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Never Steal From The Rich: Lessons From Inventing Anna
From William Chaloner to Anna Sorokin (Anna Delvey) — those who cheat and lie to the rich usually end badly
Like everyone else, I’ve been caught up in Netflix’s new show Inventing Anna. Anna’s boyfriend “the Futurist” appears to have been a modest-level techbro startup scammer who “dropped off the face of the earth” and moved to the Emirates. Anna as portrayed in the series and apparently, also in real life, is a charmless, verbally abusive young woman with behavior traits that smack of sociopathy and borderline personality disorder.
The show makes it seem as though Anna grifted millions: in reality she was charged with defrauding approximately $370,000 in cash and services, primarily scammed luxury hotel stays.
Because I do fund development and capital raises, I was particularly interested in the way that Anna’s scummy, TED-talking boyfriend “Chase” with the “dream data” platform (“WAKE”) gets investment from any/all rich men the pair encounter. Anna’s gift of abusive negging psychobabble nets Chase a cool $100K from a tech billionaire on his massive yacht. He does a lot more than that, but since “WAKE” is total vaporware, the money eventually runs out, and the office is closed, the employees left unpaid. Chase disappears from…
