Marc Andreessen says fake founders proliferate when markets boom and vanish in downturns. To spot them, ask increasingly specific questions about their work. Real founders can answer granular details from years of deep experience; impostors' stories fuzz out.
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So there are people who definitely try to come in and basically present as being something that they're not. And they've, you know, like they've read all the books. They will have listened to this interview. Right. They will, you know, they study everything and they construct a facade and they come in and present as something they're not. I would say the amount of that varies exactly correlated to the nasdaq. Right. The kinds of people who do the thing that you're talking about, they're fundamentally oriented for social status. They're trying to get the social status without actually the substance. And there are always other places to go get social status. So after 2000, the joke was B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting, which is the high status people. The people oriented to status who showed up to be in tech were like, yeah, screw it, this is over. Stick a fork in it. I'm going to go back to Goldman Sachs or go back to McKinsey where I can be high status. And so you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn. That said, in a big upswing. Yeah, you get a lot of people showing up with a lot of kind of, let's say, public Persona without the substance to back it up. So the way we structure that, you can actually say exactly how we test for this, because the test exactly addresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake. And it's actually the same way homicide detectives try to find out if you've actually, if you're innocent or whether you've killed somebody. It's the same tactic, which is you ask increasingly detailed questions. And so the way the homicide cop does this is. What were you doing last night? Oh, I was at a movie. Which movie? Which theater? Okay, which seat did you sit in? What was the end of the movie? And you ask increasingly detailed questions. And people have trouble. At some point, people have trouble making up and things just fuzz into just kind of obvious bullshit. And basically fake founders basically have the same problem. They're able to relay a conceptual theory of what they're doing that they've kind of engineered. But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back that can do it. Basically what you find is they've spent five or 10 or 20 years obsessing on the details of whatever it is they're about to do, and they're so deep in the details that they know so much than you ever will.
