Married couples run Sugar, ModCloth other tech start-ups
SAN FRANCISCO -- When Brian Sugar ponders an executive decision at his high-tech start-up here, all he has to do for quick advice is instant-message his business partner — on the other end of the living-room couch.
His wife, Lisa, agrees that their 5-year-old online women's network, aptly named Sugar, should make a key personnel move. In between shop talk, they comment on the San Francisco Giants game they're watching on TV, after tucking the kids into bed.
Unconventional, yes, but this tech tandem has thrived. Their company reaches 25 million unique monthly visitors because they have created specialized content via a constellation of 39 sites for women under 34 years old.
They have ambitious plans for their "baby": Sugar. It's in the process of expanding its content network and escalating its commerce business. And Sugar recently unfurled PopSugar Shop, a dedicated site to national and local discount offers in fashion, beauty, food and fitness. Their company is smack dab in what some might call Matrimonial Alley.
Several city blocks away, Kevin and Julia Hartz of online-ticketing platform Eventbrite are trying to figure out how to squeeze more bodies into their cramped offices. The agency employs 175, but is in full-fledged expansion.
Two floors above, Susan Gregg Koger and husband Eric are readying a photo shoot for ModCloth.com, the online fashion company they created while students at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In a whirlwind, two-month stretch in mid-2006, they managed to graduate from college, buy their first house, marry and move the company to a larger facility. Last year, they shifted headquarters to San Francisco.
A few miles south on Highway 101 in Mountain View, Evernote CEO Phil Libin is trying to persuade his wife, Sharmila Birba, who runs the company's finances and human resources, to accompany him on a business trip to China and Japan. She's not so sure.
"Sharmila gets jet-lagged if she takes the train," he says, laughing.
Silicon Valley is rich in such tandems: married couples in technology who are able to balance the demands of matrimony with the pressure-cooker demands of running a start-up. It isn't easy, as any of them will attest, but their life partnerships do offer some advantages.
Cisco Systems was founded by Len Bosack and Sandy Lerner, a married couple who worked as computer operations staff members at Stanford University, and Richard Troiano, in 1984. VMware was the business union of Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum and three others in 1998. Michael and Xochi Birch, who co-founded Bebo in 2005, struck it rich when AOL bought the social-networking service for $850 million in 2008.
Then, there were Judy Estrin and Bill Carrico. For two decades, Estrin and Carrico were the Romeo and Juliet nerd love story in Silicon Valley. Together, they founded seven companies, including Bridge Communications, which pioneered technology for linking different networks, and networking-software maker Precept Software. Cisco acquired Precept in 1998.
Family businesses are responsible for 80% to 90% of all U.S. businesses, with husband-and-wife teams accounting for about a one-third of that, according to several reports on small businesses.
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