How to address a team member that's not pulling their weight?

That’s actually a great way to phrase it. It never occurred to me that this is how it should be done.

Interesting, so sounds like they already made some progress? Wonder if it's remote team or if they have ownership... I know I wanted to do projects with people remotely but seemed to run into flakey people... Like one project I was going to do the coding, while someone else was going to do the sales. I feel like I did my part but they ended up never even trying with sales it seems.

Then wanted to do something game related in a virtual world, and got someone to agree to create models for an amount while I'd do the scripting part, then they totally just disappeared on me. This happened about 3 years ago, but I guess my problem might have been just being too cheap since we both we both were just starting out - thought we were doing each other a favor in a way.

I guess that's also one of the lessons is don't offer people a precent, seems like a common mistake. I know vesting and getting proper contracts in place with expectations is one of the lessons I've learned a bit just reading comments on HN.

Personally with my current project, trying to do most of it's alone - but it's hard... Hoping to be able to bootstrap something or maybe seek funding from a VC and then just hire a small team of employees to expand it to meet my vision. Then not sure how I feel about trying to do it remotely after being burned multiple times with other projects... I feel like meeting people in person in a big city maybe they'll take things more serious, maybe better communication and getting a feel for someone more. I feel like if you never met someone, probably easier to just blow them off. But I know in the real world that stuff happens too... But I got a feeling some people feel the internet isn't real and stuff, like people call them "online friends".

Maybe I just have bad luck to pick horrible people to want to work with, not too sure... I wonder how common this sort of stuff is anyways, well I'm sure there's been projects with a lot more stakes that went bad... No wonder some startup communities think the team is more important than the idea or product itself... I know I feel kinda alone but for now just focusing on my new project and doing it myself, hopes to take startup school to learn the more business side of things though.

I feel like I have a bit of a trust problem with people, so just want to make sure I do everything right in the future going forward. Plus if got funding that could help, I think being able to just pay someone outright as an emplyoee instead of trying to partner up might work better, if things don't go right just fire them no drama about ownership and stuff. Plus contractors technically also own any IP they create, unless they agree to reassign it but after so any decades they can petition to have it assigned back to them, so if creating long term assets where IP matters, employee makes the IP part more straight forward.