girlboss arrested for selling company to JPMorgan for $175m pretending they had 4 million users when they only had 250k
No one noticed?
Highlights
"All Frank was doing was making it simpler to fill out standard federal financial aid paperwork" but she pretended it provided $28k in student loans 2x the national average
she filled their user database with 4 million fake emails/names
it took JPMorgan a year to noootice
"Despite a public record that raised questions about Javice and Frank — including warnings from the Department of Education and Federal Trade Commission, and a wage theft lawsuit from Frank's cofounder — news outlets and investors kept buying into the narrative that Javice spun."
arrested & facing up to 30yrs in prison
"Over and over, Javice earned plaudits in the media for projects whose impact she overstated. Glowing profiles missed inaccuracies that could have been caught with a basic fact-check, focusing instead on her youth and status as one of a small number of women startup founders. One journ*list even introduced Javice, then 19, to a key Frank investor."
Her background
^ Her with her brother @ 19
ambitious af: originally made a microfinance startup called PoverUp (yuck) in high school with her brother
told the media she raised $300k for the startup, but there's no proof
CNBC ran a bit about Peter Thiel's "paid to not go to college" grant, she appeared on the show claiming she turned the offer down, Peter Thiel emailed CNBC saying she was not even selected
still got her tons of press
"Fast Company's 2011 list of 100 Most Creative People and a complimentary writeup in Forbes. PoverUp was ranked as one of the "11 coolest college startups" by Inc. Magazine, while Wharton called Javice "the voice of a microfinance generation" in a video it has since removed from YouTube."
Startup number two
since PoverUp wasn't a real company and naturally died, she created another company with an
Isreali called "tapd: a company that connected young workers with job opportunities via text message"completely bombed, lost a few hundred k and ended up in a lawsuit w/ Isreali
courtsshe pivoted Tapd to an entirely new market that (surprise) turned out to be heavily regulated and she didn't do the research. Sold it as a "learning moment"
despite this
Isreali dude joined her at Frank, before she jewed him out of 10% equity and failed to pay him salary, so he sued her
That doesn't stop a girlboss though:
While the story of Tapd seemed to be one of failure and contentious mismanagement, Javice would spin that turmoil into a story of triumph. The young founder made the crisis part of her personal success story, omitting the lawsuit and framing the layoffs as a teaching moment
Media sucking her (girl) peepee
In 2018 NYTimes let her do an Op-ed:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/fafsa-college-financial-aid.html
and was forced to follow it up with a long correction because apparently she didnt know shit about student aid
She got lots of local news:
The death blow:
Frank's public statements about its user base were all over the map.
In April 2017, Frank's website said "thousands" of families using its service had received "$75 million in free aid." (That same website had stock images of people, including of "smiling mature woman" and "good looking cheerful manager," labeled as actual users.)
In November 2018, Frank's website said it had helped 300,000 families unlock over $7 billion in aid.
Frank stuck with the "over 300,000" figure for more than two years. But suddenly, in January 2021, the company began claiming that it served "over 4.25 million students," according to archived versions of its website and tweets from Frank's account referenced in JP Morgan's lawsuit.
In reality, Frank only ever had about 250,000 users, according to JPMorgan's legal complaint.
Orange site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211
(PDF) The JPMorgan complaint: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Complaint-1.pdf
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I literally don't consider scamming JPMorgan to be a crime. Not guilty and gigabased.
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