IRL

~ the last words ~

i was never going to be an irl user. it launched around 2017 as a group-messaging app aimed at american teenagers organizing plans, and i was a thirty-something engineer in ankara with no reason to be in that room. so i missed it live and only met it in 2023, as a business story, when it turned out the app i had never heard of was one of the strangest frauds of the whole social-media decade.

on paper irl was a rocket. it raised a 170 million dollar round led by softbank's vision fund in 2021, which valued it at 1.2 billion dollars and made it a unicorn. the pitch was a headline number: twenty million monthly active users, a genuine rival to the big messengers. the founder, abraham shafi, sold that number hard to anyone writing a check.

then people inside started counting. employees stopped believing the twenty million figure, and in april 2023 the board suspended shafi and opened an investigation. by june the finding was brutal: something like ninety-five percent of the users were automated or bots. there was almost nothing under the valuation, and the board shut it down that same month. a year later the sec charged shafi with defrauding investors of roughly 170 million dollars, alleging he had faked the growth and quietly run personal expenses through the company.

~ the record ~

~ the number that was not real ~

most failed startups die because a real audience was too small or left. irl is stranger, because its audience was largely fictional from the start. the growth chart that raised 170 million dollars was mostly noise, accounts that opened nothing and messaged no one. when you strip out the bots, what softbank had funded was a modest app wearing a unicorn's numbers. the valuation was not inflated, it was hollow.

~ the reckoning ~

the sec case is what makes irl different from a normal flameout. plenty of apps overstate their metrics a little. the allegation here is that the core number, the thing the entire raise was built on, was fabricated, and that the founder knew. in july 2024 shafi was charged with fraud over it. the app was gone by then, but the lesson stuck around: a user count is only worth something if the users are people.

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