初出茅庐的创业者

Speaker 0: A Turkish entrepreneur featured on Forbes' list was arrested in the US for a seven million dollar fraud. Speaker 1: 郭克切居文 (Gökçe Kirişci) is a 1999-born entrepreneur. In 2018, at 18 years old, she came from Turkey to study at the University of California, Berkeley, and immediately fell in love with the startup culture of the Bay Area. This culture has nurtured generations of tech entrepreneurs, a significant portion of whom have become super-rich. Gökçe seemingly integrated perfectly into the Bay Area environment. Although an adult, as part of the "Gen Z" generation, she embraced the tech dreams of the previous generation, the Millennials. For example, the dream of founding a company like Zuckerberg's to make the world a better place, or a slightly narrower goal: at least make the customer experience better, and get rich quickly in the process. Gökçe learned about a large number of amazing success stories. Among her peers, there were also those who dropped out of school to start businesses. She liked Japanese-style design concepts and read extensively about economics and finance. Speaker 2: And flying. Speaker 1: Gökçe graduated from Berkeley in 2022 with dual degrees in Cognitive Science and Business Administration. Cognitive Science is an arts major, which should not include coding training. She began to embellish her resume in a creative, almost fictional writing style. Consequently, her resume gradually appeared to be rich with the technical experience needed to found a tech company. On her website, she claimed to have worked full-time at the FinTech company Robinhood and crypto developer Claps, developing products like crypto wallets. In reality, she might have just been an intern in a team during the summer. Less than six months after graduating from university in November 2022, she announced that her FinTech company, Calder, had raised $35 million in seed funding. The press release described her as a crypto strategist with a large social media following. In fact, the angel investor had only spoken with her a few times that summer, provided some feedback, and recommended potential investors; they did not invest in Calder themselves. However, this angel investor understood Gökçe's actions, as rapidly accumulating reputation is a common practice in venture capital and crypto circles. Gökçe's exaggerations did not stop there. She listed well-known brands like Nike as her initial partners, even though Nike had not signed any commercial contracts with her. Speaker 2: Hmm. Speaker 1: After graduating from university, Gökçe moved from California to New York. Her company, Calder, was located in Lower Manhattan, just a few blocks from the New York Stock Exchange. She had a requirement for new employees: they had to touch the lower, head-sized sensitive part of the bronze bull statue on Wall Street. The bull, of course, represents a bull market. The issue is, its sensitive part must have been rubbed smooth by millions of people. Gökçe believed this brought good luck, her conviction was strong, and conviction drives execution, pushing everyone forward. She posted a photo of herself with the bull's worn sensitive part on LinkedIn. Her company, with twelve employees, had an office around the Wall Street bull. She herself lived in a nearby apartment that rented for $4,000 a month. In 2024, the company officially secured $7 million in seed funding.

