A Tech Startup Too “Good” To Be True
Joanna Smith-Griffin, the founder of edtech startup AllHere, was charged with defrauding investors of $10 million. Was she led astray by a Silicon Valley myth?

Welcome to Black Sheep, a spin-off publication of my serialized memoir. SMIRK. While SMIRK was a deep dive into my unusual personal and professional relationship with one unique white-collar fraudster— Martin Shkreli — Black Sheep takes a broader view and tells the stories of a wider range of business crimes and failures.
This publication will examine cultural themes and motives that contribute to lying, cheating, stealing, and related self-inflicted disasters; the impacts of those events; and the people who play starring roles in these dramas. I find these tales both cautionary and fascinating; I hope you will, too.
Don’t be evil.
Google used to proclaim this in the 2000s as it rapidly ballooned into the world’s largest search engine. I remember the period vividly. When I was a local newspaper reporter in my early 20s, I covered a 2007 retail conference where a Google representative was a featured speaker. He illustrated the transformative potential of the internet that Google had unlocked by showing a video of someone offering free hugs to strangers in a park. It was a powerful vignette. Some audience members dabbed their eyes.
That type of messaging fueled a Silicon Valley myth Millennials swallowed like arsenic-laced La Croix: You can get rich by saving the world. We didn’t just assume the objective was theoretically possible; we insisted on companies embodying it. My generation put Corporate Social Responsibility on steroids, and it evolved from a fringe concept in the 1970s and 1980s into an essential business strategy by the 2010s. Today, it’s almost impossible to build a consumer brand without Doing Something Good for Society (at least superficially, anyway).
But clear away the warm fuzzies, and you will find a Milton Friedman-esque reality staring back at you. Business is still business. Investors demand profits. Consumers demand maximum value for the lowest prices. The pressure to grow by double and triple-digit percentages never lets up. Google1 didn’t become a $2.4 trillion mega-corporation, with a market cap larger than the GDP of most of the world’s countries, by encouraging people to give free hugs. It did so by monopolizing the online advertising market and gutting the revenue of newspapers. So much for not being evil.
In the disconnect between idealism and the harsh truth you will find a lot of false hopes and dreams…and their darker manifestation, fraud. That brings me to my latest Black Sheep subject, the now-indicted 33-year-old founder of failed education AI startup AllHere, Joanna Smith-Griffin. She’s convincing evidence the road to Hell — or federal prison (we’ll see how the case shakes out) — is paved with good intentions.
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On paper, Smith-Griffin hit every mark that a socially responsible-inclined public longed to see in tech founders. She was a graduate of Harvard’s extension school, an arm of the institution intended for working adults and other non-traditional students. She was a Black woman (the most woefully underrepresented demographic in venture capital-funded startups); she had genuine experience in the field where she was concentrating her efforts, having worked as a middle school teacher and a charter school family engagement director. She had a refreshingly unpretentious personality. She also came up with a business that had an immensely laudable mission: reducing truancy by getting parents more involved in their children’s education.
As a tool for addressing a societal problem, the concept had merit. Her company AllHere’s main product was an AI chatbot, “Ed,” that automated tasks teachers and school engagement directors wanted to do but never had enough time or resources for. It helped teachers keep in constant contact with parents about student performance, it offered 24/7 support in various languages for questions about grades, student progress, and district resources; and it flagged issues like kids skipping school. Listening to her discuss the company – which she did on podcasts, in panel discussions, and at events like SXSW EDU — it’s easy to find yourself rooting for her.
During a chat with host Ryan Kairalla on the Big Ideas in Education podcast in February 2024, Smith-Griffin observed that “teachers are asked to do so much” to address chronic student absences, “anything from making phone calls to sending postcards, sending emails — kind of trying to look under every rock to see what are the barriers that students and their families can be facing when they aren’t showing up in class.”
