Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Youtube/@Forbes; Getty Images
Gökçe Güven had a rule for new employees at her fintech company headquartered in lower Manhattan a couple of blocks away from the New York Stock Exchange: “Rub the Wall Street bull’s balls.” The tradition, she wrote on LinkedIn in October 2025 — with accompanying pictures of her and her team smiling while touching the big bronze testicles — started as a joke. But, Güven wrote, “the belief that something might bring you luck is powerful.” So she wanted to pay homage to this “very shiny symbol of ambition” as her company, Kalder, took on the world of corporate rewards points. “Belief fuels execution,” she wrote. “Here’s to charging forward.”
Güven’s drive to succeed had already taken her from her home in Turkey to the University of California, Berkeley, where she fell in love with the Bay Area start-up culture that has produced generations of ultrarich tech founders. As a 26-year-old CEO, she was well on her way to becoming one: By 2025, Güven had landed $10.5 million in funding and made it onto the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, posing with a diamond tennis bracelet on one arm and an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak on the other. The caption noted that the watch, which retails for around $50,000 used, was “her own.”
Like many young founders, Güven spoke in grand terms of “transforming” her corner of the business world with her company. In exchange for a small processing fee, Kalder provided client companies with their own cash-back rewards points that customers could then use at other businesses partnered with Güven’s firm. Consumers would get more perks from their purchases, and businesses would cultivate more customer loyalty — a win-win. Venture-capital funds, including Gingerbread Capital, which focuses on funding young women founders, were eager to invest in or advise one with a background in software engineering. “I really wanted to support a young female technical founder because that’s not so common,” says one Kalder adviser, a marketing executive with major clients in Europe. Forbes wrote that Kalder had a $35 million valuation and brought in $1.5 million in revenue in 2024. The company’s website boasted of deals with household brands like Nike and Godiva, but Güven had her eye on a much bigger prize. “Our market is the $250 billion spend” that firms make on loyalty points and maintaining customers, she said in a 2022 interview. “And we want to take it all.”
By the time Güven was posting photos with Charging Bull on LinkedIn, her determination to be wildly successful was already threatening to bring her career to an early, crashing halt. On Thanksgiving Night last year, she was arrested by federal agents as she returned to the U.S. from a trip to Turkey. In January, charges of wire and securities fraud were made public. Former friends outside the company said they were shocked to see that Güven was allegedly running the time-tested tech scam of lying to investors to prop up her firm until it actually brought in money.
According to the indictment, Güven had been keeping a bogus set of books to entice investors. While she claimed an annual revenue north of $1 million, the real number was much more modest: Kalder had made only $60,000 in total revenue since 2023. Feds say she cooked the books and invented deals with top clients, including Godiva, to “swindle” investors out of $7 million as she burned through their money trying to get the company upright. Güven has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and she and her attorneys — who include a white-shoe lawyer who prosecuted Sam Bankman-Fried — did not respond to requests for comment.
Wire fraud and securities fraud are standard issue for many tech founders who have previously waded into criminal territory. But by allegedly forging the recommendations and signatures of business contacts on her immigration papers, Güven was also charged with visa fraud and aggravated identity theft. On March 10, prosecutors added a second aggravated-identity-theft charge: Güven had allegedly forged and signed a contract with an unnamed business, then told prospective investors it was real, in a move out of Carlos Watson’s playbook at Ozy.
“There’s a famous Silicon Valley thing where you have a very gray line of faking it until you make it,” says one former adviser. “But this was not a gray area.”
As the government builds its case against Güven, former staffers and business partners are scrubbing the Kalder name from their LinkedIn pages and wondering what about the company was real at all. “She struck me as very smart and passionate about the work that she was doing,” says one small-business owner who partnered with Kalder. “It was only last year when I noticed that features were always ‘in the pipeline’ and never ready to launch, sometimes even after months of discussions for seemingly simple things.”
When Güven arrived at the UC Berkeley as an 18-year-old in 2018, people who knew her say she fit right in. Although a member of Gen Z, she was already sold on the millennial tech dream of founding a company to improve the world — or at least the customer experience — while making a pile of money along the way. “She was seeing all these amazing things happen and these stories of success, and she was enjoying being in that scene,” says a former mentor.
