First Comes Love, Then Comes Launching A Business

Cofounders often joke that their relationship is as complicated as a marriage. Three coping techniques for when your cofounder is your better half.

- Kate Rockwood

Heather and Allan Staker used to have date nights. Then the married couple launched a startup together. “Friday date night would turn into eating Indian food in front of our laptops,” Heather says. “I was starting to feel overwhelmed—we were always together, but we were always working. I went to see a life coach, who told me, ‘You’ve got to stay in love with each other, apart from your business.’ ” So they came up with a rule: No computers on date nights. It wasn’t easy, but they stuck to it. And with technology banished, their special dinners became a time to connect and talk as spouses rather than as cofounders. Their online educational program, Brain Chase, could wait.

The benefits of starting a business with a loved one seem obvious: You’re working with a person you trust, and whom you already know you enjoy spending time with. There are plenty of high-profile success stories—Cisco, Eventbrite, Popsugar, ModCloth, and SlideShare were all started by couples—to serve as inspiration for marrying business and love. But even the best partnerships can be strained by the stresses of running a business. Finding dedicated time for a relationship when there are shared work responsibilities to be delegated, staff to be managed, and conflicts to be resolved is no joke. And that’s why when things go wrong, perhaps nobody has it worse than partners who are both in love and in business: The stakes can be so much higher.

“It’s not utopia for everybody,” says Glenn Muske, a professor at North Dakota State University who has tracked the same group of 200 partnered co-founders (or “co-preneurs”) since 1997. “We find that co-preneurs feel they’re more successful, both in business and in their personal lives. But you have to go into it with your eyes wide open.”