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In Silicon Valley (the SF Bay Area), people often cite a kind of well-worn and very loose statistic: 90 percent of startups sooner or later inevitably fail for one reason or another. It should be noted that on Silicon Beach (Santa Monica, Venice Beach, Playa del Rey, and Playa Vista) the numbers look even more amusing—95 percent of startups burn through funds with no output, not even an interesting hallucination. These figures are, of course, highly relative, and the startups together with their founders are unhappy each in their own way—like in that overused line from Anna Karenin about happy and unhappy families.

What is common to all of them—both the gainers and the losers—is how 100 percent of startups profess the same public credo: “Fake it till you make it.” The twist, however, is that the gainers (the 5–10 percent) eventually stop “faking” and turn it into the accountable reality of routine business. At the other pole, the serial visionaries and unstoppable con artists from the remaining 90–95 percent of losers never seem to fade. They relentlessly continue to "Fake it as soon as you didn’t make it".

A perfectly barbaric yet accurate point "If you own a fountain, stop it for a while — let even the fountain rest”—doesn’t apply here. And not at all because there is no longer a fountain of venture capital in the hands of some notorious burning women and/or men. That fountain has already been burnt out, as they like to say, by serial founders—sometimes together with their investors—who have now temporarily repainted themselves as coaches and consultants.

One of the reasons behind launching Smart Times is the humble wish to filter out this unstoppable, unpluggable stream of hallucinations, since it has become the living fabric of an ecosystem built on the well-known Gresham’s Law: Bad money drives out good. After all, alongside these fake-it-till-you-make-it startups, others might emerge—hopefully with a higher parameter of honesty and a chance of success. We want to support their growth. Who exactly this “we” is, and how we envision it, I plan to confess in this series of op-eds.

Today is the feast day of Saint Monica, a day of observance in the very city that bears her name. I am here now, and during a sunset walk I took this photo. It struck me that Confessions is the most fitting title for these small stories and secrets yet to come.