9 ms·

Confessions of an Entrepreneur's Wife

111 points by hwijaya 18y ago

jimboyoungblood 18y ago
Bonus reading: http://www.bevnet.com/bevblog/2007/11/new-book-on-the-switch-disappoints/ http://www.bevnet.com/bevblog/2007/11/new-book-on-the-switch...
- jaxn 17y ago
  Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.
- jaxn 17y ago
  Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.
- tc 17y ago
  Best quote: Neither of the company's two founders, nor any of their successors, can alter the product's basic economics. This former executive claims they were trying to sell a product for $1.29 that cost them more than $1.00 to produce and distribute. If true, this sealed the company's fate regardless of any drama or inattention to detail.
edw519 18y ago
"When I think about those start-up days, I realize I've given up far more than I had planned. Years of writing, of books and magazine articles I could have published. I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships. I lament the toll on Bill's health, and Lily had no choice in giving up precious years with her father." Therein lies the biggest difference between the entrepreneur and the non-entrepreneur: he looks ahead and she looks back.
- prospero 18y ago
  Being an entrepreneur means that you can't reflect on the consequences of past choices?
  - edw519 18y ago
    Never said that. I also never met an entrepreneur that would have said OP's quote either.
trevelyan 18y ago
This woman sounds remarkably selfish. She admits to not working during the three years her husband was starting the company and spending summers on vacation with her child learning Spanish, yet her catalog of grievances includes the strange claim she has lost time that could have been spent publishing and socializing. Couldn't she have churned out a couple of articles while on vacation in Spain? Or maybe have saved some cash by spending the summer at home. Unbelievable.
- bonsaitree 17y ago
  Agreed. Rich people complaining about trials and tribulations regarding conditions they can actively change and/or control. The author's comments and general attitude have all the earmarks of a "trust-funded" childhood.
- breck 17y ago
  Really? I think sharing this personal story with all the details is a very unselfish thing. I would say the exact opposite. I think giving up her husband so he could work all that time, and raising their daughter practically alone, is very unselfish.
  - alexitosrv 17y ago
    She tries to present the facts, but her insatisfaction skews the story. Actually, I think sharing this personal story with all the details mainly from her viewpoint can be deemed as selfish behavior.
- granular 17y ago
  I agree. She wants him to work his ass off, and when he does, complains about not having him around. And to top it off, she stops working on her own profession, gets depressed, and then considers leaving him (which would entail taking his child away from him). She says, "but I couldn't stop picking fights about his lack of time at home.". Nice, kick him while he's down. Later -- talking about sales in general -- she adds, "When he convinces me to stay married to him, he's selling me on the better future we will have together.". So, he's got to convince you regularly to stay married to him, eh? For better or worse too old fashioned I guess. Regarding what she's given up: "I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships." Near the end she says: "I'm betting that before too long, Bill will decide to do it all again." Keep holding out your hope for all that money.
psranga 17y ago
I was bothered by the lack of introspection in the article.
- timr 17y ago
  Oh, come on...a long, well-written essay, and the best you can do is a one-line swipe at the author? At least explain why you think she lacks introspection! The comment voting here is getting to be really bad.
christofd 17y ago
What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his brand, because he didn't specify the contract under which they created design work for him, is telling. He seems like an energetic and very creative sales guy, who burns easily through money, but doesn't look at details enough. Also, his staff turnover rate doesn't sound good either. Why is he always so unstable? Come on, if you have an account like Costco or 7Eleven, you are making money. You should be able to run a stable business taking it from there - but then the job is not about being that creative anymore but about operations (just like in a big company). An entrepreneur friend of mine, who has been in business for over 40 years always says: "It's not what you make, it's what you keep!". Entrepreneurship does not need to be this extreme as it's portrayed here. I know enough company owners that coach sports for youth teams on the weekends and spend enough time with family.
- menloparkbum 17y ago
