To My Wife, The Entrepreneur

What you learn when your spouse starts a company

My wife and her assistant, hard at work

“That Was Not Good.”

Arriving in Philadelphia in 2012, my business-school classmates and I shared the same two goals: Survive our first-year curriculum and land a summer internship. For almost all of us, the second goal was far more important.

The MBA job search is intense, but it’s a neighborly kind of intensity. Everyone is gunning for the same roles, and yet, everyone helps each other out. The kids from consulting offer coaching on case interviews. The recovering bankers teach the wannabes how to build their LBOs. And if you’re interested in the consumer world, you learn quickly that the best way to get “in there” as a brand manager with the big CPG houses is to get close with someone who’s worked with them before.

I wanted a brand management gig. And, lucky me, I knew someone who could help me land one.

Annie and I met during my first visit to Philly, while I was still weighing my options between graduate schools. Though we were both dating other people at the time, we connected immediately. She had gone to Michigan; I grew up in Ann Arbor. We had lived in the same neighborhoods in New York, had the same affinity for ice hockey, and both loved 90’s R&B music. She was smart, sarcastic, fun, and had a gift for making people feel welcome and at ease. We just clicked.

Annie was also a marketing phenom. She spent three years at an elite brand consulting firm and a summer working on Ketel One’s strategy at Diageo after her first year at Wharton. She possessed an un-ignorable brilliance that shined any time “why humans buy things” came up even casually in conversation. She even helped me nab my business school apartment, saving me a plane ticket by checking out an open unit in her building, just one floor up from hers.

So when I learned I had won a spot on General Mills’ interview schedule for their summer marketing program, Annie was my first call.

“Think we could do a mock interview?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

I don’t remember what I expected walking into her apartment the following week, but I do know this: I was not ready. From the moment the interview started, Annie was a different person. This was not the warm, funny, magnetic Annie I had started to develop a crush on. This woman was picking me apart. Five minutes into the first question, as Annie stabbed at the ill-formed details of my underwhelming career story, I was coming undone. Bombing an interview? That I can handle. Especially one that doesn’t really count. But a beautiful woman I wanted to impress with a pedigree in an industry I desperately wanted to crack into, making it abundantly clear to both of us exactly how much I was not cutting it?

My ego was in tatters. And I did not hide it well.

Despite my discomfort, Annie did not hesitate to twist the knife. “How do you think that went?” She asked, straight-faced.

I chuckled, my eyes glued to the table between us, and took a deep breath, shaking my head. “Not my best.” I smirked.

I expected mercy. I did not get it.

“Yeah. That was not good.”

My face felt hot. My stomach churned. This sucked. But, a week before the real interview, Annie was telling me exactly what I needed to hear.

Embarrassed, thrown off, and vowing to never again show up to anything so unprepared again, I crammed a disgusting amount of interview prep into my next week. I memorized my stories, analyzed consumer examples, and did deep research on General Mills’ strategy, brand-by-brand.

By the end of the real interview, I was certain I had the job. I was right.

Later that day, Mills called me with an offer. “We’d love to have you join the team for the summer.”

“Thank you,” I said, only a bit of my gratitude meant for the recruiter; the rest invisibly directed at Annie, the woman who would become my wife just a few years later.

The Next Phase

I’ve bounced around a lot in my career.

I’ve been a barely-professional athlete, a merchant, a salesperson, a marketer, a consultant, and a PE operating partner. Some people say this kind of variety is a good thing. That a generalist’s breadth of experience better prepares you for the spectrum of problems life throws at you.

I buy some of that, I guess — the benefits of going broad vs. deep. But if you zoom in and study impressive people, you’ll probably notice that most of them have been at their thing since the beginning of their professional lives. It’s kind of a pattern. In an interview a few years back, Charlie Rose asked Lin-Manuel Miranda, creator of Hamilton and the most successful Broadway composer of his generation, what set him apart from the other gifted kids he grew up with.

Miranda replied:

“Cause I picked a lane and I started running ahead of everybody else . . . I was like, ‘All right, THIS.’”

This is what my wife has done with her career. Annie chose her lane — consumer marketing — a long time ago. A lane aligned perfectly with her natural curiosity and innate gifts. And she has been mastering her craft — going deep, not wide — for the better part of two decades. She’s repositioned iconic brands like Trolli, Black Forest, Klondike, Vaseline, and Axe. She’s built a business from the ground up in the health & wellness space. She’s led teams at every stage of venture, and left a trail of otherwise-unconnected coworkers, partners, and agencies who, as their time working with my wife winds down, all seem to share the same parting feedback:

“Annie is special.”

One of my favorite books, Mastery by Robert Greene, has this unique take on the idea of a career path. As Robert tells it, you should start your career by seeking out what he calls “a rigorous apprenticeship.” This is the period where you commit to learning the fundamentals of your craft by studying under a series of masters. The apprenticeship period is all about repetition, absorption, and depth. You pick up the techniques of those that you work for, and etch them into your own working style through focused practice. You spend years mastering the basics in this phase to prepare yourself for what happens next. At some point, Greene suggests, the student must leave this period of tutelage and strike out on their own. This is when they enter a new phase in their career, which he calls “the creative-active phase.” The student, schooled in their craft, seizes on a moment where they can put their technique to work in a new way — putting a powerful twist on a conventional genre and carving out a unique place for themselves within its ranks.

