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"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 c

"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.

stareblinkstare 5y ago
jgwil2 5y ago
This is by the way but I love the phrase "upstart startup."
jiggawatts 5y ago
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.
- rocqua 5y ago
  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.
- josho 5y ago
  > 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.
junon 5y ago
Fraud it till you got it?
globular-toast 5y ago
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.
xpe 5y ago
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.

stareblinkstare 5y ago

jgwil2 5y ago

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

jiggawatts 5y ago

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.

rocqua 5y ago
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.
josho 5y ago
> 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.

junon 5y ago

Fraud it till you got it?

globular-toast 5y ago

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.

xpe 5y ago

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.