Marc Andreessen explains how to identify fake founders

March 06, 2025

“There are definitely people that come in [to pitch us] and present themselves to be something they’re not. They’ve read all the books. They will have listened to this interview. They study everything and they construct a facade…. And the amount of this is exactly correlated with the NASDAQ.”

As Marc explains, when stock prices are high and tech is hot, there are a lot people who decide being a tech founder is a fast track to high status:

“They’re fundamentally oriented for social status — they’re trying to get the social status without the substance. And there are always other places to go to get social status. So after 2000, the joke was B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting — which is, the people who showed up to be in tech were like, yeah, screw it. This is over. I’m going to go back to Goldman Sachs or McKinsey where I can be high status. So you get this flushing kind of effect that happens in a downturn. But in a big upswing, you get a lot of people showing up with, let’s say, public persona without the substance to back it up.”

How does Marc identify these people? He uses the same technique that homicide detectives use to find out if you’re innocent — keep asking increasingly detailed questions:

“You ask increasingly detailed questions and people have trouble making things up and things just fuzz into obvious BS, and fake founders basically have the same problem. They’re able to relay a conceptual theory of what they’re doing… But as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back can do it. What you find is they’ve spent 5 or 10 or 20 years obsessing over the details of whatever it is they’re about to do. And they’re so deep in the details and they know so much more about it than you ever will.”