Host: Welcome to the second episode of our fictional show! Today, we have a very special guest, Sam. Sam, could you introduce yourself to the audience?
Sam: Hi, I’m Sam Conman, founder and CEO of conman.ai. I am a serial killer-entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, and a thought leader on Twitter. Before conman.ai, I scaled three startups to…
Host: Okay, I am reading your homepage. It says you’re a, quote, “next-generation, AI-native value disintermediation platform revolutionizing the liquidity lifecycle of fiat micro-assets”. I’m not familiar with those terms. Can you explain what your company actually does?
Sam: Sure, at conman.ai, we deliver hyper-optimized, dollar-equivalent unit transactions at unprecedented sub-parity…
Host: Hold on. Sorry, you’re losing me here. *chuckles* For the sake of the audience, can you explain it like I’m five?
Sam: Oh. Okay. We sell one dollar at the price of 90 cents.
Host: Wow, that's… an interesting business model. What does that have to do with AI?
Sam: Well, our homepage was vibe-coded, so I’d say a lot. But the more important thing is, when we added the “.ai” to our company name, our stock price went up 80% in a quarter.
Host: How does your company make money then?
Sam: Oh, we are not in the business of profit. We’re in the business of growth. We raise funding from VCs with our hockey-stick revenue projections.
Host: Why would VCs invest in you when your business model is not profitable?
Sam: They can see the risks. But they can also see the opportunity. When we IPO’d, they got back their money and then some.
Host: How is it possible for an unprofitable company to IPO… never mind. What’s next after that?
Sam: After that? You hype up the stock by selling a story. You tell people about the total addressable market and the monthly active users. Wall Street loves these stories, and they will push our stock price to new highs.
Host: You mean investors don’t care if the company is actually making money?
Sam: Yeah, and after some time, our stock gets picked up by ETFs and retirement funds. At that point, everyone is involved. It’s in your 401k whether you like it or not.
Host: Wow, that’s very… eye-opening. But what happens when your bull, I mean stories, no longer work? What if the investors lose confidence?
Sam: Then we announce a mass layoff and say we’re streamlining our workforce with AI. Learned it from CEOConf last month.
Host: … remind me to check my retirement fund after this.