be Frugal in Your Next Startup?
How Much is Enough?
What Does Retirement Mean?
Are You and Your Partner in Different Places?
Practice, Practice, Practice
Bibliography
About the Authors
Index
Excerpt from Startup Communities
Advertisements
Additional Praise for Startup Life
“Being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest jobs in the world. Staying happily married is one of the others. Brad and Amy show us how to successfully do both. My wife and I loved this book. Mandatory reading for any entrepreneur who doesn’t want to live alone . . . Forever.”
—Dr. Sean Wise, Professor of Entrepreneurship & Strategy, Ryerson University
“Bursting with revealing personal insights, tested strategies and case-studies, Startup Life lays out a path to sanity and success for entrepreneurs seeking to build not only a game-changing business, but a vibrant and engaged relationship along the way.”
—Jonathan Fields, author of Uncertainty
“We’ve experienced the mix of marriage, children, and several high-growth companies and even now while helping people across the United States develop startups and startup communities the path is similar. While entrepreneurship is critical to drive our economy, navigating it as a family is extremely challenging. Amy and Brad draw on wisdom from entrepreneurs and their own life to provide a phenomenal roadmap for you to maximize the upside and minimize the downside.”
—Scott Case, CEO, Startup America Partnership & Leslie Case, Manager SAKR LLC
“Through my work as founder and CEO of National Center for Women & Information Technology, Brad and I have had numerous conversations about issues entrepreneurs, especially women; have around work-life balance. In this book, Brad and Amy cover much new ground in articulating what has worked for them and giving any entrepreneurial couple a framework for thinking about how to integrate entrepreneurial work and life.”
—Lucy Sanders, CoFounder and CEO, National Center for Women & Information Technology
Cover illustrations: Silhouetted people © 4×6/istockphoto; Business People Sitting © 4×6/istockphoto; city Background: C. Wallace
Cover design: C. Wallace
Copyright © 2013 by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor. All rights reserved.
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.
Published simultaneously in Canada.
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ISBN 978-1-118-44364-4 (cloth); 978-1-118-51686-7 (ebk); 978-1-118-51685-0 (ebk); 978-1-118-49386-1 (ebk)
To the believers and the empiricists: those who are willing to love.
PREFACE
It was the summer of 2000. The NASDAQ had peaked, and while things weren’t yet in free fall, it was clear that Internet-related companies had some major stress in front of them. Brad had spent a week on the East Coast totally maxed out in 18-hour days at numerous companies in which he was an investor. We had a relaxing weekend planned with longtime friends in Newport, Rhode Island, and Brad was looking forward to catching his breath.
A town car picked up Amy at Logan Airport and then swung by an office park in the Boston suburbs to pick up Brad. He came out of the office on his cell phone, dragging his luggage, and somehow managed to get in the car while continuing the conversation. He waved a quick hello to Amy and continued talking. The driver took off on the 90-minute drive to Newport.
About halfway there he finished his call. He hung up, turned to a moderately annoyed-looking Amy, and said a more enthusiastic hello. We chatted for a few minutes and his phone rang again. He answered immediately and launched into another conversation that lasted until we got to our friends’ house.
It was late Friday afternoon in Newport on a beautiful summer day. We settled into chairs in our friends’ backyard with a drink. Brad pulled a pile of paper out of his bag and set it in front of him. Smartphones weren’t very smart in 2000, and Wi-Fi wasn’t ubiquitous yet, so he often dragged around a bunch of stuff he had to read and used “downtime” like late Friday afternoon to grind through it.
Amy and our friends chatted while Brad turned the pages on what felt like an infinite pile of stuff to read. Eventually, it was time to head to dinner, so we all hopped in the car and went to a nice seafood restaurant in downtown Newport. Our food had just appeared when Brad’s cell phone rang. He answered it, excused himself from the table, and walked outside to take the call. Thirty minutes later he reentered the restaurant to Amy and our friends eating dessert. Amy had a profoundly annoyed look on her face, but Brad figured he would relax on Saturday and Sunday and everything would be okay.