Forbes “30 Under 30” Curse
Launched out of Harvard’s startup incubator in 2016, Smith-Griffin’s AllHere Education rapidly won acclaim from media and social change advocacy organizations. The company accumulated a list of awards (displayed on its website) from the World Economic Forum, trade publications eSchool News, EdTech Digest, Tech & Learning magazine, District Administration, and policy organization the Edvocate.
But one form of recognition jump-started her race to success, or at least the appearance of success. In 2021, when Smith-Griffin was 29, she was named a Forbes “30 under 30.” Seen as an indicator of talent, ingenuity, and drive, a “30 under 30” listing can help a founder establish credibility with venture capitalists, open doors to valuable networks and opportunities, and attract even more positive PR and media attention.
But being named a Forbes “30 under 30” can also be considered a curse or a red flag. It could be a sign of too much confidence and not enough experience; a “fake it ‘til you make it” mentality; having a “too good to be true” concept; or of being a founder who is in over their head and about to drown amid ramped up public pressure. The “30 under 30” list has grown substantially from its 2011 inception, now encompassing as many as 20 different categories. But the prestige has remained just as strong, or possibly increased amid the fragmentation of online media and society’s continued preoccupation with finding the next “Steve Jobs-like” young superstar. Recipients faced steep expectations not all could live up to. Something had to give, and it did. Forbes maintains a “Hall of Shame” for all of the “30 under 30s” it has selected whose careers ended in scandal…or indictment.
In 2023, the “Hall of Shame” had 10 names including fallen crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried, his ex-girlfriend and co-CEO Caroline Ellison, Frank founder and fraud defendant Charlie Javice, and eccentric and infamous drug company founder Martin Shkreli (also my ex-boyfriend, as you probably know from my memoir SMIRK). Disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was NOT a “30 under 30,” however she did win other special recognition from the magazine and graced its cover in 2014.
With Smith-Griffin’s indictment in November 2024, the “Hall of Shame” increased to 11. Were there indications of impending disaster that the Forbes reporters negligently overlooked? Hard to say. In a video the magazine posted along with the “30 under 30s” in 2021, Smith-Griffin can be seen explaining her ambitions in soundbites that undoubtedly played well to both journalists and the public.
“Our system wasn’t working for many learners pre-Covid, and now we have an opportunity to reimagine what that looks like moving forward,” she began. Explaining that AllHere was her “first business,” she said that she had “kind of had stumbled onto this problem” of student absenteeism “and got into entrepreneurship as a means to scale what was working for me.”
Asked by the interviewer about the “American dream,” Smith-Griffin replied:
Am I living my American dream? I would say, yes “and.” I would say personally, the fact that I am a mother, I am the CEO of a company, and I’m both of those things at the same time. That to me is my dream is that I can do both of those things well.
When you ask me what does the American dream mean? Every single person, regardless of their race, their background, their gender has the opportunity to go after that which motivates them, which excites them, and which fulfills them. We have a long way to go to ensure that everybody has the opportunity to live their dream, whatever that is for them.
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2021 was a big year for Smith-Griffin. Not only did she land a “30 under 30 spot,” she also secured an $8 million Series A funding raise for AllHere. The round was led by Spero Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in “purpose-led companies.” On its website, the firm (whose name means “hope” in Latin) proclaims: “We invest in determined founders building mission-driven technology companies in three focus areas: wellbeing; sustainability; learning, work, and play.” Other participants included impact-focused firms like SoftBank Opportunity Fund, Gratitude Railroad, Potencia Ventures, and Boston Impact Initiative.
But even “impact-focused” VC firms have to make returns. No matter how much their partners want to focus on sustainability or making the world a better place, they are not in the nonprofit sector. They need to see compelling numbers in their portfolio companies indicating the potential for rapid growth. According to the Justice Department, AllHere didn’t have the numbers it needed to persuade VCs, so Smith-Griffin made them up.
Prosecutors alleged in their indictment, unsealed in November 2024, that Smith-Griffin blatantly lied to Series A investors about AllHere’s revenue, cash, and customer base. For instance, in an investor deck, Smith-Griffin claimed the company showed steady 100% growth in annual recurring revenue and 200% growth in its customers, important metrics for software startups.
