I agree it is over generalisation, but I feel in my case it was a main causation. He did under stand what my expectations where. However it was more that most of the time he had to work to support his family. He was not in a 9-5 job, he was doing freelance. So its not like he had a defined amount of time he could work. Clients work always came first and consumed most of the time.
I think the mistake was selecting a cofounder who was more committed to his consulting work than to your startup. As a freelancer your cofounder had the option to scale back his consulting or treat the startup as another consulting client. If he had to work to support his family then you didn't select someone with enough runway.
For all its benefits, the conventional wisdom of HN that one should pay off their mortgage prior to a startup may often be a mistake. A mortgage is leverage, and the cash used to pay ahead twenty years would be better used for a longer runway - $100,000 will cover many months of mortgage payments. What would most startups do for $100,000 worth of seed money?
Likewise, if a family keeps someone from going all-in to the startup that's only an issue when the other founders believe that going all in is a point of pride. In this case however, it's not that your cofounder wasn't going all in, it was that he wasn't even anteing up.
Well I can fill 14 hours a day with client work too. But when working for your startup you calculate the minimal income you need and only spend the amount of hours on a client to earn it.
The rest of the time is spent on working for your startup. When I was co-owner of a isv our main income in the beginning was consultancy for clients. In addition we developed our product and used the spare money to hire additional developers. The consultancy work made sure we had a minimal paycheck at the end of the month which would pay our mortage and the bills.
Maybe this model is not sustainable anymore with being quick to the market and bead competitors on speed. But it worked in that period of time.
This is exactly what I'm doing for my startup and have found it works really well. Although I have to say it helps to have even a small network of contacts who can direct work your way. It's easy to burn through a lot of time just looking for freelance work.
That's why I disagree that the choice of co-founder was bad because of these reasons. I think this is a overgeneralization.
Then you state you should manage development better and set better expectations. Well I think this is the main reason in the failure.
Did your co-founder knew exactly what you espected?