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The more money that flows to the sector the more of a magnet it is for sociopaths and I don't think many of us are very good at dealing with sociopaths. You men

The more money that flows to the sector the more of a magnet it is for sociopaths and I don't think many of us are very good at dealing with sociopaths. You mentioned fraud, care to give some examples (no need to name names of course).

api 11y ago
I've seen some things I'd have to tone down to sell as believable fiction, and this was several years ago doing consulting for startups. Standard issue asshattery include things like: - Paper-thin mock up demos of a product being misrepresented as actual finished sale-able product. Sorry but the V in MVP stands for viable. - Impressive people are touted as employees, even co-founders, and when you go talk to them it's news to them. Maybe they had a conversation with said founder once and expressed some interest and suddenly to investors and others they are the CTO. Sometimes this arises from the founder(s) being so narcissistic that they simply assume that anyone would of course feel privileged to join them. Why wouldn't they? - Company/founder has sales/vendor relationship with other companies and misrepresents those products as "theirs," implying that they actually own them. In one case I saw rebranding without permission, which is flat out fraud. - Signups/trials/downloads misrepresented as active continuous users or free users counted together with paid users. - Lying about educational or work background. A skilled blowhard will do so in an ambiguous way, e.g. "went to MIT" means "attended one workshop there and read a lot of open courseware." - Products that would violate known laws of physics or proven mathematical theorems. (Or sometimes even grade school math...)
- anon8418 11y ago
  > - Products that would violate known laws of physics or proven mathematical theorems. (Or sometimes even grade school math...) Drop-Kicker just covered one such startup: http://drop-kicker.com/2016/01/ampy-move-teardown-and-review/ http://drop-kicker.com/2016/01/ampy-move-teardown-and-review... This is from three PHD engineering students from Northwestern.... over $1.5MM raised via Kickstarter and investors. Hard to believe the founders (remember PHDs) are so naive to actually believe in their own advertising claims.
  - api 11y ago
    Wow. After reading that I personally call fraud. Even if there is any real tech behind the scenes, these people obviously didn't ship it to their Kickstarter backers. They hoodwinked Kickstarter as a source of easy money and then immediately turned that into VC backing. Using people that way is textbook sociopathy. People are rungs on a ladder to be stomped on. Unfortunately it works. People fall for it again and again because they don't scratch the surface enough to see what's actually there. Anyone interested in investing should take note of a few things here: highfalutin college degrees, patents (you can patent a cheese sandwich) or "patent pending" (which is trivial and meaningless), and unsupported claims of novelty are not reliable indicators of anything.

api 11y ago

I've seen some things I'd have to tone down to sell as believable fiction, and this was several years ago doing consulting for startups. Standard issue asshattery include things like: - Paper-thin mock up demos of a product being misrepresented as actual finished sale-able product. Sorry but the V in MVP stands for viable. - Impressive people are touted as employees, even co-founders, and when you go talk to them it's news to them. Maybe they had a conversation with said founder once and expressed some interest and suddenly to investors and others they are the CTO. Sometimes this arises from the founder(s) being so narcissistic that they simply assume that anyone would of course feel privileged to join them. Why wouldn't they? - Company/founder has sales/vendor relationship with other companies and misrepresents those products as "theirs," implying that they actually own them. In one case I saw rebranding without permission, which is flat out fraud. - Signups/trials/downloads misrepresented as active continuous users or free users counted together with paid users. - Lying about educational or work background. A skilled blowhard will do so in an ambiguous way, e.g. "went to MIT" means "attended one workshop there and read a lot of open courseware." - Products that would violate known laws of physics or proven mathematical theorems. (Or sometimes even grade school math...)

anon8418 11y ago
> - Products that would violate known laws of physics or proven mathematical theorems. (Or sometimes even grade school math...) Drop-Kicker just covered one such startup: http://drop-kicker.com/2016/01/ampy-move-teardown-and-review/ http://drop-kicker.com/2016/01/ampy-move-teardown-and-review... This is from three PHD engineering students from Northwestern.... over $1.5MM raised via Kickstarter and investors. Hard to believe the founders (remember PHDs) are so naive to actually believe in their own advertising claims.
- api 11y ago
  Wow. After reading that I personally call fraud. Even if there is any real tech behind the scenes, these people obviously didn't ship it to their Kickstarter backers. They hoodwinked Kickstarter as a source of easy money and then immediately turned that into VC backing. Using people that way is textbook sociopathy. People are rungs on a ladder to be stomped on. Unfortunately it works. People fall for it again and again because they don't scratch the surface enough to see what's actually there. Anyone interested in investing should take note of a few things here: highfalutin college degrees, patents (you can patent a cheese sandwich) or "patent pending" (which is trivial and meaningless), and unsupported claims of novelty are not reliable indicators of anything.