Fake it ‘til you make it: Hazards of a cultural norm in entrepreneurship

Fake it ‘til you make it—that is, deceptively claiming a new endeavor exhibits characteristics of successful entrepreneurial ventures to gain support from others—has become an accepted practice in entrepreneurship. One overlooked hazard of this strategy is that entrepreneurs’ efforts to fake it can become a slippery slope in which the deception escalates to a point where stakeholders accuse entrepreneurs of committing fraud. We delineate that the responsible use of faking it in entrepreneurial endeavors rests on entrepreneurs’ full appreciation of the determinants that make turning fiction into fact less and not more difficult. Leveraging prior research to offer new insights, we outline these determinates as controllable vs. uncontrollable elements, sole vs. contingent entrepreneurial action, and limited vs. extensive stakeholder interactions. We also look at faking it examples Lordstown Motors and uBiome, two startups whose founders engaged in and escalated faking it to the point where stakeholders accused them of fraud.