The Wife Test: Would You Bet on Him?

You have a brilliant idea.

An exceptional team.

A market worth billions.

A pitch deck polished to perfection.

Congratulations.

How’s your wife?

I didn’t invent that question.

Well, not entirely.

A founder of one of the world’s leading venture capital firms recently said that the happiness of a founder’s wife had become his fund’s number-one investment indicator.

He claimed a hundred-percent hit rate.

In venture capital.

An industry that has turned uncertainty into a business model.

His explanation was almost offensively simple.

Happy wife.

Calm husband.

Better founder.

Behind every great man stands a great woman.

We’ve been saying that for centuries.

Silicon Valley has simply decided to measure her.

How romantic.

According to the investor, a happy wife gives her husband an emotional harbor. Somewhere to recover from the chaos of building a company before going back out to build extraordinary things.

Which sounds wonderful.

Although I have some questions about the harbor’s working hours.

The investor had questions too.

He said he wanted to approach Ilya Strebulaev, the Stanford professor who has spent years studying how venture capitalists think and make decisions, about researching the phenomenon.

Strebulaev happened to be nearby.

And I happened to have read The Venture Mindset, the book he co-wrote with Alex Dang, almost as soon as it came out.

I practically vandalized its margins with notes.

I thought I understood what it meant to bet on the jockey.

Apparently, I hadn’t considered who the jockey went home to.

The Woman in the Equation

I rather like the idea that a woman’s happiness might finally make it onto an investment committee’s agenda.

It’s certainly a change from the usual questions.

Revenue?

Growth?

Margins?

And is Mrs. Founder enjoying herself?

One can imagine the due diligence.

But there’s a small problem.

In this version of the story, her happiness matters because it makes him more productive.

A rather flattering promotion.

From wife to infrastructure.

And infrastructure, as we know, is expected to work quietly in the background.

Preferably without asking for equity.

I have no objection to being someone’s safe place.

Quite the opposite.

But a relationship is a little more interesting than a support system.

What if she was already happy before she met him?

What if he was too?

Two people with their own lives, interests, ambitions, and rather specific ideas about what makes life worth living.

They meet.

They choose each other.

And perhaps, if they’re lucky, they create something neither could have produced alone.

There’s a particular kind of luxury in that.

To be loved without becoming an accessory to another person’s ambition.

And to offer the same freedom in return.

It’s a much more interesting proposition than keeping a founder calm.

But can an investor actually measure it?

And then there’s the hundred-percent claim.

I admire the confidence.

But before we add wives to the due diligence checklist, I’d like to know how many couples we’re talking about.

Who decided they were happy?

And whether this was before or after the IPO.

I’d also like to hear from the wives.

Separately.

Bet on the Jockey

One of the ideas in The Venture Mindset is Bet on the Jockey.

The person matters.

Not just the idea.

Because a brilliant idea in the wrong hands can become a remarkably expensive disappointment.

What fascinated me about the book was how easily venture thinking travels beyond venture capital.

You don’t need to be raising millions to make decisions under uncertainty.

You might be choosing a career.

A business partner.

A country to live in.

Or a person to share your life with.

In every case, you’re betting on a future that hasn’t happened yet.

And you don’t get to read the reviews first.

Of course, someone can be brilliant at business and spectacularly incompetent at relationships.

Human history offers a generous selection of examples.

Still, the investor’s observation made me wonder whether we sometimes separate life into categories a little too neatly.

As though someone walks into the office, installs excellent judgment, and leaves it on the desk before going home.

Perhaps certain qualities travel.

Perhaps they don’t.

That’s what makes the question worth investigating.

But there’s an even harder one.

Suppose we discover that the investor is right.

What do we do with that information?

P vs NP. Now With Feelings.

There’s a famous unsolved problem in mathematics and computer science called P versus NP.

One of the Millennium Prize Problems.

Imagine a giant maze.

Someone hands you a map with a route drawn in red.

You can follow the line and check whether it reaches the exit.

Easy enough.

Now take away the red line.

Find the route yourself.

Suddenly, it’s a very different afternoon.

P versus NP asks, in essence, whether being able to check a solution quickly means there’s also a way to find one quickly.

Nobody knows the answer in general.

And no, I’m not suggesting that marriage is a mathematical problem.

Although the maze comparison has its moments.

What interests me is the distinction.

Recognizing something that works.

And knowing how to make it work.

Suppose our investor can recognize a genuinely happy couple.

Wonderful.

Now tell me how they got there.

How did two people, each with their own history, personality, and ambitions, create something neither could have built alone?

And if we understood how it happened, could we reproduce it?

Or would the whole thing fall apart the moment someone tried to sell us the formula?

Of course, relationships come with an additional complication.

In a maze, at least we know where the exit is.

With happiness, two people may be looking for entirely different things.

And an investor standing outside the maze might not even know what they’re trying to find.

This isn’t literally P versus NP. Human happiness doesn’t come with a neat mathematical certificate.

But the distinction is irresistible.

Spotting a unicorn is one thing.

Knowing how to create one is quite another.

And with happiness, we can’t even agree on what the unicorn looks like.

The Most Interesting Return

I keep thinking about that conversation.

The investor.

Strebulaev nearby.

A hundred-percent claim.

And a question that turned out to be considerably more interesting than the answer.

We’ve traveled a rather long way from a pitch deck.

All because someone asked whether a wife was happy.

Perhaps what looks like a predictor is actually the result of a thousand decisions nobody was there to observe.

Perhaps the investor wasn’t measuring the secret to a successful company.

Perhaps he had stumbled upon the much stranger question of what makes two people good at building a life together.

Because finding a promising company is not the same as building one.

And finding someone extraordinary is not the same as building an extraordinary life together.

The best partnerships don’t ask one person to disappear into the other’s ambition.

They give two people room to become more than either imagined.

Which brings us back to our investor.

He wanted to know whether the wife was happy.

Fair question.

But I think he stopped one question too soon.

Would she invest in him?

Not his company.

Not his valuation.

Not the future unicorn.

Him.