I’ve invested in suspicious opportunities before (turned out to be a Ponzi) because someone “successful” recommended me it. I’ve partnered with bad businesses partners before where I did most of the work and/or put in most of the money.

As such, I’ve compiled a short list of criteria you should use to vet business partners (subject to be more strict based on future experiences).

Criteria For Business Partners

First and foremost, even if someone meets all the criteria below if your gut feel is not a “HELL YES”, then it’s a “HELL NO.” Here’s the fallacy I had:

Teamwork is great! I can just do half the work for half the money, and take half the risk. And if the business is abundant, we all win!

But the thing is if vision’s not aligned, you’ll get half the money (or less in my cases) for doing most of the work while taking most of the risk. This is most of the time. So when in doubt, err on the side of just doing the damn business yourself since you’ll end up doing most of the work regardless. Hire out the rest if you need to – you don’t need a partner to help handle the workload.

  1. They can’t be a loser. Talk to them in 3+ conversations and see if they just complain about things when you are casually chatting them up.

  2. They have to have a track record in something relevant that’ll help drive your vision. Examples:

    • If they’re a decent real estate investor, don’t listen to them for crypto investing advice.

    • If you’re doing ecommerce and they are as well, make sure they have an outstanding track record in doing something in the business that you suck at. They should have 10X the results in an area of the business vs. your previous best, and vice versa. This creates symbiosis. Otherwise, you fall into the fallacy of finding a partner just to split work.

  3. They need to have roughly the same money as you, if not more. Deadass broke partners that have little money will always have you front money and pretend they’ll give it back when they can’t. Thus, you’ll take asymmetric risks. Also, deadass broke people are highly correlated with “lazy.” In these cases, you’ll be doing most of the work and taking more risks as well. Avoid deadasses at all costs.

  4. Your goals' order of magnitude should align. Example:

    • I want $100 million so I can have a private jet. My ex-business partner wants to buy a GTR. My goals were about 3 orders magnitude more than his was. It’s no surprise I did significantly more work.

  5. Vision should align. If you both are doing this for the money, that’s great. But if one of you is doing this for the money and the other is doing it to “change the world” or just “doing it to learn,” then it’s not going to work.

  6. You should think in the same way as your partner. If you are a cold, logical thinker find another one like you. If you’re an emotional thinker, find another one like you. Otherwise, conversations will be way too slow as you both will be speaking 2 different languages. And moving slow in business = death.