In the world of startups the phrase “fake it till you make it” is well known. But what happens when you take this concept too far. Abraham Shafi was the founder of the social media site IRL. Him and his company is accused of faking 95% of their users after raking in $1.5 billion in investments. In this episode, we take a look.
Outro track: https://open.spotify.com/track/2ny4UL6ebjme9mPQEEyREM?si=0486e53182934e6f
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Correction: The “war-torn Cairo” statement was from a GQ magazine profile written on Shafi. It appears that there was no war in Egypt during the 80’s. So either Shafi lied to GQ magazine to embellish the story of his upbringing or GQ magazine made up that fact. Either way it was a faulty source that made it into the video so apologies for that and I wanted to correct the record.
Dude, love your stuff but you can’t make up a fact. It’s either a fact or it’s not. They can make it up, they can claim it, etc.
Egypt was recovering from the 1973 war (and previous wars)
@@retrocatalog That’s correct. It’s great that he’s clarifying himself. But the semantics is important in this case since he’s a really good journalist and has the opportunity to not propagate the notion that made up stuff are also facts.
Can you share the GQ magazine article? I’d love to know more. I love these stories.
Fraud are happening because the whole system is a fraud. So dishonesty is what we get when we have a dishonest system.
1:10 Cairo wasn’t war torn in the eighties
All these new Start ups promising big returns upon investments. And using chat bots to fake numbers of users pretty scary. But, then again look at Chase Bank, JP Morgan, Black Rock and dozens of other firms been around 100 years. You can’t trust any of them. Best advice if Sounds too good be true probably IS….
nope the best advice is bootstrap your startup with bots but remember to remove them later…