Most of your past transgressions will get you a free pass. Lieing about them won't.

IMO there is nothing wrong with this lie

You've just self-identified yourself as a person to avoid doing business with.

It depends. Transgressions that reflect immature judgment and make for funny stories you can tell, especially if they're more than a few years old. Failures that reflect on you as a person of low status you cannot. If you have a rocky past, you want to paint your past self as someone who hadn't settled down yet and decided what he wanted from life, not as a hapless loser who got rolled over by others.

In order to be taken seriously, you have to create a fiction of self that is congruent with the standing conception of a high-status person. This is not what anyone likes to hear; it's naked, bitter realism.

I am not such an asshole as I might sound in this thread. I hate deceiving people, and so I generally don't. It's not that I would consider it wrong-- some people can't be trusted with the truth, and it's necessary to lie to them. I just don't like mixing with people in the "can't be trusted with the truth" category at all and so I will avoid them even if they could benefit me... but I also realize that people who are more materially ambitious than I am will have to do so.

This is disgusting. You need to learn to respect yourself; this in turn will help you respect others.

I respect myself. However, I'm aware of human nature as it actually is. Most people don't even like the truth. They despise the reality around them and need to be fed a fiction in order to function. The facts-- that good people often fail for varying reasons, that life is inherently unfair and often dark-- are so disquieting to them that they shut them out. This is why people tend to personalize past success and failure beyond what is reasonable; they want to believe they live in a just world.

Imagine interviewing a candidate who says this: "I'm interested in working for you because you have great people and I want to learn from them. As long as you have interesting assignments for me to do, and my superiors make my advancement and education a top priority, I'll do an excellent job of them. If I feel that this is not the case, or become isolated, I'll jump ship on a dime. Also, if I'm ever passed over for a plum assignment that is within my capability, I'll launch my resumes that afternoon.

This is the truth for any ambitious person, but you'd be absolutely nuts to say that sort of thing on an interview. You might be thrown out the door immediately for that kind of renegade honesty. You're expected to maintain a fiction of self that is otherwise.

I said almost exactly that when interviewing for my first job out of college. They hired me anyway. They appreciated my honesty and believed they had enough great people and interesting assignments to keep me engaged.

(As it turned out, they were wrong, and I left about two years later. But I did two products for them in the meantime, and learned a bunch for myself, so it wasn't exactly a loss for either party.)

Actually, a bunch of people at my current employer - my boss, my tech leads - know that if there comes a time where I believe I can accomplish more within a startup than in my job, I'll jump ship in a heartbeat and found another company. That simply keeps the bar high for ensuring that I can accomplish significant things within my job.

"If I feel that this is not the case, or become isolated, I'll jump ship on a dime. Also, if I'm ever passed over for a plum assignment that is within my capability, I'll launch my resumes that afternoon."

is not that you will leave if your needs aren't being met; that is expected in any relationship. The reason why that raises a red flag is that it implies that you won't take action to educate yourself, and to create new interesting projects for the company if they aren't fed to you, to go and make contact with other team members if you feel isolated.

Seriously, I don't want to hire someone who wants to be a passive vessel. I ain't your daddy. I want people who will go out and get cool shit done. Sure, I'm okay hiring someone who has potential but not experience, and helping them get that experience, but I want them to be an /active participant/ in the exercise, not some passive vessel.

Also, some people prefer to not deal with 'business stuff' at all.

Obviously there is a continuum between 'only does exactly what he is told' and 'runs the business without me' and most people are somewhere between that. I'm just saying; people who quickly return to idle after a task is done rather than seeking out more work are significantly less useful.

Also, people who can't tell me when they are ready for a new challenge (or that they are being shoved into water that is too deep) are significantly less useful than those who can.

I disagree completely. The universe is benevolent by default because it has absolutely no supernatural character, and no inherent conciousness to make it anything else. Without this, science would not be possible (according to my biochemistry professor, who said "Nature does not play tricks.") I go one step further say that this applies to morality; that life is what you make of it in the vast preponderance of cases.

The universe is benevolent by default because it has absolutely no supernatural character,

Wouldn't this make it utterly neutral?

What I meant to say, and didn't articulate very well, is that human societies have egregious failures that often undermine progress. Most people are good, but most of the people who get power and status (at least in the short-term, first-order senses of these words) are the despicable, evil ones.

However, if you are bootstrapping, this is definitely not correct. Your customers don't care that you don't have a 'high status' background or how 'alpha' you are.

Don't lie! Morality is not just some arbitrary thing that you can make up as you go along if you want to achieve anything. The proper standard of morality for you and me and everyone else is not what will help or hurt the other party, it's what will help or hurt you and your long-term rational self-interest. Lying will necessarily prevent you from succeeding; see chapter 4 of Tara Smith's book, "Ayn Rand's Normative Ethics", which is on honesty.

That's the danger: getting scumbagged behind your back.

How is that "fraud"? Claiming you have customers you do not is fraud. Promising to deliver a project that you cannot or will not is a fraud. Claiming that other VCs are interested in you is not fraud; it's just the kind of thing you have to do if you weren't born into connections.

The only people who have a problem with that are silver-spoon assholes who want to keep doors shut to people who didn't hang out with them in high school.

Just how many people does Steve Jobs hire because he knew them from school? Zero, because his way of doing business is to hire the best. To the extent that people are like Jobs in this regard, their businesses are successful. People that hire friends, regardless of their ability will never rise to great heights in business (or any endeavor).

Do you want to work for someone mediocre, or someone great? Even if you were successful in your lie, lying would only get you the mediocre job. A great employer (someone of high caliber) would figure it out, or would be principled enough to fire you when they figured it out.

I never said this. Obviously, it is not true.

I said that the people who'd consider it some kind of moral transgression, rather than a strategic move, to tell a VC that you have other VC interest are the kinds of people who want to keep "the doors" closed to the hoipolloi, because their worst nightmare is outsiders getting into their club, so they have to throw into place a moral "consensus" that judges such moves to be wrong.

In other words, the investor should have known better than to listen to you. I agree on that part.

A truthful man is the hard to compromise. A man who is not greedy is the hardest to scam.