Weekly 🔥 38: The end of ‘fake it till you make it’?
In this week’s edition, we discuss
- How aspiring leaders can guide their followers toward success
- The end of ‘fake it till you make it’? (Spoiler: It isn’t)
Let’s get to it.
The good side of leadership
Daniel Rizea, Google Engineering Director and former Director of Engineering at FitBit, knows a thing or two about leadership. Here, he shares what you should expect if you are entertaining the idea of becoming a good leader in your field, including:
- Leadership is scary— This defines leaders; regardless of whether they are scared, they take action and embrace the challenge.
- You need to stand for something — Principles will help you with harder decisions down the road. When in doubt, default to your principles.
- You need to make others succeed — As a leader, people look to you to advance the mission that you represent in order to bring more prosperity to everyone that is part of that pursuit.
- Make people believe in themselves and in something bigger — To make your team achieve incredible things, you first need to make them believe they are capable of greatness.
- Talk the talk and walk the walk — Building trust is a simple process: you need to say what you will do, do it and then show that you have done it.
👉 Go deeper into the expectations of leadership here: The Good Side of Leadership
Is this really the end of “fake it till you make it”?
With the recent coverage of Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Charlie Javice, many think the play of ‘fake it till you make it’ is dead. DC Palter, who has invested in 100 companies, disagrees and argues that fraud is an inevitable outcome of the venture funding system:
As long as founders are human (still waiting for that first pitch directly from ChatGPT to hit my inbox) and need venture capital to build their startups, a small percentage will find it impossible to resist the temptation to do whatever it takes to get funding.
Some will use the money to build a successful startup and we’ll never find out they were lying. Most will fail in the next round and become nothing but yet one more failed startup investment. And a tiny fraction will fake it again in the next round and the next, snowballing into the billion dollar frauds that the world hears about in the pages of the NY Times.
👉 Read more on the (not) end of fraud in the valley: Is This Really the End of Faking It in Silicon Valley?
Till next time,