  What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. It says he was the manager of an industrial laundry facility prior to being a cofounder of a soft drink startup. Those sound like wildly different roles. He could have just been totally over his head. The first startup I worked at hired a bunch of corporate IT execs and former management consultants to be executives. Their old jobs seemed more related to their new ones than the guy in the article, yet they were still totally out of their element. They always tried to spend their way out of a hole, which always put us further in financial jeopardy. It sounds like the guy in the article tried to manage his company by doing the same sort of spending.
- HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
  It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps. The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business. Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.
mahmud 17y ago
What a whiner. My girlfriend is a musician, and a very driven and inspired woman. I don't think she will ever describe herself so publicly as ${MALE_ADJECTIVE}'s wife. Stop deriving your identity and self-worth from your partner; writing is not the sort of thing that one has to put on hold because one's partner is busy making business .. quite the contrary, the fucker is busy at home and away, crack those fingers and get cracking!
knightinblue 17y ago
I love the design of their site - www.switchbev.com
- inglorian 17y ago
  Yeah, that flash intro that you can't skip isn't at all annoying...
  - knightinblue 17y ago
    I meant the 'switch between what you want and what you don't want'. It's creative.
DannoHung 17y ago
How do you have a situation where you make a funding deal, the guys only come through with half, and they still get their equity share?
- pclark 17y ago
  desperation
- ams6110 17y ago
  I've personally seen it happen twice. A company that has a reasonably well developed product is short on cash. Some "white knight" appears with a big investment, but the deal drags out, the company is forced into bankruptcy, and the so-called savior acquires it for a fraction of the original investment amount. Seeing this same scenario here makes me think it must be a common predatory tactic. Lesson is, if you've got a good product but are short on cash, be very wary of big investors.
sutro 17y ago
This is one of the better pieces linked to from HN in some time, yet most of the comments here are critical of either the author or her husband or both. Critics, please raise your hands if either you or your spouse has raised $10M in a depressed economy, nationally launched a new consumer product into a hyper-competitive industry, and achieved multi-million dollar revenues while trying to hold a marriage and family together. Anyone? Bueller?
- christofd 17y ago
  What's questionable about the article is that it portrays entrepreneurship being so extreme and anti-social. It's about running a business. Bill doesn't do a good job here. He's great at marketing and raising money but that's not what a company survives on and continues to pay people's paychecks and paying back his investors. Summary: the company founder did a poor job at taking care of employees, investors and his own family. Is this considered desirable behavior these days? I thought we learned something from two market crashes after 2000. This is basically a typical reckless Gen-Xer dot-com story risking it all and going broke. I'm amazed his investors (which got screwed) even gave him money.
  - sutro 17y ago
    You imply that you could have done better. So please share your relevant comparable experience. Ever raise $10M and bear the weight of those investor expectations? Ever been CEO of a multi-million dollar company? Ever launch a manufactured consumer product? I suspect that it might be a bit difficult. I suspect that what is best for your investors, your partners, your employees, your customers, your family, and yourself might not always be the same thing, which I suspect might lead to many difficult decisions along the way, decisions which unfortunately will later get called into question by a peanut gallery of HN readers who consider themselves business experts because they've built a couple of websites.
    - christofd 17y ago
      Well, I've raised and received an acquisition offer of about that number, but the startup team quickly disintegrated. Guess what, I don't put this on my resume! It was a failure and caused a major fallout under several friends! Regarding the "built a couple of websites" - I've worked for startups in bioinformatics/ AI and for public research projects with several million bucks funding. I'm sorry but my heroes are company owners that can sustain a business for a long time and give back to the community. Not quick scams that screw over investors. I know quite a few startup founders (in IT) here in Ontario, Canada, that know how to support their people. And these aren't guys building websites, but in the 'top 10 awards, up and coming in Canada'.
Andys 17y ago
> the CEO said, "it's better to have 1 percent of 10 million than 100 percent of nothing." A false dichotomy, surely. The voice in the back of my head says its better to have >=50% of something small with real, stable growing than 1% of 10 million where you are trying to outsmart the wolf packs of the VC industry.
keltecp11 17y ago
This is really well done... some relationships in my life have certainly been affected by, well you get it.

