I Lied at My First Job Interview

I lied at my first job interview. Not a small lie. Not a "slightly embellished" version of the truth. I made up a whole story about growth experiments I had run at my startup, Spaceonova, even though I hadn't run any of them. I had planned them. There were spreadsheets, hypotheses, and a full roadmap in my head. Then life happened, resources dried up, priorities moved, and none of it got executed. I walked into the interview and described those plans like they were my greatest hits. And I got the job.

Then I did it again at my second interview. This time I talked about things I had wanted to do at my first company but couldn't. Same problem: not enough time, not enough autonomy, not enough room to try. Most jobs let you have 50 ideas and give you permission to test two. Mine kept making it into interviews before I had a chance to make them real.

A 2024 Gallup study found that only 30% of U.S. employees felt engaged at work, an 11-year low. I'd bet a lot of that starts with people arriving with a head full of ideas and hearing some version of: that's interesting, but let's focus on the roadmap. So yes, I kept lying. But it wasn't malicious. I was describing the person I could've been if somebody had let me try.

My third interview broke that loop. Lux, the founder at StreamAlive, didn't ask, "What have you done?" He asked, "What can you do for us?" I could answer that one honestly. I told them every experiment I had wanted to run, every strange hypothesis sitting in my notes, every growth play I had been waiting to try. Their answer was simple: "Go do it."

I spent the better part of two years at StreamAlive and ran more experiments than most growth people run in five. Some worked. Some flopped spectacularly. Nobody kept an experiment-success-rate KPI over my head. The team just said, "Try it. See what happens. Learn from it." For the first time, all those imagined reps became real ones.

I saw what those reps had changed when I interviewed for my current Growth Lead role at ngram. I didn't lie. Every experiment I described had happened. Every result came with data. Every framework was something I had built from scratch and stress-tested in the real world. StreamAlive's freedom hadn't only helped me while I was there. It had made me genuinely qualified for every company after it.

That is why big brands are career traps for people early in growth. Large companies tend to optimize for process, not learning. You inherit the playbook, the established funnel, and the best practice somebody worked out three years ago. Your job is to operate the machine, not rebuild it. A Forbes report on workplace innovation found that the most transformative ideas appear when employees have room to experiment, take risks, and own their work. Most big companies give you none of that.

I'm not saying quit your job tomorrow. But I do want to know what happened when the machine failed. I wouldn't only ask how the growth team is structured. I'd ask, "What was the last experiment someone on this team ran that completely failed, and what happened after?" The answer tells you whether failure produces learning or punishment. I would also listen for a founder who can say, "I don't know." A rigid answer about exactly how growth should work usually means they want an executor, not an experimenter.

The famous name can still open your next door. Google, Meta, McKinsey, any of them. The door after that depends on what you actually did. If your Google story is that you ran an existing paid-search playbook with a larger budget, that's maintenance. Growth gets sharper with reps. A big company might let you run 2-3 experiments in a quarter. A scrappy startup that trusts you might let you run 2-3 in a week. The title can look bigger while the experimentation muscle gets weaker.

This is where the usual career ladder stops making sense to me. Get a known company, move to a better-known one, and repeat until LinkedIn approves. My biggest jump worked more like a trampoline. StreamAlive wasn't famous. Nobody's eyes went wide when I mentioned it at dinner. But it gave me something a big brand couldn't: a body of real work I no longer needed to embellish, exaggerate, or lie about.

The rest of the signal is messy. I would optimize for learning velocity before title or brand. 6 months of real work at a 20-person startup can move a career further than a Senior Growth Manager title at a Fortune 500. I would look for some chaos, because a company where everything has been figured out has fewer things left for you to figure out. The pattern in my own career was lie, lie again, freedom, then truth. No experience, still no real experience, finally doing the work, and finally having real work to talk about. Freedom now became credibility later.

If you're in an interview stretching a slide deck into an experiment you supposedly ran, I get it. I've been there twice. Instead of getting better at lying, go find the company that makes lying unnecessary. For me, that was the one where somebody finally said, "Go do it."