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Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars

148 points by benackles 14y ago

paulsutter 14y ago
The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is. Even the mild bullshitters I know are struggling to make anything happen. 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.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is. 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).
  - paulsutter 14y ago
    I've found that a lot of people will use "telling the truth" to rationalize a lot of negative behavior. We can all easily mistake our own uninformed opinions for "the truth". One way to learn the difference is to notice when "telling the truth" causes you to be misunderstood often. 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.
    - rdl 14y ago
      What I think works is being totally forthcoming about problems, risks, etc. in the past and present, but maybe being a bit optimistic about future possibilities. i.e. "This quarter our sales were down 10%, but we think it was due to reason x, and we have strategy y in place to address that. We will be monitoring closely and adjust as needed.". 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."
Jd 14y ago
I think the general rule is people who don't do things well that well have to lie about these things. Like everywhere else, Silicon Valley has probably a greater number of people who don't do things well than people who do, so there are lots of people fibbing. 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.
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potatolicious 14y ago
I agree with the general point of this, but disagree on the tone and the implications. 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.
- larrys 14y ago
  Using a "using a true but empty metric to promote your business" is more like being creative in that the reader, if careful, should be able to spot the bullshit. The same as when you read product labels or any advertising copy. 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.
nameuserc 14y ago
Show me an honest company with a solid service or product and I will be more than willing to support them financially. 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
aaronbrethorst 14y ago
What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway. The 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4457448
- hkmurakami 14y ago
  >What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway. 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. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4456210 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4456210
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    > 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.
    - larrys 14y ago
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kapilkale 14y ago
Its worth considering why this happens. 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.
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3pt14159 14y ago
You think Silicon Valley is bad? Hahaha. You should see Toronto. The distribution here is totally bimodal. The 10 to 15% that get it and the remainder that are so totally clueless it isn't even funny. 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.
- HorizonXP 14y ago
  I really wish we could fix the situation here in Toronto. I really don't want to have to go to the Valley, there are competitive reasons why I want to keep my startup here. But if funding is as difficult to find as Torontonians make it out to be, I may have to move.
benatkin 14y ago
Most lies in the startup community are shallow lies that mislead those who don't have filters or don't care enough about a particular entity to do their homework about them. It's deep lies where people attempt to mislead even those that are doing due diligence that are high risk. Shallow lies have a lower, but still significant, risk to the liars. 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.
gojomo 14y ago
There's a difference between positive euphemism/spin and outright fabrications. 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.
mattmanser 14y ago
When I was about 12 I remember doing some school craft competition where we had to make and then sell our wares to our teachers. A teacher said something to me that's always stuck, but I always struggle with following. 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.
- anon808 14y ago
  Once it's recognized that a person thought that way, why would any rational person believe what they had to say?
  - Danieru 14y ago
    Very true. The salesman's only saving grace is that no human being is rational.
- ScottBurson 14y ago
  Agreed. When I read 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."
haberman 14y ago
I've just returned from a three-week vacation, and one thing that strikes me as I re-enter our little world of tech is how much of the attention and focus of our incredibly rich and fortunate community is spent on bitterness and negativity. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority (I've engaged in my share of negativity), it's just an observation, and I want to see if I can avoid it in the future while still participating in the extreme mental stimulation that drew me to tech in the first place.
- eurleif 14y ago
  I think part of the hacker ethic is not being afraid to point out when you think something's wrong, because it's how communities (and software projects) improve. You may take this post as negativity, but I think it's intended to start a discussion about how things can improve, which is a positive thing.
gkoberger 14y ago
It seems disingenuous to compare what "Shirls" did with many of the points made in the article. "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.
steve8918 14y ago
The author may have a point in general, but using Holstein is sounding more and more like the wrong example to stand behind. 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-card-fraud-records/ http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-...
- supercanuck 14y ago
  That isn't necessarily credit card fraud though. It could just be unapproved expenses and incidentals. 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.
  - xanados 14y ago
    The e-mail from Michael Herzog, assuming it's legitimate, is pretty damning. Unapproved incidentals doesn't account for using someone else's work credit card to purchase multiple plane tickets. I agree with your broader point, however, and don't think this story is particularly appropriate, at least for HackerNews_(t-3).
    - supercanuck 14y ago
      I went back and read the article you mentioned, and I still don't. I see a corporate credit card being used for travel expenses and incidentals. He even says in the "damning" email that she met a business associate of his. 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.
j_baker 14y ago
The world is filled with liars. I can come up with examples of this happening outside Silicon Valley for almost all of these points. 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.
- nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
  > Lying about who you're friends with? Every high schooler in existence. Who would a high schooler lie about being friends with? Was I really that lame that I don't recall ever doing that?
  - victorhn 14y ago
    Maybe a popular guy/girl, you seem to gain social status by claiming to be friends with other high social status persons.
  - j_baker 14y ago
    Ok, so maybe it's an exaggeration to say that everyone does that. I bet you'd be surprised if you really sat down and thought about it though. "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."
- mojuba 14y ago
  True, but there is, I think, a greater concentration of it in business and how companies present themselves to the world, rather than in every day life of ordinary people. 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.
