[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.