A Silicon Valley Dream Collapses in Allegations of Fraud

From what I have read on Kim's blog and other articles, this appears to be more a case of the CEO Choi being an immature and incompetent individual who started out to earn some big bucks but couldn't handle failures and ended up creating one fraud after another. To me it doesnt look like he started the company with the intention of committing some grand scam.

Sure, but (I don't know if you saw it before he wiped his profile) it was puffed up wa-aaaaaay more than that. He'd have been lying somewhere.

This reminds me of my last job, where the karma gods smiled upon me and not so much for another guy.

I've always written my resume somewhat uniquely for SEO[1] and happen to work quite heavily in the Linux space. At the time several years ago, my resume was on the first or second page google search results for something along the lines of "linux system administrator" and variations.

The stars must have aligned as some poor schmuck thought he'd spruce up his resume by copy & pasting lines verbatim from the first 4-5 good Linux resumes he found via google. Unfortunately for him, one of them was mine. Also unfortunately for him, I'm known as a very technical interviewer that doesn't take any bs.

So besides the fact he wasn't qualified from a technical perspective for this position, I decided to see what he'd do. I stopped him mid interview and pulled up my resume on my phone. I handed it to him and asked him to read a few lines. Then I asked him to read a few lines that were verbatim from his resume. His face lost all color and he shuddered. There is simply no way I was buying that he and I both came up with the following 3 lines in a row:

    * Re-implemented the global dns/ldap setup for higher availability. Used keepalived for auto-failover
    * High performance computing, benchmarking, and kernel tuning. Constant review of upstream kernel activity
    * Maintenance and engineering on a from scratch Linux distribution in support of high volume electronic trading

Amongst two or three additional ones, it was too much of a cooincidence. He swore that the recruiter had doctored his resume and that the recruiter was a liar. I gave him a shot at doing tech for the rest of the interview. However, I turned it up to 11 and was visibly agitated at this point that he'd stolen from my work trying to market myself. Now I'm normally extremely friendly in interviews, but teched him so hard it hurt my brain. He failed miserably.

We told his recruiter the story and said if it was true we were going to immediately stop doing business with that recruiter and his company. He quickly and happily forwarded us every single email from that candidate clearly showing they'd done nothing other than rearrange the styling and put their awful logo on it. The recruiter decided to stop working with this candidate as well.

Moral of the story: Don't steal people's resume, they work hard making it and that is dishonest. Don't lie to technical people about your technical skills. It will ruin your future career prospects.

[1] http://www.digitalprognosis.com/resume.htm

Proper title: A Silicon Valley Dream Collapses in Allegations of Fraud.

Gold rushes bring in the fraudsters. @honkhonkpants response, I take it tongue in cheek. Born and raised here. There is a lot of good that does happen, the Valley used to be more balanced (tech, manufacturing, ag, etc)...

In the 10+ companies I've been at, I could see one as having been fraudulent, that was mostly at the non-founder level pushing work overseas for kickbacks. His career has since stalled.

When things are easy and fast and loose, study the gold rush or any other similar history, these things will happen. Today, it's sad that those backing people like this don't use all the tools at their disposal to do deep do diligence. It seems like if you tell the right story, have people skills, and the surface isn't scratched, you can end up with a seed round that isn't warranted.