The dirty truth behind the LinkedIn celebrations, the Forbes covers, and the $99 courses your favorite influencer keeps pushing.
There’s a kind of founder you’ve seen on your timeline this week.
The one who sold a startup for nine figures after eighteen months. The one giving a TED talk at twenty-five. The one whose face is on Forbes 30 Under 30.
There’s also a kind of influencer you’ve seen on your timeline this week.
The one who “made millions” and is now selling you a course for $99 about how to do the same.
Don’t get blinded by either of them.
Both are selling you the exact same thing: a story. And sometimes the story is a lie.
I just watched a 30-minute breakdown of the biggest scams of recent memory
It’s called The Fraud Chronicles, by ColdFusion featuring Coffeezilla. If you’ve spent any time in startup land, you should watch it. It’s not really about crypto bros. It’s about a pattern.
Here’s what the pattern looks like.
Charlie Javice sold Frank to JPMorgan for $175M. The users didn’t exist. JPMorgan paid the money, tried to email the list, and the emails bounced. Because there was no list.
Sam Bankman-Fried built FTX on tokens backed by nothing. When the music stopped, around $10 billion in customer money was gone.
SafeMoon told retail investors the liquidity pool was locked. It wasn’t. The founders had a backdoor. More than $200M walked out.
The Day Before sold a AAA-quality zombie MMO to gamers worldwide. It didn’t exist. The studio had two people. They pocketed roughly $3M in pre-orders and disappeared four days after launch.
Miles Guo raised about $1 billion from a “media platform” claiming to expose the Chinese government. Used the money to buy yachts.
Different industries. Different scams. Same shape.
The pattern is the same every time
Fake users.
Fake metrics.
Fake transparency.
The wild part isn’t the fraud. The wild part is how long it worked before anyone opened the spreadsheet.
Charlie Javice was a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. JPMorgan did diligence. Lawyers signed the docs. It took months of bounced emails before anyone realized the user list was made up.
Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of every business magazine on earth. He had Tom Brady and Larry David doing his Super Bowl ads. He testified in front of Congress. Sequoia published a long profile suggesting he was one of the most important people of the decade.
These weren’t grifters in a basement. These were the people you were told to look up to.
Why founder hype is the same trick as influencer hype
The influencer who “made millions” and is selling you a $99 course?
He made the millions selling the course. Not doing the thing.
He sells you a system for getting rich, because that’s the actual business. The screenshots, the lifestyle reels, the “I quit my 9-to-5” story — it’s a sales funnel for the course. The course is the product. Everything else is the demo.
The founder who sold for $100M in eighteen months works the same way, just with bigger numbers.
Sometimes the company was real. Sometimes it was a deck, a few inflated metrics, and an acquirer who didn’t audit.
You can’t tell from the announcement post. The announcement post looks the same either way.
What this means if you’re actually building something
If you’re a founder who’s been at it for three or five or eight years, watching twenty-somethings flip startups for nine figures while you’re still answering customer support tickets at 11pm, this is the post for you.
Real users don’t vanish under a subpoena.
Real revenue doesn’t unwind in a deposition.
Real product doesn’t need a fake demo.
The people on the LinkedIn carousel today are not the people you’ll be looking up to in ten years. Some of them will be in prison. Some of them will be on their fourth pivot, quietly deleting old tweets. Some of them will have done it for real. You can’t tell which is which yet.
So what do you actually do?
Watch your own numbers. Not theirs.
Talk to your customers. Not the conference circuit.
Ship to learn. Not to launch on Product Hunt.
When someone tells you their growth number, ask how they count it. When someone tells you their revenue number, ask if it’s MRR or ARR or annualized from one good month. When someone tells you they “exited,” ask for the price in the public filing.
Most of the time, you won’t get a straight answer.
That’s the answer.
Building slow with real numbers is boring.
It’s also the only thing that survives.
Doron Segal is the CTO and co-founder of Per Diem (YC W21), the operating system for brick-and-mortar businesses.
Source: “The Fraud Chronicles feat. Coffeezilla” by ColdFusion.