Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars
nickoneill.com
nickoneill.com
It was "Don't point out your own short comings"
I was saying things like 'in the final run the paint job will be better', highlighting the deficiencies of our Xmas decorations instead of highlighting the positives.
If you've ever met a good sales person working for your company, they're almost blind to the deficiencies in your products. It's not that they're deceiving you, it's that their internal reality is that that they see the positives, that's all they talk about. That's the product they're selling. If you try and say 'well this bit isn't great', they give you a confused look.
As soon as the 'negatives' click, their sales plummet. It's a built in defence mechanism to add confidence and to be honest it's up to the client to see the deficiencies, not the sales person.
That's kind of like a start up founder is, they've got to focus on the positives just to keep going. To stay working the hours, to keep their team going. To keep believing it will work out in the end. Having been part of a failed startup, I think the time for honest reflection and learning is afterwards.
But saying you've met x and y and z, worked for a company you haven't and photoshopping yourself in photos?
That's not the same thing at all.
That's just fraud.
Let's not conflate the two as this article has.
Walk around any conference that startup founders are attending and you are bound to hear countless stories of how well things are going.
I think, "Well, duh. You know, the truth might not be any of your business."
actually... Once you have credibility with the person you are selling to? pointing out your own weaknesses, I think, builds a lot of trust.
But if pointing out your own weaknesses looks like you are trying to deflect criticism, you are a long way from honesty.
Most of your examples of lying are just about interpreting things differently. To an entrepreneur, their company is heading in the right direction because the signups are consistently going up. Sure, they haven't figured out how to keep those people engaged yet, but building a successful company takes time. There's not a blurry gray area between focusing on the positives and completely making something up that's provably false.
Yes, there are plenty of liars out there, but I don't think most of the behavior you're describing in your post fits that description.
(Not that that answers your question).
I guess that we are outnumbered though.
> Dishonesty has two parts: 1) saying something that is untrue, and 2) saying it with the intent to mislead the other person.
He goes on to agree with Feynman: there are times where we "should ben[d] over backwards to show how [we] are maybe wrong" [1].
Yet, Aaron later states that "intellectual" honesty is an "impractical standard" to apply to every-day life. Some occasions call for it, others don't. Unfortunately, where we draw the line seems to be moving towards the latter.
-- Homer SimpsonThe impression I've gotten is that prospective investors and the like expect that you're going to contort your numbers into a just-over-the-horizon hockey stick. So, any stance that rejects this fake 'crushing it'[1] mentality is viewed as an indication that you're failing miserably.
[1] For the record, I absolutely hate this term. I'm sure Gary Vaynerchuk is a great guy, but I think he's done the world a disservice with this asinine idiom.
edit: I'm not justifying engaging in this behavior at all. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4457448
The slippery slope that reminds me of the Harvard cheating article that was on the HN frontpage today [1]. It also reminds me of doping among professional athletes.
If others are lying/cheating/doping to get ahead and succeed, I wonder what the "right thing to do" is, for those who manage to have the perspective to think of how they should act.
I'm consulting enough to pay my bills and live comfortably, while building products for which I will charge money. If these products work out, then awesome! If not, no harm done. I've learned a bunch of new skills and added some cool new pieces to my portfolio, which I can flip into picking up new clients at a higher rate.
I guess I'm pursuing a 'lifestyle' business. More power to the folks who want to raise a round of funding and work 80 hour weeks, but it's becoming less and less interesting to me over time. Especially now that I've been through a few soul-crushing startup experiences.
Nothing at all wrong with starting small and building up from there. Don't apologize. Work 80 per week in your "lifestyle" business and you will see it grow.
The contract I'm doing right now is, by far, the best job I've ever had. My stylist remarked to me the other day that I haven't lost any more hair in between my last two visits to him. My girlfriend thinks I'm generally more relaxed and happier than she's ever seen me.
I promise you it doesn't.