111 points by hwijaya 18y ago

Bonus reading: http://www.bevnet.com/bevblog/2007/11/new-book-on-the-switch-disappoints/ http://www.bevnet.com/bevblog/2007/11/new-book-on-the-switch...

jaxn 17y ago
Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.
jaxn 17y ago
Wow, the comments on that thread are great! Thanks for the link.
tc 17y ago
Best quote: Neither of the company's two founders, nor any of their successors, can alter the product's basic economics. This former executive claims they were trying to sell a product for $1.29 that cost them more than $1.00 to produce and distribute. If true, this sealed the company's fate regardless of any drama or inattention to detail.

edw519 18y ago

"When I think about those start-up days, I realize I've given up far more than I had planned. Years of writing, of books and magazine articles I could have published. I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships. I lament the toll on Bill's health, and Lily had no choice in giving up precious years with her father." Therein lies the biggest difference between the entrepreneur and the non-entrepreneur: he looks ahead and she looks back.

prospero 18y ago
Being an entrepreneur means that you can't reflect on the consequences of past choices?
- edw519 18y ago
  Never said that. I also never met an entrepreneur that would have said OP's quote either.

trevelyan 18y ago

This woman sounds remarkably selfish. She admits to not working during the three years her husband was starting the company and spending summers on vacation with her child learning Spanish, yet her catalog of grievances includes the strange claim she has lost time that could have been spent publishing and socializing. Couldn't she have churned out a couple of articles while on vacation in Spain? Or maybe have saved some cash by spending the summer at home. Unbelievable.

bonsaitree 17y ago
Agreed. Rich people complaining about trials and tribulations regarding conditions they can actively change and/or control. The author's comments and general attitude have all the earmarks of a "trust-funded" childhood.
breck 17y ago
Really? I think sharing this personal story with all the details is a very unselfish thing. I would say the exact opposite. I think giving up her husband so he could work all that time, and raising their daughter practically alone, is very unselfish.
- alexitosrv 17y ago
  She tries to present the facts, but her insatisfaction skews the story. Actually, I think sharing this personal story with all the details mainly from her viewpoint can be deemed as selfish behavior.
granular 17y ago
I agree. She wants him to work his ass off, and when he does, complains about not having him around. And to top it off, she stops working on her own profession, gets depressed, and then considers leaving him (which would entail taking his child away from him). She says, "but I couldn't stop picking fights about his lack of time at home.". Nice, kick him while he's down. Later -- talking about sales in general -- she adds, "When he convinces me to stay married to him, he's selling me on the better future we will have together.". So, he's got to convince you regularly to stay married to him, eh? For better or worse too old fashioned I guess. Regarding what she's given up: "I lost a friendship, an airplane, a lot of money. I sacrificed years of socializing that could have sparked new friendships." Near the end she says: "I'm betting that before too long, Bill will decide to do it all again." Keep holding out your hope for all that money.

psranga 17y ago

I was bothered by the lack of introspection in the article.

timr 17y ago
Oh, come on...a long, well-written essay, and the best you can do is a one-line swipe at the author? At least explain why you think she lacks introspection! The comment voting here is getting to be really bad.

christofd 17y ago

What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. The story with his design company almost owning his brand, because he didn't specify the contract under which they created design work for him, is telling. He seems like an energetic and very creative sales guy, who burns easily through money, but doesn't look at details enough. Also, his staff turnover rate doesn't sound good either. Why is he always so unstable? Come on, if you have an account like Costco or 7Eleven, you are making money. You should be able to run a stable business taking it from there - but then the job is not about being that creative anymore but about operations (just like in a big company). An entrepreneur friend of mine, who has been in business for over 40 years always says: "It's not what you make, it's what you keep!". Entrepreneurship does not need to be this extreme as it's portrayed here. I know enough company owners that coach sports for youth teams on the weekends and spend enough time with family.

menloparkbum 17y ago
What I don't get is why this guy (Bill, the entrepreneur) is always teetering on the brink of disaster. It says he was the manager of an industrial laundry facility prior to being a cofounder of a soft drink startup. Those sound like wildly different roles. He could have just been totally over his head. The first startup I worked at hired a bunch of corporate IT execs and former management consultants to be executives. Their old jobs seemed more related to their new ones than the guy in the article, yet they were still totally out of their element. They always tried to spend their way out of a hole, which always put us further in financial jeopardy. It sounds like the guy in the article tried to manage his company by doing the same sort of spending.
HeyLaughingBoy 17y ago
It's probably a very low-margin business and that doesn't leave much room for error. Software businesses are about the highest-margin ones out there and that can skew your perceptions when you look at other fields. I think this guy took on a lot more than he expected to and that was the source of a lot of the problems: energy only takes you so far. At some point you need actual knowledge and that's where hiring experts helps. The instability comes from the fact that he's not just getting these big contracts, but at the same time is trying to grow rapidly. Were he just to settle at a certain level of sales and stay there for a few years, he'd probably be running a profitable, but smaller business. Instead he swung for the fences and struck out.

