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Comment by petilon | Hacker News Reader

Some founders "fake it till you make it", and this news should serve as a cautionary tale.

"Fake it till you make it" originally meant behaving as an established company would, as opposed to presenting yourself as an upstart startup without a lot of customers. Basically: Professional website, formal company structure, normal business sales practices, having people available to answer the phones, and so on. You still had to do the work and deliver the results, but the goal was to overcome hesitancy to use startups instead of established companies.

It didn't mean literally lying about your capabilities or accomplishments in order to garner more investment money.

That's not "fake it till you make it". That's just fraud. It's not really hard to distinguish between the two, despite the way some people are trying to merge the two definitions.

It's fairly common to see an element of outright fakery before the hopeful-but-not-guaranteed "till you make it".

A coworker was using a mobile app from a startup offering to do "receipt OCR using AI/ML" when in fact they were sending most of the scanned pictures to a call-center in India to be manually entered. They hadn't yet figured out the fancy image recognition algorithm, so they were just throwing AWS Mechanical Turk at it while building up a user base. Realistically, they might never get to that level of AI while staying solvent.

That's not so different ethically to what Theranos was doing. The only difference with Theranos is the scale of it all.

There are two parts to this comparison. The first is, do they outright lie. If they are claiming "we are using AI" to investors, that might be fraud. But that is avoidable with just adding in "we are using AI for some receipts".

The second, and more important, question is, are they harming customers. Theranus gave people unreliable blood test results and lied about their reliability. That does actual harm to customers. Whereas for scanning receipts the only thing a customer really cares about is accuracy.

> That's not so different ethically to what Theranos was doing

No. One is we know we can do OCR, we know we can do AI, it's just an engineering effort to put those pieces together. The risk is schedule risk.

Theranos was hard science. They did not know if they could do what they fraudulently claimed they had already done. They needed scientific discoveries to deliver. The risk was can the necessary technology be invented.

I thought "fake it till you make it" was more of an individual strategy, not a company strategy. If a company behaves like an established company would, they are not faking anything, they are behaving like an established company would. For the individual strategy it's more about combating impostor syndrome. At higher levels many people have this feeling that others have something they don't, so it's telling people to just accept that feeling and be the impostor, because, in fact, everyone is an impostor anyway.

Fraud it till you got it?

FITYMI can also be interpreted as presenting yourself (and company) with confidence that sometimes only more successful people (and companies) radiate. Like the comment above says, this does _not_ mean lying.

This is by the way but I love the phrase "upstart startup."

No, no, no. I see this all the time around Theranos ("Hey, there are lots of other fake-it-til-you-make-it companies out there, Theranos just went to extremes"), and I don't think it's accurate, at all.

The line around fraud is really not that gray. If you're lying about current facts for personal gain, that's fraud. You can hype all you want about the future, and most VCs are actually fine with you selling them the "yeah, it's hamster wheels in the backend now, but just wait until we build out our tech and scale!" line (just see all the well funded "AI" startups that just have legions of people "training" the AI), but if you say that it's the whizbang tech right now, but it's really just hamster wheels, that's fraud.

Fraud is not just an extension of "aggressive selling".

Maybe don't fake "medical devices" till you make it.

She was not found guilty on any charges of harming or swindling patients.

This was about the wealthy investors. They will come after you whether you fake medical devices or bombs.

The Justice Department was only interested in the case because Theranos operated in a highly regulated industry with lots of government oversight. SaaS and consumer tech startup founders lie and cheat and blow up investor money every day and no one really cares.

All the wealthy investors gain nothing from Holmes going to jail. In fact the lengthy trial only drags them into the spotlight, which they'd rather stay clear of.

> The Justice Department was only interested in the case because Theranos operated in a highly regulated industry with lots of government oversight.

I don't think so. I think there were very powerful investors and others associated with the company (like board members) who were stung and embarrassed.

> SaaS and consumer tech startup founders lie and cheat and blow up investor money every day and no one really cares.

Do you have any roughly equivalent examples on the scale of the fraud and the people associated?

> All the wealthy investors gain nothing from Holmes going to jail. In fact the lengthy trial only drags them into the spotlight, which they'd rather stay clear of.

I disagree with this too. It's a good way to clear their names as it were ("we aren't greedy gullible idiots, she tricked us"), and a great way to send a message not to cross the ruling class.

They were the only people not guaranteed an outcome -- investment is inherently risky. Medical procedures are not.

Did you just say that medical procedures are not inherently risky? The data does not support that claim.

In any case I'm not sure how the comment addresses what I wrote.

the point is she could have never made it. First year grads of meds schools would look at it and tell you its impossible. Its like knowing a floppy stores 1.44 MB and showing it as a breaking technology - we won't change anything but we tell you it will fit 16TB with our magical formula.

Faking it doesn't work if you are committing fraud?

I think that's the key point here. Was Jucero fraud? I think there's a clear line between a) we have an idea for a product but we have certain limitations that are feasible to overcome, with more time and investment; versus b) we have a product, we're using it in the field, patients are using it, and it works great. In the first scenario, you could fake the dream but you're not promising something that you know to be absolutely false.

I could almost see "fake it til you make it" if your idea is based on already proven technology, but success depends on something like brand recognition, network effect, etc. In the case of Theranos, whether her technology worked or not was ultimately going to be decided by Mother Nature, not by a market.

Fake it all you want until your fakery harms innocent parties.

What's an example of a fakery that doesn't harm innocent parties? If you pretend a product (or a feature) that doesn't exist exists, then at the very least a competitor is unfairly harmed.

Innocent is perhaps the operative word. If investors expect and/or used to certain amount of fakery they are not "innocent" [1] or if the competitors are doing the same thing they are not necessarily "innocent" either.

[1] In this context to take meaning as knowledge, not meaning "not guilty" here.

If a site like Reddit gets started by creating nonexistent or sock-puppet users, for instance, that's hardly on the same level as falsifying medical tests "just until we get the bugs sorted out."

The conviction here was defrauding investors, not defrauding medical tests.

If Reddit included those sock-puppet users in their metrics to investors, then that would be roughly equivalent fraud.

In the legal sense, competition doesn’t qualify as an innocent party.

The sociopaths who are attracted to founder life are immune to this lesson.

She strikes me as the cute blonde version of Orson Welles in The Third Man...

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