Tech startup culture thrives on bold claims and big personalities.

That became a problem when a young entrepreneur started telling everyone he was a college dropout, even though his old classmate watched him graduate – from an Ivy League university, no less.

Why would his friend lie about graduating?

You’ll want to read on for this one!

AITA for calling out my friend who pretends he dropped out of our Ivy League university?

My friend (22M) is a rising star in the startup world.

He raised a significant round of venture capital money and has gone viral several times for his tech.

He has also amassed a whole following of wannabe tech bros on LinkedIn and other spaces who admire him.

But he hasn’t come by all of this success honestly.

The problem is him and his co-founder are both lying, calling themselves Ivy League dropouts when they actually graduated.

They’re bragging about how they didn’t need college to succeed, comparing themselves to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and influencing younger kids to drop out of school.

This couldn’t have been further from what actually happened.

In reality, they built their startup on the back of our school’s generous resources.

All of their early financial support and access to tech has come from our school’s startup incubator and tech labs.

And they did graduate.

I walked across the stage with them in May and watched them get their diplomas.

His friend’s dishonesty had begun to rub him the wrong way, so he figured it was time to humble this guy.

But now they’re online bragging about how they’re Ivy League dropouts because they took a semester off two years ago to focus on their startup.

So I called them out on social media and said my friend is lying to his fans and promoting anti-education nonsense, when he actually built his whole startup off our college’s resources.

That ignited a whole social media firestorm of people arguing on my friend’s page, and he’s since been saying I’m just jealous of him and that it is inconsequential whether he dropped out or not.

AITA?

His friend can argue all he wants, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a liar.

What did Reddit make of all this?

This user doesn’t sound too surprised that their friend is behaving this way.

Choosing to be dishonest with someone who looks up to you is just deplorable.

This user thinks they should start dropping receipts left and right!

What’s the point in lying about something that many other people would take pride in?

Building a career off a foundation of lies is sure to catch up with him eventually.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.