Why Everyone in Tech Is Talking About LARPing

It’s time to add another word to the founder dictionary.

The term “LARP” started as an acronym for live action role play. LARPers wore costumes and adopted characters, imagining a video game-like world in real life. Then the internet adopted it, making it a stand-in for terms like “poser” or “faker.”

Now, the term is all the rage in startup land. A LARPer is someone who’s playing founder more than actually being one. They loudly flex their work and the circles they run in, rather than fighting for customers.

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan fashioned it into a warning: “Be earnest, don’t larp.”

The anatomy of a LARPing founder

Intercom cofounder Des Traynor warned about it in a September email to Business Insider: “Look, you get one shot at this life, don’t waste it LARPing as a startup founder for followers.”

Indeed, the founder-influencer type is growing — and it’s hard to distinguish earnest marketing from performative hype-cycling. Is that 996 post a real portrayal of your hustle, or is it merely grindslop?

Posting about 996 on LinkedIn — but having an ultra-high screen time spent on the X app — was on Christian Di Bratto’s list of attributes of an LARPing founder. Others he listed were sleeping on the floor of a WeWork and quoting Paul Graham essays like scripture.

Graham himself has commented on the rise of LARPers and how difficult it is to spot them. He responded to a comment accusing Y Combinator of being full of LARP.

“YC is pretty good at filtering them out at this point, but it’s inevitable that a few will slip in,” Graham wrote. “Especially among the younger founders, where larping is often indistinguishable from inexperience.”

Tan asked Sam Altman about the LARPing accusations at YC Startup School in July. (Rather than pronouncing the acronym, Tan spelled out the words — “live action role play” — over and over.) Altman was confused: “They say that about YC specifically?” he asked, before questioning, “What’s the claimed larp?”

Altman ended up pivoting to talk about “haters on Twitter.”

Decoding the LARPing craze

Cosplaying founder isn’t exactly new in Silicon Valley. One might call Elizabeth Holmes the godmother of LARPers.

What is new, then, is the power of social media marketing. “Too many ‘founders’ these days need to quit larping and just admit they’re content creators,” wrote product designer Alec Freese.

The trend may also have to do with the market itself. AI is hot, and startups are raising rounds previously unheard of. Put frankly, it’s a good time to be a founder.

Aditya Prasad, an engineer at Silna Health, gave one reason LARP was gathering in startups: “It is too difficult for larpers to get into Anthropic.”