[adventured]

That's where the fine line comes in.

Did Excite sign a contract saying that they had the funds to pay in the case of winning the bid? I don't know the answer to that, it wouldn't be an uncommon requirement when bidding on a contract like that however.

Microsoft almost certainly lied on multiple occasions about what they already had, in trying to get MITS and IBM to take them seriously. The common historical story goes that they did lie - just how the wording went, who knows, they were clearly being intentionally deceptive regardless to capture the opportunity.

[Mz]

What I am saying is there is a difference between "It has not been done, but I believe I can pull it off" and "Look, look, we can totally do this and have already succeeded, here are the (completely faked) test results proving it!"

The former is a gamble, but it may be an informed gamble where you already have some idea of how to make it happen. The latter is a lie.

Startups absolutely should be operating in the realm of "It has not been done, but we think we can pull it off. In fact, we are pretty confident of that." They should not be operating in the realm of outright con artistry and fraud.

If you have the right experience, skills, education, personal assets of various sorts and solid mental models, predicting your expected success in a specific domain does not guarantee you will succeed. But it isn't necessarily just BS either.

The challenge is for other people to know which category you fall in. But you should know whether you are genuinely confident or straight up conning people -- barring serious delusion of some sort.

[skybrian]

It's extremely common to get the tense wrong. "This is what our product does" instead of "this is what our product will do." (They hope, if all goes well.) This is not (just) grammar nit-picking, it's often the difference between a promise and a lie.

For public companies, this is what results in "forward-looking statements" boilerplate. But it happens all the time in technical presentations.

I try to call people on it, but sometimes it's a losing battle.

[Mz]

Yeah, one of my very, extremely backburner (dead?) projects is called The Memome Project. The idea was to try to develop the architecture of ideas more solidly. Words and ideas have real value, meaning and power. I think Startups very much operate in the realm of ideas. Some ideas are really solid things, based on good mental models and rubrics and good data. And others are basically hot air. They are cheap and insubstantial and don't mean much of anything.

We need better ways to talk about and think about and measure the difference between those two things. The difference can be the difference between brinkmanship and outright fraud.