Founding a startup may come at the cost of your sex life

Running a startup requires an immense amount of time and effort, which leaves little room for anything else in your life, especially sex. A handful of startup founders in China have opened up about this problem, albeit anonymously, in a recent article that Tech in Asia has translated. According the founders, running a startup either leaves them with too little time to have sex, or too little energy to have anything more than half-hearted sex. Many of them claim that they’re romantic relationships have degraded, or even ended entirely, because of this problem. 

Recently, an interesting article has been doing the rounds in China’s startup circles. Its authors are anonymous, and with good reason – they’re sharing the dirty secrets about sex life as the founder of a startup. And the truth? It ain’t pretty. What follows is a translation by Tech in Asia of the article’s most interesting section. Since the authors are anonymous and some of the piece is hearsay – stories from friends and acquaintances – none of this information is verifiably true. Nevertheless, we suspect these tales will sound familiar to startup founders all over the region. Frequently traveling means less time to spend with your partner, but it’s for business, so what choice do you have? Working late too often. Originally, you could always eat dinner with your partner after work, but now by the time you get home you don’t want to wake her up, so you just sleep in another room. The wife prepares a candlelight dinner, buys a sexy negligee and toys and hopes for a really romantic evening… that is then destroyed by my constant phone calls with an investor. A friend’s daughter, when she goes off to school in the morning, says, “Daddy, I’ll see you the day after tomorrow.” Every other day, he and some of the other team members work until very late and sleep in the office.