11–20 of 166 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why did you choose not to blow the whistle?
I didn't have all the information that's coming out now. People tried. Read the article. The last investment was finalized days after someone raised concerns after realizing we didn't contact 70% of our customers.
Sounds like a witch hunt. Big corpo tries to get rid of competitor. And once again government destroyed someones life. Now that he cannot do his part anymore its so easy to proof he deceived investors because well he doesn’t have any numbers to show si yeah he was lying. And besides, who didn’t flex a slide or two to show future numbers how they hoped it will look instead of honest truth. If thats the case then DOJ h…
- where are the contracts corresponding to revenue? Yeah they are SaaS focused on SMB but this is a financial product, there will be contracts, NDAs, etc
- if the majority of the customers are fake there is such little load on the system. How does engineering not figure that out?
- How does no one see an insanely low COGs when paying the cloud services bills, or the lack of allocated resources when looking in the management interfaces?
- Even saas Products with supposedly a no touch sales process still have sales people and sales engineers for key accounts. What are all the sales people doing if they’re not running trials?
- let’s say he hid all of this by having tens of thousands of $10 a month customers. How does your VP of sales not get totally freaked out that the overwhelming majority of revenue is coming from no touch sales? If that’s the case that radically changes your growth and go to market strategies. The entire go-to- market team should be wondering what is going on? Same with product management. Your roadmap would be completely different with a long tail of extremely low revenue customers.
- how does sales/client success not notice that no one is expanding? How they aren’t talking to small customers about expansions?
- How does no one notice a complete lack of analytics or actions being generated by all the supposed customers?
- product management is going to want to get feedback from all of these customers. They’re going to be looking in analytics tools or session replay tools like fullstory. They’re going to look at the accounts and users and do outreach to emails asking for meetings. Aren’t they going to notice all of those people are fake?
- support/client success is going to have insanely high customer to support person ratios. Where are all the support tickets for that many customers?
- Managing cash flow would be very hard. Finance is going to see all this revenue coming in and want to scale. The VCs are going to want to see money being spent on marketing activities etc. to further the growth. If there’s no corresponding revenue being spent to acquire customers but tons of revenue coming in that’s a giant red flag
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I didn't have all the information that's coming out now. People tried. Read the article. The last investment was finalized days after someone raised concerns after realizing we didn't contact 70% of our customers.
The details of your post go beyond those mentioned in the article. Could you provide additional links?
The fake financial statements were publicly released: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-release/file/1317641...
Ex-employee here. Adam Rogas is a pathological liar and sociopath who dragged this out for years. I don't know how multiple audits failed to raise red flags over multiple $999,999.99 fake Stripe payouts. He literally inserted millions every few lines that didn't match up with the data around it. They never asked anyone else to produce the same report. Everyone involved should never be responsible for this amount of m…
Being an executive at a (substantially smaller) SaaS startup I have no idea how having up to 90% of your revenue be fabricated could happen without others knowing: - where are the contracts corresponding to revenue? Yeah they are SaaS focused on SMB but this is a financial product, there will be contracts, NDAs, etc - if the majority of the customers are fake there is such little load on the system. How does engineer…
Noone gives a shit when they're getting paid.
Have VCs started skimping on DD because problems come up so rarely? Lightspeed (who led the last round for these guys) isn't a no-name firm, they invested in Snap, GrubHub, Telegram, etc. Surely they have the experience to find out gigantic major problems like this? This feels like something that should've come up in diligence before they sent them 120 million bucks... There are so many places it could've shown up or…
I feel sorry for any CEO who actually steps down to spend more time with his/her family. That explanation has now more or less been completely co-opted by "Our CEO got caught in an embarrassing scandal and they need to fade from the public eye for a bit." I now assume that anyone who gives that reason on their way out must have done something terrible that is yet or about to come to light.