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We're off-air this week. So, here, in light of recent global attempts at fakery, is one of our most popular episodes of 2019: Fake It Till You Make It.

Are you selling the dream or running a long con? How to sort the Silicon Valley spin from the outright lies.

We've got a ton of show links this week. Great reporting from all these sources. Support content makers!!!

Show Links:
https://www.vox.com/2015/2/26/8114391/inventions-dumb-fads
http://fortune.com/silicon-valley-startups-fraud-venture-capital/
https://www.wired.com/story/theranos-and-silicon-valleys-fake-it-till-you-make-it-culture/
https://www.wired.com/story/theranos-and-silicon-valleys-fake-it-till-you-make-it-culture/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/21/big-tech-products-silicon-valley
https://www.sfgate.com/technology/article/Spectacular-recent-Bay-Area-tech-startup-failures-12378764.php#photo-14592820
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2019/mar/20/elizabeth-holmes-and-her-firm-theranos-show-why-we-must-stop-fetishising-entrepreneurs

Episode Transcript

These shows are dictated to and transcribed by machines, and hurriedly edited by a human. Apologies for the typos and grammar flaws.

Technology can be a harsh business. You spend years and millions of dollars developing a product, only to find out no one wants it, or that another innovator has turned your invention from a product into a feature.

With the release this week of The Inventor, a documentary about the failed startup Theranos, we thought it was time that MSP took a deeper look into the industry’s fake it till you make it ethos.

Matt, I can’t believe that you are going to be the one telling people about the dangers of faking it.
•Who better than me?
•I’ve spent my entire life faking it.
•I’ve got a masters degree in faking it from Stanford.

That’s a lie!
•Exactly. If you want to catch a conman, you get a con man.
•If you want to talk about lies, find a liar.
•That kind of the point about today’s show.
•There’s a fine line between promoting your invention, giving it enough hype to get yourself some media coverage and some venture capital and flat out lying.

Juicero!
•Exactly. Now Juicero wasn’t a lie.
•But it was very weird. And it was a great example of giving customers exactly what they don’t want at a price they can’t afford.
•Which, in Silicon Valley speak, is the perfect business model.

We haven’t talked about this for ages. Go on. Remind everyone what’s it’s all about.
•People like juices. And I imagine, people who have millions of dollars of stock options can afford to buy really fancy juicers.
•Juicero was an attempt to meet the market’s need for slow pressed juices.
•So they marketed a really expensive juicer – I think it was USD700 or something – which had to be connected to the Internet.
•And you could only use it with really expensive bags of the company’s own pre-mulched juices.