This one is real. In startup world, everyone is telling the story they want others to hear. If you pick your head up and look at your peers it can feel like you don't belong. As someone who has emerged from Plato's Cave I can say for sure that The Kafkaesque nature of confidence in startups and venture capital is something you can endure.
Unfortunately we can't change this environment, so we have to learn to work with it. From day one you quietly tell people you're working on a startup and wait for them to laugh. If you're not from the Bay Area or NYC this one can be especially tough. You make it public on LinkedIn and try to claim the founder hat, then you start talking to customers and VCs and something strange happens... It turns out Your startup becomes real when enough people believe it. So go pretend for a while, it's ok, it turns out pretending is a necessary part of the path to building something real.
-