When we got into bed an hour or so later, Brad could sense that something was wrong.
“I’m done,” said Amy.
“Yeah, this was a bitch of a week. I’ve got a couple of companies that are imploding, and it seems like nothing is going right anywhere. I’m exhausted. I’m glad it’s the weekend—I’m done with this week also,” Brad replied.
“No. I’m done. Not with the week. But with living this way. You aren’t even a good roommate anymore. I love you, but I just don’t want to live this way. I’m done.”
Silence. Even though Brad is a guy, he knew that at moments like this the goal should not be to solve the problem. As uncomfortable as it was, he let the silence sit in the air, partly because he had no idea what to say.
Eventually, Brad quietly responded, “Wow, I’ve really fucked up to get things to this point. I’m not done, but if you are, then it’s on me to try to change. I hope you’ll give me one more chance.”
Amy did. And a dozen years later, we are happier than we’ve ever been. Sure, we have our bad moments together, but they are few and far between.
That night in Rhode Island was the nadir of our marriage. This book is our effort to tell the story about how our relationship survived and how we learned to thrive in the very complex and stressful world inhabited by an entrepreneur.
AUDIENCE
This book is for any entrepreneur who wants to be in a successful relationship. It’s also for anyone who wants to be in a successful relationship with an entrepreneur. Whether you are already in a relationship, have a family, or aspire to be in a relationship, we hope you can learn and benefit from this book.
If your relationship is in trouble, this book can help. If your relationship is going well, this book can help you make it better. If you are on top of the world as a couple, this book can help you stay there.
While we’ve aimed this book specifically at entrepreneurial couples, we think the advice, stories, suggestions, and approaches here can apply to any relationship.
We’ve been together for 22 years. We’ve had major ups and downs and almost had our relationship end 12 years ago. We’ve worked hard to get to an amazing place, and have thought and talked hard about it along the way. We’ve spent many hours talking to our friends, many of whom are entrepreneurial couples, about their relationships. We’ve learned a lot, made a lot of mistakes, and figured out a lot of things.
Several years ago we decided to try to write it all down so we could share with everyone on the planet, especially as the Startup Revolution that we are so involved in spreads. This is our attempt to do that.
OVERVIEW OF THE CONTENTS
After a brief introduction, we’ll explain our philosophy around relationships and cover some specific concepts that we feel are at the core of any relationship. We’ll then spend a chapter on communication, which we believe is the foundation that every relationship is built on.
We’ll spend a chapter talking about startup company life, followed by the personality of an entrepreneur. We’ll then go deep into a set of values that we believe are key to a successful relationship for any entrepreneurial couple.
We’ll then spend time on skills, tactics, and tools that we have developed and learned over the years and applied to our relationship. We’ll talk about common issues and conflicts, and then spend a chapter on the scary big issues such as illness, relationship failure, and divorce.
We then spend entire chapters on four issues: money, children, family, and sex and romance. Since we don’t have children of our own, the children chapter is primarily contributions from entrepreneurial couples who do have children.
We finish up with a chapter titled “Enough.”
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
Startup Life is the second book in the Startup Revolution series. The Startup Revolution web site (http://startuprev.com) has links to numerous additional resources, including the Startup Life web site (http://life.startuprev.com). This site includes a blog that we regularly update with stories about different approaches to having an amazing startup life.
The first book in the Startup Revolution series is Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. The Startup Communities web site is at http://communities.startuprev.com and includes a blog that we regularly update with stories about startup communities around the world, a discussion board at http://hub.startuprev.com for those interested in talking about startup communities, events that Brad will be participating in around startup communities, and resources for anyone interested in creating a startup community.
