While it is unusual for the med tech industry, isnt it what startups do all the time ? it is not that surprising to me .
It is not pure SaaS companies either, in the EV/self-driving space we have outright frauds like Nikola rolled a truck downhill to make the video and were public at $8 Billion. Others like Rivian/ tuSimple are definitely are not going to meet the projections in sales and plans they have published. Tesla constantly says a lot of things they never delivery or deliver much later than promised.
The equivalent in SaaS would be something like saying you had a single non-distributed non-sharded table RDBMS technology that could perform equivalent at 10 billion records on full ACID as well as Postgres could on 100K records. You have no such thing. No one knows how to make such a thing. It would require a breakthrough in software at Turing award level. You should get slapped with charges if you take investor money claiming such a thing.
The magnitude of the lie isn't hugely relevant, a lie is a lie.
Sales people lie all the time and make claims about features that don't exist, often because the company has other priorities not because they are 'impossible' - but again, that doesn't really matter either.
It's a tactic used by salespeople to get the company to rally around a feature or set of features.
It's very common.
You have to ask yourself how that is not prosecuted as being illegal.
I think most of the start up proposals are more “here is what we do, where we’re going to go and how”.
They may have nothing / not much yet… but you know that investing and generally their products are very “doable”. Online focused cleaning service for example… it’s a crud app, maybe they don’t get users and fail, but the service was doable.
Theranos claimed to already do the magic thing with blood (many tests with very little blood) that they simply could not do and never did.
Big difference is Theranos lied about what the could do. Rando start up who is honest that they don’t yet do the thing, no big deal.
You can take money and have nothing… fail, but if you’re honest it’s not fraud.
At least Tesla actually delivered shit though and had actual real working electric cars. I don't think any investors are regretting investing in Tesla based on Elon's promises...
Is this pedantic correction as in you would not comment had I said "most" of the time or do you mean to imply it is rare/uncommon/ unusual for startups to do so ?
Startups do NOT regularly re-package other companies' deliverables as their own, and especially not to cover for the fact that they've promised the impossible.
It is not pure SaaS companies either, in the EV/self-driving space we have outright frauds like Nikola rolled a truck downhill to make the video and were public at $8 Billion. Others like Rivian/ tuSimple are definitely are not going to meet the projections in sales and plans they have published. Tesla constantly says a lot of things they never delivery or deliver much later than promised.