cs702 14y ago
Like them or not, these kinds of exaggerations and not-quite-lies are common in business for a good reason: if customers, partners, investors, and/or employees ever perceive a company as a failure, they will start leaving the company. Once a company starts losing customers, partners, investors, and/or top people, it can quickly find itself in a downward spiral that is extremely difficult to reverse. 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.
- adgar 14y ago
  > When it comes to entrepreneurs specifically, more often than not these white lies are nothing more than a sincere effort to generate positive momentum 'out of thin air' when facing the harsh realities of entrepreneurship. Which is why talk is cheap. Anyone can bullshit, startup founder or no.
tomkit 14y ago
White lies are a necessary evil in business and in life. Would you tell someone with terminal illness that they look like shit and that there's no hope? It is a good thing, however, that YC has been turning back the dial on presenting vanity metrics + funding pitches at their demo days. At some unquantifiable threshold, white lies do become outright lies.
- ucee054 14y ago
  Traxler: How do I look? Vukovic: Like shit, boss Traxler: Your mama! The Terminator, 1984
mjn 14y ago
I see this often in academia as well, and imo it really damages the scientific literature. When I read an article, I really want an honest assessment by the author of the strengths and weaknesses of their approach and others. I don't only want to hear about how great the author's approach is, but I also want to hear positive things said about the "related work", and negative things said in the Conclusions about their own work. But usually neither of those happens, because then your paper won't be accepted: you need to demolish the existing work and play up your own great contribution. I think it's what happens naturally in environments that are based more on competition than concern for accuracy.
- montecarl 14y ago
  My Ph.D. thesis advisor and I are trying to combat this trend in our field. We are working to develop a suite of benchmarks to evaluate and compare different methods/algorithms. The goal is to require everyone to run their code against a set of accepted standard problems in the field and obtain a fair comparison. As reviewers of papers we can and must hold authors accountable to their claims. You can't just claim that your algorithm is superior without comparing it to the work of others on a set of community agreed upon benchmark problems. The scientific review process needs to hold authors accountable for their claims. It isn't an easy task, but with some work it is possible to establish fair metrics. Once these metrics are in place it should no longer be possible to present your ideas in an biased light.
  - mjn 14y ago
    That's an interesting approach that I do think can improve some things, but I think the underlying problem is that incentives need to be changed. It's not only metrics, but just giving honest opinions: what use-cases do you really think your algorithm is suited for, not looking at it in the most optimistic possible light? If academia weren't as ultra-competitive as it's become in the past two decades or so, I think there would be more chances of getting honest and useful answers to such questions in papers. One still finds them sometimes in papers of people who don't have to play "the game" anymore: papers by senior full-professor types are often quite interesting because of how they can say what they really think.
guscost 14y ago
America is full of liars. The world is full of liars. 90% of all employees are incompetent. Doesn't cancel out your point, however.
pg 14y ago
Every place full of ambitious people is full of liars, but I've lived in several such places and overall the ratio of lying to ambition here is lower than anywhere else I've found. There are a lot more posers in New York and LA and Cambridge than there are in SV.
- pacificleo1 14y ago
  same is true for india and other asian countries too
- defen 14y ago
  New York poser: Lies about how much money they have, how much they enjoy investment banking/BigLaw, the cool bands they know, etc 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?
- rdl 14y ago
  Posers in Cambridge? I assume you mean in the Boston finance/brahmin/etc. world, or maybe in "academia", not in engineering programs or the tech world. MIT grad students seem pretty transparent about what they're doing, what impact it could have, etc.
igorgue 14y ago
And then here is Steve Blank, beloved by so many here, asking everyone not to lie: http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/ http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/ while companies are allowed to lie.
bpatrianakos 14y ago
I have decided that for me personally, the comments defending the original TC article are what I'll point to when I say "HN really has gone downhill". The article was awful journalism (it shouldn't even be considered journalism) and read like a gossip rag except no one knew or cared about the girl in question. 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.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
To me it's funny to hear people complain about people lying in the startup and tech industry. You should hang out with some outside sales people sometime. Those guys make what she did look like a girl scout bake sale.
dbecker 14y ago
Maybe it's because I don't live in Silicon Valley... or because I'm less "into the startup scene" than other people on HN... but I'm surprised anyone even cares about the TechCrunch article. 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.
michaelochurch 14y ago
People are piling on Shirley Hornstein because (1) she got caught, and (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it. 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.
- qq66 14y ago
  Claiming that you worked at company X when you didn't is like claiming that you have a degree from a university that you didn't attend, and is one of the most clear-cut and common examples of professional deceit. I don't think this is a sexism issue at all -- look at how roundly Alexey Vayner was mocked. While I don't think the TechCrunch article was an example of charitable judgment, people are bloodthirsty and love to string up an "example case" every so often.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    The more I read up on her, the less I like her. I agree. "Borrowing fame" is one thing, but claiming you worked at a company where you didn't is unethical.
- mmcnickle 14y ago
  >>> (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it. 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?
- thatdrew 14y ago
TallboyOne 14y ago
She's very good at photoshop. I wish I had more to say.
npguy 14y ago
The premise of the article is wrong. The post would lead to an argument saying every marketing effort is a lie. Which is a dangerous argument, since it would imply everyone trying to say "it cost me x dollars to do this. pls pay y" - in which case, no business would exist. Everyone does a bit of marketing - big mac says total burgers sold a number that always goup. nothing wrong with that, IMO
anovikov 14y ago
I think lies are the nature of our industry: it is a self-propelled train, with each element of a chain working mainly to 'sell' everything to the next one, with little regard about its intrinsic value, more to the ability to be sold to the next one (which goes straight to the IPO, see Facebook). In the end, public and pension funds pay for that, so we are basically cashing out people's future pensions now (as we know, almost all pension programs are underfunded, mainly for this reason: their managers invest in shit, for the lack of anything else). This is much like how MLM works, except the last level (victim) is more clearly defined. 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.

