I was worried that here in the US it's fraud all the way down, but just yesterday I met somebody who actually makes things, so I guess it's just fraud most of the way down.

I've come to realize this: we are all raising money more than we admit. Whether it's from venture capital or donations to fund non-profits, money is more political than I realized because it's all about the idea of value, which is subjectively determined by humans.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

I worked for a company that did opt-in spam email. Their main offices were in Silicon Valley, but they had a startup thing in LA that I worked at. Ostensibly we were building a self-service email campaign app to be bundled with Weblogic Commerce Server (which itself was basically DOA).

It became pretty obvious to me from the get-go that nothing was being built, and the startup was just siphoning money off the parent company. I'm not sure if there was any fraud going on beyond a bunch of people collecting a paycheck.

I think the boss was skimming off of the captive H1Bs, and there was a guy in NYC who never did anything as far as I could tell. I wouldn't be surprised if there was some kind of kickback going on there.

My first day, I went out for sushi with the top devs, who proceeded to tell one horror story after another about the boss. Awesome way to start a job. I lasted 3 months.

A lot (all?) VCs charge some form of fees (typically capped at 20% of the entire fund, split in various percentages through 4 years investing, 4 divesting period). These fees often are only paid out only based on the actively deployed capital, and are not the only incentive: the main incentive is shares in gains (carry).

The reason they're based on actively deployed capital isn't that the LPs (people who give VCs money to invest) want them to deploy the money in a stupid way, but they definitely don't want VCs to get the fees if the money wasn't invested. Therefore, VCs:

1. Want to raise as much money as possible 2. Want to deploy as much money as possible

Ideally, as quickly as possible.

There's nothing fraudulent about the idea of calculating VCs fees in various scenarios.

There's however the extremely dodgy part of the portfolio companies paying their investor (VC) fees for anything. This is an obvious conflict of interests, and should never happen, but I personally know of multiple VC funds here in Europe (will skip the names to not get sued, lol) who base their entire operational model on funding shitty companies that have 0 chance of success, charging them for the office space and often "shared services" they provide. Unsure if this is a regulatory overlooking, or something that's deliberately legal, but IMHO shouldn't be. Probably they talked their LPs into agreeing to this on paper.

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

What's striking is how long it takes to notice. The incentives to keep believing the job is real — salary, identity, colleagues — are much stronger than the incentive to question the foundation. Sunk cost at the organizational level.

At the end of the day he wrote some software which sounds legitimate and useful. What management did without his knowledge isn't really his problem.

At the other end of this extreme is if you have a good job in a bad industry, like gambling or boiler room frauds. You should feel responsible even if your job is just maintaining the servers.

I look at everything now as a journey not a destination. When connecting one's work carrier with a bank, one must keep in mind that some other people might have joined the organisation because of quite distinct reasons than we did. So yes there might be a fraud ongoing in our company, but it's not our fault

Well, you did good and got paid. It all sounds very serendipitous. Isn’t like 99% of all tech fraud?