Come join us and explore, talk about, and help create the Startup Revolution.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We have had an amazing experience writing this book together. We have been talking about it for several years and finally committed to it when Brad agreed with his publisher (Wiley) to do a series of books called Startup Revolution. We started in earnest in June 2012 during a three-month stretch where we spent the entire summer at our house in Keystone, Colorado. Other than a trip to Europe last summer where we spent 60 days together, this was the longest uninterrupted stretch of time we’ve spent together in our 22-year relationship.
While we had high hopes of writing together side by side all summer, Brad was hard at work on the first book in this series, Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. We spent some time on Startup Life, but the work really didn’t start in earnest until the beginning of September. As a result, this book is evidence that you actually can write a book largely in two months in the midst of all the other craziness of an entrepreneurial life. While several of our friends have suggested that our next book should be called Startup Author: Surviving and Thriving Writing a Book with Your Significant Other, Brad is going to get to work next on Startup Boards: Making Your Board of Directors Useful Again, and Amy is going to finish up her first novel, The North Side of Trees.
We have learned from numerous people about how to have a successful and satisfying relationship. Many of them have been entrepreneurs—some of whom we have worked with, many of whom we are close friends with, and all of whom we have incredible respect for. This book is a blend of our experiences and what we have learned from others; we couldn’t have done either our relationship or this book without the help, support, wisdom, and friendship of all of these amazing people.
There are a number of contributions throughout this book from friends of ours who are entrepreneurs or are in a relationship with an entrepreneur. They have been brave, kind, and generous enough to share their thoughts and stories, and we value both their friendship and their contributions. Following is the list, in the order they first appear in the book. Gang, you are awesome—thank you!
Geraldine DeRuiter and Rand Fishkin, Laura and Pete Sheinbaum, Ben Horowitz, Alexandra Antonioli, Jerry Colonna, Heather and Tom Chikoore, Fred and Joanne Wilson, Ellen and Howard Lindzon, David and Jil Cohen, Bart and Sarah Loreng, Paul and Reneé Berberian, Keith Smith, Jenny Lawton, Tim Enwall and Hillary Hall, Ilana and Warren Katz, Sandra and Will Herman, April and Jud Valeski, Mark Florence and Nicole Glaros, Krista Marks and Brent Milne, Ben and Emily Huh, Mariquita and Matt Blumberg, Mark and Pam Solon, Jerri and Tim Miller, and Dave Jilk and Maureen Amundson.
Brad’s assistant, Kelly Collins, continues to be a critical part of our work life, tirelessly doing whatever we ask her to do. In addition to being an extraordinary assistant to Brad, she is a good friend to both of us and is always incredibly gracious about helping Amy out with whatever she needs that intersects with Brad’s life. Kelly, we don’t know how we’d do this without your help.
The team that Brad works with at Wiley, especially Bill Falloon, Meg Freeborn, Tiffany Charbonier, and Sharon Polese, continues to be awesome.
Brad’s partners at Foundry Group—Jason Mendelson, Ryan McIntyre, and Seth Levine, along with David Cohen, the co-founder and CEO of TechStars—are a special part of our work life. Thanks for supporting us in our own journey.
Finally, there are many couples in entrepreneurial relationships with whom we have worked and been friends over the years. You inspire us every day to live life to the fullest and extract every bit of happiness out of our existence on this planet.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to Startup Life, a guide for having healthy relationships while working in the pressure cooker environment of a startup company. There are many powerful myths of the all-consuming nature of being an entrepreneur, and it is indeed difficult to balance your work life and your personal life. In fact, many people think that balance is not even worth trying for because it is a fool’s errand. Others say that starting a company is another impossible goal, and it is true that the vast majority of startups do fail. But if you’re an entrepreneur who loves your company and also happens to be in love with a particular person, you’re not going to be stopped by naysayers or discouraged by the difficulty of the challenge of trying to do two hard things at once. If you’re stubborn and committed to creating both a company and a relationship, this book will help you and your partner work together to clarify and communicate your core values, experiment to discover which relationship techniques work for you, and build a long-term life together while you’re building your company. If you already have a company and are thinking of adding a relationship to what is already a complex system, or you have an existing love relationship and are considering embarking on building a company, this book is for you.
