Delve removed from Y Combinator

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/delve

by carabiner • 4 months ago

510 308 4 months ago

gnabgib• 4 months ago

Related: Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own (295 points, yesterday, 153 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615434

whilenot-dev2• 4 months ago

More likely related: Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service (836 points, 14 days ago, 323 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319

jaredsohn• 4 months ago

Interestingly, they show up in the company list. When you click the link it returns 404.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=delve

whilenot-dev2• 4 months ago

Probably just a means of updating the Algolia index.

philip12092• 4 months ago

Can they keep their CISO out of jail?

cyrusradfar2• 4 months ago

Related from an hour earlier: Delve removed from YC website [archive.org] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405

ChrisArchitect• 4 months ago

an example of why to avoid archive links in submissions (save 'em for comments), because the source link here will win.

cyrusradfar2• 4 months ago

Thanks! felt crazy linking to a 404 ;) live and learn

carabiner2• 4 months ago

Bye-bye tweet from founder: https://x.com/kocalars/status/2040262537166618887

Notably YC hasn't wished them a farewell.

philip12092• 4 months ago

At least they put a ladder up that tree

GaryBluto2• 4 months ago

striving to make the world a better place.

Why do all start-ups say this? I don't think there are many companies publicly saying "We're going to go 'scorched earth' on everybody."

bombcar2• 4 months ago

Because if they had the money to be honest about it they'd not be a start-up!

shepherdjerred• 4 months ago

Oracle, right?

nurettin• 4 months ago

Striving to make the world a better place for us. Is what is implied.

minimaxir4• 4 months ago

It was a meme over a decade ago so prevalent that HBO's Silicon Valley did a joke about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

Saying it in 2026 just makes it sound more insincere than usual.

mikert89• 4 months ago

funny thing about this tweet is the founder still couldnt stop herself from name dropping MIT

carabiner2• 4 months ago

Look at this series of tweets from her:

One interesting observation I’ve noticed is a lot of top founders did oddly strong at math from a young age.

https://x.com/kocalars/status/2027076198002553159

Nauseating.

claaams• 4 months ago

Much like their soc audits, her time at MIT was also incomplete. Still doesn’t stop them from cosplaying as a grad though!

emerald_rat903• 4 months ago

So they decide to drop this from their COO while their CEO has been doing all the talking on a friday night? Looks like YC told them they had to announce this and this was their least-viewable option.

rvz2• 4 months ago

There is no saving Delve after this.

The only next product launch is an investigation.

bilalq2• 4 months ago

While I do think Delve and the leadership there should be held responsible, it's a bit weird to see YC and others take shots at them for breaking the law when so many of their prized unicorns achieved what they did by being willing to just ignore laws and deal with the consequences later.

colechristensen• 4 months ago

There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.

tikhonj• 4 months ago

Yeah, fraud is what happens when you don't make it.

borski7• 4 months ago

Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law, especially when that law is actual intentional fraud.

Also, there was no “endgame.” They weren’t trying to change the law; they were exclusively breaking it for profit.

bilalq2• 4 months ago

Let me more clearly instead say that many successful startups knowingly and intentionally broke the law.

But I agree that Delve is a special case and should naturally be held to a higher standard here because their whole business is around being compliant with the law. When most other startups break the law, they do it to get an advantage over competition. Delve did it in a way that sacrificed their core value towards customers.

TurdF3rguson2• 4 months ago

Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law

Huh? In a legal sense I'm pretty sure they're the same thing.

afavour• 4 months ago

Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law

This is something Airbnb has facilitated for a very long time, no? And Uber, back when it started.

From a legal perspective I don’t see that it matters whether you’re trying to change the law or not. You’re either following it or breaking it.

jrflowers5• 4 months ago

Ignoring a law is different from knowingly and intentionally breaking the law

This is like a line from a Naked Gun movie. The only way that this sentence could be true linguistically is if the party doesn’t break the law that they’re ignoring (e.g. I could ignore the rule against perpetuities while drunk driving through a zoo)

gmerc• 4 months ago

The deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught

sky2224• 4 months ago

Can you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very aware.

bix6• 4 months ago

Airbnb, DoorDash

Pxtl• 4 months ago

They broke laws that programmers care about.

