Metigy shows the dark side of start-up myth making

Barrister Miles Condon, SC, peppered David Fairfull, the former chief executive who faked revenue numbers and bank statements at his start-up Metigy, with hundreds of questions in a public examination last week. But Condon did not ask the one I most wanted an answer to: why? Why start the lie?

Perhaps the answer wouldn’t have helped Metigy’s creditors get any of their $40 million back. Perhaps the company’s liquidators had already gleaned the answer in private. But it would have explained whether Fairfull was an aberration in start-up land or a product of it.