How Startups “Fake It Until They Make It” — Or Until They Go To Jail
It’s OK to promise the moon, but you’d better deliver.
As Elizabeth Holmes starts her prison sentence, there’s still a lot of speculation about whether or not she was just a smart, ambitious entrepreneur who was lured to the dark side by a system that is set up to work against a certain sort of smart, ambitious entrepreneur.
Make no mistake, I can totally get behind that theory. But there’s no denying that at some point, Theranos’ strategy shifted from “fake it until you make it” to “criminal activity.”
It’s never been easier to start a tech company, scrape together a minimum viable product, and quickly offer that product to a market or investors. But in a lot of ways, it’s never been more difficult to get that market or those investors to take notice and open their wallets to, you know, fund that tech company.
It’s a Catch-22 that usually results in founders putting a greater emphasis on “fake it until you make it.” It’s a phrase that’s as old as entrepreneurship itself. The problem with it is that it can mean whatever you want it to mean.
On one hand, “faking it” means selling the idea for a product that doesn’t exist yet, leaning on a team who can deliver the tech to any market, and making…