Our goal with this book is to help entrepreneurs and their partners have a healthier notion of what startup life looks like and to decide together what success means to you. There is a lot of buzz about work-life balance, much of it rather defeatist regarding the possibility of figuring out a sustainable solution. We’d like to counter some of the myths about the necessity of a maniacal work life and the notion that more hours at work increases the success rate of startups. The goal should be to work smarter, not harder, and to be efficient and deliberate about where you spend your time. We want couples to examine their preconceived notions of what the startup life entails, and see whether they can create a path that works for them in the face of powerful and persistent mythologies about entrepreneurship.
We’d like this book to serve as a tool to help people think about what they want their lives to look like and be, in an entrepreneurial environment and in a longer and broader time frame. It can be used as a guide for exploration within an existing relationship, clarifying values and needs, and making it easier to have conversations about difficult topics. It’s also optimistic and encouraging about the possibility of starting a relationship while you’re already on an entrepreneurial adventure.
It’s hard to create a startup company. It’s hard to create a healthy long-lasting relationship. It’s incredibly hard to try to do both of these things at the same time, or to start one or the other while in the midst of an existing startup or relationship. Both experiences can reveal things about yourself that are surprising, disappointing, changeable, immutable, such as whether you believe people change over time or that there’s always room for self-improvement. Or that loving someone means accepting everything about them just as it is.
You will hear us say over and over again that the first principle of relationships, and startups, is communication. Without consistent, effective, honest communication, your relationship situation will be much more challenging. If you have different communication styles, use words as weapons, or expect your partner to be a mind reader, you are going to have to solve the fundamental issues around communication before you can tackle anything else. You can try a wide range of techniques, seek professional help, or enlist your best qualities to have effective communication within your relationship. Any efforts to improve communication are worthwhile, even if results can take time to be visible. We will harp on this notion throughout the book without apology. A commitment to being the best communicator you can be is a good place to start, and to return to, throughout your startup life.
One of our basic premises is that language matters. What you call your relationship matters. What you call yourself in public and private matters. What words you use when to speak to each other matters. The words you use when you talk about your relationship and your work to other people matters.
The second principle we’re going to emphasize is core values, and communication is obviously a precursor to figuring out what your core values are. Shared values are what keep you together over time. They are part of what initially brought you together as a couple. You will clarify these values together over time. Being able to articulate your personal priorities will help you direct your energy in the directions that will bring your goals to fruition. Having a mission statement for your company is a fundamental part of keeping the ship headed in the right direction, and having the same kind of alignment with your partner can make for much easier sailing. This book will help you communicate about what your core values are and how to live them.
HETERONORMATIVE LANGUAGE AND PARTNERSHIPS
Our language, rich and varied though it is, still lacks words for life partner or significant other that are more romantic and less businesslike but don’t imply or require heterosexual relationships. Furthermore, your business partner and your life partner can be the same person. Throughout this book we will use the word partner to indicate spouse, beloved, intimate other, soul mate, or whatever you call the person with whom you’re working on a lifelong commitment. We will try to use inclusive language without confusing business partner with life partner. We will use the word partnership or relationship to mean marriage, cohabitation, and any form of long-term romantic intimate relationship that two people enter into. You’ll also hear us refer to this throughout the book as an entrepreneurial relationship.
