I am married with a 3.75 year old daughter (she insists on the .75).

The two main issues (of course) are money and time.

The money side is "easy": the key to success is to have enough money to cover the time spent on the startup. If money gets tight, the startup will be one of the targets of much negative emotion by your s.o., yourself being the other main target. This is not a comfortable situation.

The time side is hard! I wish I knew the answer to this. Talking about the startup when you're not feverishly working on it can be a bad thing when patience wears thin on time spent on the startup. What is helping alot is total focus on s.o./family when not working, and then working at times unseen. (My recent strategy has been getting up pretty early to get in extra work before everyone wakes up.) What has also been very helpful is getting finished. An almost finished startup is much easier to imagine succeeding than lines of code on a screen. So launch ASAP.

Good luck, and don't do the startup unless you absolutely have to do it - thats my excuse.

Married. My husband is my co-founder. Working together is tons of fun & we live and breathe our startup. I highly recommend marrying your co-founder, or co-founding with your husband/wife.

Not to defend this particular article, but all essays revolve around the viewpoint of the author. An essay is not a research paper.

Your daughter's good at math. I didn't learn fractions & decimals until I was about 7.

>> I don't drive a Toyota or shoot with a Canon SLR because they don't work.

A poorly written article in my opinion. It revolves around the viewpoint of the author, without any facts or figures.

Hooray for same sex relationships.

There's no reason why "geeks" can't understand these other topics as well (and likewise, people from other backgrounds can learn to code). I don't like pigeonholing people and expecting them to only be good at one thing.

If you can understand both sides of the equation, that's a huge advantage. Technology is still very important, and people who don't understand it are going to have (or cause) problems.

I wonder if they've thought this through. No really promising startup would go through all this just for a 1/n chance of $50k.

This is structurally different from raising investment. An investor tries to fund (as far as they can tell) all the good startups that approach them. Here there is only one prize. Which means the better the applicants, the more likely you're wasting your time applying.

You've picked some bad examples... Flickr founders were a philosophy major and former art director:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caterina_Fake

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Butterfield

myspace founder has a master's degree in film:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Anderson

Too bad LinkedIn doesn't seem to allow users to mod up the better responses, there is too much noise there.

It's a poorly constructed sentence. I think he meant "I drive a Toyota / shoot with a Canon and it's not because they don't work."