I'm not an expert, but writing "My advice to founders: fake it." on a publicly accessible blog doesn't sound wise, it's like saying "I will almost certainly lie to my future investors during the interview". If I were the investor and came across this article when doing startup due diligence, that would have raised some serious concerns about the CEO and her company.
I was going to comment about this but wasn't quite sure what to make of it.
However, I would not characterize what the article encourages as lying, but, rather, bluster is the word I'd choose.
More importantly, my impression of the article (confirme by the sibling comment) is that this is being advocated because that is actually what the VCs want, to the point where they either asked for it explicitly or asked for a lack of the opposite (humility).
Granted, there are specific suggestions to fabricate, literally fake, or pretend, but these need to be understood in context.
> Nonetheless, investors want to hear a passionate origin tale. If you don’t have one, make one up.
Does the factual accuracy of such a story make a bit of difference in terms of due diligence in the business sense, as opposed to, say, other history, such as education/skills/experience of the founders?
> My advice to founders: fake it. Pretend you know exactly what the product will be in five years, even though you know your plan will change.
This seems almost silly to criticize, taken in context. As with the rest of the paragraph, there's no advocacy for a founder to falsely claim anything credible. Rather, the advice is to claim, confidently, the incredible (which everyone involved already knows not to be true, because it can't be true). The point is the confidence, evangelism, and, well, bluster.
To me, this actually paints the VCs in a bad light, rather than the OP founders. It's one thing to encourage a high degree of confidence (perhaps as a proxy for perseverence), but there's a danger of becoming too accustomed to believing seven impossible things before breakfast and thereby blurring the line between credible and incredible, as well as blurring the line between confident and over-confident.
Of course, that doesn't matter if alternate funding decision techniques do no better at overall returns. It's easy to call out Theranos and Juicero as examples, but they just as easily could be nothing more than selection bias.
"Faking it" is incredibly common, and there's nothing wrong with it. I've worked at several startups over the past 20 years, and almost every founder is faking it to some degree.
(And "startup due diligence" is pretty superficial at the seed stage...)
My advice was not "lie to investors." My advice was to fake your confidence and certainty, even if you're not feeling confident or certain. Investors want to know that the CEO has courage and the ability to evangelize.
I don't see much, if any, novelty here, especially if one substitutes the synonym "Marketing" for "Evangelizing". I vaguely recall it being something of a trope in the software industry (perhaps not even limited to that) decades, if not longer, ago that CEOs were really CMOs.
