AI grifters are making our job harder

Building software is my profession, and I do it honestly. I rather quit software than participate in the circus.

If I were an LP in tech today, I’d be scared shitless. The same way people should’ve been in 1999 but weren’t. Back then, it was Pets.com’s sock puppets and Webvan’s 30-minute grocery delivery. Today, it’s demo videos that aren’t real, pitch decks filled with hallucinated traction, founders chasing headlines instead of product-market fit, and customer logos. At its best, it’s bending the truth; at its worst, it’s committing fraud (yes, reporting raised capital as ARR is fraud).

bem, the company I founded with Upal Saha in 2023, is an AI startup. We’re deep in the trenches, but it feels like we’re doing it in a war zone, not against competitors but against grifters who’ve made “fake it till you make it” the default business model. I’m almost glad our product is so boring; it doesn’t make for flashy demos. Those who use it and pay for it get value out of it.

Software used to be about product, tech, and defensibility. Moats were things like network effects, switching costs, and proprietary models. Now? The moat is narrative manipulation. Reality distortion. Polished fiction. The ability to bend the truth just enough to get to the next round. The difference between Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field and that of current founders is that there was substance behind Apple’s releases. Today’s reality distortion field is just gaslighting.

The disheartening conclusion? It worked for a while. It worked extremely well. The house of cards is starting to crumble, though, and it’s looking uglier every day.

Schadenfreude

I thought I’d feel second-hand pleasure from seeing grifters get their time in the news, but I don’t.

When “just ship it” becomes “just sell it, whether it exists or not,” trust erodes across the entire industry, between builders and customers, between founders and investors, between capital and conviction. Most sales objections we receive today at bem are due to the distrust generated by bad actors. We’ve actually built our sales process to acknowledge the skepticism in the industry; everyone tries bem before signing a contract.

We’re not just talking about a few bad actors anymore. The volume is cranked up across the board. AI made it worse, not because the tech isn’t real, but because the buzz is. It’s become the perfect tool for vaporware, for faking scale, for demoing things that are literally impossible today. If the claims seem outlandish, they probably are.

This isn’t new; it’s just worse than ever before. In my 15 years building startups, I’ve lived through 3 tech hype cycles, and every cycle has gotten worse and worse. The first AI hype cycle 10 years ago was bad. The crypto hype cycle was a terrible waste of time and money. I wonder if people building true, valuable financial infrastructure with crypto felt like this back then? I wonder if they woke up in the morning saying, “Fuck NFTs; I’m building a way to make cross-border payments easily.” A bored ape makes for a much funnier demo than clicking a “Pay” button.

Call to arms: morality is not in the P&L

I get it. Being honest feels stupid today. I feel like a moron. I wonder how many people reading this are, very deep down, thinking that bending the truth to pass the hot potato to the next sucker is an acceptable moral compromise. It truly feels like the easiest thing to do today. As an investor, you get to report to your LPs their investment is on paper X% more valuable. As a founder, you get to continue building your company and skim some off the top in case the house of cards falls down.

I’ve done a lot of self-reflection lately. Building software and organizations around it is my profession. I plan to continue doing it until I die. I always play the long game. I want bem to outlive me. When you play such a long game, you simply can’t grift. It’s not that I don’t enjoy the finer things in life. Money unlocks tremendous lifestyles. Flying in a PJ to Tokyo seems like a sweet deal. I just get much more pleasure out of building in earnest. If I can ever afford to fly private, the journey to get there must be honest or non-existent.

I told Upal the other day that I finally realized what my job is in life. My job is to seek out the unjaded and the honest. In looking for partners, employees, customers, and investors. It’s all the same. There’s a group of people out there who are hungry for the right things: building and creating value, from carpentry to software. There’s people out there who will not cut corners or compromise their morality and values to practice their craft. Those people will die in peace, having rendered a positive output on our insignificant planet. I want to work with those people.

Am I jaded? Perhaps a little; but I’m also decided to continue operating how I operate. I rather die than compromise.

I was looking for the right title for this post, and Upal finally gave it to me this morning. He said to me “AI grifters are making our job harder”. I couldn’t agree more. But if that’s the fight we have to fight, then so be it.