In a way similar to what some people do to attract the opposite (or, uh I guess in cases the same) sex. If there is a perceived big enough prize people will say what they have to say to win.
For the record early in my career with my first company I had to sell up against IBM for a contract about 500 hundred thousand dollars. I told the buyer honestly that if they wanted to be assured of making the right decision to go with IBM because of our small size. But if they wanted a team that could (I don't remember the exact wording so instead of making it up I will leave it at just something like "work harder for you" although it was obviously more creative than that). We got the contract against IBM and their professional sales team in suits and kept it for about 7 years.
I agree that there's a fine line between making a legitimate sales pitch for your startup and lying to your investors, but the article doesn't address that point at all.
I can't say I agree with this, the implication is that if you don't do it you will be harmed, which may be true in the short term but not in the long term [1]. I liked xo's reference to the worst argument in the world (http://lesswrong.com/lw/e95/the_worst_argument_in_the_world/) basically if you focus on the lying you miss the argument.
So when someone says "How is your startup going?" you provide the most positive answer you can come up with. This is a lie of omission if there are big clouds gathering over it, but if what you say is truthful then you've met the social obligation of responding. I've got a friend who is explicitly complete when you ask them how they are doing, with comments like "well my hemorrhoids have flared up and all the fruit I ate gave me diarrhea so my arse is pretty painful at the moment." which people find a bit off putting. You don't have to be graphic like that of course and so if you're omitting details on the principle that this other person is just making 'small talk' then I would argue that is Ok.
Now if you have a potential investor ask you "How is your startup going?" and you say "Great! Adding users like crazy, totally crushing it!" when you know you won't make payroll next month if you don't get some more money in, that is lying with an intent to deceive the investor. The goal being to get them to invest before they really find out what is going on so that afterwards it will be fine. I've known people who do this, they rationalize it by thinking "Lets assume this person has just invested the money I need, what would the status of my startup be then?" and they answer that way, because that statement will be true in the future if they invest, and if they don't invest the startup will be dead anyway so who cares. But it robs the investor of the data they need to ask critical questions. It could be that the startup really does just need a bridge investment to cross the 'chasm' (in the Geoffrey Moore sense), but it also might mean there is fundamentally something wrong like a dysfunctional engineering or marketing team. This sort of 'loose relationship with reality' is just wrong.
So pulling it back to the 'forcing' thing, this behavior erodes trust. And in so doing puts folks who engage in it at a disadvantage against those who do not. So choosing not to engage may lose you a deal today, but longer term will make you more respected which will get your more business later. And the best thing about it is you don't have to keep remembering what you said to be sure and not contradict yourself.
[1] I get the point where you don't survive to the long term which is bad.
thanks for the link. I'll read it later tonight.
> So pulling it back to the 'forcing' thing, this behavior erodes trust.
Yes, absolutely.
> And the best thing about it is you don't have to keep remembering what you said to be sure and not contradict yourself.
For me the most important part is maintaining self-respect. Not contradicting yourself doesn't hurt either.
What concerns me, though, is the seeming rampancy of this behavior. I wasn't in the industry for the aftermath of the first dot com bubble, so it's possible that this behavior will go away, and I just haven't seen it happen before. I'd be interested in your take on it, since your resume indicates you were in the middle of it.
The fashion part comes from what it means to be 'hip' which entirely driven by the flavor of the hour. We've talked about it on HN a bit but the best analog is that the coolness factor of 'doing a startup' got to be high enough that we got a huge influx of people who "want to do a startup" which is distinct and different from folks who "want to do X, this is the company I created to do that."
Too many people these days are doing startups like they used to do rock bands.
The second part is money. When rich people do it, especially people who were "like you" before but are now "rich" it creates a sense in folks that don't know any better that it is easy, or that anyone can do it. It is what causes people to move to LA from Nebraska to make it big in the movies.
