The only good delve is the go debugger
Delve removed from Y Combinator
201–210 of 344 posts
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
> YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Of course they're responsible for their investments; they're just not liable. YC has a lot to answer for in the damage it's wreaked over the years.
> YC has a lot to answer for in the damage it's wreaked over the years. What damage is that? (excluding the present case)
> What damage is that? (excluding the present case)
That seems to be an introspective question.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you considered whistleblowing?
I'd called out fraud (blatant lying in investor updates) at a VC backed startup where I was a technical co-founder, once. I emailed all the investors and presented all the evidence to them. They decided to not rock the boat and keep my charlatan co-founder. So, I left. Now, the company is slowly bleeding to death.
> Now, the company is slowly bleeding to death.
There are thousands of companies where the shady practices are rewarded, the companies thrive and make money for the investors. So the investors are incentivized to reward this behavior just on the chance that they are rewarded back.
Whistleblowing sinks those chances and the investors and VCs know it. It doesn' just take away the money, it even takes away the plausible deniability. They put a lot of effort to absolutely punish any whistleblower to discourage the rest. Anything for a dollar. and this is probably all you'll ever need to know about almost every VC out there. Beyond the witty "I'm rich so I'm smart" blog posts and tweets, they're very much just the "anything for a dollar" type of people.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#204streissand effect in action, surprised this thread was allowed to live.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the kind of personality that gets you on 30U30 correlates with being willing to engage in massive fraud, and being able to get away with it for a minute. Holmes, SBF, Shkreli, Charlie Javice, Ishan Wahi...
Not sure it's exclusively a U30 thing. When it comes to grift and fraud, a well known 79 year old comes to mind.
Who rapes and bombs schools full of U18 children.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#206Someone leaked an internal Bookface chat from Garry Tan (YC CEO) saying: We have asked Delve to leave YC. YC is a community, not just an accelerator. The founders in our community have to trust each other, and we have to trust them. When that trust breaks down, there's really only one thing to do. We're not going to get into the details publicly. We wish them well. https://x.com/___4o____/status/2040271468874076380 I…
"They've betrayed my trust but I wish them well" is an interesting statement.
"Bless their little hearts"
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#207Interesting! I worked for one YC startup that committed blatant fraud, with the founders vanishing when investors started chasing them to bring them to responsibility. And they haven't been removed. Just marked as "inactive".
As early investors, did YC benefit from the fraud at the expense of the newer investors ?
Nope. Founders just disappeared with whatever money was left.
They claimed to have a working product and a big list of paying clients while in fact they had a half-assed prototype written by one hapless dude who they paid to the tune of $15 an hour. Which i helped to transform into a somewhat-better prototype and they paid very well for it. But no actual paying clients ever existed and the idea was obviously brain-dead from day one. After they got tired of pretending, they stopped paying, then disappeared. Then years later i read in the news that subsequent investors launched an investigation into fraud and they were put on the list in some countries.
I'm sure no one except themselves ever made any money on it, certainly not YC.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#208I'm getting the impression that a lot of people in this thread think this is because they violated an open-source license and saying things to the effect of, "they're just the ones who got caught". I also thought that was the scandal initially. (And when it comes to license violations, yes, there's absolutely more where that came from.) But that's just the cherry on top. I don't think they're being thrown out because…
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Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#209It's not just about delve. It's about yc's model. YC encourages YC companies to trust other YC companies even though they are early. If you can't trust your batch mates for something as crucial as compliance, the model doesn't work.
They've graduated 5,000+ companies, so some fraud is hard to avoid, especially with young hungry founders willing to do anything to succeed. Honestly, it's a pretty good track record that there's only been a handful of companies like this.
It's precisely because they graduated 5000+ companies that fraud is more difficult to avoid.
They scaled up massively the size of each batch and their frequency to a point where they are incapable of auditing them.
Re: Delve removed from Y Combinator
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
> YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Of course they're responsible for their investments; they're just not liable. YC has a lot to answer for in the damage it's wreaked over the years.
> YC has a lot to answer for in the damage it's wreaked over the years. What damage is that? (excluding the present case)
They’re responsible for the existence of scribd. Not aware of any other obviously socially net negative companies.