18 Powerful Couples Who Rule The Tech World

A few years ago, Aaron Hirschhorn and his wife Karine went to visit their family on the east coast. They left their two dogs, Rocky and Rambo, in a kennel. It cost them $1,400 — more than their trip — and Rocky hid under Hirschhorn's desk for the next two days.

The pair started brainstorming better solutions and then spent 2011 turning their home into a dog-sitting hotspot. Over the course of the year, they took in 100 dogs when friends went out of town.

The result was DogVacay, a network of local dog sitters, which has raised $22 million from investors such as First Round Capital, Benchmark, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Dave and Brit Morin are married, and each is working on a startup.

Dave is running Path, a mobile social network. Brit left Google to start her own company, Brit+Co, which launched in November, 2011. It's a design and cooking site full of inspirational how-to posts. This past year it raised $6 million.

It wasn't an easy year for Fab CEO Jason Goldberg, but at least the newlywed had his husband by his side.

Jason Goldberg married Christian Schoenherr in August 2012. Schoenherr is an account manager in New York for T-Systems North America, a division of Deutsche Telekom that provides information technology services.

Kevin and Julia Hartz run Eventbrite. They met at a friend's wedding while Julia was working for MTV (on "Jackass") and Kevin was founding Xoom.

They knew right away they wanted to start a company together. Now their startup has raised $140 million and more than 140 million tickets have been processed on Eventbrite.

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is married to Zack Bogue. Bogue is co-managing partner of venture capital firm Data Collective.

Mark founded gaming company Zynga. Ali is cofounder of online home-furnishings retailer, One King's Lane, which recently raised a $112 million round of financing that nearly valued the company at $1 billion.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is married to SurveyMonkey CEO, Dave Goldberg.

Sandberg believes picking the right life partner is the single most important decision a professional can make. She's grateful she's chosen someone who isn't only motivated himself, but who also supports her career. "I have an awesome husband," she told the crowd at Business Insider's Ignition conference, "and we're 50/50."

High-school sweethearts Eric and Susan Gregg Koger launched Modcloth thanks to Susan's love of vintage clothing.

Susan couldn't resist buying cute vintage pieces, even if they didn't fit her. Eventually, she and Eric went off to college and her dorm room grew so full of stuff they decided to sell it online.

Today Modcloth employs hundreds of people and has raised money from Accel and Norwest.

Re/code founder and journalist Kara Swisher is married to vice president of Google[X], Megan Smith.

Paul Graham and his wife Jessica Livingston run Y Combinator, the startup school/seed-funding venture that has invested in hundreds of companies.

Graham detailed how they came up with the idea when Y Combinator turned seven:

In March 2005, Graham's wife Jessica did not like her job. She worked for an investment bank in Boston and was looking to leave.

Graham, who made money selling a web application he developed called Viaweb, decided to create a job for her.

The two discussed the initial idea for Y Combinator on a walk home from dinner. Graham would put $100,000 into the project and Jessica would quit her job to work for the new early stage investment firm. Two of Graham's friends, Robert Morris and Trevor Blackwell, gave the couple $50,000; Y Combinator began with $200,000.

Michael and Kass Lazerow are the founders of Buddy Media, which sold to Salesforce.com for ~ $700 million.

Before founding Buddy Media, they launched Golf.com together, which they eventually sold to Time Inc. For a very personal account of their home and work relationships, read this article Lazerow wrote for Inc.

Microsoft co-founder and his wife Melinda co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. They met while Melinda was employed by Microsoft as a product manager.

It took eight years for Carley Roney and David Liu to fall in love after meeting as undergrads at NYU.

But after they reunited at a graduate school party, the pace picked up. Two years after they got married, the pair went into business together. The Knot, founded in 1996, was their second venture.

It's been a bumpy road with some dark times during the tech bubble burst, but now the company is publicly-traded and employs hundreds of people. The founders say 80% of all women who are planning a wedding sign up for their site.

Megan Quinn, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, is dating Google Ventures' MG Siegler.

Quinn formerly worked for Square and Google; Siegler worked for Mike Arrington's CrunchFund and was a writer for TechCrunch.

Nihal Mehta is the founder of mobile advertising company LocalResponse, and he's invested in a number of startups. His wife, Reshma Saujani, was the daughter of refugees and she has big political aspirations. She ran for New York City Public Advocate in the fall but lost. She's also started an initiative called Girls Who Code to get young women interested in tech from an early age.

Google board member Diane Greene is married to Mendel Rosenblum. They co-founded VMWare, along with three other people in 1998. Greene, who was CEO, was famously let go in 2008 and Rosenblum left shortly after.

Greene kept her hand in tech startups, as an angel investor in a bunch of them and Rosenblum is a professor of engineering at Stanford.

Sam Lessin co-founded Drop.io, which was acquired by Facebook and his stock made him very wealthy when Facebook went public.

Jessica Lessin, his wife, is a technology reporter who launched a media company this year, The Information. The Information has broken a lot of news, including Google executive Susan Wojcicki's big new role as head of YouTube.

Valleywag heard chatter of actress, model and startup investor Tyra Banks dating recently divorced venture capitalist, Shervin Pishevar. Pishevar made a smart, early bet on Uber when he was at Menlo Ventures. Banks has her own investment vehicle, Fierce Capital.

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