I've also seen startups destroyed by a founder divorce, but a pre-nup wouldn't/didn't help. The problem (in all 3 cases) was that the founder's concentration,

I've also seen startups destroyed by a founder divorce, but a pre-nup wouldn't/didn't help. The problem (in all 3 cases) was that the founder's concentration, drive, motivation, and confidence was destroyed. Divorce is hugely emotionally tumultuous: people going through it usually do not have the mental bandwidth to spend on something as attention-demanding as a startup. It also usually leads to big changes in lifestyle, goals, and motivations: many folks I know who have gotten divorced completely reexamine what's important in their life. (In some cases, this leads to the divorce rather than the other way around.) Very often a startup, or the specific startup they're working on, isn't one of those things once the dust settles. The lesson I took from it wasn't to get a pre-nup, it was to invest time in your relationship even while doing the startup, and get your spouse on-board with it. That's somewhat incompatible with the Silicon Valley image of a maniacal laser-focused startup founder, but then, a large number of them have a wreckage of a personal life that ultimately ends up costing them a lot of what they've made in startups.