A lot of 'numbers' startups cite are basically fake I think. Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement to TechCrunch you have no idea what they are actually calculating

But there is a clear line that gets crossed if you start actually making a database of millions of synthetic users and that's what happened with 'Frank' that sold to JP Morgan and eventually the founder was prosecuted

Not just users, but number of companies. So many startups list out all the companies using their products, who also happen to be an army of startups. I doubt they're all using each others products, just doing what they can to juice each companies perceived metrics.

>"A lot of 'numbers' startups cite are basically fake I think."

I like Ed Zitron's reporting on the AI industry (though I disagree with him on AI's potential capabilities).

I wonder how much of AI-related revenue are because of accounting fiction rather than actual cash.

Either way, I think the stock market is as disconnected as it has ever been with actually ground reality of the US economy and industry.

Internet being full of bots, I usually do the s/users/bots/ automatically in my mind.

Even some users are just bots... (At least their behavior is/are)

The oh so celebrated "Fake it till you make it"

https://youtube.com/shorts/VpyLcfDsmNg

And then she started paying for facials and stuff as part of her necessary legal fees or something.

"But your honor! I need to look presentable to the jury when they're convicting me of rampant fraud!"

In the current environment I doubt Elizabeth Holmes would go to prison. She would be saying the machine would work by early next year. After all a drop of blood is just a smaller quantity. Making the machine work is just an engineering problem.

If she were really clever she would recruit a social media army of all the weird conspiracy theorists who think "medbeds" are real.

Of course now we know that a drop of capillary blood containing interstitial fluid and a random mix of venous and arterial blood is unsuitable for most blood tests. At least you will have googled that if you're an Elon stan preparing to tell me how they're not comparable.

> Like if someone says we have this many users as a statement you have no idea what they are actually calculating

I think that's BS. User metrics are usually very explicitly defined (e.g. monthly or daily active users have always been clearly defined wherever I've worked, even if just for the sole reason that people collecting those numbers need to know what to count). User quality is definitely a gray area and estimating bot percentage has become increasingly difficult, but user metrics are not some ill-defined, fuzzy math notion.