We want to say at the outset that we support all committed relationships, and that we fully support the right of our LGBTQ friends to have the same legal benefits afforded by the marriage contract as we do, even though we’re not certain why the government confers any benefits at all. We cared so little about the legal part of marriage that we didn’t get a marriage license until three years after we eloped to Alaska. We didn’t claim any tax deductions, insurance benefits, or even free spousal rental car privileges during that time, but it didn’t change the essential nature of our connection to have a piece of paper from the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder’s Office. As part of our premise that language matters, being able to call your husband or your wife those things instead of boyfriend or girlfriend, or partner, is a different level of seriousness in our society. We look forward to the day when people who love each other are able to share all the meanings of the word spouse. Entrepreneurs who are in committed relationships and don’t intend to get married, whether they’re legally able to or not, are also covered by the word partner.
OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS
We aren’t right about everything. Our path is only one of the myriad ways that people have figured out how to be happy together. We’ve asked a bunch of entrepreneurs and their partners to share their advice, approaches, and stories of success and failure. We appreciate their willingness to share what are often difficult stories. We are here to say that it can be done, and we applaud anyone who manages to stay together in these parlous times. We’re not claiming to have some magic book of wisdom, although our secret sauce can add some spice to your relationship. What we do know is that it takes real dedication, hard work, top-notch communication skills, and a sense of humor to find your particular path together in this world.
We want to prevent lovely people who love each other from ever reaching the point that Rand Fishkin, the CEO of SEOmoz, describes here. We agree with everything he shares about how he and his wife, Geraldine de Ruiter, a travel blogger and writer at Everywhereist.com, are trying to get through the current struggle of building an extraordinary business while having an amazing relationship.
Being happily committed is an achievement and a huge and difficult accomplishment. Some of the habits you need to develop to get there are like flossing your teeth—they are good habits that take only a small amount of time, but you can’t make up for the missing days. Others are like preventative medicine that helps you keep your love healthy on a regular basis. Yet others are like regular checkups at the doctor that you do on a semiannual basis, while the rest are profound and deep behaviors that require years of commitment to master.
We are trying to share what we have learned in hopes that it will make it easier for you to have a fulfilling and purposeful life, which we believe needs both work and love to be complete. We hope this books helps people who are trying to build an intimate relationship at the same time they’re building their startup company. If we help a single startup relationship, we’ve succeeded.
CHAPTER TWO
PHILOSOPHY
Conventional wisdom says that entrepreneurs can’t have work-life balance. It’s repeated over and over that entrepreneurship is an “all-in” experience and the partner of the entrepreneur has to accept that he is playing second fiddle to the entrepreneur’s startup.
We completely reject this notion. We reject the idea that the more you work, the better the outcome. We reject that time spent on work matters more than having a fulfilling life. And we reject the notion that an entrepreneur should defer her experience of a full life for “after her business has been successful,” especially since that day may never arrive.
We strongly believe that every entrepreneur, whether 21 and working on your first startup, or 57 and a multi-time successful entrepreneur starting a new company, benefits from having room in her life for relationships. Your startup is a part of your life, not your entire life. Both you and your startup will be more successful if you have a full experience on this planet.
The historical notion of retirement reinforces the idea that you work hard until later in your life, squeezing in everything else, and defer your exploration of all the nonwork things until you retire. This construct completely misses the point that you have no idea when the lights will go out. As a result, deferring the experience of a full life until you are finished with work may result in your never getting to live the life you want. The cliché of a businessperson’s retiring to travel around the world with his partner and dying shortly after retirement is a sad one, but it reinforces the error of deferring the life part of the equation.
Entrepreneurship is really hard. So are relationships. In the same way that failure should be accepted in startups, it should be accepted in relationships. No one is perfect; mistakes will be made—often. Entrepreneurs are told to “fail fast”—make a mistake, learn from it, pivot, and move on. This doesn’t mean quit your startup, but it does mean not to linger on the mistake once you’ve figured out why it happened and what you can do better the next time. The same is true with relationships: own your mistakes, learn from them, and move on.
Patience, a sense of humor, and willingness to forgive are excellent qualities to cultivate in yourself and to encourage in your partner. There are going to be challenging times in any business and in any relationship; having high but reasonable expectations that your relationship will endure through whatever comes is an important piece of the picture for long-term success.