148 points by benackles 14y ago

The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is. Even the mild bullshitters I know are struggling to make anything happen. 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.

michaelochurch 14y ago
The most successful people I know are straight shooters who tell it like it is. 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).
- paulsutter 14y ago
  I've found that a lot of people will use "telling the truth" to rationalize a lot of negative behavior. We can all easily mistake our own uninformed opinions for "the truth". One way to learn the difference is to notice when "telling the truth" causes you to be misunderstood often. 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.
  - rdl 14y ago
    What I think works is being totally forthcoming about problems, risks, etc. in the past and present, but maybe being a bit optimistic about future possibilities. i.e. "This quarter our sales were down 10%, but we think it was due to reason x, and we have strategy y in place to address that. We will be monitoring closely and adjust as needed.". 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."

Jd 14y ago

I think the general rule is people who don't do things well that well have to lie about these things. Like everywhere else, Silicon Valley has probably a greater number of people who don't do things well than people who do, so there are lots of people fibbing. 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.

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potatolicious 14y ago

I agree with the general point of this, but disagree on the tone and the implications. 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.

larrys 14y ago
Using a "using a true but empty metric to promote your business" is more like being creative in that the reader, if careful, should be able to spot the bullshit. The same as when you read product labels or any advertising copy. 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.

nameuserc 14y ago

Show me an honest company with a solid service or product and I will be more than willing to support them financially. 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

aaronbrethorst 14y ago

What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway. The 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 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4457448

hkmurakami 14y ago
>What especially bothers me about this sort of trend is that it forces those of us who aren't big on bullshitting to do it anyway. 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. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4456210 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4456210
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  > 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.
  - larrys 14y ago

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kapilkale 14y ago

Its worth considering why this happens. 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.

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3pt14159 14y ago

You think Silicon Valley is bad? Hahaha. You should see Toronto. The distribution here is totally bimodal. The 10 to 15% that get it and the remainder that are so totally clueless it isn't even funny. 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.

