Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Startup Life, a guide for having healthy relationships while working in the pressure cooker environment of a startup company. There are many powerful myths of the all-consuming nature of being an entrepreneur, and it is indeed difficult to balance your work life and your personal life. In fact, many people think that balance is not even worth trying for because it is a fool’s errand. Others say that starting a company is another impossible goal, and it is true that the vast majority of startups do fail. But if you’re an entrepreneur who loves your company and also happens to be in love with a particular person, you’re not going to be stopped by naysayers or discouraged by the difficulty of the challenge of trying to do two hard things at once. If you’re stubborn and committed to creating both a company and a relationship, this book will help you and your partner work together to clarify and communicate your core values, experiment to discover which relationship techniques work for you, and build a long-term life together while you’re building your company. If you already have a company and are thinking of adding a relationship to what is already a complex system, or you have an existing love relationship and are considering embarking on building a company, this book is for you.

Our goal with this book is to help entrepreneurs and their partners have a healthier notion of what startup life looks like and to decide together what success means to ...