Like, it's a company that sells AI-slop powered regulatory compliance. How many laws do you think the "fake it ill you make it and you'll never make it" AI will break? But "regulatory compliance" is laws that startups hate, so breaking them is good.

Copyright and the copyleft licenses built upon it are the laws that support the software industry instead of just making sure innocent people aren't hurt by all this innovating and disrupting.

KennyBlanken• 4 months ago

At its core, this article argues that Delve fakes compliance while creating the appearance of compliance without the underlying substance.

Anderson Consulting er I mean "Accenture": "Hey, that's our job!"

PWC: "Yeah! Fuck off!"

KPMG: "Damn straight!"

Ernst & Young: "What they said."

Deloitte & Touche: "Ditto."

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals#List_of_th... )

olalonde• 4 months ago

Working around arguably dumb regulations and making your customers happy in the process is not the same as defrauding your customers.

worik3• 4 months ago

Working around arguably dumb regulations...

...is breaking the law

arionhardison• 4 months ago

While I agree with you, I also find myself wondering who draws the line. Given the current political atmosphere and its increasingly fluid relationship with "truth," I have to consider that the line for others may not be where it is for me — especially given the nuance buried in the details of many B2B deals.

Their value prop had to be strong enough to get past YC, past the other founders in the batch, past due diligence. Given that, I'm no longer comfortable casting "fraud" as a clean binary.

To be clear — I do genuinely believe they are a fraudulent company that lied and deserved to be removed. But introspectively, I have to sit with the fact that the space between "working around dumb regulations" and "outright fraud" is murkier than we'd like to admit.

MangoCoffee• 4 months ago

fake it until you make it? at some point this attitudes of Silicon Valley start up will back fire.

HaloZero• 4 months ago

I think it's fairly straight forward why. It's because Delve broke the law and got other YC companies in trouble vs other industries & people not under the YC banner.

thoughthadlogin• 4 months ago

Sure, most companies could add an About section and probably put this behind them pretty quickly. They could have even hired someone like Delve to assure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.

But Delve themselves can’t really do any of that. They’ve screwed up on a fundamental piece of their own business model. Their core offering *is* Compliance as a Service!

How could I trust their word that they’ll ensure my company is compliant? How could I trust their word that a company I’m doing business with is compliant? They can’t even handle their own Apache 2.0 licensed works, and that’s child’s play- relatively speaking. I’m supposed to trust that they can handle PCI and HIPPA and all the rest for other companies?

This is like having a dentist who doesn’t brush and floss their own teeth. Or a building inspector working out of a moldy office suite with exposed rebar. Or an editor with a personal website full of typos and grammatical errors. It’s a dealbreaker to anyone with common sense.

borski7• 4 months ago

You’re right, you can’t.

Unlike Zenefits, which had (allegedly?) committed fraud for part of their business in the interest of moving faster, and then Parker came back with Rippling…

These guys’ entire and actual business model was fraud.

DaedalusII2• 4 months ago

zenefits didnt commit fraud in the social sense they allowed people to sell real financial products without having a broker licence. its more like not wearing seatbelts than scamming people

the car was real, but there was no drivers licence. 'licence fraud' -> fraud

delve is an actual scam

baggy_trough2• 4 months ago

can't believe I almost spent 10 grand on this company a week before they blew up.

everfrustrated2• 4 months ago

The two founders being early 20's with no background in compliance wasn't a red-flag?

mememememememo4• 4 months ago

Plus the 30u30 is now a signal.

baggy_trough2• 4 months ago

I didn't know about them or think to check into the founders.

jacquesm12• 4 months ago

"By combining the evidence I collected together with what the sim.ai team provided, I will show that Delve has stolen an open-source company’s tech by violating their license and then making a lot of money with it."

You mean like OpenAI, Anthropic and all these other 'unicorns'?

I'm happy we're all clear on how bad Delve is but in essence what they were doing is exactly the same as what these AI companies do.

