The BS Artists Are Coming For Your Startup

This is what they mean when they say they want to fund you

Joe Procopio
6 min readNov 10, 2022

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image by pressfoto

I want to give you a little real-world peek at how newly-successful entrepreneurs can pretty easily get tricked into spending their hard-earned revenue under the guise of a phony investment in their startup. I won’t use names because I don’t want to get sued. I’ll just list out the schemes.

I’ve been an entrepreneur for almost three decades. And in addition to my current “real” job running product at a high-growth, VC-backed startup, I’m also the founder of Teaching Startup, a startup to help startups build and grow better startups. The former, having raised north of $60 million, gets unsolicited investment offers all the time. The latter never got a single one. Until now.

In the last six months or so, an army of bullshit artists have come out of the woodwork wanting to “fund Teaching Startup.” And if you do happen to know anything about Teaching Startup, you’ll find this as funny as I do.

If you don’t, get ready to laugh. Or generally be ambivalent. I don’t know, I’m writing this as I go.

Offers To Fund My “Fake” Startup

Teaching Startup is not a fake startup. It’s very real. It has been making startups better since May 2020…

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Joe Procopio
Joe Procopio

Written by Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. I write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com