“We talked a lot about philosophy and the cutting edge of technology,” the former mentor says. Güven gave them a book on wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of design. They chatted, like everyone else in the Bay Area, about Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics, a 2011 book on how to return the monetary system to a more altruistic setting. Güven was interested in the Myers-Briggs personality test and the crypto fads of the day, such as non-fungible tokens. “I love flights because I can reflect and focus on passion projects in a liminal space,” she posted on X around this time. She was the type of college student who would willingly blog about how the 2019 crypto-market crash could impact wider crypto adoption in the future. She didn’t talk all that much about her life back home in Turkey. “From what I understood, her family’s pretty wealthy,” says the former mentor.
If Güven had the grand vision, this person says, she lacked some of the technical skills to build a company herself. “I had a feeling that she was always more attracted to design,” they say. “Yeah, I don’t think she coded.”
Soon after graduating from Berkeley in 2022 with a bachelor of arts in cognitive science and a bachelor of science in business administration, Güven began polishing her résumé to make it seem as if she had the technical experience to build a tech company. Her LinkedIn claims that during her college years, she was working “full time” at Robinhood and the crypto developer cLabs, where she engineered products including crypto wallets. But a former cLabs staffer says she “exaggerated” a summer role; a representative for Robinhood says she was only a summer intern on the product-design team.
Güven’s liberties with the truth soon became more serious. In November 2022, two days before Bankman-Fried’s FTX went bankrupt, Kalder announced a $3.5 million seed-funding round. Press releases cited Meltem Demirors, a crypto strategist with a significant following on social media, as an angel investor. “We spoke on the phone a few times over the summer of 2022,” Demirors wrote in an email. “I listened to her ideas, gave her feedback, and introduced her to investors who were doing consumer tech deals and might be interested in her round. This is very much normal in early-stage venture — investors talk to founders and to each other all the time.” But Demirors was clear: “I am not, nor have ever been, an investor in Kalder.”
Demirors said she was not surprised by Güven’s invention. “Reputation laundering happens a lot in venture and crypto, and it’s impossible to control,” she wrote. The fabrications accrued. Even though Nike was listed as a partner on Kalder’s site, the sports giant said in an email that Kalder “does not appear on any of our contracts.” Booking.com said in an email that it “does not have a partnership” despite the suggestion otherwise on Kalder’s website.
Güven lived in a $4,000-a-month apartment near Wall Street decorated with tasteful posters of Alexander Calder mobiles and rented a co-working space above Charging Bull to house her company of about a dozen. “Coworking spaces are college libraries for adults,” she tweeted. With Kalder’s appearance of a growing start-up, more investors were coming in. In 2024, the company landed a $7 million seed round with sophisticated backers including Noah Doyle of Javelin Venture Partners. Doyle, a co-founder of a points system acquired by United Airlines in 2001, also joined as the sole other board member along with Güven, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
Despite Güven’s exaggerations, her employees did have a service to sell to clients, which is not always a given for 30 Under 30 alumni. “The product did work,” says a former adviser. “It’s not like there was no product.”
Still, there were concerns about Kalder’s reach in a market for rewards programs packed with well-financed competition. I asked a product manager in the payments industry if Kalder was breaking ground as a service for small businesses to provide loyalty points. “You mean like a punch card? People definitely do that,” they said. Major point-of-sale systems like Square already have loyalty programs, as does the massive e-commerce platform Shopify — two huge barriers to market dominance for a small start-up.
Former employees also say that, on a technical level, Kalder never quite developed its API, or application programming interface, a software protocol for different apps to communicate with one another. Without an API, the promise of a universal rewards program in which consumers could pay at one company and use their cash back at another could not fully be realized. “As we started to look at some of these deployments and test the products, it started to look a little shaky,” says the former adviser.
But Kalder kept growing until the spring of 2025, at which point an employee went to Doyle with concerns about the company. According to prosecutors, Doyle hired outside counsel to conduct an audit. Kalder’s total revenue since its inception was around $200,000 — millions short of Güven’s claims. Doyle had to tell one large investor that the start-up’s revenue streams were “fundamentally projections” of revenue. (No charges have been filed against Doyle, who declined to comment.)