So no, it is not a new phenomena. And the proportion of the bullshit to actual content is proportional to the fashion + money aspect. In 2000-2001 after the dot com bust was settling, none of the cool kids wanted to be startup people any more, so the people you ran into who were doing startups were more likely to be doing it because they believed in what they were doing. Now with Facebook and Google and the newly minting of a bunch of fresh twenty-something millionaires (or billionaires in some cases) the folks that mercifully left have unfortunately returned.
Off topic:
Chuck, I'm still waiting for that datacenter in my pocket idea to launch. ;)
Also therein lies opportunity, to stand out, to leave a lasting impression. While my network is still small, and I'm not known by many people yet, they trust me, and know they will get honest feedback, without the BS. If someone asks hows it going? I say: "I'm not really sure, today" or I "slept all day haha" or sometimes positive stuff too "super productive week", because it's ups and downs. If they don't understand that, or think I'm a loser, so be it.
Have nothing to prove or forced to say anything that isn't true. And maybe that's a luxury, so not saying this path will work for everyone, or that it's the 'best'. It's just a strategy, and so are lies, deception, inflation which I will try my hardest to avoid at all costs, because it goes against my core values.
YMMV
I disagree that the existence of liars "forces" others to do the same, and I think it's a really harmful way of thinking.
LA Poser: Lies about being friends with celebrities, deals they're working on, movies they're making etc
Cambridge poser: ??? How many books they've read? How many ancestors came over on the Mayflower?
MIT grad students seem pretty transparent about what they're doing, what impact it could have, etc.
I once, when I was younger and dumber, had a self-proclaimed "angel" investor tell me that he needed to ask his wife if he could invest 25k after leading me to believe he could close a whole round himself. Of course this was 3 or 4 months after we first started talking to him.
Man, I have to stop myself or I'm going to end up being quoted in a Tech Crunch article. At least in SV lies at least have some point to them. Make more money, or initiate a relationship. Over here people don't even lie for a purpose, they do it just to try to look cool and waste other peoples time.
The main thrust here seems to be "everyone lies, get over it", which seems counterproductive. There also seems to be some equivocation over, say, using a true but empty metric to promote your business... and photoshopping yourself into a picture with a celeb, or falsely claiming to be an employee of a company.
These things are both fibs, but one is IMO much, much greater in magnitude than the other. We're all used to people being overly optimistic and deliberately withholding damaging info, but we're not used to outright fraud at this level.
Imagine if a startup claimed to have indexed billions of user contacts (as pointless of a number as it may be) but in fact has indexed only hundreds - all of which from the founders' own phones. This is the severity of fraud we're talking about.
I've seen web hosting companies refer to their hard disk space as "premium" storage or with other adjectives to make it appear as if you are getting something which is better than an ordinary seagate server grade hard drives (as if some server company is going to use consumer grade drives). Colo companies talk extensively about biometric security at their facilities (note if your stuff is that important that you care about that you should probably go onsite and verify it, right?).
So what the startups are really doing is just what ad agencies have done for decades. They are using words to sell their product in a creative way.
Vanity metrics? "Customers saved an average of $200 by switching to Geico"
Acquisition boasting? I'm sure this happens all the time, but nothing comes to mind immediately.
Perpetual Euphoria? Enron's CEO talked the company up until the last minute.
Perpetual Euphoria for Investors? Housing bubble.
Lying about firings? How many people who publicly resign are actually fired? Happens all the time in DC.
Lying about how committed you are? I'm sure this happens all the time, but nothing comes to mind immediately.
Lying about how much money you're losing? Enron. WorldCom. Banks.
Lying about who you're friends with? Every high schooler in existence.
TL;DR - The world is filled with slimeballs.
Who would a high schooler lie about being friends with? Was I really that lame that I don't recall ever doing that?
"You know, Leslie Fischer and I are totally BFFs. She went to the dance with Bobby Jones and told me all about it. She told me he dumped her to hang out with his friends and then started dating that tramp Haley Freeman."
Advertisement in general is a total tip-to-toe agreed lie. Even if everything is true about that new crappy washing machine powder (can it be true though?), then at least the overly happy face of the ad mom is a lie. But we somehow agree to see those lies. We are trained to extract valuable information from it or otherwise just get programmed at the subconscious level.