mahmud 17y ago

What a whiner. My girlfriend is a musician, and a very driven and inspired woman. I don't think she will ever describe herself so publicly as ${MALE_ADJECTIVE}'s wife. Stop deriving your identity and self-worth from your partner; writing is not the sort of thing that one has to put on hold because one's partner is busy making business .. quite the contrary, the fucker is busy at home and away, crack those fingers and get cracking!

knightinblue 17y ago

I love the design of their site - www.switchbev.com

inglorian 17y ago
Yeah, that flash intro that you can't skip isn't at all annoying...
- knightinblue 17y ago
  I meant the 'switch between what you want and what you don't want'. It's creative.

DannoHung 17y ago

How do you have a situation where you make a funding deal, the guys only come through with half, and they still get their equity share?

pclark 17y ago
desperation
ams6110 17y ago
I've personally seen it happen twice. A company that has a reasonably well developed product is short on cash. Some "white knight" appears with a big investment, but the deal drags out, the company is forced into bankruptcy, and the so-called savior acquires it for a fraction of the original investment amount. Seeing this same scenario here makes me think it must be a common predatory tactic. Lesson is, if you've got a good product but are short on cash, be very wary of big investors.

sutro 17y ago

This is one of the better pieces linked to from HN in some time, yet most of the comments here are critical of either the author or her husband or both. Critics, please raise your hands if either you or your spouse has raised $10M in a depressed economy, nationally launched a new consumer product into a hyper-competitive industry, and achieved multi-million dollar revenues while trying to hold a marriage and family together. Anyone? Bueller?

christofd 17y ago
What's questionable about the article is that it portrays entrepreneurship being so extreme and anti-social. It's about running a business. Bill doesn't do a good job here. He's great at marketing and raising money but that's not what a company survives on and continues to pay people's paychecks and paying back his investors. Summary: the company founder did a poor job at taking care of employees, investors and his own family. Is this considered desirable behavior these days? I thought we learned something from two market crashes after 2000. This is basically a typical reckless Gen-Xer dot-com story risking it all and going broke. I'm amazed his investors (which got screwed) even gave him money.
- sutro 17y ago
  You imply that you could have done better. So please share your relevant comparable experience. Ever raise $10M and bear the weight of those investor expectations? Ever been CEO of a multi-million dollar company? Ever launch a manufactured consumer product? I suspect that it might be a bit difficult. I suspect that what is best for your investors, your partners, your employees, your customers, your family, and yourself might not always be the same thing, which I suspect might lead to many difficult decisions along the way, decisions which unfortunately will later get called into question by a peanut gallery of HN readers who consider themselves business experts because they've built a couple of websites.
  - christofd 17y ago
    Well, I've raised and received an acquisition offer of about that number, but the startup team quickly disintegrated. Guess what, I don't put this on my resume! It was a failure and caused a major fallout under several friends! Regarding the "built a couple of websites" - I've worked for startups in bioinformatics/ AI and for public research projects with several million bucks funding. I'm sorry but my heroes are company owners that can sustain a business for a long time and give back to the community. Not quick scams that screw over investors. I know quite a few startup founders (in IT) here in Ontario, Canada, that know how to support their people. And these aren't guys building websites, but in the 'top 10 awards, up and coming in Canada'.

Andys 17y ago

> the CEO said, "it's better to have 1 percent of 10 million than 100 percent of nothing." A false dichotomy, surely. The voice in the back of my head says its better to have >=50% of something small with real, stable growing than 1% of 10 million where you are trying to outsmart the wolf packs of the VC industry.

keltecp11 17y ago

This is really well done... some relationships in my life have certainly been affected by, well you get it.