Generally speaking, it's very hard to convince the right person to co-found a startup. It's comparatively easy to convince the right-for-now person to join on a noncommittal basis. It's not easy to patiently and persistently search for the former, when the latter is so much quicker to come by.

I failed at founding a startup under similar circumstances. This was back in school, on the verge of graduation, when the idea struck me and I decided to go for it. My timing was terrible, given that my would-be co-founders had full-time jobs lined up. Joining me, and turning down our various offers in pursuit of the startup, was a proposition somewhere between slightly insane and certifiably so.

And so I gave everyone a pass. I "hired" a bunch of them on a part-time basis -- knowing that they'd be leaving to start their day jobs in about two months, and, therefore, inadvertently giving myself two months to generate enough traction to convince them to stick around. God, I was so naive. But I'm glad I learned the lesson at a (relatively) young age.

I don't blame any of them for the failure of that short-lived startup. I blame myself. In retrospect, I realized that my own commitment to the startup had been no deeper than theirs. If it had been, I'd have hustled a lot harder to find committed co-founders.