All founders have an origin story involving an unsolvable problem that they simply couldn’t accept. For Rodgers, it was paper. His mother was a matrimonial lawyer, and Rodgers, as part of his childhood chores, organized stacks and stacks of financial disclosure documents, including for couples under prenuptial agreements. There had to be a better solution, she would later say. While attending Suffolk University Law School, she took a course called Lawyers and Smart Machines, on how to automate certain legal processes. “They taught us coding, which I wasn’t good at,” she admitted. That’s where Jaffe, an engineer, later came in, although the two eventually had their own separation. (Rodgers preferred not to go into detail.)
Rodgers began building his platform a few years after graduating from law school, just before his own marriage, to another lawyer. “We were the first couple to use HelloPrenup,” she said. “We were the test case.” She and her husband had 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 marriage. I had the best marriage,” she said.
Examining the scene at Sadelle’s, we guessed where Affleck and Lopez might have sat. “There are so many people,” Rodgers observed. “Maybe somewhere in the back.” We began discussing the end of his own marriage. She and her husband had a baby in 2020 and the start of the pandemic left them without caregiver. “He’s a patent litigator. He was very busy. I was working as a lawyer and trying to grow this business,” she said. “It was just a squeeze on a squeeze on a squeeze.” They divorced in 2022.
But the COVID The lockdown also set HelloPrenup up for success. Nobody wanted to go to a law office. “Everything was being digitized very quickly,” Rodgers said. By the start of 2021, around two and a half million women had left the workforce, in what is known as a “female exit”. An article from the HelloPrenup site sounded good: “Who was supposed to stay at home, take care of the children, become a pseudo-teacher, take care of household chores and manage to stay at their desk eight hours a day? Women.” Amid the ashes of girlboss feminism, Rodgers saw opportunity. “Prenuptial agreements can solve the motherhood problem because you can have an equalization clause,” she told me, explaining that a larger share of assets could compensate for a stay-at-home parent’s lost earning potential.
Rodgers calls prenuptial agreements a “modern vow” because they can govern finances and other major life decisions. during marriage. Today’s couples want these choices to be made in a spirit of equality and supported by a contract. “They ask, ‘Are our in-laws going to move in?’ Are we going to buy a house or clean house? FIRE method and travel around the world? » FIRE is a lifestyle popular with millennials and Generation Z, marked by extreme saving and aggressive investing; it means “Financial Independence, Retire Early”. A millennial older, I had to look it up.
In February 1990, it was announced that Donald and Ivana Trump were divorcing after thirteen years of marriage. The news made headlines. “They aired it before the story in South Africa,” one outraged New Yorker told a local television crew, referring to Nelson Mandela’s release from prison that week. People immediately began speculating about the loot. “It’s not just a marriage that’s at stake. It’s Donald Trump’s reputation as a dealmaker,” journalist Richard Roth said on CBS News. The couple had a prenup – and three “post-nupts” – granting Ivana around twenty million dollars, a fraction of Trump’s alleged five billion dollar fortune. “IVANA BETTER DEAL», we read on the cover of Daily News. In a sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” Jan Hooks, as Ivana, balks at the prenup: “This contract is invalid. You have a mistress, Donald.” (Rumors swirled that Trump had been unfaithful to a Southern beauty queen named Marla Maples.) Phil Hartman, playing Trump, flips through the pages of the contract before saying, “Under Article 5(2), I’m allowed to have mistresses as long as they’re younger than you.” »
The marriage contract largely held. Ivana got a measly fourteen million, a mansion in Greenwich, an apartment in Trump Plaza, and use of Mar-a-Lago one month a year. But it was understandable that the public thought that Trump’s entire empire might be at stake. In the 1980s, prenuptial agreements usually made headlines because they were rejected. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported that Steven Spielberg was ordered to pay a hundred million dollars to his ex-wife, actress Amy Irving, after a judge voided their prenup, which was allegedly scribbled on a piece of paper. (Irving said through a representative that “no prenup was ever discussed.”)
