SF Tech Insider Lists the Revenue-Inflation Playbook: $0.06 GitHub Stars, Swapped Invoices, Annualized LOIs
tengyanAI · x · 2026-10-23
An account embedded in the SF tech scene for a few months catalogued how private-market startups inflate their numbers: landing a $3M lab order and annualizing it 26x into $80M revenue, scheduling all deals to close in one month and multiplying by 12, swapping $5M LOIs with friends' companies, and buying GitHub stars at 6 cents each. The last company caught swapping invoices reported $220M in revenue and is now bankrupt. tengyanAI adds that the same positioning games run in both crypto and AI/tech, urging skepticism toward headline numbers in private markets.
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