So, somehow the habit of lying in the commercials is extended to all of the public relations.
Shirley Hornstein is a nobody to me. She fooled some people, which is a shame. But, how many people are really affected by photoshopped pictures with some celebrities on her facebook page. The rest of this isn't particularly newsworthy either.
The TC article is irrelevant gossip. This blog response is sort of a stretch too.
That said, there are some people in Silicon Valley who are doing a great job at what they do, and for them statistics, etc. are useful tools to show what they are doing well.
As a general rule, it is probably better to focus on the people who are doing things well and to attempt to imitate them, rather than the people telling you about their tech startup while they run a food truck.
It's not good to lie but writing a takedown piece about a nobody makes you look like a bigger ass than the subject of the article itself. Especially when the entirely of the story could be summed up as "this girl lied about being a big shot. Here's some pictures that may or may not have been made by her and may or may not be innocent like how lots of people photoshop people next to famous people". There was no research, it was a dumb story unworthy of coverage by a widely read blog like TC, and I think it's shameful the story ended up on HN at all without being killed let alone the front page.
Yeah sure, it sparked a discussion about ethics and whatnot but if you look at the comments a lot of them read like people discussing the one-sided farces that are reality shows.
One of the comments in the blog post points to a very in-depth betabeat article that says that Holstein was involved with much more than just name dropping... she has been accused of credit card fraud and ripping off people around her. If the allegations are true, it might be that she is a criminal and a pathological liar with likely mental issues.
http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-...
When I worked with Fortune 500 Co, I had unapproved expenses that I had to pay for. I wouldn't consider that "stealing." All we know from that article is "several thousands".. could that be dry cleaning bills over 3 years or is she buying HDTV's on amazon. hard to say.
The problem I have with all this, is all this evidence seems rather circumstantial. I don't even know this woman or have any interest in this topic other than playing contrarian and thinking to myself if someone kept tabs on all my poor behavior over the course of a few years, I'm sure I too could come out looking like a pathological liar with mental issues.
I see an accusation, but I also see a business meeting and a corporate credit card being used.
I don't see theft, pathological lying and a mental disorder, but there very well could be dishonesty going on. Who knows, though. This is why we have courts of law.
I'm sat here at a computer near London and it just doesn't matter what she did or didn't do. You could turn around and say I don't matter and you'd be right, except for when someone's looking for me to sign up, and what she did or didn't do wouldn't affect my sign up.
A startup hub like Silicon Valley is partially valuable because founders / investors / etc run into each other, and presumably something good comes out of these chance meetings.
Let's assume John is running a failing startup. John goes to TC Disrupt and meets all sorts of people, some of whom ask him how his startup is doing?
John can't say that his startup has no traction, or that they can't get investors lined up, or that the last startup he ran was a failure. If there's a shot this person can help John out, he's best served by presenting an optimistic and selective version of the truth. Which is where things like vanity metrics come in.
Even if Valley folks didn't judge startups for having a tough time, it would be in every founders incentive to present a positive outward image.
There's an art to this where you shouldn't lie or present metrics so ludicrous they tip off the bullshit-meter of whoever you're talking to. But some combination of honesty, optimism, and determination seems like a better formula than listing the shortcomings of your startup in your first casual conversation with someone you just met.
Also, when creating/leading you often have to preemptively believe things at the edge (or just over the edge) of plausibility, in order to have any chance to "make them true". Such statements are not 'true' in a rigorous academic or legal sense, and even have a risk of becoming completely falsified as events develop.
But at the time and in the spirit in which they were offered, they declare the speaker's honest hopes and beliefs about what's possible. Sometimes the speaker is even deceiving themself, by signalling more certainty than is warranted about uncertain outcomes.
