The CEO and COO relationship when you are married to the CEO: Dave Weiss of Hatch

The CEO and COO relationship is difficult enough between two people who met at work. Dave Weiss co-founded Hatch with his wife Ann, who is CEO, which means the working relationship and the marriage share the same room.

Hatch builds sleep products. Hatch Restore combines a sound machine, sunrise alarm, smart light, meditation app and alarm clock into one device. The company appeared on Shark Tank in 2016 and, at the time of this conversation, was in more than 2 million homes. Weiss is founder, president and chief operating officer, and spent six years before that as CTO and SVP of product management at BabyCenter.

A medium engineer and a good explainer

Weiss's self assessment is unusually honest. He started as an engineer and describes himself as a medium one, but a good explainer of what engineers do. That got him pulled into meetings to translate, which became his path into engineering leadership.

The motivation underneath it was wanting to be in the room. Early in his career, product wrote requirements and threw them over the fence to engineering, and he wanted to be where the solution for the customer actually got designed. At BabyCenter he got the chance, taking on product, marketing and design alongside technology.

The translation skill came from somewhere specific. He spent time early on teaching high school math and computer science, where the audience was a fidgety sixteen year old with no context and no particular motivation to acquire any. His method was to say it again, and again, until it landed for someone who knew nothing. That turned out to transfer directly to explaining technical work to the rest of a company.

What the COO does when the company is small, then less small

At the beginning the role was everything, including manufacturing, which was entirely new because Hatch was the first company Weiss had worked at that makes physical products. He and Ann spent a lot of time in a coffee shop working things out before launching. He ran customer support and, in his words, all sorts of things he was not trained to do, which is simply what happens at five or ten people.

The handoffs came as the numbers grew. He ran marketing when spending a few thousand dollars a month was enough to move product. Once the spend became serious, the company needed a CMO, so they hired one.

Today he spends his time with the product development organization, product, engineering, design and QA, the team that builds things. He admits the choice is partly selfish, since it is the part he enjoys most. His summary of the path is one many operators will recognize: he has probably run every department in the company at one point or another.

Hardware is harder than software people think

Hatch had an unusual start on capital. Ann had founded a company before they met, exited successfully, and had a venture firm willing to back whatever she did next. True Ventures, their main backer and an early investor in Ring and Peloton, knew the category well enough to warn them that one of the tools they built would have to be thrown away. Weiss's reaction at the time was to ask whether that really happens.

His retrospective is the most quotable thing in the episode. Coming from software, he saw hardware as a new problem to solve. Knowing what he knows now about hardware and specifically about connected devices, he is on the fence about whether he would do it again.

The reason is an expectations gap he explains with a comparison worth stealing. If your bank's app is down for maintenance on a Saturday, you close it and get on with your day. You do not switch banks. Now imagine your microwave saying it cannot heat your food today, please come back tomorrow. Physical objects in the home are held to a completely different standard, in a connected device market that is still immature.

Then there is the environment. Interference inside someone's house, router firmware updating underneath you, hundreds of Android versions. It makes for a demanding test lab, and things still escape into the world that QA never sees. Weiss has driven to customers' homes to wire a unit up and work out what was happening.

The founder story he tells is the one that captures the category. A thousand units needed the bottom ring removed, a part swapped, and everything reassembled. They set up tables, ordered pizza, and recruited his kids and their friends. His comment is that these are the moments you wonder whether other companies do this, and that after talking to other founders, everyone has their version.

Raising money for a consumer hardware company

Weiss is direct that raising capital is always hard, and that a great deal depends on what is in fashion at the moment, with valuations flying at companies with far less revenue.

Hatch had three strikes by conventional venture logic. Consumer is challenging. Hardware is challenging. And they started with babies and new parents, a market investors have historically treated as difficult. The company began as Hatch Baby and expanded to sleep for the whole family.

His comparison is wry. He has friends in B2B software for whom, as he describes it, checks appear at the doorstep. What has worked for Hatch is proving repeatedly that the business has legs and finding investors who believe. He also points out the obvious counterexample people forget: Apple makes hardware. And Peloton demonstrated that purpose built hardware wrapped in a complete experience is what consumers actually want.

The fundraising division of labor between the founders is a nice illustration of the partnership. Ann leads. Weiss joins for the second or third conversation, where his job, by his own description, is to be quiet most of the time and say one or two intelligent things at the right moment. He is aware people occasionally wonder whether he speaks at all.

