The Power of 2

Conventional wisdom says that starting a fast-growth business with your spouse is too risky, too intense, too fraught with potential drama. But these couples have turned their partnerships into their superpowers.

- By Tom Foster. Photograph by Joanna Kulesza

COMPANY Tiff's Treats

CO-FOUNDERS Tiffany Chen & Leon Chen

The idea for their cookie business hatched after she stood him up for a date. Apparently, there were no hard feelings.

Tiffany

Chen remembers sitting on a plastic bucket turned upside down over a drain that was spewing wastewater into the kitchen of the Austin-based cookie-delivery company she had co-founded. It was 2001, torrential rain was overwhelming the city's drainage and sewer system, and Tiffany was trying to do whatever she could to keep the flood level from reaching the electrical outlets. She and her business partner and now husband, Leon, had begun their company out of an apartment as college kids just two years earlier, and this small kitchen, in a storefront they shared with a potato restaurant called Spudnik, was their first official place of business. The two of them had been working day and night since graduation to meet the surging local demand for their service, but they hadn't managed yet to break out of the cycle of doing almost everything themselves including flood control.