All founders have an origin story involving some intractable problem that they simply could not accept. For Rogers it was paper. Her mother was a family law attorney, and Rogers, as part of her childhood responsibilities, collected stacks of financial disclosure documents, including for couples entering into prenuptial agreements. “There has to be a better way,” she will say later. While studying law at Suffolk University, she took a course called Lawyers and Smart Machines, which focused on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us programming, which I was not good at,” she admitted. It was here that engineer Jaffe would later appear, although the two would eventually have their own differences. (Rogers chose not to go into detail.)
Rogers began developing her platform a few years after graduating from law school, shortly before her own wedding to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were a test case.” She and her husband met on Match.com (“old school,” she noted) and married in 2019 in Newport, Rhode Island, at the picturesque Castle Hill Inn overlooking Narragansett Bay. “Oh my God, I had the best wedding. best wedding,” she said.
Looking around the stage at Sadella's, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez could be sitting. “It’s so crowded,” Rogers noted. – Maybe somewhere behind. We began discussing the end of her own marriage. She and her husband had a child in 2020, and the onset of the pandemic left them without family support. “He's a patent litigator. He's been very busy. I've been working as an attorney and trying to build this business,” she said. “It was just pressure on pressure on pressure.” They divorced in 2022.
But COVID-19 The quarantine has also contributed to HelloPrenup's success. Nobody wanted to go to a law office. “Everything was digitizing very quickly,” Rogers said. By early 2021, approximately two and a half million women had left the workforce in what is known as the women's retreat. The HelloPrenup article read: “Who had to stay home, look after the kids, become a pseudo-teacher, take on household responsibilities and still manage to sit at their desk for eight hours a day? Women”. Amidst the ashes of “girlboss” feminism, Rogers saw new opportunities. “A prenuptial agreement can solve the problem of the maternity penalty because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a larger share of assets can offset the loss of earning potential of a stay-at-home parent.
Rogers calls a prenuptial agreement a “modern-day vow” because it can govern finances and other major life decisions. for wedding. Today, couples want this choice to be made in a spirit of equality and supported by a contract. “They ask, 'Are our relatives going to move? Are we going to buy a house or do some renovations?' FIRE method and travel the world?' » FIRE is a lifestyle popular among millennials and Generation Z, characterized by extreme savings and aggressive investments; it stands for “Financial Independence, Retire Early.” As an older millennial, I had to look it up.
In February 1990, it became known that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing after thirteen years of marriage. The news dominated the headlines. “They published this before the story came out of South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told local television, referring to Nelson Mandela's release from prison that week. People immediately started talking about the spoils. “It's not just the marriage that's at stake. It's Donald Trump's reputation as a fixer that's at stake,” journalist Richard Roth said on CBS News. The couple had a prenuptial agreement (and three “postnuptials”) that allegedly resulted in Ivana receiving approximately twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump's estimated $5 billion fortune. “IVAN'S BEST OFFER“- read on the cover Daily news. In a Saturday Night Live skit, Jan Hooks, who plays Ivana, refuses her prenuptial agreement: “This contract is void. You have a mistress, Donald.” (Trump was rumored to have cheated on a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, who plays Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “Under Section 5, Clause 2, I am allowed to have mistresses as long as they are younger than you.”
The marriage contract has basically taken place. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza and the right to use Mar-a-Lago for one month a year. But it was clear that the public believed Trump's entire empire might be at stake. In the eighties, prenuptial agreements were usually in the news for being thrown out. In 1990 Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay his ex-wife, actress Amy Irving, $100 million after a judge voided a prenuptial agreement that was allegedly scribbled on a piece of paper. (Irving said through a spokesman that “no prenuptial agreement was even discussed.”)
