“Fake It ’Til You Make It”: The Power and Peril of Implied Social Validation in the Entrepreneurial Journey

This paper explores how outlier entrepreneurs use implied social validation to “fake it ’til they make it,” and what the consequences of this practice are within a society that is increasingly characterized by such behavior. Building on Goffman’s (1983) interaction order and Cialdini’s (2021) social proof heuristic, I explain how outlier entrepreneurs—much like confidence artists—can “fake it” to give rise to legitimacy judgments that diverge from reality, and why social media has made this easier than it has ever been. I then offer a typology of four different kinds of faking it, and explore the societal consequences of failing to ensure that “making it” requires explicit social validation, thereby allowing entrepreneurs who look too much like charlatans to displace those with integrity as the bellwethers of the economy and other domains of society. I conclude with some potential remedies that both entrepreneurs and their stakeholders may employ to protect themselves from being victimized by fraud in a world increasingly characterized by implied social validation.