My 2 partners in the startup are both married - one for 20 years, the other for 10. I sit with them all f'ing day and hear their conversations with their wives - my assessment is their marriages are happy ones.
And more and more I've started to think about the startup as a particular kind of marriage. The reality is that 7 months into this thing, if anyone left we and our investors would be totally fucked. So we are signing employment agreements.
I'm not sure if this was ever communicated to me about marriage, but signing papers that commit you to each other - our employment agreements - induces a kind of relaxation. There's the minor anxiety of living up to their expectations of you - but somehow explicitly laying out how everyone trusts everyone feels like a warm blanket.
I'm not sure what my point is. Watching us enter into specific contracts - it has made me think about lawyering a little differently. Trust and commitment in a contract, written or not. There's probably not enough of it.
