4 ms·

You should work with your spouse. It's great, and a lot of companies have successful husband/wife teams. Here's an HN thread that lists a few: http://news.ycomb

You should work with your spouse. It's great, and a lot of companies have successful husband/wife teams. Here's an HN thread that lists a few: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663881 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=663881 I've liked some Guy Kawasaki articles, like the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint, but this article seems hastily written. Another fallacy is to think partnerships are bad. Partnerships are great in certain markets. Seek out people... you'd be surprised who'll take a phone call.

joel_feather 17y ago
Working with your spouse needs a special kind of person on both sides. Most people would not succeed with this, some would. Just because you would does not mean most would.
hapless 17y ago
This was the only piece of advice in the article that I really liked. It doesn't matter whether you work well with your spouse. It could be a truly great working relationship and still present a problem for your firm. The problem is that other people will hate working with you and your family. You will fail to recruit the best, you will have to pay the workers you do recruit more money, and morale will always be lower than it would have been if you had not hired your family. Other employees will simply assume your family gets special treatment. (And they're always right.)
- philwelch 17y ago
  Lots of married couples run businesses together; it's somewhat of a change that this is now viewed as a bad thing. Of course, there is also a difference between hiring family and cofounding with family. If you cofound with a spouse, this problem might be unique to a startup environment where your early employees expect to be treated as equals. In a more traditional business, it's definitely not an issue.
- tptacek 17y ago
  People will hate working with you if your company is failing to execute. If you haven't hired your husband, they will find some other reason to hate you. In any group of smart, opinionated adults, there are 100,000 reasons to hate your coworkers --- compensation, effort, strategy decisions, nepotism, cliques. Kawasaki's comment ignores the upsides of working with your spouse. You can both keep longer hours. It's easier to balance childcare needs. You can get another unquestionably committed team member. Singling out family involvement is a fallacy. There are thousands of successful family businesses. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that fail that never even considered hiring a spouse. There's simply no data to back this point up, just supposition.
sethg 17y ago
I think working with your spouse is a special case, because if your company hits it big (or crashes and burns), then your spouse is likely to share in the joy (despair) whether or not he or she is officially a co-founder. So if the spouse has some talent that could make the company more likely to succeed, it's not necessarily A Bad Idea for him or her to come on board. This is different from saying "well, Uncle Murray needs a job so I'll hire him to do my bookkeeping"--that's much more likely to be A Bad Idea.

joel_feather 17y ago

Working with your spouse needs a special kind of person on both sides. Most people would not succeed with this, some would. Just because you would does not mean most would.

hapless 17y ago

This was the only piece of advice in the article that I really liked. It doesn't matter whether you work well with your spouse. It could be a truly great working relationship and still present a problem for your firm. The problem is that other people will hate working with you and your family. You will fail to recruit the best, you will have to pay the workers you do recruit more money, and morale will always be lower than it would have been if you had not hired your family. Other employees will simply assume your family gets special treatment. (And they're always right.)

philwelch 17y ago
Lots of married couples run businesses together; it's somewhat of a change that this is now viewed as a bad thing. Of course, there is also a difference between hiring family and cofounding with family. If you cofound with a spouse, this problem might be unique to a startup environment where your early employees expect to be treated as equals. In a more traditional business, it's definitely not an issue.
tptacek 17y ago
People will hate working with you if your company is failing to execute. If you haven't hired your husband, they will find some other reason to hate you. In any group of smart, opinionated adults, there are 100,000 reasons to hate your coworkers --- compensation, effort, strategy decisions, nepotism, cliques. Kawasaki's comment ignores the upsides of working with your spouse. You can both keep longer hours. It's easier to balance childcare needs. You can get another unquestionably committed team member. Singling out family involvement is a fallacy. There are thousands of successful family businesses. There are hundreds of thousands of companies that fail that never even considered hiring a spouse. There's simply no data to back this point up, just supposition.

sethg 17y ago

I think working with your spouse is a special case, because if your company hits it big (or crashes and burns), then your spouse is likely to share in the joy (despair) whether or not he or she is officially a co-founder. So if the spouse has some talent that could make the company more likely to succeed, it's not necessarily A Bad Idea for him or her to come on board. This is different from saying "well, Uncle Murray needs a job so I'll hire him to do my bookkeeping"--that's much more likely to be A Bad Idea.