With the rise in land prices many farmers are now using them to ensure that a divorce doesn't result in having to sell a family farm that's been in the family for generations.

It doesn't have to be an adversarial process, and you need to make sure the other party is properly compensated, this compensation often comes from the firm/company/farm that is requiring the pre/post nup.

Now, if both parties are founders in the enterprise then it can be tricky if they both still want to run the company, in which case, I don't know how that could possibly be settled in a way that would make either party happy other than the pizza solution, one side names a price and the other side gets to decide to buy or sell.

For example, you get the business and the condo, then your husband gets the house and the yacht.

All founders' spouses had to sign. It's basically an extremely focused post nup.

Incidentally, this means that depending on the property law in your state, your share might be halved in event of divorce, and your spouse gets a nice paycheck.

Since both you and another comment so quickly zero in on the divorce aspect in this story, it's worth pointing out that Barbara Mikkelson was, in fact, a proper co-founder when snopes.com started, and worked alongside her husband for 20 years.

This situation is no different than any other founder leaving the company and selling his stakes. HN will have to find another way to blame this on women.

And, yes, there are mechanisms to prevent such problems. First among them would be the right-of-last-refusal: Before you sell, you have to offer the stock to the other co-founder(s), at the exact same terms you're offered. But that's not automatic, and has to be established early on.

I think you’re letting your own bias leak here where you implicitly assume all founders are male and their spouses female :)

That’s a glib way for me to make the point, but it does feel like you are jumping to conclusions. I would argue that divorce-related acrimony between founders is still at least somewhat interesting, in the sense that it’s a valid question whether or not there are standard ways to avoid problems in such complex and unpleasant situations as divorce. No matter the gender of the people involved!

It seems like you're the one assuming it'd be a given that the woman didn't contribute. Nobody else said anything about them.

It is valid to ask if this shift from talking about the actual story to talking about invented hypotheticals, and hinting at the danger a spouse might pose to one's company, would have been as quick or as easy or as likely had the spouse in question been male.

And the reason that people always "bring gender into it" or in other cases always "bring race into it" is simple: although to you it may seem that these factors are completely unrelated, to other people the whole experience of their lives is of gender/race being forced on them as a factor. The lack of that experience on the part of a minority of the population (white men, mostly) is not equivalent to gender/race not already being "brought into it", but rather an indicator of the ways in which biases and double standards, once deeply-enough embedded into a society, cease to be seen as such and instead are assumed to just be the default neutral state of affairs.

Nobody is under any obligation to discuss that aspect of the story. It's not even what the story was about.

> shift from talking about the actual story to talking about invented hypotheticals

You're not the Discussion Police nor are you the arbiter of the actual topic of the story.

This is starting to border on thought crime, and I think it's incredibly dangerous.

Prenups could be tossed in court unless both parties had their own lawyers paid by them individually.

Yes. Don't invest.