I spent last week in Bangalore. Met a lot of people. Most of them were full of it.
One guy told me he had a huge exit. I asked which company. He named one. I asked when. He got vague. There was no announcement online. No acquirer in the press. The way he said the number was bigger than the number he would have written on paper.
Another guy had been "figuring it out" on the same problem for fourteen months. I asked what had changed in the last quarter. New deck. New framing. Same code. Same zero users. Figuring it out was the name of the place he had been parked.
A third told me he had solved something. I asked how he knew. He said he just knew. No users, no benchmark, no one had paid him to keep solving it. The word "solved" was doing a lot of work for a word that means what it means.
This is what people online are now calling LARPing. Performing the work without doing the work. Not lying exactly. The deck exists. The Stripe account exists. The Twitter bio is word perfect. What is missing is the thing underneath.
The line I heard the most was some version of "I am not technical, I am just a CEO." Said cheerfully. Almost as a brand.
I do not buy it. Not in 2026. If you are building software and you cannot answer a basic question about the thing you are building, you are not the CEO. You are the person standing next to it. There is a version of non-technical founder I respect, the one who is on a steep, painful learning curve, reading the codebase, asking dumb questions, filing real bugs. That person earns the title. The version I do not respect is the one who treats "not technical" as a permanent identity. A reason they will never have to know.
The tools to understand your own product have never been cheaper. Choosing not to use them is a choice. Most of the time, it is the larp choice.
The thing that made it work, I think, is that the cost of looking like you are doing the thing has collapsed and the cost of doing it has not. Landing page in a weekend. Demo video in an afternoon. Stealth name for free. Real users, real revenue, real research, those still take years.
So a kind of arbitrage opens up. Spend ten percent of the effort, capture most of the social reward. Investors round up. Recruiters round up. The few people who would notice are usually too busy doing the actual work to argue with you.
Almost nobody I met was doing it on purpose. That is the part I keep thinking about. The water everyone is swimming in rewards it. Most of them half believe their own version. Pure cynics are rare. Most are just doing what the room is paying them to do.
I want to be clear about one thing. The people I met were not bad people. They were warm. They introduced me to others. They made me talk when I would have stayed quiet. They genuinely went out of their way for a kid they did not have to spend any time on. As individuals, I have nothing bad to say about them.
But if I take myself out of it and look at the room honestly, I think this kind of larping is a disgrace to the startup ecosystem. It pollutes the thing it pretends to be part of. The whole point of an ecosystem is that real founders meet real money and the matching is honest enough that good companies get built. When half the room is performing, the signal gets buried in noise. Investors stop being able to tell the difference. Real founders get rounded down to the same average as the larpers. The bar for everyone drops.
I have to be honest about myself here too. I am 16. I have a blog with a few essays. I write about ideas. By any reasonable read, I am also one rough week away from becoming exactly the kind of person I have been writing about for a thousand words.
The test I keep coming back to after the trip is this. Can I describe what I actually did this month in past tense, with nouns, no "ing" words? Not building, exploring, researching, ideating. Built what. Shipped what. Wrote what. Talked to whom. If the answer keeps dissolving into gerunds, I am performing the work and calling it work.
The honest version of what I want from the next year is simple. Less posting, more shipping. Less talking about what I am going to build, more things I have already built. I have to lock in. The frame is small enough that I can apply it to myself today. If at the end of the week I cannot point to a thing, I had a larp week. That is fine once. It is not fine for a year.
The people I came home wanting to be like were almost all the quietest ones in the room. The ones actually shipping something rarely had time for the performance. They had real work to get back to.