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I recently was working with a quantum startup where the founder was so jealous of me he came up with a new lie about his history and accomplishments multiple ti
by ksaj 7y ago
I recently was working with a quantum startup where the founder was so jealous of me he came up with a new lie about his history and accomplishments multiple times a day. It was endless, and nearly nothing he said had any basis in reality.
I totally gave up on him when his lies became so audacious he got mad at me twice for casually dismissing his claims of being the real Satoshi and that Rigetti totally stole his ideas, forcing him to play catch up. He managed to get in a story about strangling a person to death and the Canadian Armed Forces covering it up because it was a "ptsd-related blackout," and that the RCMP would put out a kill order if anyone without top secret clearance entered his commercial "lab".
Why he couldn't figure out why I was so disinterested in these stories is beyond me... I think he was just looking for a buddy with similar professional interests that he could brag to, and couldn't figure out how to keep me interested in his otherwise woefully lacking / plagiarized code base that didn't do nearly half of what he claimed it did.
Originally I was trying to help him get his head on straight, but within a day of his total meltdown at my expense, I was over that, and have zero sympathy for what his investors are soon to learn.
Ironically, in all his fantasy wisdom and military-strength security, even after supposedly having his ideas stolen from him, he never got me to sign a non-disclosure agreement, even when I brought it up multiple times with both him and his primary investor.
It really looks like self-sabotage to me. Baffling.
- cj 7y agoSometimes the best thing to do in that kind of a situation is to let the person "win" the conversation every so often.
- ksaj 7y agoMost of the time I just nodded along and mmhmm until he lost steam. It's hard to fake interest throughout a full on barrage of crazy. I went along with everything until I discovered nearly his entire code base was copied from other people's git repos and the one thing that seemed to have a little genuine code wasn't capable of meeting his claims. Then he pretended it as "obfuscated" and as a hacker, I should see through it. The problem is,I totally saw through it. Maybe he was hoping I'd turn his imaginations into real things. I really couldn't tell. His behaviour was so bizarre, I was concerned he could explode spectacularly. Not worth the time and effort to calm his jealousy and internal rage.