On Lying

2026.02.08

CXXXVIII

[Hardline; An Honest Founder; Elastic Truth; Sliding Down the Slope; Crossing the Chasm; I Lie, Too]

Thesis: The first step to a more honest society is admitting how much lying actually goes on.

[Hardline]

I've lied and I'm ashamed of it. If you've lied, which you very likely have, you should be ashamed of it, too.

This post might make you uncomfortable. You might not view some of what I’m going to call a lie as a lie.

My hardline stance really only works if I either lie and say I've never lied or if I admit I've lied, too.

So, yes: I have lied.

I hate to admit it, but I must - if I can’t even be honest enough to admit that, how dare I write about honesty?

With that out of the way, before we begin, here is the dictionary definition of a lie:

An intentionally false statement

The blurriest part is the intention.

[An Honest Founder]

The best place to start is with a collection of actual lies I've personally heard from actual founders. I don't believe in doxxing, so I've kept the details as scant as possible to keep them anonymous.

Two leading notes:

1. I don't actually know if lying is more common among founders than it is among, say, consultants, bankers, fishers, or minimum wage workers, and I'm not convinced that it actually is. That being said, founders are who I'm most familiar with. And, in a lot of cases, the lies founders tell are maybe more interesting because they have larger reaching negative impacts than the lie a McDonalds worker tells to get off work.

2. If you've never done selling, I need to emphasize something: A deal is not closed until the person actually signs the contract or pays. Buyers say yes quite often without actually buying.

Out with the lies:

• First Paying Customer: Someone I worked with on a small side project told me, "I got our first paying customer." My heart jumped: I was so happy, we hadn't gotten a paying customer after months of effort. To make sure, I said, "Did he pay yet? Or sign something?" Then: "No, not yet." To which I responded, saying he's not paying til he's paying. Funnily enough, the person never paid.

• First Paying Customer Part II: A startup whose sporadic updates I got sent a note saying, "we closed our first deal & got revenue.” Then, in the next update, when they went out of business, they mentioned that the deal never actually closed.

• Two Enterprise Clients: A founder I spoke to who raised a lot of money from a Tier 1 fund told me "Our customers are x & y," both big companies. 30 minutes later, I found out y hadn't signed anything yet and they were still negotiating. By definition, that is not a customer.

• The $250K Deal: Another founder I met who went through the most reputable incubator (yes, that one) told me he closed a deal for $250K ARR. In reality, he had a much smaller paid pilot with them for maybe $10K ARR and was 'working' on the $250K deal. When I checked in 5 months later, still hadn't closed.

• The 10x Founder: A founder told me the deals he used to close in a specific role were $1K, then three months later told me they were $10K for that same role. He was lying at least once...

• ACV x A Few Customers = $0: A founder once told me his "Average Contract Value" (ACV), or the blended average of what he charges his customers is $24K/yr. He also talked about having "customers". Turns out he had 0 customers, which means his ACV was actually just his asking price, and the 'customers' he referenced were fake.

Note that a lot of these instances deal with the blurring of definitions, usually "customers." Maybe I'm old school, but a customer is someone who is paying you something. "Closed a deal" means someone signed a contract or paid you something. Your deals can't be worth $1K and $10K at the same time.

[Elastic Truth]

The catch is, I doubt any of the people above (except maybe one) thought to themselves "I'm going to lie to Noah, now." Very likely, from their view, they were, at worst, "stretching the truth."

Unfortunately, unlike Sia's heart, the truth is not elastic.

And even more unfortunately, it's super easy to chart a path from a couple things that really aren't lying to things that literally are just lying.

Here's one very real progression from not lying to lying:

• Omitting Correction: You hear inaccurate information about you, but you let it be, often because the error is advantageous. Example: Seeing a screenshot of a client telling other people BirdDog had at least 12x the revenue we did, and doing nothing to correct it. I don’t believe this is lying by omission, because you’re not the one actively laying down facts for them to pick up.

• Cherry Picking: Intentionally construing information in a way that increases the probability of other people making errors. Example: Saying how much you charge new customers and saying how many customers you have in the same conversation, even though you just doubled your price so your ACV is 2x lower than what you charge now. Might be lying by omission, for the sake of argument not lying.*

• Truth Stretching: Making a false claim supported by some (often subtly) misconstrued facts. Example: Describing your ACV as the current price you're charging in the same conversation as you said how many customers you have. Note how subtle the difference between this and the above is...and I think that difference is enough to make this squarely a lie!

