What's the ugly side of Silicon Valley and the tech industry culture?

Bad actors and sketchy ethics.

I have been in tech for five years now. They have been the best years of my life.

I've run into my fair share of bad actors and have literally slept on a small love seat for six months while living in San Franciso.

When times are good in any industry people looking to turn a profit flood in. Tech has and is experiencing quite a solid run of good times. $50 Billion valuations and multi-million dollar exits publicized by mass media and founders on magazines attract bad actors.

My first startup launched at TechCrunch Disrupt the same year as Zenefits launched at Disrupt. While we were speaking to everyone at our booth I met a person I will call Alex, he worked for a tech media site. Not a big name one.

He was thrilled to talk about what we were doing, and he was incredibly kind.

As most startups do our startup did not take off as we expected. Tons of lessons learned but that is for another time.

I got a call from Alex, and he told me about a new startup he was working on. He claimed to work at a big (search engine) company and owned a minority share in a sports team. He asked me to be his CMO and told me he had a deal with a large public company.

I said I was interested and he wanted to do a handshake deal.

The alarms went off.

After months of discussion, I found out he had several felony convictions for check fraud and wire fraud. It turns out he never worked at that big search company either.

Dodged a bullet.

Lesson learned quickly in my career; there are lots of people in tech that are in it for the wrong reasons.

I hear stories about founder fighting at least once a month and some cases where one or more founders is blatantly lying to potential investors.

Now, the way I plan on mitigating these risks is to only work with people that have a track record and a reputation on the line.

Reputation is the most critical part. Some may strongly disagree. An example of how this is applied: only take money from an investor where if they act badly their deal flow will suffer.

The logic behind this, an investor that does not have this type of repetitional risk has no downside in treating you, the founder, poorly.

Also, entrepreneurship has an insanely broad scope. Due to stretching interpretations and vanity, entrepreneurship can encompass affiliate marketers who don't create a product at all, influencers, multi-level marketers, and the unemployed trying to find their next gig looking to fill a gap in their resume.

The broad definition lends itself to blurred lines. Migrations from these other categories into the Silicon Valley where their values/goals may not align with the general ethos of Silicon Valley.

Specifically, marketing has a dark underbelly including affiliate marketing, buying and selling of fake traffic and daily active users, fake social accounts, spammers, and other grey/black hat activity. Often the world of legitimate Silicon Valley technology companies mixes in with this underworld.

Now, I have a healthy respect for Silicon Valley. The ethos of Bay Area exists in the mind. I have several growth marketing clients in the Bay Area and travel there often.

While there are bad actors, there are hundreds of insanely talented and genuine individuals that I am incredibly grateful for and continue to learn from.