Start-up Culture’s Empty Promise: From Fake Problems to Fake Wisdom

The contemporary start-up scene – particularly the wave often branded as “Gen Z entrepreneurship” – reveals a paradoxical blend of inflated ambition and profound emptiness. Anyone who spends time examining pitch decks, LinkedIn posts, or investor talks quickly recognizes the pattern: rarely is the focus on solving a genuine problem. Instead, what dominates is a business-model formalism that reduces “entrepreneurship” to a purely performative gesture.

1. From Solving Problems to Manufacturing Businesses

Classical economics assumes that markets emerge from real needs. Yet in today’s start-up ecosystem, “problems” are less discovered than invented – often as thin pretexts for monetization.

What emerges is an economy of simulation: apps, platforms, and services conceived not from necessity, but from the calculation of whether a plausible narrative can be sold to investors. The result is a proliferation of solutions in search of a problem – products no one asked for, wrapped in the rhetoric of “disruption.”

2. Investors: Between Greed and Intellectual Laziness

Capital follows this logic. Rather than investing in substance, many investors are content with projections of potential exits. Money flows into slide decks, not solutions.

“Fake it till you make it” has shifted from cautionary phrase to operating principle. Success and failure become indistinguishable, both narrated through the same rhetorical choreography: “We learned so much” or “We are on our way to becoming market leaders.”

But the deeper question remains: are investors learning anything? Or has the game become so self-referential that “learning” is no longer part of the equation?

3. Sales, Marketing, Social Media and the Aesthetics of Surface

Within this machinery, sales and marketing are not secondary but essential: they sustain the fiction. Social media amplifies it further. The endless stream of polished posts, CEO reflections, and staged “behind the scenes” photos creates an illusion of vitality where little substance exists.

Reach has become more valuable than impact. Visibility replaces meaning. Start-ups no longer measure themselves by the problems they solve but by the number of impressions, likes, or followers they accumulate. In this environment, marketing inflates trivialities into supposed “insights,” while social platforms reward repetition, slogans, and posturing.

The result is a marketplace of sameness. One start-up announcement looks like the next, every “thought leadership” post echoes the last. What spreads is not innovation but imitation, a chain reaction of copycats who confuse visibility with value.

4. The Arrogance of Half-Knowledge and the Cult of Influence

The most revealing trait of this culture is the shift from naïveté to arrogance. Discovering a fundamental concept – say, the importance of cash flow – is presented as a revolutionary breakthrough.

Much of this is reinforced by the rise of business influencers and superficial business-school teachings. Founders mimic the tone, language, and frameworks of these figures, mistaking style for strategy. They recycle borrowed wisdom, convinced it makes them visionaries, while in reality they become copies of copies.

The rhetoric of “we reinvented business” is not only exhausting but telling: it exposes a generation unable to distinguish between novelty and banality. Entrepreneurship is being reframed as a posture, where posing, posting, and parroting substitutes for actual thinking.

5. A Counterpoint: Substance over Simulation

The alternative lies not in new buzzwords but in a return to fundamentals:

• Identify real problems.
• Talk less, build more.
• Measure success not by reach but by relevance.
• Create products that endure, not just pitch decks and viral posts that seduce.

A start-up truly rooted in problem-solving does not require weekly “CEO learnings” on LinkedIn. Its value is not proven by followers or engagement metrics but by the reality of its contribution.

6. Conclusion: Shut Up and Make

The current start-up culture thrives on appearance rather than reality. It is a cycle of investor greed, founder naïveté, influencer mimicry, and marketing facades. Social media accelerates this, rewarding reach over meaning, repetition over originality, and surface over depth.

Yet within this spectacle lies a radical appeal: be quiet, and act.

Substance over simulation. Relevance over reach.
The future will not be built by posing, copying, and chasing impressions, but by doing.