飞速发展与“福布斯”光环

Speaker 2: Hmm. Speaker 1: After this, her career developed rapidly, giving the impression that she was on a path similar to that of a female Mark Zuckerberg. In 2025, her actual secured funding reached $10.5 million, and she was featured on Forbes' prestigious "30 Under 30" list. At 25, she appeared on the magazine cover as a young, smart, emerging talent, and as a new-generation immigrant who achieved success through talent and resilience – a significant advantage. Gökçe wore a diamond bracelet on one hand and an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak watch on the other. The caption specifically noted that this watch was difficult for ordinary consumers to buy at retail price, usually only available on the secondary market at a premium. The diamond-bezel model Gökçe wore could sell for $50,000 to $150,000. Speaker 2: Hmm. Speaker 1: The field Gökçe's company, Calder, focused on was inter-merchant unified loyalty rewards. This concept sounds appealing. We all know different credit cards, airlines, or merchants have reward programs after spending, which can be redeemed for cash, discounts, shopping vouchers, or free upgrades. The market value for these benefits can reach $250 billion. Gökçe's company could provide a foundational technology platform to connect different merchants, breaking down the loyalty walls between brands. Miles accumulated from your flights could become a pair of Nike sneakers. Your credit card spending could turn into Godiva chocolates. Gökçe's company combined FinTech with marketing, offering brands underlying software application programming interfaces (APIs). The precise data obtained helps merchants understand customer spending habits as if reading their souls, thereby attracting and retaining them. Through this cross-merchant flow, Gökçe could build an ecosystem where even small brands' points would have broad circulation value, akin to cash, stimulating consumer spending. Gökçe's Calder company charges only a small service fee in this process. Speaker 3: What we see is we need to solve problems and we need to be customers first. What our brands care about is that they are making money and they are also rewarding customers every day. And um, most importantly, creating what we call in win-win situations. Speaker 1: Gökçe is skilled at articulating her business concepts with beautiful language. She aims to innovate and transform existing methods, and her passion easily attracted venture capitalists. Many are interested in funding female high-tech entrepreneurs, especially young women. According to a Forbes report in 2025, Calder was valued at $35 million, with 2024 revenue of $1.5 million. It had already partnered with household names like Nike and Godiva, totaling 28 clients. However, Gökçe was not satisfied. Her focus was not on taking a small slice of the pie, but the entire pie – the entire $250 billion loyalty rewards market. She wanted to capture it all. The problem is, the universal loyalty rewards sector has well-funded competitors, and many large brands have joined Gökçe's company. Even surviving would be difficult, let alone capturing the entire market, which is a distant dream. Speaker 3: Your brand is winning when you swipe your card at the partner store. The partner store is winning because they now acquired a new customer quickly. And lastly, the customer is winning because they just earned rewards. Speaker 1: So, in the spring of 2025, employees of Calder found board members, requesting an external audit. Gökçe was initially cooperative, but as the lies gradually began to unravel, she felt her position in the company was threatened. She then began to retaliate, locking some employees out of the company's computer systems and canceling their health insurance, while still deducting premiums from their paychecks. By August, she had fired all dozen or so employees and started anew with a few trusted friends, including her sister, who was pursuing an MBA. The fired employees went to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to report Gökçe's fraudulent activities, hoping to receive whistleblower rewards. In November 2025, on Thanksgiving night, Gökçe was arrested by federal agents upon returning to the US from a trip to her native Turkey. In January 2026, federal prosecutors charged her with wire fraud and securities fraud. These charges, and these methods, are standard for tech entrepreneurs involved in crime. Gökçe's deception methods were not very innovative; they were essentially traditional. Lying to investors to keep the company running, hoping to cover up the lies once real profits were made. According to the indictment, Gökçe maintained two sets of books, one specifically for investors. She claimed over $1.5 million in revenue for 2024, but the actual figures were far more dismal. From 2023 until the incident, her company, Calder, had only generated $60,000 in total revenue. Deals with top clients like Godiva chocolates existed only in her fabricated accounts. In her view, she might not have truly falsified anything; the $1.5 million revenue, even if not yet realized, could be considered a good prediction of the future, a cross-temporal invocation of data. This "quantum-mechanical thinking" of burning investors' money to get the company on track led prosecutors to believe she defrauded them of $7 million. Gökçe pleaded not guilty to all charges. She hired very famous New York lawyers to defend her. Speaker 3: Unlike domestic suspects, Gökçe, as a Turkish-American international student, is also suspected of forging recommendation letters and signatures of famous people in her immigration documents. Therefore, she also faces charges of visa fraud and aggravated identity theft. In November 2025, Gökçe obtained an EB-1 visa for outstanding talent, which included forged celebrity recommendation letters. By early March this year, federal prosecutors added a more serious identity theft charge. Gökçe is suspected of forging a contract with an anonymous company and then using it to deceive investors. Speaker 0: The company had announced to had raised ten point five million in total funding, including a seven million dollars seed round at the time. Cota publicly referenced brands such as Godiva, Nike, he told IOA Swiss football club, BSC Young Boys, and a strategic partnership with the IATA International Air Transport Association, as part of its network. Speaker 1: In Silicon Valley, there's a widely circulated saying: "Fake it 'til you make it." Lies repeated a thousand times will eventually become meeting minutes for the board of directors. Thus, some people develop an instinct: today's false accounts are tomorrow's real accounts, just recorded a bit earlier. This might be an instinct only overly clever entrepreneurs have. "Cleverness can backfire" is the principle here. We