> What about married founders. Isn't it very important to have an understanding wife? The understanding can have a time, cost and cashflow/earnings limit. At o

> What about married founders. Isn't it very important to have an understanding wife? The understanding can have a time, cost and cashflow/earnings limit. At one of my start-ups, of the first dozen co-founders or staff (who received sweat equity at +2%), I was the only singleton. After 18 months it was clear some wives (all staff was male, except for our designer) were beginning to feel that their husbands weren't spending enough time with them, earning enough from the project in the short-term or that they couldn't take vacations as frequently or for long enough. At around two and a half years, there was a revolt by the wives, who had come to know each other, and we had to change some of our practices within the company to accommodate them, or we'd lose staff and potentially many months of development, when we were reasonably close to finishing our first major & deployable build. We were quite open amongst ourselves in discussing the issue, but a considerable problem was that our product (corporate software) had a long & detailed development period and revenue generation was delayed longer than anticipated. Our alpha/guinea pig testing of our product hit has some snags as a result of the revolt and ultimately revenue generation has been further delayed as well. I can understand their perspective and we have tried to accommodate them, but our view (co-founders and senior staff) is that this is our "retirement fund" and we want it to be successful in the medium and long term, not a short-term small cash generator.