LARP: The Revenue Infrastructure for Serious Founders Who Need No Customers
LARP – Revenue infrastructure for serious founders
I built LARP, a satirical platform where founders swap fake revenue to inflate their Series A metrics without moving a single dollar. By pairing users to wire imaginary money back and forth, we create perfect accounting entries while cash remains untouched. This project mocks the circular financing deals seen in giants like NVIDIA and OpenAI, proving that revenue is just an agreement between friends.
Revenue is just an agreement between friends.
- nylonstrung
If you go through the most recent YC batches, it's insane how much of their "customer list" is just other companies in the same or recent batches
- mjfisher
It says something about the state of the world that I was genuinely uncertain whether this was actually a joke right until the last paragraph.
Very well done.
- bluegatty
Nvidia / OAI etc. are selling each other product which have a fair market value.
They're not moving money around with 'no services rendered'.
It does however mean that the situation is 'highly leveraged' - and therefor risk is more concentrated, and, they do disclose.
Nominally there's nothing wrong with investing in one's own supply chain.
It makes a lot of sense for a value chain player with huge cash position and therefore a lot of power to take a % ownership of a buyer.
Consider for a moment - what if Nvida acquired OpenAI? They would be two divisions in the same company. Would anyone consider it wrong for surpluses from one to be invested in the other? No. The moment it's 'managerial accounting' instead of 'balance sheet accounting' - nobody would care.
Imagine Google or AWS acquired Nvidia - maybe in 2017 so it would seem more realistic in terms of price - would any of this seem financially dubious? No.
Of course - those mega mergers would be bad for competition, but that's a separate question.
There's nothing inherently wrong going on here, as long as it's on the books and people understand the inherent structural risk of coupling etc..
- abalashov
Okay, that's genuinely funny. Sadly, it might be a little subtle for the folks who need to feel the mockery most.
- anotherhue
I was able to close my first series A after just a few hours of using this. I wish the rate limits were higher though.