COMMUNICATION
We are going to say this one over and over again: communication is the most important factor in having a successful relationship.
Knowing this and practicing this can be two very different things, especially in an always on, always urgent environment. We will give you some simple tactics to practice. The hard part is making time to do them. The point is for you and your partner to figure out what works for you, keep practicing those techniques, and try new things if something starts to feel stale or just stops working for either one of you. You can circle back to retry techniques that used to work in the past that have been set aside for any reason. Sometimes we drift away from a habit and find that reinstating it can feel fresh and useful and we wonder why we ever stopped.
We’ve put the best, most obvious, and sometimes most difficult value first on the list, which is where it should go in your relationship. Communication builds trust, connection, and intimacy, and is absolutely the most vital underpinning to a successful relationship. For some couples, communication is easy, except when topics are difficult. Not being able to talk about unresolved issues, having different communication styles, or being conflict avoidant are common barriers to effective communication. It can be challenging to take responsibility for saying what you want and need. Your partner is not a mind reader, nor can you read your partner’s mind even if you think you can. Each of you has an obligation to be brave when it comes to initiating communication and working through issues. Some issues don’t ever get completely resolved but come up through a relationship over and over again; issues that seemed resolved can crop up again if one of you changes your opinion or has an experience that steers you in a different direction.
If your relationship is relatively new, you won’t have a shared history and track record of successful communication with positive outcomes to rely on. But you also have the excitement and chemistry of newness to offset that. We believe that getting to really know your partner is a lifelong journey, and that you can always learn something new about each other, whether you’ve been together for months, years, or decades.
A fairly obvious but vital part of communication is humor. A lot of anger or built-up frustration can be defused with humor, but it’s also important that the aggrieved partner feels heard and feels like they’re being taken seriously. As with many things, timing is important. You’ll figure out what works for you, and also discover that there aren’t necessarily consistent responses from your partner. Figuring out your rhythm, signals, cues, and nonverbal gestures can take time, and there may be unpleasant learning experiences along the way.
Another crucial area for communication is to talk about expectations, limits, boundaries, and being clear on what is unforgivable behavior to each of you. Addiction, infidelity, and violence are potentially some of the reasons that a partner might state are beyond the point of no return for her. We have a friend who says, at least partly seriously, that a serious religious conversion experience in her partner would be a relationship-ending event, primarily because her partner would be a completely different person than he had been throughout the course of their relationship. The work involved in each of you knowing for yourself what is intolerable, and then having the courage to be clear about it with your partner, is work that will strengthen you as individuals and as a couple.
PRIORITIES
There are times when the highest priority is getting the next product release out the door. Try not to schedule these for Friday afternoons, knowing that you will likely create a scenario where it drifts into Friday night, and then Saturday, and then Sunday, especially if you’ve already committed to spending time with your partner. Be realistic about the ebb and flow of the work cycle, and make sure that there actually are ebb times.
None of this means there won’t be stretches of intense work that dominate everything else for days, weeks, or even months. Communicating clearly when these stretches will happen is critical. In this book, we’ll give you plenty of tools for dealing with this, as well as for creating a cadence that can actually work, even in the context of these very intense periods of time.
Knowing for yourself and sharing a commitment with your partner that your relationship is a high priority, and sometimes is the highest priority of all, will make it easier to adapt to intense work times and to make more time for the two of you when there is an ebb time. If your company really has no cycles of lower intensity or you feel like you can never take a week away, that’s an indicator that you have work to do to grow your company structure to support healthier lives for you as well as your employees. The actual long-term highest priority is to have a good life, with room for both love and work.
