What I find interesting is that people often seem to feel this way, myself included, but then there are these start-up weekend events where the goal is to build something quickly based on ideas presented in one evening and teams built in a couple hours and people seem to be willing to take that chance without much problem. I wonder what the difference is that people perceive that makes them so cautious in one context but not the other.
If you waste a weekend on something (fun), that's not really a significant loss. I'd be more than willing to waste a weekend building something even it doesn't work out. However, most of my partnerships are have lasted much much longer than that. It's very costly work on something for even a few weeks and have the partnership fall apart.
Just recently a friend of mine had a serious break-down with his designer. This wasn't a partnership relationship, he was contracting the designer. But when the designer flaked out, misappropriated other designs, and disappeared for weeks that ended up costing my friend a lot of time and money.
Face-to-face communication contains significant non-verbal information which lends itself to trust. The human organism has developed ways to test others for inauthenticity, lack of confidence, etc. These tests are difficult to apply online, but humans do them naturally face-to-face.
