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Indian-origin entrepreneur tricks investors with fake credentials
The post has since drawn over 330,000 views and sparked widespread discussion around the biases within the venture capital ecosystem.
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Malvika Choudhary - Tue, 03, Jun 2025
- 11:11 EDT
- 19
Bhavye Khetan / X
An Indian-origin entrepreneur claimed that he drew interest from 27 venture capitalists using a fabricated founder persona—without any product, pitch, or business plan.
In a widely circulated post on X, Bhavye Khetan, a UC Berkeley graduate based in San Francisco, said he created a fake identity listing credentials such as “Stanford CS,” “Ex-Palantir,” and repeated mentions of “AI” in his emails.
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“Sent cold emails to 34 VCs. 27 replied. 4 asked for a call. This game is rigged in ways most people don’t understand,” he wrote. The post has since drawn over 330,000 views and sparked widespread discussion around the biases within the venture capital ecosystem.
I made a fake founder persona. No product. No pitch. No deck.
— Bhavye Khetan (@bhavye_khetan) June 2, 2025
Just:
- Stanford CS
- Ex-Palantir
- Used the word “AI” 3 times
Sent cold emails to 34 VCs.
27 replied. 4 asked for a call.
This game is rigged in ways most people don’t understand.
Khetan’s claim that investor attention could be drawn solely through buzzwords and elite affiliations—with no actual company—has raised concerns about how funding decisions are made.
Khetan currently serves as Attaché at the House of Klein and Parker, a private firm focused on building and operating AI-native companies across both consumer and B2B sectors. He earlier led go-to-market strategy as a fractional engineering advisor at GrowthMentor and served as Head of Growth at FlowGPT, a startup backed by Goodwater Capital and DCM Ventures.
He previously founded Merge, a fintech product that consolidated multiple credit cards into one with automated rewards-based payments, and co-founded SAYLUS, a mapping platform designed to chart safer routes in urban areas. SAYLUS partnered with IBM, the Government of India, and the Embassy of Latvia, and also published research in the International Journal of Science and Research.
Reactions to Khetan’s post have been mixed. While some social media users praised the stunt for exposing flaws in the VC system, others criticized it as deceptive and unproductive.
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