Comment by matwood
I hear what you’re saying, but it feels a bit too cynical to expand it to all business. Did you tell your boss you’d finish some task today? If something comes up, as often does at work, and you don’t finish, did you lie? Predicting the future is hard even as soon as what will happen today, now do that for the next quarter or 4 quarters. Of course there are fraudsters out there, but I view most founders as rampant optimists instead of liars. And you kind of have to be an over top optimist to be founder.
> Did you tell your boss you’d finish some task today? If something comes up, as often does at work, and you don’t finish, did you lie?
No. A good-faith failure is different from a lie.
The rule of thumb I use to handle ambiguous situations is "if my incentives were different, would I be saying something else right now?"
> Of course there are fraudsters out there, but I view most founders as rampant optimists instead of liars.
Most founders are both.
They're rampant optimists in the sense that they believe in their thing so much that it overrides all other concerns. But that often makes them liars via an argument of the form "my thing is so important and will change the world so much that I have to lie now to make sure it can be so great".
I'm not saying founders are ogres. The kind of lying they do derives from fairly ordinary human failures. But it's still lying, it's still normalized, and it still has terrible consequences all the time.