Today I had a call with one of our bigger partners. We’ve worked together for the last two years. A new person has joined their team, coming from the corporate world, where you have resources, budgets and people to hand work to.

We were catching up after our conference two weeks ago, and it went really well. Then the conversation turned. They had heard that a key team member had recently moved on, and they asked, politely, whether I’d be able to do it again next year.

What they don’t know is that I already have. For the last couple of months my colleague was working on another priority project. Everything on the demo day side was me. I was also fundraising, building SoPhy, running our social media, writing content, updating investors and looking after our partners.

When I explained this, I could see they didn’t believe me. They assumed there must be a team somewhere.

I keep coming back to this. I could easily have said I had a team. Nobody asked for names. Everything we had set up was polished enough that nobody would ever have guessed it was one person. I told the truth anyway, and the truth was the less believable version.

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I’ve been watching The Diplomat on Netflix. It follows an American career diplomat who has spent her life in the field in Afghanistan and the Middle East. She’s suddenly posted to London as ambassador, and soon people are pushing her toward the vice presidency. The show exaggerates, but its point is simple: in politics, perception often matters more than what’s actually true.

Most of us know politics from elections. Some of us know it from corporate life, where you befriend the right people and say the right things to get promoted. In startups we like to think we’re above all that, and we don’t even call it politics.

We should, because some of the best-known stories in our world were built on perception.

Elizabeth Holmes convinced investors, a board full of famous names and the media that Theranos could run a full range of tests from a single drop of blood. It couldn’t. She went to prison.

Adam Neumann was probably one of the greatest showmen startups have ever produced. He made a property company look like a tech revolution. When the curtain came down at WeWork, the valuation went with it.

In both stories, very little was worth anyone’s attention until it came to light. Both founders understood something most of us don’t like to admit. Perception is what the public sees, and it decides what the public believes. If you’re smart, you can shape it.

From the outside, people see me as much bigger than I am. Because Rare Founders is one of the largest startup communities, they assume I know everyone. A lot of people know me. That’s not the same thing, and I simply don’t have time to talk to everyone.

The same goes for the brand. Sponsors and partners often assume a big team sits behind Rare Founders. In reality we have a team of developers building SoPhy. For the last three years almost everything else has been me, working around the clock with a lot of tools and a lot of support.

I’ve chosen to be open about this. Honesty is my power. Sharing my tools, my mistakes and everything I’ve learned is how I hope other founders get further and faster than I did.

What I’ve noticed is that every time I share the reality, I ruin the dream a little. People realise I’m not the Wizard of Oz. They see the person behind the curtain, and some of the magic that brought them to me fades.

That’s understandable, and I don’t hold it against anyone. There’s a reason people say never meet your idols. We only ever see the tip of the iceberg, and our brains fill in the rest. Social media works because most people forget they’re seeing only the side of the story someone chose to show.

So the question I keep asking myself is this. Do I let people see me as bigger than I am and grow into it? Or do I keep being transparent and keep ruining the dream until the business is big enough that I don’t need to hide behind anyone’s perception?

I’ll be honest about this part too. I don’t think every exaggeration is a lie.

I think it’s fine to round up. It’s fine to be slightly delusional, to see a bigger picture and to see yourself as bigger than you are. I’d argue it’s necessary. Entrepreneurship is notoriously hard, and the odds are stacked against you. You’re far more likely to fail than to succeed. If you see yourself as bigger than you are, your chances of actually getting there go up a little.

When we hosted our first demo day, we called it London’s largest demo day. At the time that was a slogan. We created it, then we made it true. Someone could call that a lie.

The danger comes later, and this is where the research gets uncomfortable. In 2016, Tali Sharot and Dan Ariely published a study in Nature Neuroscience called The brain adapts to dishonesty. They scanned people’s brains while giving them repeated chances to lie for personal gain. The amygdala - the part of the brain that fires when we feel we’re doing something wrong - lit up on the first lie. On the second, it fired less. By the time people reached the fifth or sixth round, it had quietly stopped protesting. And here’s the sentence that stuck with me: “the more it falls, the bigger our lies become.” The researchers watched small, self-serving lies escalate into much bigger ones, inside the same person, inside the same hour.

That’s the slippery slope in neurological form. Round-ups pile up. The feeling that said “careful, that’s a stretch” gets quieter each time, and one day you no longer remember it was a stretch at all. You start believing your own version, and the reality you’re describing doesn’t exist anymore.

There’s a lovely older study that nails this part. In 1984, Quattrone and Tversky ran what became known as the cold-water study. They told people that cold-water tolerance predicted a healthier heart. People’s endurance shifted in whichever direction the story favoured them - and when asked afterwards, most of them genuinely believed they hadn’t changed their behaviour. The lie wasn’t to anyone else. It was to themselves, and they couldn’t see it.

That’s the real danger of the fake-it-till-you-make-it philosophy. It’s not the version the audience sees. It’s the version you start seeing, long after the round-up has stopped feeling like one.

So here’s where I land, at least for now. A slogan isn’t a lie. Ambition isn’t a lie. Something becomes a lie when the claim can cause harm to an investor, a customer, a partner or a team, directly or indirectly. And honestly, the hardest part isn’t drawing that line. The hardest part is noticing you’ve crossed it, when the part of your brain that was supposed to warn you has quietly gone to sleep.

I’m conflicted about all of this, and I won’t pretend otherwise. I feel fairly in tune with both the dark and the light sides of people. I can see both sides of even the most scandalous stories. We’re all flawed, and all we can do is our best each day.

I’m not claiming to be an angel. I’ve pushed boundaries, and I’ll do whatever my business needs to succeed. Nothing will stop me.

But today I choose honesty. If people see me and value me for who I really am, I think my chances of success are higher. Anything they later see from the outside, like the bigger team, the bigger events and the bigger brand, will feel like an upgrade instead of a disappointment.

And there’s a selfish reason, too. The Sharot study scares me a little. If the brain quietly adapts to small lies, I’d rather not give mine the practice. The curtain stays open partly for the people reading this. It also stays open for me.

Our community is full of founders going through exactly what I’m going through, with the same worries and the same doubts. If seeing the real version of my journey makes even one of them feel less alone, the lost magic is worth it.

What you choose is up to you. This might change for me one day. For now, the curtain stays open.

✅ Know a founder who has been quietly holding up the illusion of a much bigger company? Forward this their way. Sometimes the truth is the least believable story in the room, and it’s still worth telling.

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(Last week's poll results)

Are employers working people? (7 votes)

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