"Fake It Till You Make It" is a dangerous slogan

Fake It Till You Make it is a dangerous slogan, since it can be interpreted to sanction lying, if you’re going to do something good at the end. It’s like selling a fake iPhone and using the money to build a better smartphone than the iPhone. That’s still cheating and fraud. I know founders who’ve played this game and lost: many of their employees and customers would no longer work with them. Some of them don’t return the founder’s calls. Some have even threatened the founder and the company with lawsuits. That’s how people react when you cheat them. Some of these founders are basically con-men, albeit dressed up in impressive sounding startup mantras. If anything, a petty thief is easier to identify, since he doesn’t pretend to be something he’s not!

You can see how Fake It Till You Make It can lead people astray.

A less radioactive slogan is Believe in yourself till you make it. When you’re starting a startup, there’s a gap between how the world perceives of your company (reality) and what it could be (potential). And many of us engineering types are trained to present facts rather than stories. Unfortunately, non-engineers perceive this as lack of capability or ambition. So we should remind ourselves to be a little more bashful, and to not undersell ourselves. By contrast, salespeople often over-sell. If they have something worth 10, they come across as if it’s worth 100. As opposed to engineering types, who can come across as if it’s worth 2. So, believe in yourself till you make it, till the world’s perception catches up with what you knew all along.