Even the most famous surname in tech right now had to allegedly fake her way in.
The Clicks That Weren’t Real
Unless you have been living under a rock, you already know about the Phia scandal by now.
For anyone who hasn’t fully followed it, here’s the plain version. Phia is a shopping assistant co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, launched in 2025, that lives on your laptop or your phone. When you’re shopping in Safari, Phia finds cheaper alternatives, ideally secondhand, for whatever you’re looking at.
Phia was supposedly a raging success among young shoppers, because now you could get coveted luxury fashion items for less.
But Bloomberg’s investigation found something uglier underneath. Phia was claiming sales it never actually drove. On iOS, when a user arrived through someone else’s affiliate link and hit checkout, the extension quietly opened a background tab, swapped in its own affiliate link, and took the credit for the sale.
Phia is not a one-off. It’s a pattern. And the pattern keeps getting worse.
Small Plug
Two years ago, I sat on an idea for eight months, too scared to start alone. I eventually built that idea into a real company, landed brand partnerships, raised money, made sales, and did it all as a solo founder with a team of seven.
Now I’m running a series to prove a solo non-technical founder can take a new idea, validate it, and ship a real app in 30 days, on three hours a day, max.
If you’re sitting on an idea too, come build with me. Follow me on Instagram.
Fake It Till You Make It
Charlie Javice, a Wharton grad, built Frank, a student financial-aid startup, and rode it to Forbes 30 Under 30 in 2019. When JPMorgan came knocking, ready to buy, she told them Frank had more than 4 million customers when the real number was under 300,000.
They were reportedly counting anyone who had merely clicked the site as a user. And Javice paid a data-science professor roughly $18,000 to generate synthetic customer records to back the claim. That inflated number was a big part of what justified the price.
When JPMorgan’s team asked to see the real user data during due diligence, Javice blocked them, citing Frank’s privacy policy and terms of service. JPMorgan bought Frank for $175 million in 2021 anyway, and the deception fell apart the moment the bank tried to market to those “customers” and about 70 percent of the emails bounced.
Delve was the latest hot startup in Silicon Valley, the one everyone wanted a piece of, until a few months ago. Now it allegedly sits in a murkier space too. The YC-backed compliance automation startup, founded by Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, raised $32 million at a $300 million valuation on the promise of SOC 2 and HIPAA certification in days instead of months. An anonymous whistleblower operation calling itself “DeepDelver,” published a roughly 10,000-word Substack investigation alleging fabricated compliance evidence, trust pages populated before any actual work had been done, and “certification” routed through what the report calls Indian shell entities dressed up as US CPA firms.
Sell first and build later has always been the rule in Silicon Valley! But not everyone who follows that rule ends up in court.
Some Lies Make You A Legend
We all know Reddit’s origin story. In the first few weeks, roughly 99 percent of submissions on the site were Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman posting under fake usernames, an attempt to solve the classic chicken-and-egg problem and set the tone before real users showed up.
Reddit faking its early users is beloved startup lore. Every product that relies on network-effects has done some version of it.
Nick Swinmurn founded Zappos by photographing shoes in local stores he had no relationship with and no inventory in, and when an order came in he would drive over, buy the pair at full retail, and ship it himself.
So, a human quietly doing the work behind an “AI” product is completely normal. It’s every Wizard-of-Oz MVP that ever shipped, including mine.
And no one wakes up one day and decides to commit fraud. It starts smaller, with harmless deceptions to get the ball rolling.
My Own Ladder Of Lies
Almost nobody wants to be first. Not the first customer. Not the first employee. Not the first investor.
So you stretch the truth a bit.
During my very first brand conversations, I told people I was closing deals with three brands when the reality was that I was just in the initial conversations. At my first networking event, I said I had a team of four people, but it was just me doing everything. I used to pretend to be an intern when I was interviewing people on the street, because I wanted to see their honest reactions. I said yes when someone asked if I had a cofounder, because I was embarrassed to admit I was a solo founder.
Then there’s the one I’m least proud of.
I was pitching to an angel, someone with real standing in the fashion-tech space, and it was going well. She liked the idea, and she liked me enough to talk seriously about writing a check. I name-dropped a few other angels I claimed to be talking to. She said she was friends with a few of those names, and she’d talk to them about a possible co-investment.
I froze. I admitted I’d reached out but hadn’t actually started those conversations. She politely said she would get back to me, but as expected, she never did.
So because of a small, seemingly inconsequential, lie, I lost someone who would have been in my corner, someone who was probably ready to write a check.
The Line
With this latest news, I’ve been sitting with something heavy.
Almost every early-stage founder stretches the truth in some way, most of the time, and I don’t think that’s bad.
Javice was convicted. Delve and Phia are still contested allegations. But none of them are a separate species from the rest of us. They’re what the stretching looks like after it goes unchecked long enough to compound.
So if that angel investor hadn’t called me out, would I have been capable of stopping? Could I have tried something bolder the next time?
And that’s not a comfortable feeling.
Because I am not sure whether I’m self-aware enough to know when I’m close to the line.
Are you?
What’s your “fake it till you make it” story? And will you be brave enough to draw the line?