Founders now have another term for their vocabulary.
The phrase “LARP” originally meant “live action role play.” Its practitioners dressed up, assumed personas, and recreated a video-game-style world in the real world. The internet later repurposed it as shorthand for a “poser” or a “faker.”
In startup culture, the word has suddenly become fashionable. A LARPer is someone who performs the role of founder more than they actually live it: loudly showing off their work and the people they associate with, instead of chasing customers.
Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, turned the idea into a caution: “Be sincere, don’t larp.”
What a LARPing Founder Looks Like
Des Traynor, cofounder of Intercom, warned about the phenomenon in a September email to Themoneytimes: “Look, you get one shot at this life, don’t waste it LARPing as a startup founder for followers.”
The founder-influencer archetype is expanding, and the line between genuine promotion and performative hype is increasingly difficult to draw. Is a 996 post an honest account of your grind, or just grind content?
On Christian Di Bratto’s list of LARPing-founder traits was posting about 996 on LinkedIn while spending an extreme amount of screen time on X. He also cited sleeping on the floor at a WeWork and treating Paul Graham’s essays like scripture.
Graham has himself weighed in on the growth of LARPers and the challenge of identifying them. He replied to a comment claiming that Y Combinator was full of LARP.
“YC is pretty good at filtering them out now, but it is inevitable that a few will get through,” Graham wrote. “Especially among younger founders, where larping is often impossible to separate from inexperience.”
At YC Startup School in July, Tan asked Sam Altman about the LARPing allegations. Rather than saying the abbreviation, Tan repeatedly spelled out “live action role play.” Altman seemed puzzled: “They say that about YC specifically?” he asked, before adding, “What’s the alleged larp?”
Altman then shifted the conversation to “haters on Twitter.”
Making Sense of the LARPing Mania
Playing founder through cosplay is not new to Silicon Valley. Elizabeth Holmes could almost be called the godmother of LARPers.
What has changed is the influence of social media marketing. “Too many ‘founders’ today need to stop larping and admit they are content creators,” product designer Alec Freese wrote.
The wider market may also be feeding the trend. AI is in high demand, startups are raising rounds that were once unimaginable, and, frankly, it is a strong moment to be a founder.
Aditya Prasad, an engineer at Silna Health, offered one reason LARPing is taking off in startups: “It is too difficult for larpers to get into Anthropic.”