• The Outright Lie: Making something up with no attempt at justification using facts. This is actually so hard to come up with an example of because there is almost always a justification using facts. Example: My startup is a unicorn (trust me, bro).

Now, where I think a lot of people will disagree with me is that Truth Stretching is literally just lying. If this makes you uncomfortable, it should--for that reason, it's also the single most important point in this blog.

If we confined lying to just The Outright Lie, basically no one would ever lie! After all, there is nearly always a justification of some sort.

The reason I'm not just naming Truth Stretching as "Lying", which it is, is really to make sure you're paying attention--even though we might not think of ourselves as liars, we all know how easy it is to stretch the truth...

_{*While you can argue that Cherry Picking is "lying by omission,” to reach the vast majority of readers with the rest of my argument, I'm going to presuppose that Cherry Picking is NOT lying. If you think it is lying, then I think you'd actually agree with my conclusion MORE.}

[Sliding Down the Slope]

The internal monologue that goes with Omitting Correction & Cherry Picking is quite close to the dialogue that goes with Truth Stretching.

I Omit Correction a ton. You know, only one person to my knowledge has correctly guessed BirdDog's revenue, and it was only after she lived with me for 3 months. When nearly everyone else overshoots*, you start thinking things like:

• "Most people have no idea what's going on"

• “People are very inaccurate estimators”

• "People will think what they want, anyways."

These thoughts, although justified, make it a lot easier to jump to Cherry Picking, and I can see how Cherry Picking is very close to Truth Stretching. This is especially true when you benefit from people being wrong: of course it is easier to acquire new customers if our prospects think we are making more money than we are!

Reiterating the example above, the jump from Omitting Correction to Cherry Picking is as simple as mentioning total customer count in the same conversation as monthly price... if you just 2x'd price a month ago, it's very rationale for a customer to over estimate what you’re making by roughly 2x.

Here, each fact is entirely honest and true. But, together, it’s easy for the other person to draw some inaccurate conclusions on one or two bad assumptions (price == ACV).

And the fact that they made a bad assumption is lot easier pill to swallow when you've already started thinking "People will think what they want, anyways."

_{*Barring our 5th customer, who thought he was our first...}

[Crossing the Chasm]

From Cherry Picking, you’re just a hop skip and a jump from Truth Stretching, which is lying.

Go back to that same conversation—customer count and price mentioned in the same call. All it takes to go to Truth Stretching is if you say your ACV is $X instead of saying your price is $X, even though your ACV is lower.

The hard pill to swallow is that if the sales conversation was an audited financial statement without additional context, that would be fraud. By definition, ACV*Customer Count = Revenue.

If you ACV*Customer Count is less than revenue, that’s not ACV!

But, it's not an audited financial statement. It's a sales call. And it’s really really really easy to justify saying ACV here…

• You didn't specify if it was ACV across your customer base or if there was an invisible asterisk that is ACV of the customers in the last week

• It could be "ACV" before discounting

• It could be aspirational or target ACV

Again, in an audited financial statement, it would be lying if these asterisk were not mentioned. But it’s not an audited financial statement, it’s a sales conversation! I’m being such a stickler about this because the difference is so subtle to the person saying it that it’s really easy to miss altogether and not even consider a lie.

And, in most cases, it’s “probably fine.” But at the same time, saying this puts you one step closer to the person who says they have customers & closed deal when they didn’t.

If you can “stretch” the definition of ACV, how much easier is it to stretch the definition of “customer?” Remember, you really believe (and want to believe) that they will sign the contract, and a few people at the company told you they will!

The pragmatic counter argument in favor of truth is that it’s basically as easy to Cherry Pick as it is to Stretch the Truth… and one puts you further from the kind of person who lies about customer than the other does.

And, the person who lies about customers is closer to the person who gets arrested by the FBI than the person who doesn’t lie at all…

I’m here every week giving my honest take on the founder’s journey & about how we really do live in a society - if you enjoyed, please subscribe!

[I Lie, Too]

I'd be lying if I said I never lied.

Oh, how I wish it were the truth.

The reality is, I have stretched the truth. Which, by my own definition... means I have lied.

I'm not proud of it. And I don't think you should be either when you do it.

I'm not so naive and utopian to think everyone will read this post and stop lying.

Rather, the intention here is to make you stop, think, and be more honest with yourself about how honest you actually are.

This post was well worth writing if at least one person who reads it stops and thinks twice the next time they're about to "stretch the truth."

Live Deeply,