MOTIVATION
Many different things motivate people. Motivation as a psychological topic has been studied since at least the 1970s, and most researchers divide motivation into extrinsic (or external) and intrinsic (or internal). Extrinsic motivation occurs when you do something in order to attain an outcome, like monetary rewards, grades, or gold stars, or avoiding punishment or negative emotions like shame, guilt, or humiliation. Enjoying the task itself rather than working for some other reward drives intrinsic motivation. For some, like Brad, intrinsic motivation dominates. Others, like Amy, are more balanced between intrinsic and extrinsic. Yet others are dominated by extrinsic motivation. Understanding what drives you, and what drives your partner, is critical to a successful startup life.
In the 1980s, Ed Roberts (MIT’s David Sarnoff Professor of Management of Technology; founder and chair, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship) determined that some entrepreneurs are driven by the need for achievement while others are driven by the need for independence. In our experience, we’ve observed that some entrepreneurs are driven by the joy of success while others are driven by the fear of failure. There is an ongoing conversation about what motivates entrepreneurs and whether they’re as comfortable with risk as the myths indicate, or whether they’re motivated by not wanting to risk a life in a cubicle. If the entrepreneur is motivated by success, the inevitable ups and downs of any company can be more emotionally dramatic than for an entrepreneur who is motivated by creating a lasting enterprise.
Understanding what motivates your partner is essential to having a successful relationship over a long period of time. Assuming that what motivates you also motivates your partner, especially if your partner is an entrepreneur, can create a chasm of misunderstanding between you. We’ll give you plenty of suggestions and perspectives on this throughout the book, but like many things, it starts with communicating what you think motivates each of you.
LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP
Part of the fascinating thing about being in a relationship is that it thrusts a mirror in your face so that you see your own behavior more clearly, which can sometimes be hard to take. The paradoxes and internal inconsistencies in each of us are root causes of all manner of conflicts, and often make our partner feel like they are involved with a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character. In Chapter 5 we explore common dichotomies in the entrepreneurial personality, and in Chapter 8 we discuss how common issues and conflicts often arise from the entrepreneurial personality.
We believe that a healthy relationship helps you become your best self. You have an opportunity to feel safe and encouraged by your partner, as well as the reciprocal opportunity to be supportive and encouraging. As part of thinking about what you want your life narrative to look like, consider what kind of story you want to be able to tell about yourself. Being thoughtful, kind, honest, challenging when appropriate, and supportive in hard times are qualities that you want to be able to practice and improve upon. And you want to encourage these qualities in your partner.
Two excellent books on marriage (or committed partnerships) are For Better: How the Surprising Science of Happy Couples Can Help Your Marriage Succeed by Tara Parker Pope and Spousonomics: Using Economics to Master Love, Marriage, and Dirty Dishes by Paula Szuchman and Jenny Anderson. Both books examine what makes a good marriage and what specific things you can do to ensure that yours is one of the happy ones. For Better includes chapters on the science of conflict and the science of sex. Spousonomics uses economic principles like loss aversion, cost-benefit analyses, incentives, and metrics to monitor the ongoing health of your partnership.
Reciprocity is a high value in personal and business relationships. This doesn’t mean tit for tat counting up who did what, but a general sense that both of you are working at making your relationship as great as it can be. Checking in regularly to find out whether you both feel like you’re putting in equal effort or being asked to sacrifice more than your fair share is a fundamental communication habit. As children we were all taught that life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean that a sense of fairness isn’t a good virtue to cultivate in your relationships.
If one of you feels that he is doing all the sacrificing, that’s not going to be sustainable over the long run. It can be good to clearly articulate whose turn it is to be the supportive one, and if your business has certain cycles of craziness (for example, retail products that must be launched in time for Q4 holiday season), you can plan for that and either buffer some extra time together in advance or schedule something special for the aftermath, or both. We like to use a savings account metaphor for this. You can build up a surplus of togetherness and then drain the account down, and you can do some short-term deficit spending, but you need to balance the books regularly. Our Qx quarterly vacation off the grid, which we discuss in Chapter 7 along with other tactics that we have discovered, fulfills this function for us, as well as restoring sleep and energy for all sorts of adult activities that might feel like onerous tasks when work is particularly demanding.
