inmyhead

It's sounds like you've done a bit of homework, as would be expected of someone with your background. However, when selecting a partner, make sure you spend a great deal of time getting to know them. I can't stress that enough.

Also, I'd encourage you to solicit people that have similar interests (possibly expertise in something you wished you knew more about & enjoy), which can potentially turn into your product/business. If you want to spend a significant portion of your life working on something, it might as well be something you enjoy (cause you can grind out a living doing things you don't care about for anyone). When recruiting engineers, let them know what spaces / ideas you are considering. From my experience, passion for a space gets more responses then delineated qualifications.

Best of luck.

Unfortunately, yes. I'm not sure if it's directly related to the fact that HR is a high volume function and there aren't any objective metrics that track how gracefully non-selected candidates are degraded or if legally, it's better to say nothing at all. I also have some suspicions that many posted jobs are posted on spec, which is to say that they are 'in the pipeline', but not authorized to actually hire.

In the current job market, it's easy to get sloppy with practices like these. It is rude, but such is life.

Personally, I've had endless reschedules, interviewer no shows, long dark periods (even when the outcome has been positive) and no response (after being flown for on-site interviews). It's not specific to company size, stage, industry, location, etc. As I mentioned above, it probably has to do with a lack of managing the feedback loop of non-selected candidate satisfaction.