Two weeks ago, Charlie Javice, founder of the student-aid startup Frank, was sentenced to 85 months in federal prison for defrauding JPMorgan in its $175M acquisition of her company. Prosecutors showed she fabricated millions of users to juice her results.

If you’re getting Theranos flashbacks, I get it. But if you’re drawing a straight line from these crimes to a conclusion that startups are just lies wrapped in too much VC money—or if you just broadly disdain the hype and pitching that surrounds startups—then I want to provide some ideas and guidance for how to cleanly distinguish between good and bad, and how to confidently present your version of the future without feeling like you’re channeling Adam Neumann.

It's important to remember that pitches are about things that haven’t happened yet. If everything you say were already happening, it wouldn’t be a pitch—it would be a report. That sets up the fundamental distinction that separates almost all startup hope from startup crime: “Lying” about the future is vision. Lying about the present or past is fraud.

“We expect $5M ARR by Q1 2026” looks good in a business suit. “We have $5M ARR today” (assuming it’s not true) matches an orange jumpsuit.

Academic Communication vs Business Communication

That temporal distinction is the easy step. Here’s what’s harder, particularly for founders coming from academia: Becoming comfortable with projecting confidence and certainty when your entire training has been to avoid that.

Academic communication thrives on highlighting uncertainties, unknowns, and a reluctance to draw confident conclusions unless the data is overwhelming. It’s fundamental to the scientific method, and anything else smacks of used-car salesmanship.

In business, on the other hand, there’s a premium on leadership, conjured confidence, and a future you have yet to create.

Science counts on growing the corpus of established knowledge to push us forward. Business reaches for an exciting future and pulls us there. Scientists anchor to facts to keep them honest. For founders, investor skepticism is what keeps them honest—you can only flex as far as you can convince.

For academic founders, the key thing to internalize is that neither communications style is right or wrong. It’s like tuxedoes and bathing suits. Both are perfectly acceptable forms of clothing as long as you wear them for the appropriate occasion. Showing up to an investor pitch with a dense PowerPoint filled with tentative conclusions is like showing up to your wedding in a Speedo.

Simplification vs Oversimplification

Science is nuance. When you’re translating it to a business context, the skill to learn is the difference between distilling it down and dumbing it down.

I recently worked on a pitch about a startup working on eradicating HIV. The science of their solution is complex; the metaphoric simplicity we landed on is that the founders figured out a way to remove the invisibility cloak from the virus so the human immune system can destroy it. That’s distilled, not dumb—presenting the story through that metaphoric lens makes the startup’s tech intuitively clear to a broad audience without compromising the science behind it.

If you’re compressing jargon and complexity into meaning, you’re simplifying. If you’re glossing over key facts, you’re probably oversimplifying. As Einstein supposedly said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

Vision vs. Hallucination

Vision without execution is hallucination. So in addition to describing an exciting future, you need to present a plan for getting there. Every investor understands that if you haven’t done clinical trials or received FDA clearance, there’s still substantial risk the whole thing will fail.

What that means is there is a premium on outlining the steps you need to take to get there. Where will you insert yourself into the industry value chain? Will you manufacture your product or license it out? What other solutions being tried to solve the problem you’re addressing, and why will your approach win? No one is asking to certainty, and no one wants you to hide risks or unknowns; everyone is clamoring for plausibility. Give it to them.

Duct Taping the Future

Elon Musk has been promising imminent and widespread adoption of self-driving technology since 2014. Why is that not illegal? Because there’s nothing wrong with changing the timeline of your prediction. There’s everything wrong with claiming you’ve already done something.

Theranos didn’t go down for dreaming; it went down for describing non-existent capabilities as real. Javice didn’t get seven years for ambition; she got it for inventing users and data.

When investors put in their money, they’re buying a piece of a billion-dollar idea for pennies on the dollar. The degree of the discount is a reflection on your ability to paint the future. Don’t let academic communication hold your valuation back.

And, of course, don’t be Charlie.