> We then had a few more meetings, and the company wanted to come visit our offices so they could make sure we were a 'real' company. At that time, we were only 5 guys. So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were. It worked, and we got the contract."

That strategy was tried with Barry Minkow, with "ZZZZ Best", the fake building maintenance company fraud.[1] He did prison time for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Minkow

"Its not fraud when we do it"

> While still in high school, Minkow founded ZZZZ Best (pronounced "Zee Best"), which appeared to be an immensely successful carpet-cleaning and restoration company. However, it was actually a front to attract investment for a massive Ponzi scheme.

Apples and oranges.

It's not fraud if Sam's company delivered. Did they?

I'm not sure if that's true. If they obtained a financial advantage (e.g. a contract) via deception, then that could well be fraud. I don't think it makes much difference if they eventually delivered on the contract or not.

It'd probably come down to the legal definition of "deception." It's not Sam's fault if the customer saw a lot of people poring over screens and walking around with papers and assumed they were employees. But if he explicitly introduced them as employees, yeah, that'd be over the line.

Similar to the debate over whether it was ethical of Reddit to seed themselves with sock puppets.

It totally is his fault if those people were directed by him to pretend to be employees of the company – which he seems to admit.

"I contracted some people specifically to pretend to be employees so that someone else would be deceived into thinking they were employees. But somehow it's still not my fault that this person was deceived."

Seems like a weak defense.

Well, they were employees, after all. Temporary ones. Very temporary ones.

Yeah, this kind of pedantry isn't going to work in a legal setting. Obviously the intent was to deceive the person into thinking that the company had a large number of regular employees.

I still don't see where the bright line of the law was crossed here. Is it really so surprising when people who are willing to do things like this get ahead of people who aren't?

Are you really so certain that we'd be better off otherwise?

Is it surprising that people sometimes lie and cheat? No, of course not.

Is it surprising that people who lie and cheat sometimes obtain an advantage by doing so? Again, no.

But yes, I do think we would be better off without people lying and cheating.

IANAL and I do not claim that the law was necessarily broken in this instance, but the intent was clearly to deceive a business partner in order to obtain a financial advantage. I mean just look at SA's own words here:

> So we hired a bunch of our college friends to 'work' for us for the day so we could look larger than we actually were

The deceptive intent is explicit in his own description of events. It's honestly quite silly that you are looking for some semantic get-out clause here when SA's own statement is so explicit.

There was another AI start-up, one backed / supported by various conservative politians from Germany and Austria thatvdid the same thing, hiring people to look busy when customers (bad) and investors (a lot worse) showed up at the offices: Augustus Intelligence.

At best, this is fake it till you make it. At worst, it is fraud. The tiny, tiny differce is whether that next investor shows up or not. Just ask FTX.

I do not respect people resorting to that kind of thing.

I have never seen him speak, but odd that an example of him faking it is supposed to make him seem genuine?