HorizonXP 14y ago
I really wish we could fix the situation here in Toronto. I really don't want to have to go to the Valley, there are competitive reasons why I want to keep my startup here. But if funding is as difficult to find as Torontonians make it out to be, I may have to move.

benatkin 14y ago

Most lies in the startup community are shallow lies that mislead those who don't have filters or don't care enough about a particular entity to do their homework about them. It's deep lies where people attempt to mislead even those that are doing due diligence that are high risk. Shallow lies have a lower, but still significant, risk to the liars. 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.

gojomo 14y ago

There's a difference between positive euphemism/spin and outright fabrications. 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.

mattmanser 14y ago

When I was about 12 I remember doing some school craft competition where we had to make and then sell our wares to our teachers. A teacher said something to me that's always stuck, but I always struggle with following. 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.

anon808 14y ago
Once it's recognized that a person thought that way, why would any rational person believe what they had to say?
- Danieru 14y ago
  Very true. The salesman's only saving grace is that no human being is rational.
ScottBurson 14y ago
Agreed. When I read 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."

haberman 14y ago

I've just returned from a three-week vacation, and one thing that strikes me as I re-enter our little world of tech is how much of the attention and focus of our incredibly rich and fortunate community is spent on bitterness and negativity. I'm not claiming any kind of superiority (I've engaged in my share of negativity), it's just an observation, and I want to see if I can avoid it in the future while still participating in the extreme mental stimulation that drew me to tech in the first place.

eurleif 14y ago
I think part of the hacker ethic is not being afraid to point out when you think something's wrong, because it's how communities (and software projects) improve. You may take this post as negativity, but I think it's intended to start a discussion about how things can improve, which is a positive thing.

gkoberger 14y ago

It seems disingenuous to compare what "Shirls" did with many of the points made in the article. "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.

steve8918 14y ago

The author may have a point in general, but using Holstein is sounding more and more like the wrong example to stand behind. 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-card-fraud-records/ http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-...

supercanuck 14y ago
That isn't necessarily credit card fraud though. It could just be unapproved expenses and incidentals. 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.
- xanados 14y ago
  The e-mail from Michael Herzog, assuming it's legitimate, is pretty damning. Unapproved incidentals doesn't account for using someone else's work credit card to purchase multiple plane tickets. I agree with your broader point, however, and don't think this story is particularly appropriate, at least for HackerNews_(t-3).
  - supercanuck 14y ago
    I went back and read the article you mentioned, and I still don't. I see a corporate credit card being used for travel expenses and incidentals. He even says in the "damning" email that she met a business associate of his. 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.

j_baker 14y ago

The world is filled with liars. I can come up with examples of this happening outside Silicon Valley for almost all of these points. 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.

nuclear_eclipse 14y ago
> Lying about who you're friends with? Every high schooler in existence. Who would a high schooler lie about being friends with? Was I really that lame that I don't recall ever doing that?
- victorhn 14y ago
  Maybe a popular guy/girl, you seem to gain social status by claiming to be friends with other high social status persons.
- j_baker 14y ago
  Ok, so maybe it's an exaggeration to say that everyone does that. I bet you'd be surprised if you really sat down and thought about it though. "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."
mojuba 14y ago
True, but there is, I think, a greater concentration of it in business and how companies present themselves to the world, rather than in every day life of ordinary people. 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.

cs702 14y ago

Like them or not, these kinds of exaggerations and not-quite-lies are common in business for a good reason: if customers, partners, investors, and/or employees ever perceive a company as a failure, they will start leaving the company. Once a company starts losing customers, partners, investors, and/or top people, it can quickly find itself in a downward spiral that is extremely difficult to reverse. 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.

adgar 14y ago
> When it comes to entrepreneurs specifically, more often than not these white lies are nothing more than a sincere effort to generate positive momentum 'out of thin air' when facing the harsh realities of entrepreneurship. Which is why talk is cheap. Anyone can bullshit, startup founder or no.

tomkit 14y ago

White lies are a necessary evil in business and in life. Would you tell someone with terminal illness that they look like shit and that there's no hope? It is a good thing, however, that YC has been turning back the dial on presenting vanity metrics + funding pitches at their demo days. At some unquantifiable threshold, white lies do become outright lies.

ucee054 14y ago
Traxler: How do I look? Vukovic: Like shit, boss Traxler: Your mama! The Terminator, 1984

mjn 14y ago

I see this often in academia as well, and imo it really damages the scientific literature. When I read an article, I really want an honest assessment by the author of the strengths and weaknesses of their approach and others. I don't only want to hear about how great the author's approach is, but I also want to hear positive things said about the "related work", and negative things said in the Conclusions about their own work. But usually neither of those happens, because then your paper won't be accepted: you need to demolish the existing work and play up your own great contribution. I think it's what happens naturally in environments that are based more on competition than concern for accuracy.

