An internal investigation by IRL’s board of directors found that 95% of the app’s reported 20 million users were “automated or from bots.”
The term unicorn refers to a privately held startup company with a value of over $1 billion. It is commonly used in the venture capital industry.
In case that helps anybody else as much as it did me.
I already knew what that term means and I still had trouble parsing what the headline was talking about.
I thought it was a mff hookup app
In this particular case, you could say that the real unicorns were the human users.
The 1 million real users: Fuck me, I guess?
Internal investigation? They didn’t know they set up 19 mln of not accounts? Or maybe someone did it for them?
The board of directors for a company is supposed to act as an internal balance. They’re the ones that do the overall governance and make sure shit isn’t going sideways. Basically, they’re the ones that are supposed to watch the watcher (CEO).
What likely happened is that the CEO and others in charge of decision making didn’t give a shit that an ever-increasing number of their users were bots because it made numbers go up. Advertisers were still paying. 20 million users looks GREAT for an IPO. Who cars if they’re fake?
The board did their job, which was to fact check everything that went on.
With 95% of users being fake this means that there really is no way to be sustainable but more importantly THIS IS FRAUD.
No users, advertisers are being deceived, users are being deceived, potentially the fucking SEC being deceived… yeah, you pull the plug as soon as you find that shit out and start pointing fingers.
Probably they knew but they tried to save face by putting up a show.
With no one (and I mean me), and apparently the majority of Gen Z not knowing about it, no wonder they resorted to bots.
But after raising its SoftBank-led $170 million Series C round at a $1.17 billion valuation, the company’s internal troubles became more obvious.
I feel like every time I read one of these stories, there is a note about a huge investment from SoftBank.
Masayoshi Son (founder of Softbank and the legendary Vision Found) was lucky with Alibaba once. His strategy is literally (confirmed by many founders) that if you throw enough money in there (usually in 150mn+), it’ll scale and be a unicorn.
Well, what do you think happens if you are a unicorn founder raising maybe 500k-2mn and some oversees fund comes along and gives you 170mn with the only goal of scaling globally.
Launch events here, new market there, private jets, … Softbank and Son is also known for his lax oversight in his investments and throwing more money at it when they become bankrupt.
Another famous example is WeWork (10bn+ investment by Softbank).
And every story is just exceptionally dumb and easily avoidable.
Source: Experience
Yep, Softbank seems to have a gift for investing in stuff that fails. Kind of sad to see, I heard that it and Masayoshi Son were decent at business at first.
Dead by bots?
