Today at Y Combinator’s Demo Day, founder Michelle Crosby told the story of going through her parents painful divorce as a nine year old. The silver lining? That she grew up to smooth this process for families to come.

Crosby has a background in family law. Nearly half of all marriages in America end in divorce and studies have shown that divorce iCan be a traumatizing event for children and cause lasting psychological damage. Despite this, little has been done to improve the experience for everyone involved.

Rather than starting with competing lawyers, Wevorce puts one lawyer at the center of the parents to begin negotiating and planning. Each step of the process also involves a software component to help iron out the various agreements and settlements and track all of the paperwork. Wevorce claims its software helps attorneys complete paperwork in 60% of the time it normally takes and saves clients money on fees.

Wevorce also provides information on the psychological effects of divorce to create empathy on both sides and help people cope with the challenges. It integrates counseling and communication in a more holistic approach to what is traditionally a heavily legal-centric process.

The internet is here to help with the good parts of relationships. There are dozens of internet companies to help you find your partner, and just as many to help you plan your wedding and subsequent baby showers. When a relationship is no longer working, however, the internet is a fair weather friend with little aid to offer. This is where Wevorce comes in. Divorce is unpleasant enough as it is, why not make it easier?

This is a guest post by entrepreneur Alex Laats

In the early 1990’s, I attended a startup conference, where the speaker emphasized that a large percentage of entrepreneurs end up getting divorced. Forgetting what the rest of the presentation was about, I left with the idea that starting a company had the potential to ruin my marriage.

At the time, I was working for MIT, with dreams of starting a business. By 1996, I was ready to pull the trigger and start a company — but the alarming divorce statistics had left their mark. My wife, Laura, and I had a baby with visions of expanding the family, and an old home with a mortgage requiring extensive repair.

There’s never a perfect time to get married, have a baby, move in to a new home, and start a company. However, the dream of launching a tech startup had overtaken me, and I discussed the idea frequently with my wife. Laura had the patience and tolerance to listen. Shortly before starting my company, she gave me a coffee mug that said, ‘Carpe Diem,’ which changed to ‘Seize the Day’ when hot coffee was poured into the mug. I knew she was on board.

Because of the warnings from the presentation, I knew we had to start the company with the clear knowledge that our marriage would be put at risk, and we needed to be realistic about what it would require from both of us. An incredibly lopsided deal was made: I would work long hours out of the house. Work would come first, and Laura would bear the brunt of the taking care of our home, baby and finances. On top of that, she would continue working because we needed the income. My household responsibilities were minimal and manageable. We called it “The Deal.”

My startup “NBX” was one year old when we learned Laura was pregnant with our second child. When our son was born, it was clear the original arrangement wouldn’t work. There were plenty of moments when we didn’t have answers. We developed a new deal, and we made it work. It was a year later that 3Com bought NBX for $90 million.

This immediately and meaningfully changed our lives — money and personal time were suddenly in the equation. Happiest when working to build an exciting new business with a great team of dynamic and creative people, I immersed myself in another startup. Over the last 10 years, I’ve been involved with four start-ups, three of which were successful.

There have been plenty of rocky times along the way. At one particularly bad moment, I recall telling Laura to shoot me if I got involved with another startup. Thankfully, she understood my frustration but ignored my request.

I recently met a new company with a great business model, super-creative team and profitable growth, and couldn’t turn down the opportunity. It was time for another Deal, but this time it was with Laura, my two teenage boys and middle-school daughter. We’ve worked together to set expectations, and with everyone’s help we’ve found a comfortable balance.

When making these deals, it’s necessary to remember others are making sacrifices for your benefit. It’s important not to forget the little things. As cliché as it sounds, I remember my Dad starting my Mom’s car to warm it up before she headed to work. I make the morning coffee every day for Laura. I’m a bit obsessive about it, I confess.

Even when I’m up and out the door before anyone else is awake, Laura can turn on the coffee and know I’m thinking of her, and I appreciate the fact that she holds it all together.

Alex Laats brings 20 years of experience as a high-tech entrepreneur, business operator and team builder to ZeroTurnaround. Most recently, Alex created three businesses (Boomerang, RAMP, and AVOKE) and acquired one (Digital Force Technologies) while serving as president of BBN Technologies’ Delta Division. BBN is legendary in the geek world for many things including the development of the early Internet nodes and the invention of e-mail. BBN was successfully acquired by Raytheon.

Prior to BBN, Alex co-founded two business, including NBX, which was one of the first successful enterprise VoIP businesses. NBX was successfully acquired by 3Com.

Alex walks a fine line of geek and businessman; all the while still maintaining his title as four square (the schoolyard game) legend in the short-guy, over-40 category. 