Culturally, people should understand that implicit disclaimers apply... as when a coach tells their team, "we're going to outplay our opponent" or a commander tells their soldiers, "we're going to take this objective". The statements are aspirational, not yet literally true, and they are spoken aloud as an intentional mechanism for increasing their chances of coming true.
I am not telling things are totally that bad, but i am sure it is a big part of Silicon Valley success: it is a collection of top sellers in the world, and they are more successful in mortgaging other's future that everyone else.
People who are trying to play it fair are labeled 'lifestyle businesses' and ostracized.
I think it's good to ask why someone is singling out a single person or company for shallow lies, as it might reveal a bias. Something doesn't seem quite right about that TechCrunch post.
With some shallow lies, large amounts of money is at stake. Investors will make mistakes and lose money. These shallow lies are worth paying attention to and so are those who keep getting fooled by them.
"We're doing well, our investors are happy!" is saving face (or, perhaps they want to believe it so badly that they do).
What she did is the equivalent of falsely saying "We have an investment from Andreessen Horowitz -- see, here's a copy of our term sheet!" and then using the person's credit card to buy yourself a plane ticket.
Everybody lies a bit to themselves feel better when things are going badly. Congressmen leave to spend time with their family, breakups are always "mutual", etc. This is completely different than the TC article.
At the end of the day I think people who work for companies like that feel better about what they're doing than [famous lying CEO] wannabes.
When you rely on lying over and over again, your whole life becomes a lie. Maybe you are worth something to a market, but to many people you are worthless. As a liar you have no value to them.
There is huge value in honesty. Maybe it can't be measured in financial terms. But I personally will pay a premium for honesty. It's of limited supply and always in demand.
+1 for nickoneill
VCs will not hand over tens of millions of dollars to someone they know is a liar or habitual exaggerator. Sure, they don't always find out in time. But I really haven't seen that strategy work out.
There is no benefit to telling a good story unless you actually have a good story.
Once you're successful, you can be that way. I think it's pretty rare that people get successful as "straight shooters". Telling the truth makes you a bearer of bad news a lot of the time. I know, because I've been described as "pathologically honest", and often it doesn't end well.
You can "speak truth to power" if you wish. Power already knows the truth. So the only thing you do, by doing so, is identify yourself as a threat, now that they know you know. And the last thing power wants is an epidemic of truth-knowing (i.e. a morale problem).
The successful people I'm referring to were not bullshitters before or after their success. Bullshitting really not a success trait. It's a wannabe trait that ends up losing.
You don't want to say "there wasn't a problem", but you also don't want to say "sales went down, we have no idea why, we're just going to continue" or "sales went down, we're doomed."
Everyone does a bit of marketing - big mac says total burgers sold a number that always goup. nothing wrong with that, IMO
Vukovic: Like shit, boss
Traxler: Your mama!
The Terminator, 1984
When it comes to entrepreneurs specifically, more often than not the positive spin is just a sincere effort to generate momentum 'out of thin air' when facing the harsh realities and stomach-churning odds of entrepreneurship.
What that woman profiled in TechCrunch did, however, was very different: she crossed the line.
Which is why talk is cheap. Anyone can bullshit, startup founder or no.
If you "trick" powerful people into accepting you as one of your own by claiming connections you don't have, and succeed in doing so, you've earned it. (If you fail, then slink away quietly and try again in a couple of years.) A lot of people are dumbasses who let the crowd make their decisions for them, and they deserve what they get from people who can mislead them about the crowd opinion (and mostly, those outsiders are just as competent, and would only be rejected because they weren't born in the "right" place).
Overt fraud is wrong. If you claim to be a doctor and don't know a thing about medicine, that's quackery and it endangers people and you belong in jail. If you convince the powerful that you are part of their club until the lie becomes true, then it's not really my thing, but I see nothing wrong with it.
I agree. "Borrowing fame" is one thing, but claiming you worked at a company where you didn't is unethical.
Women do get a terrible time in tech,the video game industry in particular, because of their gender, but this doesn't seem to be the case here. Care to explain why you think otherwise?