But can you reliably judge the character of people who are incentivized to deceive you? In my experience, most people are happy to keep their options open, and

But can you reliably judge the character of people who are incentivized to deceive you? In my experience, most people are happy to keep their options open, and most people discount volatility pretty hard when forced to make their life choices path-dependent. Not just to start a company, but when it comes time to commit resources to something, you find that even those who you believed would carry through, whether thanks to their track record or particularly convincing talk, will drop out. I think of it as them having a high discount rate. The NPV of choosing a riskier path with later reward is thus lower than the stable, short term higher returns of stability, and the cost of "flaking" (the likelihood of you choosing not to do business with them ever again if you get to a position of such success that you can afford it) very low, especially if you are not currently in a position of success. Plus, you'll "understand", right? I've gotten better over time at spotting those who'd drop out, but still have a 30-40% failure rate. I chalk it up to flakers being good at convincing other people - too good for me to spot them - and factor that in as a cost of doing business with good people which pays off in the long term. If you have a reliable way to spot flakers early, I'd love to read about it. (FWIW on the original subject - Noam Wasserman's data show the highest rate of failure for "family/friends who become co-founders", followed by "fresh hired co-founders" with "people who worked together before as co-founders" being a significant predictor for co-founding success.)