I guess this is the way to get rich quick now. Imagine a company with millions of fake users all created by a LLM app.
May I introduce https://chirper.ai
Oh boy, it's here. So soon...
A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
111–120 of 252 posts
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#112Reddit famously started with a lot of fake users. I think the founders mentioned it in an interview. Even the Swedish guy from the show Succession was inflating his numbers. And those attributed clicks from Facebook (especially fb) and Google, better not to look too close.
Happens in the show Silicon Valley too.
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#113>funding round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Oh dear. I wonder if there will be a Fund 3
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#114> Two years ago, a messaging app startup called IRL reached a $1.2 billion valuation
> Earlier this year, a former employee alleged that IRL—the name stands for “in real life”— had fired him after he voiced concerns that many users were bots
It's hilarious that "In Real Life" was 95% bots.
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anybody who has seen a Masayoshi-son presentation and then gives SoftBank capital to invest deserves whatever loss they take. https://www.businessinsider.com/13-slides-softbanks-vision-f... https://finance.yahoo.com/news/golden-geese-unicorns-inside-...
i don't understand how a presentation like this (and by extension, the company) can somehow accrue nearly 70 billion in market cap. perhaps it is so genius i cannot even comprehend.
Perhaps. Or perhaps nobody wants to admit publicly that they don’t get it either, and don’t want to miss all that sweet, sweet, alpha that gets generated when SoftBank figures out how to enable telepathic communication.
There may also be a fair amount of The Common Knowledge Game[0] going on.
0 - https://www.epsilontheory.com/harvey-weinstein-common-knowle...
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#116> “Oh, man, the number of times I’ve been asked why my company isn’t growing as fast as X and then found out X was a fraud all along.” This, in sports, finance, startups - everywhere. Dirty players skew the dynamics of any system leading to worse outcomes for those that choose to remain honest. We need the supposed ‘smartest guys in the room’ to be less dumb and do due diligence and we need strong consequences for fo…
> We need the supposed ‘smartest guys in the room’ to be less dumb
Indeed. Many don't quite understand technology, and investors are no exception.
There are smart ones, but those not necessarily make good investments -- they may simply look for good future exits and leave the bomb on the laps of the next suckers.
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#117How are messaging apps still getting these valuations when Telegram, signal, Whatsapp and lime chat exist?
Only one of those doesn't require your phone number. It'll be nice when we get to the point where we can have a proper working chat app that doesn't require one. Hangouts used to be great but Google has to always make sure their chat doesn't work.
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Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#118Reddit famously started with a lot of fake users. I think the founders mentioned it in an interview. Even the Swedish guy from the show Succession was inflating his numbers. And those attributed clicks from Facebook (especially fb) and Google, better not to look too close.
Reddit is a little different as their intention was to populate the platform with content in the early days [1], not to mislead investors with fake metrics.
Mind you that Huffman and Ohanian did this manually, while founders today can use LLMs to fill their platforms with bots that can interact "naturally" with users. I wonder how many are already doing it.
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've always had this background thought that it would be a fun job to do "due diligence" on behalf of VCs. I remember being on the receiving end of some of that work, and I wasn't all that impressed. Do today's VCs take technical due diligence seriously? If not, why not?
For the enterprise saas business we built, vc duedil was talking to customers, both directly via our introductions and backchanneled via their network. For the technical aspects, our vcs didn't / don't care. That's our job to figure out, and if we don't, they fire founders. I'm honestly not sure how you would seriously audit chat app numbers, and I suspect and hope Abraham Shafi is going to prison. For most businesse…
It's not that hard.
- Look at the application logs
- Look at the emails and reach out to a sub-sample of them to determine if they are real users
- Look at the network traffic/volume numbers
- Look at the architecture to see if it could actually support that volume
- Look at the pattern of content in a random sampling to see if it's just "Lorem Ipsum" or actual, real content
The consequence of not doing even basic DD are outcomes like the $174m fraud that JPMC eventually discovered: https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/5/23671000/jpmorgan-frank-fr...
Re: A messaging app startup that raised $200M shuts down afters users were 95% fake
#120Reddit famously started with a lot of fake users. I think the founders mentioned it in an interview. Even the Swedish guy from the show Succession was inflating his numbers. And those attributed clicks from Facebook (especially fb) and Google, better not to look too close.
Thanks for the spoiler. :(
Sorry. It is not important at all for the plot, no worries.