ordinary people know that accounting has no gray areas; the red line of illegality is very clear. Based on Calder's actual operations, it's unclear what truly exists. Their foundational software interface APIs seem to always be in development and never truly launched. For some simple requests, months of discussion yield no practical application. Speaker 0: Today, on Forbes by the numbers, meet the Forbes 30 Under 30 class of 2026. Speaker 1: After Gökçe was indicted by federal prosecutors, the tech investment community was abuzz. Not because her business ideas were particularly unique, nor because the $10.5 million funding was an astonishing figure. What everyone paid most attention to was her Forbes title. The Forbes 30 Under 30 list was established in 2011, and its selection process is generally considered rigorous. Judges have included singer Taylor Swift and OpenAI founder Sam Altman. Among those who have made the list are indeed outstanding individuals, including founders of super-successful companies like Cameo, Ethereum, and Spotify. Among Chinese tech elites are YouTube co-founder Steven Chen, Daor H, and Alex Wang, founder of Scale AI, who is considered the next Musk. Currently, the Forbes list in the AI field is almost dominated by individuals of Chinese descent. Those on the list, with good monetization potential, find it easier to open doors to investors, get speaking fees, join boards, and secure funding. This title is, of course, also written into funding proposals and outstanding talent visa applications. Speaker 0: There's a joke that's been circulating online recently: "Congratulations to the other winners. I'll see in prison." The joke is aimed at the Forbes 30 Under 30 list recently becoming sort of a curse; several former Forbes honorees have been charged with major financial crimes. Speaker 1: Another interesting phenomenon is that beneath the exceptionally dazzling glory of the Forbes list, there is also a shameful shadow. It has, in a way, become a fast track to prison. Quickly, from a rising star to deep in trouble. A group of young people made the list, and a few years later, they were indicted. This includes the crypto prodigy Sam Bankman-Fried, who orchestrated one of history's largest financial scams, involving tens of billions of dollars. He made the Forbes list, and three years later, was sentenced to 25 years in prison, where he is currently serving time. Speaker 0: Think about Sam Bankman-Fried in Caroline Ellison's FTX, Charlie Javice of Frank, and even Martin Shkreli before them. Speaker 1: Conventional crypto fraudsters, like Do Kwon, are also in the multi-billion dollar range. Then there's the notorious "Pharma Bro," Martin Shkreli, who speculatively drastically increased the price of Daraprim, a drug for treating AIDS, from $13.5 per pill to $750, a 5,000% increase. As a result, he became a representative of a notorious antisocial personality disorder. In 2017, he was imprisoned for seven years for securities fraud. At the pinnacle of these young, intelligent, and daring fraudsters is Elizabeth Holmes. Her blood-testing company, Theranos, was valued at $9 billion in 2014. She herself was hailed as the world's youngest self-made female billionaire. Speaker 3: Born great things. Speaker 1: ... (unintelligible) ... Poems was making the greatest promise of all that she could save lives through a revolutionary blood testing device she had created. Speaker 3: Hmm. Speaker 1: But her blood testing device simply did not work; it could only rely on deception. Elizabeth was never on the Forbes list, but she appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, like a saint in the high-tech startup world, always wearing a black turtleneck, holding a vial of blood. Indeed, because of these disgraceful records, Forbes magazine has created a pillar of shame, displaying young people they promoted who ended up in prison. The 30 Under 30 Elite list has become a list of 30 inmates sentenced to 30 years. The magazine published a self-deprecating article to explain this flaw under their brand, stating the list is future-oriented and even Buffett cannot predict the future with 100% accuracy. Thus, the Forbes 30 Under 30 Elite list gradually makes its inductees wonder: will they join the ranks of the world's richest people in the future, or will they quickly sink and join the ranks of prisoners represented by Elizabeth Holmes? After this series of cases, investors who have been repeatedly "harvested" will see less of a halo when they look at the Forbes list. Speaker 0: They released pieces titled "Talent Shame", it featured "posed" winners. She ended up facing "fraud allegations." And now another name added to that list: Gökçe Kirişci, the twenty-six-year-old CEO of FinTech startup Calder, was charged with securities fraud, wire fraud, these a fraud and aggravated identity theft. Speaker 1: Looking at the main metrics, the Forbes list indeed prioritizes startup funding scale and operating revenue above all else. In the view of a financial magazine like Forbes, if a candidate not only has an idea but can also raise funds and continuously scale, it should naturally be the most convincing sign of young talent. However, the problem is that the magazine itself lacks the ability to audit accounts and contracts. Gökçe's image was good, and the $10.5 million she raised was real. Forbes took a snapshot; it did not fabricate anything. But what is seen in the media is not necessarily the whole truth. Gökçe herself, praised by the Forbes list, said the selection process was rigorous and exciting, making her feel humble. Speaker 0: What did investors think they were funding? And why does this particular badge keep appearing in stories like this? Speaker 1: Gökçe's trial is scheduled for June 15th. Securities fraud and wire fraud can carry a maximum sentence of 20 years, visa fraud 10 years, and identity theft 2 years, for a total maximum sentence of 52 years. When this 26-year-old woman is released from prison, she will be 78 years old. Of course, in the US, they don't usually give the maximum sentence for every crime. I imagine she might be released in middle age. She has surrendered her Turkish passport. Her sister paid a $50,000 bail for her, and she is currently out on bail. The sisters likely come from a very wealthy Turkish family. Some wealthy children may have a tendency to slightly exaggerate their current success, believing that the future will make it a reality, and their parents will cover any problems.

结语

Speaker 1: Alright, everyone. Today, this story about a young, smart, and famous young person from a prestigious school who can do many things but chooses to commit fraud will end here. Thank you for listening and watching. Welcome to support us with likes, comments, shares, donations, and memberships. We will see you next time.