As for the fake reviews… People across the org may have wildly divergent experiences working at a company. Even a fairly small company. Often the person who someone reports directly to has an outsized impact on said person's experience. In an early stage company the individuals doing people management tend to be, at best, very new to that specific part of the job. At worst the company grows large-ish before any official "reports-to" structure is put in place.

I've worked at places where my advice to leadership would be "keep doing what you're doing" while other Glassdoor reviews seemed to have had one of the worst experiences of their lives. That doesn't mean that I planted a review. Maybe I had a particularly good manager? I could have worked in the only good part of the org or a negative review may have come from someone who worked in the only bad part of the org.

It's pretty easy to openly communicate with management (all the way up to c-level) in my experience, no need to put it on some website when you could discuss it with them directly.

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For example, let's say I wanted to take an expensive vacation. I would fly to Europe (1st class, of course), stay in nice hotels, and basically live it up. I would mark this down as a "recruiting expense", or "customer acquisition cost". If the investor cared to drill down to this level, all they would see is a $75,000 trip to Europe for recruiting. They wouldn't know how many people went, or how successful it was. $75k is nothing next to an engineer's salary, and a recruiter would take a fee on the same order of magnitude, so I doubt they would bat an eye, but a 20-something founder could take a pretty sweet vacay for $75k.

Want a new motorcycle? Its for product testing, of course. New $80k Tesla? We're exploring how our tech could be expanded to used in cars, not just with motorcycles. Hookers and blow? Team building.