I wonder how this compares to other fields. Whenever you have a market like this, there's a giant incentive for fraud, and the more people cheat the stronger the incentive gets to the point that you lose if you don't cheat.

That being said -- for my own co. I did not fudge numbers at all. In fact I understated them sometimes. We raised less money than our competitors, which probably hurt us, but we also got very high quality investors that are not a giant pain to work with and are not idiots. Those investors in turn introduced me to others and to our current CEO (hired to replace myself, was my idea in part) and they're all high quality.

I'll take it. Working with shitty people sucks, and my guess is the people you get when you bullshit are themselves bullshitters and assholes.

I could have bullshitted like mad and raised stupid money during the COVID era fund raising bubble. I'd be left with shitty people though, and a waterfall you'd never clear, so you'd never see an exit unless you went insanely vertical.

The last part is a nuance a lot of people don't get: raise too much and/or on too high of a valuation and you will never clear the waterfall unless you get an 0.000001% super-unicorn outlier growth curve. Every $1M in valuation means you have to go into more and more rarefied air to see a good exit. At that point you're basically gambling. Gambling is a tax on people who can't do math.