Married co-founders, described honestly

Other married couples contact them for advice about starting a company together, and Weiss says they give the honest picture.

His analogy is having children together. It stretches you in many directions, takes space and air out of the room, and tests you. What you get in return is a set of shared experiences most people never have with their spouse. Being on Shark Tank together. Launching a first booth at CES. Sitting next to each other unscrewing a thousand products.

He does not skip the cost. The stress, the sniping, the bad behavior everyone is capable of. His view is that it recedes in retrospect while being genuinely painful in the moment.

What they do about it is worth noting because it is concrete rather than sentimental. They have more than one CEO coach, and each of them has their own therapist, on the explicit reasoning that this journey is hard whether or not your spouse is your co-founder. He is clear it is not for everyone, and equally clear he would not want to have done it without her.

Inside the company he says it has become a non-factor, though he suggests asking the rest of the executive team. Externally, there was some initial investor hesitation that success and a track record dissolved.

The mechanism they use in disagreement comes from one of their coaches: smart people with the same facts usually reach the same conclusion. So when there is friction, they step back, put boundaries around the discussion, write prose to force clarity, and ask what facts they are missing that would explain the divergence. When it genuinely comes down to instinct rather than information, one of them has to disagree and commit.

Transparency as an anxiety reducer

Weiss's argument for radical transparency is not ideological, it is practical. Fear of the unknown is stronger than the discomfort of knowing the facts.

Hatch meets as an entire company weekly. During a fundraise, they show the team the deck. When quarterly financials arrive, they show the financials. He acknowledges this creates both comfort and discomfort, and that people arriving from large companies find it strange at first, before acclimating and recognizing that they are owners and this is how businesses actually work.

The two founders provide different halves of the emotional register, which he describes as their personal brands. He is very steady and rarely rattled, which people find reassuring. Ann's excitement and energy make whatever the company is doing sound worth doing.

He also punctures some startup mythology in passing. The old illusions about working around the clock in a garage, set against the comfort of a big company, are less true than they were, and beyond a certain size the jobs look fairly similar. Where it does hold is the first five or ten people, which genuinely requires jumping in with both feet. His test for that: when the company needs its first retail box and six of your ten people raise their hand despite none of them ever having made one, you have the right team. You are hiring for excitement about a new challenge rather than reluctance to work outside an area of expertise.

Values that do real work

At around 40 people, going remote and growing quickly, Hatch did the values exercise properly. It took a long time and was deliberately specific, avoiding the generic statements about believing in customers in favor of what actually makes them unusual.

Then they wired the values into hiring. Every interviewer takes one value, explains how it shows up at Hatch, and asks the candidate how it resonates. Weiss says it screens out poor fits and, more usefully, attracts strong candidates who notice a company being deliberate about who it is.

Pick up a shovel is the bias to action, named after exactly the retail box moment. It is not standing at the edge of a ditch observing that someone really ought to dig. Weiss still fires up his drill press to make holes in product housings to get at program reports.

We believe in wet paint is about sharing work early. It has become an internal meme, with people adding dripping paint to their Figma files. His observation is that not everyone is comfortable with this, particularly people from creative backgrounds trained toward the big reveal, so the company has to make it safe.

Humans over process carries the argument. Success is built on human relationships. A relationship can overcome a gap in any process, and the best process in the world will not overcome a gap in the relationships. So the company wants people who know each other, know each other's kids' names, and spend real time together.

His illustration is the US Olympic men's basketball team, which lost an exhibition game before the Games despite a roster of stars, then found its footing over the tournament and won gold. His reading is that talent was never the issue. They did not yet know how to play as a team or trust each other. His conclusion for Hatch is that the value of team exceeds individual talent, however much of the latter you have.

Building connection on purpose

Asked how you build that remotely, Weiss's answer is that the first and biggest challenge is creating space.

Team rooms people can drop into. One on one meetings. Onboarding that includes 30 conversations, many with people whose work has nothing to do with the new hire's job, on the premise that knowing people and being known is a precondition for being effective.

The insight underneath is sharp. Their best and brightest wanted to use their time as efficiently as possible, and that efficiency was precisely what prevented them from getting to know anyone.

His fix comes, again, from teaching. He used to spend fifteen minutes of a Monday morning class asking students about their weekend and their tennis matches, and sharing his own, which normalized the conversation. The payoff was that the remaining thirty minutes had everyone genuinely present, in a way that opening with take out your books never achieved.

