by entrepreneurs, for entrepreneurs

• Join - It's Free!
• Log in

Get Your Mate’s Buy-In: Jason Feinsmith

Jason Feinsmith’s story: The minute his wife said she wouldn’t mind putting off the dream house in Silicon Valley for a few years, Jason Feinsmith knew his business had a chance.

“That was a statement of confidence and support; that was us being a team,” says the 38-year-old CEO of Accomplice, a virtual tool to help professionals manage tasks and synchronize goals across workplace teams. “Whatever I do in my business, it’s part of our lives, right? So the big decisions I make with her because they affect her.”

As a kid, Feinsmith watched his parents split up. The “massive disruption” in both their personal lives and their careers left a lasting impression. If you’re married or otherwise in a committed relationship, he decided, you need emotional capital from your mate to fully “fund” a startup.

Your Life Partner, then Your Business Partner

Before launching Accomplice with business partner Uri Sarid in early 2005, Feinsmith worked for several years “making lots and lots of money” as an executive at Intel.

During that time, he constantly found himself wishing for some sort of tool to not only organize his own daily tasks, but those of his team. He researched, but couldn’t find such a thing, and started spending nights and weekends developing one before he and Sarid left their jobs and launched their company.

But first and most importantly, Feinsmith says, he talked things through with his wife, Elana. A certified financial planner, she not only gave him emotional support, but crunched numbers to see how the family could manage in the meantime.

Accomplice pulled in 12,000 users in the first three months, and now employs a staff of five. But without Elana’s buy-in, Feinsmith says, it never would have happened.

It’s Shared Sacrifice and Risk

“It’s not just the financial,” Feinsmith says, “there’s the emotional aspect. You have to have the confidence that your partner is on board with you. And you also have to recognize what she’s doing, the sacrifice she’s making. If the risk doesn’t pay off, she suffers.”

For now, Elana’s at home with their two kids while Feinsmith tends to business. He checks in with her about big decisions and when he’s feeling low – knowing he’ll get a boost. It’s the kind of support a business partner can’t provide, the sort he needed in late summer 2006.

August is a tough time to raise business funds, and Accomplice’s two big investors were wavering – one was in the hospital for a month and the other put funding on hold. Feinsmith was flattened by the fear that Accomplice was already going south, for keeps.

But Elana urged him to stick it out. “She said, ‘Jason, I believe in you, you can do it, and you’ve just got to do it,’” he says. “She reminded me of all the things we’d said, what great achievements we’ve made with this company.

“That encouragement and support gave me the additional confidence I needed to weather that storm and do some bold moves to make it work. And we did get more funding.”

Jason’s Bonus Insight

Good marital relationships are great models for successful business partnerships, Feinsmith says. Because he knows about balance at home, he can replicate it at the office.

“When there’s a good relationship,” at home or in the office, “you’re able to perform better because you don’t have distractions that get in the way. Usually, people who have good relationships at home have the emotional intelligence required to succeed in a startup.”