montecarl 14y ago
My Ph.D. thesis advisor and I are trying to combat this trend in our field. We are working to develop a suite of benchmarks to evaluate and compare different methods/algorithms. The goal is to require everyone to run their code against a set of accepted standard problems in the field and obtain a fair comparison. As reviewers of papers we can and must hold authors accountable to their claims. You can't just claim that your algorithm is superior without comparing it to the work of others on a set of community agreed upon benchmark problems. The scientific review process needs to hold authors accountable for their claims. It isn't an easy task, but with some work it is possible to establish fair metrics. Once these metrics are in place it should no longer be possible to present your ideas in an biased light.
- mjn 14y ago
  That's an interesting approach that I do think can improve some things, but I think the underlying problem is that incentives need to be changed. It's not only metrics, but just giving honest opinions: what use-cases do you really think your algorithm is suited for, not looking at it in the most optimistic possible light? If academia weren't as ultra-competitive as it's become in the past two decades or so, I think there would be more chances of getting honest and useful answers to such questions in papers. One still finds them sometimes in papers of people who don't have to play "the game" anymore: papers by senior full-professor types are often quite interesting because of how they can say what they really think.

guscost 14y ago

America is full of liars. The world is full of liars. 90% of all employees are incompetent. Doesn't cancel out your point, however.

pg 14y ago

Every place full of ambitious people is full of liars, but I've lived in several such places and overall the ratio of lying to ambition here is lower than anywhere else I've found. There are a lot more posers in New York and LA and Cambridge than there are in SV.

pacificleo1 14y ago
same is true for india and other asian countries too
defen 14y ago
New York poser: Lies about how much money they have, how much they enjoy investment banking/BigLaw, the cool bands they know, etc 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?
rdl 14y ago
Posers in Cambridge? I assume you mean in the Boston finance/brahmin/etc. world, or maybe in "academia", not in engineering programs or the tech world. MIT grad students seem pretty transparent about what they're doing, what impact it could have, etc.

igorgue 14y ago

And then here is Steve Blank, beloved by so many here, asking everyone not to lie: http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/ http://steveblank.com/2012/07/30/lying-on-your-resume/ while companies are allowed to lie.

bpatrianakos 14y ago

I have decided that for me personally, the comments defending the original TC article are what I'll point to when I say "HN really has gone downhill". The article was awful journalism (it shouldn't even be considered journalism) and read like a gossip rag except no one knew or cared about the girl in question. 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.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

To me it's funny to hear people complain about people lying in the startup and tech industry. You should hang out with some outside sales people sometime. Those guys make what she did look like a girl scout bake sale.

dbecker 14y ago

Maybe it's because I don't live in Silicon Valley... or because I'm less "into the startup scene" than other people on HN... but I'm surprised anyone even cares about the TechCrunch article. 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.

michaelochurch 14y ago

People are piling on Shirley Hornstein because (1) she got caught, and (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it. 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.

qq66 14y ago
Claiming that you worked at company X when you didn't is like claiming that you have a degree from a university that you didn't attend, and is one of the most clear-cut and common examples of professional deceit. I don't think this is a sexism issue at all -- look at how roundly Alexey Vayner was mocked. While I don't think the TechCrunch article was an example of charitable judgment, people are bloodthirsty and love to string up an "example case" every so often.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  The more I read up on her, the less I like her. I agree. "Borrowing fame" is one thing, but claiming you worked at a company where you didn't is unethical.
mmcnickle 14y ago
>>> (2) she's female. The second of these is 90 percent of it. 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?
thatdrew 14y ago

TallboyOne 14y ago

She's very good at photoshop. I wish I had more to say.

npguy 14y ago

The premise of the article is wrong. The post would lead to an argument saying every marketing effort is a lie. Which is a dangerous argument, since it would imply everyone trying to say "it cost me x dollars to do this. pls pay y" - in which case, no business would exist. Everyone does a bit of marketing - big mac says total burgers sold a number that always goup. nothing wrong with that, IMO

anovikov 14y ago

I think lies are the nature of our industry: it is a self-propelled train, with each element of a chain working mainly to 'sell' everything to the next one, with little regard about its intrinsic value, more to the ability to be sold to the next one (which goes straight to the IPO, see Facebook). In the end, public and pension funds pay for that, so we are basically cashing out people's future pensions now (as we know, almost all pension programs are underfunded, mainly for this reason: their managers invest in shit, for the lack of anything else). This is much like how MLM works, except the last level (victim) is more clearly defined. 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.