For the leadership team the practice is a deliberate rotation. Keep a list of people you meet with beyond your direct reports. Weekly for directs, monthly for some, every six weeks for others. His test question is whether three months could pass without you speaking to anyone on the marketing team, and the answer is that it should not. If the instinct does not come naturally, schedule it.

He models it himself, including dropping a video link into the company's random Slack channel to ask whether anyone else is eating lunch. His point is that once people see this is not socializing for its own sake, and that the company is genuinely better for the relationships, it becomes self sustaining.

The advice for the growth journey

Weiss's advice is to be present. It is a marathon rather than a sprint, and every size of company has something worth appreciating that you will not get back.

His method for staying connected to why it matters is to read Amazon reviews and NPS comments, where there is a real person who was helped, and some who were not. As the company grows the stress does not disappear, it changes shape. He is glad to have handed off things he was not qualified to do, and misses some of them anyway.

On what actually enabled the growth, he names values and transparency, with an important caveat. Early on they did those things without naming them, because it was simply who they were. It was only when growth started making things feel off that they identified the missing ingredient as the connection that used to happen naturally in an office, and became deliberate about recreating it.

His last data point is the one that suggests it worked. Very few regrettable departures, and people who have stayed a long time.

The 5 things I took away from this conversation

1. Married co-founders should build the support structure before they need it. Two CEO coaches and separate therapists is not an admission of trouble, it is infrastructure. Weiss is honest that the job strains any partnership and that sharing a household with your co-founder concentrates it. The couples who ask him for advice get the real version, which is the right way to give it.

2. Smart people with the same facts usually agree, so find the missing fact. This is the most useful conflict tool I have heard on this show. When two capable people disagree, the default assumption should be an information gap rather than a values gap. Writing it out in prose forces the gap into view. Only when it truly comes down to instinct do you fall back on disagree and commit.

3. Hardware punishes assumptions software people carry over. The microwave comparison reframes the whole reliability question. Nobody forgives a physical object in their home the way they forgive an app. If you are moving from software into devices, that expectation gap is the thing to plan around, not the engineering.

4. Values only matter if they change a decision, and hiring is the decision. Handing each interviewer a value to explain and probe is the most practical implementation of company values I have come across. It also does recruiting work in the other direction, because candidates notice a company that has actually thought about who it is.

5. Efficiency is what stops your best people from connecting. This is the observation I keep thinking about. High performers optimize their calendars, and the first thing cut is the unstructured conversation that makes a team function. Fifteen minutes of weekend talk before a class is not lost time, it is what makes the next thirty minutes work.

FAQ

How does the CEO and COO relationship work when the founders are married? At Hatch it works through explicit structure. The founders use CEO coaches, each has their own therapist, and they have an agreed method for handling disagreement that starts by looking for the missing fact rather than relitigating the position. Weiss is candid that the arrangement is not for everyone and that the strain is real in the moment.

What does a chief operating officer do in a company that makes physical products? Everything, early on. Weiss covered manufacturing, customer support and marketing at various points because a ten person company has no alternative. As specialists were hired he narrowed to product development, meaning product, engineering, design and QA. His summary is that he has run nearly every department at some stage.

What makes hardware harder than software? Customer expectations and environment. People forgive an app that is down for maintenance and do not forgive a device in their home behaving the same way. Add interference inside houses, router firmware changing underneath you and hundreds of device variants to test against, and issues reach customers that no QA process would have caught.

How do you build culture on a remote team? By creating space deliberately rather than hoping it happens. Hatch runs onboarding that includes many conversations unrelated to the new hire's job, asks leaders to maintain a rotation of people they meet with beyond their direct reports, and normalizes informal contact from the top. Weiss's underlying observation is that efficient people cut exactly this activity first.

How should company values be used in hiring? Hatch assigns each interviewer one value to explain, with concrete examples of how it shows up in practice, then asks the candidate how it resonates. It filters out mismatches, and it signals to strong candidates that the company has been deliberate about its culture rather than decorative about it.

Also mentioned

• Hatch and Hatch Restore, and the company's earlier incarnation as Hatch Baby
• Shark Tank, where Hatch appeared in 2016
• True Ventures, Hatch's main backer and an early investor in Ring and Peloton
• BabyCenter, where Weiss was CTO and SVP of product management
• CES, where the founders launched their first booth together
• Disagree and commit, the decision principle the founders fall back on
• Figma, where the wet paint value shows up as dripping paint on in-progress work

Listen to the full episode

Dave Weiss on Between Two COO's

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