Dad and child image via Shutterstock 

Postagram, the mobile app that takes your Instagram photos, prints them, and sends them to your friends as postcards, published a beautiful little love story today. Two long-distance lovers kept in touch with Postagrams … and then received a wonderful, creative gift at their eventual wedding.

I talked to Postagram’s CTO, Bryan Kennedy, about the story.

“Apparently it was a couple that was doing the long distance relationship thing,” Kennedy told me. “The boyfriend sent a Postagram every week. Then, at their wedding, the bride’s sister presented them with a gift made up of those Postagrams.”

Here’s the story, from the Postagram blog in the words of the former girlfriend, now wife, LaDonna Consolo:

Source: Sincerely

Postal love via Instagram and Postagram

When my husband and I first met and started dating we lived about an hour apart, so we could only spend time together during the weekends. The five weekdays would stretch long but Mike would always send me a Postagram with pictures from our weekend and sweet captions that totally melted my heart.

After eleven months of dating, we were married, and my sister used my Postagrams from Mike to create a set of wall hangings to decorate at our reception. These sweet hangings now adorn the wall over our bed, and are a constant reminder of our love story. Most people might think to put these in a typical photo album but these meant so much more to us and we love being able to look at them every day and reminisce.

Thanks for making an app that gives us such a unique way to commemorate special days and preserve our memories. We love you Postagram!

That’s a great story, and great example that connecting with people doesn’t just have to happen via social media or pixels on a screen.

Postagram is a service by Sincerely. The San Francisco company recently launched Sesame, a new gift-in-a-box product line, just a day before Facebook announced its own gift plans.

Image credit: Sincerely

Nothing says romance like boiling lava

Indie sandbox building game Minecraft allows players to create some pretty wild and imaginative things, so it was only a matter of time before someone used it to pop the big question. Last year, an unnamed BioWare employee proposed to his girlfriend by writing “Marry me?” in lava in the game world. He also built a gigantic engagement ring. According to the video, she said yes.

“I got better things to do than help some schmuck hit on his main squeeze!”

Leave it to Gearbox Software to come up with a totally irreverent and hilarious way to propose marriage. In this video, foul-mouthed Borderlands mascot Claptrap is coerced by an off-screen developer into asking superfan Tora if she’ll marry her boyfriend, Ben, but not before he hits on her himself. Ben tells Kotaku that playing Borderlands together “easily made that awkward starting out stage of any relationship go extremely smooth.”

Hacker puts his skills to good use

YouTube user TheRealPfhreak originally wanted to propose to his girlfriend at Mount Baker in Washington, the site of the couple’s first date. There was no discreet way of getting there, however, so he did what he thought was the next best thing and digitally recreated the mountain by hacking a copy of role-playing game Chrono Trigger. “I spent a long time debating whether or not this proposal was awesome or incredibly stupid,” he explains. “Her friends and my friends helped talk me into it, and it was a huge success!”

Now you’re proposing with portals

When Gary Hudston wanted to ask his girlfriend, Stephanie, to marry him, he enlisted the help of level designers from Portal 2 mapping community website ThinkingWithPortals.com — as well as Valve’s Eric Wolpaw and GlaDOS voice actress Ellen McClain — to build him a very special proposal, according to Time. “You can say no,” GlaDOS says. “I’m sure he’ll get over it … eventually.” Luckily for him, she said yes.

Love and marriage in Little Big Planet

Listen closely and you can hear an audible gasp when gamer “DimmuJed’s” girlfriend discovers his proposal in a custom-made level of Little Big Planet called “Love and Marriage.” “She was so shocked she kept playing and knew I was filming. Afterwards, we hugged, she cried, and I gave her an engagement ring,” he writes.

A Mobius Proposal

A Mobius Proposal is a co-op puzzle platformer created by Matt Gilgenbach for the sole purpose of proposing to his girlfriend. Players in the game are on opposite sides of a Mobius band and must work together in order to overcome obstacles. “I incorporated the proposal in the game by displaying a fake low battery message and hiding the ring inside the battery pack of the controller,” Matt writes. He then secretly turned on his webcam to record the above reaction.

There’s an app for that

Jen is a verifiable fiend for iOS puzzle games, according to Cult of Mac, so her boyfriend, Joe, asked Foozle creator William Thurston to create an in-app proposal. Thurston agreed and worked the message “Jen, I love you with all my heart and nothing would make me happier than to spend the rest of my life with you. Will you marry me?” into his physics-based puzzle game. Beneath the message, there was just one button: “YES.” Not only did Thurston agree to create the proposal for free, he even offered the game as a free download for a limited time.

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