Breaking through to the creative-active phase requires both skill and vigilance. It requires an ability to recognize not only opportunity, but also fit. You have to wait and prepare for the unique set of circumstances that can transform what you’ve learned in your apprenticeship into an unfair advantage over others playing the same game. Doing this takes bravery. You need to feel the fear that accompanies a less certain path, and then take the leap anyway, with only the hope that the risks might be outweighed by the freedom and upside of building something all your own.

The reason I’m telling you all this is so you understand a few things.

That my wife finished her apprenticeship about two years ago.

And that her creative-active phase began when she met Martin.

The Origin Story

Martin, a young, handsome South African MD, was practicing medicine as an allergist at the Cleveland Clinic when he began to notice something. He noticed that many of his patients suffering from skin sensitivity were coming back from their dermatologist visits angry and disappointed. Despite using derm-recommended skincare brands, his patients’ conditions were failing to improve. Martin got curious. He began studying the ingredient labels of the major skincare brands marketed to consumers with sensitive skin — the same ones the dermatologists were recommending. And Martin learned a couple important things.

First, that many of these products contain known allergens: Ingredients that we know can irritate your skin.

Second, that the standard a product must meet to earn the right to label itself as safe for sensitive skin is virtually non-existent. Anyone who wants to make the claim is, more or less, free to do so. There’s no government regulatory body to check with, and very little legal approval needed. To promise that you can provide relief from a condition that afflicts millions of people in the U.S., the burden of proof is shockingly low.

Martin saw an opportunity. He began experimenting with simpler, cleaner formulations for a homegrown line of skincare products. Products whose value would come not from active ingredients, but from what they don’t contain — allergens, irritants, and all the toxic stuff buried in the other brands’ ingredient labels. And as he dialed in his formulations, Martin had a series of realizations.

First, that he was onto something.

Second, that he had a lot of work left to do before he could bring his idea to market.

And third, that he could not do this work alone.

He needed a co-founder. Someone who could supplement his medical background and patient empathy with the brand vision it would take to capture a crowded market’s attention. Someone with the business rigor and discipline that an enduring company could be built upon.

That’s when he found Annie. That’s when the two of them began building their company together. A company into which my wife has poured all the earned secrets and pent-up energy gathered from her past apprenticeships. A company that, as it’s unveiled this week, marks the first chapter in a new, more creative phase of my wife’s career, and in her life as a businessperson.

And me? I’m the guy with a front row seat to the whole thing.

What’s It Like Being Married to a Founder?

I read somewhere that there are two ingredients in the recipe for keeping a marriage healthy, alive, and vibrant:

1. You need to spend time apart from your partner

2. You need to watch your partner “in their element” — putting their unique gifts to work out there in the world

When your partner starts a company, you’re guaranteed plenty of both.

After teaming up with Martin, Annie transformed the front bedroom of our new house into her office. Soon enough, I noticed a hotel-style hanger on her doorknob. Here it is.

Annie’s office

The door-hanger is funny. But it is not a joke. When Annie’s office door shuts and the hanger is up, you do not enter, for two reasons: There is too much work to do, and not enough people to do the work.

That work — directing vendors, crafting how to talk about your offering, managing a budget, testing the product, talking to customers, building creative for social posts, constructing influencer strategies, starting a company — is both relentless and impartial. It does not care how many employees you have. Big company or small; it’s the same work that moves things forward. When you’re a team of two, delegation doesn’t exist. You make your own leverage, or you fall behind.

As a result, Annie and Martin work not just long hours, but hard ones.

So each day, her office closes, and her door-hanger barrier swings into place. She gets her seclusion and time to crank. And, when we reunite that evening, she carries something with her. Something intangible, and yet impossible to miss. A small measure of momentum. The afterglow of a little win. An elegant solution to an “oh shit” problem that only she could have conjured up. And I see my wife, immersed in her craft, after a few hours apart from each other, holding the latest evidence of the progress she’s created and bathed in the soft light of what she’s discovered that day — about her business, and about herself.

Time apart. And her in her element.

I get both of these every day that I’m home.

What a gift.

Founding a company is a grind. Annie has worked harder these last few years than at any other point in her career. And there’s no denying that her decision to start a business has brought her more than occasional stress, tears, late nights, fear, and frustration, which occasionally spills over into mine as well. But what’s come with all that — the opportunity to witness the person I love taking the courageous leap to start and sustain something all her own — has brought us closer together than I ever thought possible.

So what’s it like, being married to the founder of a startup?

Well, I can tell you how it feels. I feel lucky. Lucky to have crossed paths with the capable, brave, and brilliant woman who pushed me to be better from our very beginning. Lucky to have found a window in our life together which allows her to pursue her entrepreneurial dreams. Lucky to watch firsthand as she weaves together a business and a brand, starting with only the unsprouted seed of a brilliant insight and the commitment of a willing co-founder.

And lucky to stand here today, a few years later, marveling at the seamless fusion of all her venture’s elements, each one bearing the subtle but distinct mark of her artistry, and whispering to myself, in awe:

“My wife did that.”

Annie’s startup — Untoxicated — opened its doors to the world this week.

And I am so damn proud of her.