I spent last week in Bangalore meeting startup people. A lot of them were full of shit.
The first guy told me he had a huge exit. I asked which company, he named one, I asked when, and he got very vague all of a sudden. I checked later: no announcement anywhere, no acquirer in any press. The way he said the number out loud was bigger than the number he would have ever written on paper.
The second guy has been "figuring it out" on the same problem for 14 months. I asked him what changed in the last quarter. The deck is new. The framing is new. The code is the same and the user count is still zero. At some point "figuring it out" just becomes the name of the place you are parked.
The third guy told me he had solved something. I asked how he knows. He said he just knows. No users, no benchmark, nobody paying him to keep solving it. But sure. Solved.
Twitter calls this LARPing now. Performing the work without doing the work. The crazy part is it is not even lying most of the time. The deck really exists. The Stripe account really exists. The bio is word perfect. Some of them are even working very hard. There is just nothing underneath that a user can touch.
The line I heard the most was "I am not technical, I am just a CEO." Said cheerfully. In 2026. Bruh. Understanding your own product has never been cheaper in the history of software. If you are building software and you cannot answer one basic question about the thing you are building, you are not the CEO. You are just a person standing next to a product.
I respect a non-technical founder on a painful learning curve, reading the codebase and asking dumb questions. That person is doing the work. What I do not respect is "not technical" as a personality trait, like it is some condition you were born with. It is a choice. Most of the time it is the larp choice.
Why does the larp work so well? Because looking like you are doing the thing got insanely cheap while actually doing it did not. A landing page takes a weekend. A demo video takes an afternoon. Real users still take years. So you spend 10% of the effort, collect most of the social reward, and nobody calls you on it, because investors round up, recruiters round up, and the people who would notice are too busy working to argue.
The part I keep thinking about is that almost nobody I met was doing it on purpose. Most of them half believe their own story. The room pays them to perform, so they perform. And to be fair, they were genuinely nice to me. They introduced me around, made me talk when I would have stood in a corner quietly, went out of their way for some kid they had zero reason to spend time on. I have nothing bad to say about any of them as people.
But as an ecosystem it is a disgrace. The whole point of the thing is that real founders meet real money and good companies come out of that matching. When half the room is performing, investors cannot tell who is real anymore, and the actual founders get rounded down to the same average as the larpers.
My turn to be honest. I am not writing this from some mountain. I am 16. I have a blog with a few essays on it. By any reasonable read I am about one rough week away from becoming exactly the person I have spent 1,000 words making fun of.
The test I have been using on myself since the trip: can I describe what I actually did this month in past tense, with nouns? Not building, exploring, researching, ideating. Built WHAT. Shipped WHAT. Talked to WHO. If my answer keeps dissolving into gerunds, I am performing work and calling it work.
So the next year is simple. Less posting, more shipping. I have to lock in. The frame is stupidly small: if I get to the end of a week and I cannot point at one thing, that was a larp week. Fine once. Not fine for a year.
The people I came home wanting to be like were the quietest ones in every room. The ones actually shipping something never had time for this. They had real work to get back to.