Güven was cooperative with the inquiry at first, say a former employee and an adviser, but she began fighting back as it exposed her fabrications. “It was pretty obvious that she felt her position was threatened in the company,” says the former adviser, who adds that Güven locked employees out of Kalder’s computer system. “She felt that people were coming after her.” According to one staffer, Güven also canceled employees’ health insurance, though the company still deducted the premiums from their checks. By August, she had fired everyone and started over with a small group of her close friends, including her sister, who is currently finishing her M.B.A. Prosecutors claim that in October, after Doyle stepped down from the board, he called one investor who wanted his money back and told him Güven was “fast and loose with a lot of her projections.” He advised not to sue because any “legal action would quickly use up” Kalder’s funds; from speaking with a former prosecutor, Doyle was under the impression that a securities-violation case against Güven would be “extremely weak.” It was around this time that federal prosecutors in New York began investigating Kalder: One of the fired employees had come to the Securities and Exchange Commission seeking a whistleblower reward for exposing the alleged fraud.
When the indictment was made public in January, tech circles on social media lit up with posts about the alleged fraud — not because of the flashiness of the rewards business or the $10.5 million number attached but because of Güven’s Forbes status. They added her to the so-called Forbes 30 Under 30 pipeline to prison, a reference to the pattern of young founders who make the list and, often within years, face indictments. These founders include Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison of FTX; crypto fraudster Do Kwon; Charlie Javice, who fraudulently boosted the customer numbers of her financial-aid company, Frank; and pharma bro Martin Shkreli. (Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes technically never made the list, though people often tack her on because she hosted the Forbes Under 30 Summit in 2015 — and because of the infamous, laudatory Forbes magazine cover of Holmes holding a vial of blood.) Forbes itself acknowledged the pattern with a Hall of Shame post in 2023. “Regrets, we’ve had a few,” the editors wrote. “The 30 Under 30 list is, by definition, future-facing, and not even Warren Buffett can predict with 100 percent accuracy.”
Founded in 2011, the Forbes 30 Under 30 is perhaps the magazine’s second-best-well-known product behind its live count of the richest people in the world. Each year, as many as 20,000 young people apply or are nominated to the list’s 20 categories, which include finance, health care, sports, and AI. Forbes editors sift those numbers down to about 60 per category before handing the list to outside judges, who have included Taylor Swift, Marc Benioff, and Sam Altman. The names are whittled down again, and ultimately the editors choose who makes the cut. “We really care about money first,” says a Forbes editor who works on the project. “We think that earnings, revenue, obviously if you raise money and scale, that is the strongest sign that you don’t just have an idea but that people are trusting you, that they’re giving you money, that you actually have a business.”
There is a background check, beginning with birth dates to ensure under-30 status. Staffers will Google candidates’ names plus keywords such as allegations or assaults and then do a criminal check; anything involving fraud or violence results in an immediate elimination. In Güven’s case, she passed the test because Kalder had received $10.5 million in genuine investments by the time she applied. To actually audit the company’s income streams would be “too high of a burden of proof” for each candidate, says the Forbes editor, who describes the list as a “snapshot” of a person’s career at that time. “You have to have faith that those venture capitalists did their diligence before they invested,” the staffer says. “We talked to the investors who pitched them and said ‘Kalder is great.’” It’s much more difficult to vet a candidate when they are allegedly lying to their investors.
The vast majority of those who get 30 Under 30 distinction never tread into criminal territory, but it makes some sense that there will be outliers in the headlines every few years. A list that promotes founders trying to make their mark on the world is going to attract young entrepreneurs desperate to get other people’s money to fund their pursuit of success in illegal ways. A former mentor of Güven says they could see how “if you’ve got wealthy parents or people backing you,” it may be easy to exaggerate your current success and then make it become a reality. “But I never would have guessed Gökçe could have ever got into this position,” they say.
As her case heads toward a trial set to begin on June 15, it’s unclear if Kalder is still functionally a company. Some former employees say they are considering a civil lawsuit over unpaid wages, but others feel for their old former boss. “She’s not Elizabeth Holmes. She actually has personality,” says one former staffer. Güven, who has surrendered her passport, is out on a $50,000 bond put up by her sister and has been ordered not to seek new investments in her business by the court. Nor is she allowed access to Kalder’s financial accounts. When I requested a meeting in early March with Güven through her website’s portal to discuss new business, she appeared to accept at first but canceled the day before the video call was scheduled.
This year’s Forbes 30 Under 30 list was published a few months back with close to 10 percent of those honored coming from UC Berkeley. For $375 a ticket, attendees can mingle with them at a conference in Phoenix in April billed as the “definitive gathering of game-changers.” Güven will not be in attendance. A spokesperson for Forbes says that, until her legal case is resolved, she is on a “no-fly list” for the company’s events.
