Chamath’s claim was that, from the 2021 baseline, incidents of startup founders stretching the truth or committing fraud to secure venture funding would get “meaningfully worse” as capital inflows rose and diligence weakened.

Since 2021 there has been a conspicuous wave of high‑profile, venture‑backed founder fraud cases centered on inflated metrics and fabricated customers. A 2024 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners piece explicitly frames a pattern of “fraudulent founders,” grouping together Theranos, Frank (Charlie Javice), HeadSpin, FTX, Celsius, Terraform Labs and others as recent examples where founders misled investors about technology, revenues, or user numbers. (acfe.com) TechCrunch’s 2024 coverage of the IRL social‑app case notes that, by mid‑2024, the SEC had charged a venture‑backed founder with fraud “for the second time this week — and at least the fourth time in the past several months,” underscoring an unusual density of such cases. (techcrunch.com) Additional post‑2021 examples include Joonko’s founder allegedly fabricating customers and bank statements to raise ~$27 million, IRL’s founder allegedly faking user growth to raise ~$170 million, CaaStle’s founder allegedly using falsified financials to obtain over $300 million, and Frank’s founder, Charlie Javice, convicted and sentenced in 2025 for inventing millions of fake student accounts to induce JPMorgan’s $175 million acquisition. (insurancejournal.com) Crypto startups like FTX and Terraform Labs, heavily financed by top VCs, were also found liable for multi‑billion‑dollar frauds in this period. (techcrunch.com)

System‑level enforcement data show overall misconduct cases rising from the 2021 baseline. SEC enforcement actions increased from 697 total in FY 2021 to 760 in FY 2022 and 784 in FY 2023, with stand‑alone actions rising from 434 (2021) to 462 (2022) to 501 (2023), and monetary penalties hitting record or near‑record levels. (sec.gov) SEC Chair Gary Gensler reported more than 35,000 tips and complaints in FY 2022—over double 2016’s level—and tied much of the new misconduct to emerging, tech‑heavy areas such as crypto. (sec.gov) A 2023 Wall Street Journal analysis explicitly described an SEC crackdown on startup “fake it till you make it” culture, highlighting startup cases (e.g., Skael, Zymergen, Medly) and linking them to headline scandals like Theranos and FTX. (wsj.com) These sources treat founder‑led securities fraud in the startup ecosystem as a growing, systemic problem rather than isolated one‑offs.

The causal mechanism Chamath cited—cheap money and weak diligence—also appears in post‑2021 reporting. FTX’s huge 2021 raise, with competing blue‑chip VCs and a record $900 million round, is widely viewed as a product of the ZIRP‑era capital glut; later commentary questioned how much substantive diligence investors actually did, despite Sequoia’s claims. (coindesk.com) In the Frank case, court filings and post‑mortems describe JPMorgan as being in an aggressive 2020–2021 fintech acquisition push and criticize its rushed, shallow diligence compared with peers like Capital One; at sentencing, the judge faulted both Javice’s fraud and the bank’s lack of scrutiny. (fortune.com) These narratives align closely with Chamath’s warning that abundant capital and relaxed vetting would encourage founders to exaggerate or cross into outright fraud.

We do not have a clean time‑series of all “startup founder fraud incidents,” so the exact magnitude of the increase can’t be quantified. But given (a) the clear post‑2021 wave of venture‑backed founder frauds, repeatedly treated by regulators and fraud experts as a broader phenomenon, and (b) rising enforcement and tip volumes from the 2021 baseline, the available evidence supports the judgment that the problem did, in practice, become meaningfully worse in the years following his 2021 prediction. On that qualitative basis, the prediction is best assessed as right.