We believe in thinking long term—like a lifetime. If you want to be in a committed relationship with the same person for decades, you need to have a sense of growing together and creating positive and healthy patterns and habits that will build and persist throughout your life together. We believe in having high expectations for yourself and your partner, but also learning how to forgive and practicing that on a regular basis.
Just as good patterns build over time to create a strong foundation for your relationship, the dark side is that bad patterns accrete as well. Resentment, anger, power, control, and other difficult emotions also become more deeply entrenched with repetition of a trigger and an automatic response. It takes hard work to create positive patterns and attention to when bad habits are developing and address the underlying feelings and root causes of the pattern.
TIME COMMITMENT
How many hours a day can you commit to spending time with your beloved? What about weekly? Monthly? Setting these expectations, communicating about what is a reasonable amount of time to both of you, and trying to meet somewhere in the middle is a good benchmark to set. It’s also a way to have data-driven accountability and goal setting, which suits many entrepreneurs’ personalities.
We like to keep track both subjectively and objectively. Measuring quantifiable data can occasionally be very useful, especially if you have widely divergent ideas of how much time the entrepreneur is working or how frequently you do fun social activities without staring at your phone the entire time. Although it was never going to be reasonable to think that Brad would work 40 hours a week, there were times when we did track Brad’s weekly hours with an upper limit of 80 hours a week. There are 168 hours in a week, minus 80 working hours, minus 49 hours for sleeping 7 hours a night, which still leaves 39 hours for doing fun things together—almost a “normal” work week’s amount of time. We also defined work as “any time Brad isn’t available to play,” so that a conference call from home was still work.
We haven’t had to track actual hours together versus hours working in a while, but having real data can be a great starting point for conversations about how much work is enough or sustainable or what the ebbs and peaks really look like. Setting specific measurable concrete goals for your personal life can be just as useful at home as it is at work.
UNCERTAINTY
There has been a great deal of research and writing on what happiness is and how to achieve it. Going through the relationship section of a bookstore or the hundreds of thousands of books that show up on Amazon under the search for “relationship” will keep you busy for a very long time. While many of these cover goal orientation, communication, willpower, and the power of positive thinking, they rarely touch on what is at the core of a startup life: uncertainty. We’ll go deep on that throughout this book, how to think about it as a couple, and how to address it constructively in the context of a long-term relationship.
PERSISTENCE
While this may sometimes be described as stubbornness, or can trend into the deep waters of being unwilling to listen and change your mind, the same dogged determination to make your company succeed is an excellent trait to bring to your relationship. Being willing is a vital trait: willing to compromise, willing to change, and, above all, willing to keep trying in your relationship no matter how difficult things may become. Knowing that your partner is willing to do what it takes to make your relationship happy is a great trust builder. You may each have histories full of break-ups, or parental divorce, or just a generalized skepticism about the possibilities of love, and persistence may mean needing to reduce your own readiness to run away. Ideally, you are, or are becoming, or want to become, reasonable adults, in this thing for the long haul.
HAPPINESS AND THE POWER OF HABITS
There is a relatively new body of research on happiness and positive psychology that reveals what actually works to make people happy. Each individual is unique, but there are data showing what creates happiness. Having strong intimate relationships is, not surprisingly, an important factor in overall happiness. While a certain amount of happiness comes from your genetics, there are many things within your control that you can do to be a happier person and to have a happier relationship. Some of the useful books in this area include:
Martin Seligman’s
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment
; and
Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being
Daniel Gilbert’s
Stumbling on Happiness
Sonja Lyubomirsky’s
The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want
Gretchen Rubin’s
The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun
; and
Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life
Charles Duhigg’s
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
It’s important to decide that you do indeed want to be happy and then explore what works for you and for your partner to create a happy life together.
