Going From Faking It to Making It

European Straits #74

Dear all,

Worldwide, a heated conversation is rising around the idea that entrepreneurs are liars. Two days ago, The Financial Times’s Andrew Hill wrote an article in which he says that “entrepreneurs bluff all the time”. A few days before, New York Magazine’s Reeves Wiedeman dedicated an in-depth piece to the faltering Vice media empire. There, lying seems to be a key part of the ‘problem’.

And then there’s the Theranos saga, which saw Elizabeth Holmes make the long journey from being on the cover of the New Yorker to being criminally charged for having allegedly made fraudulent claims about the company’s product. The driving force behind that story is the French-American journalist John Carreyrou, whose riveting book Bad Blood became the talk of the town on Twitter.

We at The Family have always been interested in this discussion of the line between optimism and lying, as one of the key pieces of advice we give to entrepreneurs is, “Fake it until you make it”.

That phrase really needs to…