I realize I'm a few years late to the party by commenting here now, but I followed your instructions in the article to the letter. Here's the problem: You said "Who is everyone in the company that you *fully* trust?" (emphasis mine)

I work for a small company that shall remain as nameless as myself. I know (beyond acquaintanceship, having at least had several conversations with every single one of them) every person in the company.

There is nobody here I *fully* trust. Expressed as percentages, there are people who I 90+ percent trust. There are also people I only about 70% trust. Not stellar, but at least it's a passing grade. And there are two people in particular I don't trust very much at all. It's hard to assign percentages when they get this low, but both are well below 50%. One is the guy in charge of the whole thing.

I've been here for over a year, and feel no less integrated with the team than anybody else here. I'm liked and respected by my coworkers, and vice versa.

But liking and respecting someone is different from fully trusting them. My test was to bring each person in turn to mind, and ask myself, "Do I trust them enough that I would cofound a company with them?"

Every time, the answer was "no". Person X cares more about cool hacks/features than stability and testability. Y overengineers everything. Z only seems to have two modes: working as though it's a death march, and not working while recovering from that. The list goes on.

What advice would you give me? (And I realize this isn't an advice column, but writing this comment has helped me organize my thoughts, so I'd like to put it out there into the world so that at the very least, someone else in a similar situation might see it and realizes they're not alone.)