How to convince a fellow programmer to join your startup
wheels: Honestly I don't try to persuade people.  I want them to know what they're getting into and be willing to take that risk with us.  I feel like if you lure someone away from a steady job with pie-in-the-sky logic, you're setting yourself up to lose a friend.  When I got my co-founder in on things, we talked very seriously about the realistic chance of success, how much stress it would be, and well, how much we'd learn along the way and that we might even have a little fun.  Expectation management seems to be important.