According to prosecutors, the data she provided was false. In FY 2020, when she claimed AllHere made $3.7 million in ARR and had 92 customers, the company actually had just $5,400 in ARR, only $11,000 in total revenue, and just 31 customers. She also allegedly told investors AllHere had eight major school district customers when it only had two and that it had $2.5 million in cash at the end of 2020 when the number was actually below $500,000, according to the indictment.
On top of lying rampantly to land AllHere’s Series A, prosecutors alleged that Smith-Griffin obtained $1.5 million in cash for herself by embezzling money from the company and fraudulently selling her own shares to pay for a house in North Carolina and an extravagant wedding in Miami.
“Am I living my American dream?”
Like all fraud schemes, AllHere eventually came unraveled. According to the government, the downward spiral began in 2023. Silicon Valley Bank, at the time the company’s only bank, collapsed in March 2023 and had to be put into FDIC receivership. Citing the temporary crisis, Smith-Griffin begged for a $250,000 bridge loan from her investors, all the while allegedly still lying about the company’s finances, so that she could make payroll.
The same year, Smith-Griffin started talking to investors about a Series B and continued supplying fake financial results, according to the indictment. By September 2023, a venture capital firm had valued her company at $135 million based on her fraudulent numbers, and offered to invest $35 million, prosecutors alleged. But the following month, the firm expressed reservations, having started to find “issues in AllHere’s financials during the due diligence process.” The Series B deal was canceled by December 2023.
If things looked bad for AllHere in 2023, they got worse in 2024. Smith-Griffin was late sending financial updates to investors for the first quarter that year, prompting an investor to contact the company’s accountants directly. One sent the company’s real financial numbers to the investor, showing revenue, ARR, and contract numbers roughly 90% below what Smith-Griffin had reported, according to the indictment.
In a desperate attempt at damage control, Smith-Griffin created a fake email address and used it to pretend to be a consultant, contacted investors, and offered additional (false) financial details, prosecutors alleged. She also fired the accountant who had sent the real data to the investors. The investors talked to each other, though, and compared what one of them had received from the accountant with what Smith-Griffin had sent them. Reality sunk in.
In June 2024, the AllHere board fired Smith-Griffin and furloughed most of the company’s staff, and then in August 2024 the board put the company in Chapter 7 liquidation bankruptcy. Ironically, the company was in the process of landing its first and only multimillion-dollar customer in the lead-up to the implosion. The Los Angeles Unified School District approved a $6.2 million contract with AllHere in June 2023. The “Ed” app for the 560,000+ student district was launched in March 2024. Unsurprisingly, there were immediate problems, including data privacy issues as AllHere collapsed.
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Outrage spread throughout social media platforms when Smith-Griffin was finally arrested. Other Black women founders were enraged at her alleged conduct, which they perceived as setting their entire demographic back in a struggle to achieve equality in white male-dominated Silicon Valley. For example, Jillian Anderson, founder of female-friendly ride-sharing app HERide, had this comment:
A fair amount of mockery was also directed at Forbes, which had begun to acknowledge its “30 under 30” list’s uncomfortable connection to fraud just a year earlier in November 2023. Smith-Griffin’s indictment attracted significant attention largely because she had been a “30 under 30” and demonstrated that, again, one of the magazine’s picks was likely destined for a prison jumpsuit.
But even assuming the indictment is completely true (note the charges still need to be tested in court), it doesn’t allege Smith-Griffin was a complete fraud. The initial $4 million she raised in pre-seed and seed money wasn’t fraudulent, according to the indictment. Her company did have revenue and steady growth — it just wasn’t enough to satisfy venture capitalists.
And although it’s easy to make fun of Forbes, the media is just a mirror. If some of our “best and brightest” turn out to be frauds, we only have ourselves to blame. Maybe what we demand from founders is something too good to be true.
In this essay, I am not observing any distinction between Google and the corporate parent its founders created in 2015, Alphabet.