I think even if you are a private company, lying is still a type of fraud. And private companies still have shareholders. Just because they are not public companies doesn't mean they can just lie to their shareholders, although perhaps it is more difficult to prove?
The only area that I can think of where you can get away with lying about an industry or asset is when it comes to crypto. You can make sky high predictions and because they aren't labeled as securities there is no victim. Because they use the word decentralized there is no one responsible.
What is lying, then? Startups very frequently pitch the "best version of themselves" to potential investors, it's (in my understanding) extremely common.
The problem with Theranos and now Nikola is that the industries they're doing it in have very specific laws that you can violate just by speaking/writing. That isn't usually the case with startups, and so when one founder stretches the truth about how far along their SaaS platform is and it's fine, Nikola rolls a car down a hill and their CEO gets indicted.
I just think there are some habits that come out of SV in particular that are fine within that bubble, almost expected really, but come out not looking very good if you try to apply that behavior/logic to a more scrutinized part of the market.
Elizabeth Holmes.
I think even if you are a private company, lying is still a type of fraud. And private companies still have shareholders. Just because they are not public companies doesn't mean they can just lie to their shareholders, although perhaps it is more difficult to prove?
The only area that I can think of where you can get away with lying about an industry or asset is when it comes to crypto. You can make sky high predictions and because they aren't labeled as securities there is no victim. Because they use the word decentralized there is no one responsible.