Mike Rothenberg, an Austin-area native, Stanford grad, will join fellow Texan, Elizabeth Holmes, a Houston-native who attended Stanford, in jail for committing fraud in another Silicon Valley scheme. Raise them in Texas, and then send them to the Hoover Institute at Stanford, an institution that promotes personal and economic liberty, free enterprise, limited government, and an every-man-for-himself philosophy, and this is what results.
Mike Rothenberg, fraudster extraordinaire, at Stanford, teaching others how to defraud the capitalistic system.
Delivered by a jury in Northern California, the verdict ends a 10-year journey for Rothenberg, who burst onto the Bay Area scene in 2013 at age 27 with a $5 million fund and gobs of BS to persuade some of the hysterical mass media at TechCrunch that his one-man firm was special enough to merit coverage. Known as Silicon Valley’s party animal, this guy differentiated himself by using other people’s money to have lavish parties for entrepreneurs. Rothenberg, a Jehovah’s Witnesses, apparently believes that the destruction of the present world system at Armageddon is imminent, and the establishment of God’s kingdom over earth is the only solution to all of humanity’s problems. So in the meantime, let’s create destruction as we self-aggrandize. Jehovah’s Witnesses are known for their door-to-door preaching of nonsense, so Mr. Rothenberg was well educated in the art of persuading people to believe BS.
As described by the San Francisco Standard, “Free massages for startup founders, hot-air balloon rides in Napa, box seats at Golden State Warriors games: Such was the life for those in the constellation of Rothenberg Ventures, a venture capital firm that was the toast of the Silicon Valley world during its brief heyday in the mid-2010s. The company’s excessive practices became notable enough to be skewered by an episode of the HBO tech satire Silicon Valley.” The $5 million funding that started the company, according to Bloomberg, came from friends, family and former classmates at Stanford University and Harvard Business School.
In our capitalistic system, where good-ole-boys give each other money, Rothenberg assured one investor, who put $2 million into Rothenberg’s River Studios in early 2016, that their investment would be put into the company; in actuality, Rothenberg used much of that money to pay back funds that he borrowed from these guys.
By the end of December 2015, Rothenberg had deceived Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), another recently fallen star in the tech ecosystem, led by a guy from Indiana who now lives on the high hog in Hawaii. These guys suck money from the middle class to orchestrate their self-aggrandizing schemes. It’s the Ronald Reagan deregulated, Neoliberal hellscape that we live in. Rothenberg sought to obtain a $4 million credit line from the bank so as to cover up a shortfall he didn’t want investors to know about. While doing this, he apparently made “false statements and misrepresentations” to SVB. But who cares if he’s lying, we’re all gonna make money at the expense of the working stiffs (hehe). Rothenberg misrepresented the size of the company’s 2015 fund and the fees they collected in connection with managing the fund.
At this point, it was clear that something was wrong. In July 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission opened an investigation into the company—after an employee tipped the agency off to the company’s misconduct. Come August 2016, Rothenberg Ventures faced an exodus of top brass—including two C-suite executives and a partner. Now that they had made their money, before the SEC caught on to their schemes, it was time to jump ship to avoid jail. Knowing when to pull-out is critical to making money and staying out of jail. It’s the timing method, and as a Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mike was apparently not well schooled in the timing method and pulling out when screwing people.
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