[Research Seminar] Criminal Deception In Silicon Valley
October 16th, 2025
2:30pm – 4pm in Village Building (B252) & on Zoom
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Speaker: Nevena RADOYNOVSKA – Em Lyon, France
(Co-Authored with Tim WEISS)
abstract
Scholars are increasingly interested in studying how entrepreneurs employ deception. Research in cultural entrepreneurship specifically looks at the cultural work involved in deceiving audiences through the dramatization of entrepreneurial stories. Yet, we argue that this rather narrow focus, as well as the analysis of antecedents and consequences of entrepreneurial fraud among scholars of organizational wrongdoing, fall short in capturing how entrepreneurs carry out criminal deception—employing deception to defraud audiences. Specifically, we lack an understanding of the cultural and organizing work involved in criminal deception. To advance a theory of criminal deception at the culture-organizing interface, we inductively analyze court data of Silicon Valley ventures and their entrepreneurs prosecuted for fraud between 2000-2023. Our findings reveal a process of façading through which entrepreneurs construct, perform, and protect illusory appearances—façades that project high-growth venture performance to audiences while masking ventures’ actual, subpar performance. We identify three forms of façading—surface, reinforced, and deep façading—that are contingent on the severity of the expectation-reality gap that entrepreneurs face and the nature of the audiences they must convince. Our theoretical framework captures how the
level of sophistication in façading corresponds to widening expectation-reality gaps, wherein entrepreneurs detach the venture’s externally projected appearance from its actual operational reality. We make contributions to the literatures on cultural entrepreneurship, organizational wrongdoing, and the social effects of entrepreneurship.