
Silicon Valley Is Filled With Liars - benackles
http://nickoneill.com/silicon-valley-is-filled-with-liars/
======
mattmanser
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.

~~~
biznickman
As we discussed in the comments of the post, I think I simply blur the
definition of "lying". Stretching the truth, or purposely omitting the other
side of the story is a form of lying if you ask me. Am I completely wrong
here?

~~~
dvdhsu
Aaron Swartz has a post on dishonesty:
<http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/intellectualdishonesty>

> _Dishonesty has two parts: 1) saying something that is untrue, and 2) saying
> it with the intent to mislead the other person._

He goes on to agree with Feynman: there are times where we "should ben[d] over
backwards to show how [we] are maybe wrong" [1].

Yet, Aaron later states that "intellectual" honesty is an "impractical
standard" to apply to every-day life. Some occasions call for it, others
don't. Unfortunately, where we draw the line seems to be moving towards the
latter.

1\. <http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm>

~~~
wesleyd
It takes two people to lie, Marge - one to lie, and one to be lied to.

    
    
      -- Homer Simpson

------
aaronbrethorst
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>

~~~
hkmurakami
_> 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>

~~~
aaronbrethorst
> 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
"I'm pursuing a 'lifestyle' business"

Nothing at all wrong with starting small and building up from there. Don't
apologize. Work 80 per week in your "lifestyle" business and you will see it
grow.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I'm definitely not apologizing, nor am I working 80 hours a week on my
'lifestyle' business :)

The contract I'm doing right now is, by far, the best job I've ever had. My
stylist remarked to me the other day that I haven't lost any more hair in
between my last two visits to him. My girlfriend thinks I'm generally more
relaxed and happier than she's ever seen me.

------
pg
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.

~~~
defen
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?

------
3pt14159
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
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.

------
potatolicious
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
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.

------
j_baker
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
> _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?

~~~
j_baker
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."

------
dbecker
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.

------
mjn
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
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
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.

------
Jd
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.

------
bpatrianakos
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.

------
steve8918
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-...](http://betabeat.com/2012/08/shirley-hornstein-shirls-credit-card-
fraud-records/)

~~~
supercanuck
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
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
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.

------
haberman
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
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.

------
kapilkale
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.

------
gojomo
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.

------
anovikov
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.

------
benatkin
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.

------
igorgue
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/> while companies
are allowed to lie.

------
gkoberger
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.

------
nameuserc
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

------
paulsutter
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
_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
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
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."

------
npguy
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

------
tomkit
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
Traxler: How do I look?

Vukovic: Like shit, boss

Traxler: Your mama!

 _The Terminator_ , 1984

------
at-fates-hands
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.

------
cs702
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
> 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.

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

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

------
michaelochurch
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
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
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.