Tyrubias• 4 months ago

While I despise the sham commercial LLMs have made out of intellectual property, I think Delve is one step worse than that. The technology behind LLMs is innovative, even if the data used to train them have ethically and legally dubious origins. Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.

jacquesm12• 4 months ago

The only thing that makes delve worse in my book is that they're selling compliance, they have zero excuses. But the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic even if they don't sell compliance do whitewash bulk copyright violations and they have valuations far in excess of Delve. Too big to fail I guess.

chromacity• 4 months ago

Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.

I'd wager there's some prior art...

throwaway81523• 4 months ago

Fraud as a service! The next big thing!!!

maxbond9• 4 months ago

I'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 they violated a license. There are really serious fraud allegations. Allegedly they were rubber-stamping noncompliant customers, leaving them exposed to potential criminal liability under regulations like HIPPA.

https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...

I've only skimmed this so I do not endorse these allegations, but I think it's context missing from this discussion.

fontain• 4 months ago

YC has no problem with morally questionable behavior, many YC startups do things that are just as shady. YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Delve’s problem is that they betrayed so many other YC companies in the process. An important value of being in YC is access to a ready-made customer base. The licensing issue is nothing compared to their fake audits but it is an affront to the YC community, hence, kicked from the community.

I’m sure if Delve has only engaged in fraudulent audits or had only resold another YC company’s product, they would have been allowed to stay, the problem is all of that combined pissed off enough other YC companies.

throwaway27448• 4 months ago

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.

madaxe_again2• 4 months ago

I think it’s partly that, but also that when you have something that is toxic, radioactive and on fire on your ship, you shove it overboard, and assess just how bad the damage was afterwards.

PunchyHamster2• 4 months ago

Of course, giving money to terrorists also doesn't make the side giving money responsible /s

The delusions people establish to feel better about their or someone else they like mistakes...

dvfjsdhgfv• 4 months ago

YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do.

Formally they might not be (depends on the case), but morally they are.

alanknguyen• 4 months ago

This is definitely why they're removed from YC. Their practices affect other YC companies like Lovable and such and that's absolutely unacceptable.

JasonHEIN• 4 months ago

lol strongly agree it is just cherry on top. In big tech they also copy but just copy in a smart way so I don't believe that's the reason they got removed.

jacquesm12• 4 months ago

I came across a top tier compliance auditor doing the same thing recently. I tried to talk to them about it and rather than approaching this from a constructive point of view they wanted to know the name of the company that got certified so they could decertify them and essentially asked me to break my NDA. That wasn't going to happen, I wanted to have a far more structural conversation about this and how they probably ended up missing some major items (such as: having non-technical auditors). They weren't interested. They were not at all interested in improving their processes, they were only interested in protecting their reputation.

I'm seriously disgusted about this because this was one of the very few auditors that we held in pretty high esteem.

Pay-to-play is all too common, and I think that there is a baked in conflict of interest in the whole model.

vasco• 4 months ago

It's auditing, nobody that is good at doing anything goes to auditing, unfortunately its one of those jobs. I haven't interacted with any auditor that actually understood all they were auditing, some are better than others but the average is worse than almost any other job description I have dealt with.

dmos627• 4 months ago

Have you considered whistleblowing?

miki1232112• 4 months ago

There's an excellent podcast and writeup on this from Patrick mcKenzie, which explains the story in more detail, including an interpretation of their statement and background on why this is a scandal in the first place.

https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...

rvba• 4 months ago

Write up is supposed to be concise..

wlonkly• 4 months ago

Thanks for this -- I remember when this broke I thought "I'll wait for Patrick McKenzie's take" and then promptly forgot to keep checking for it.

whatever1• 4 months ago

All LLMs do this, yet nobody bats an eye.

tankenmate• 4 months ago

LLMs can't be held legally liable, only the people who use them.

tim3332• 4 months ago

There's quite a good summary of the allegations here https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1rz15ui/i_will_no...

Pre-written audit conclusions. The "Independent Service Auditor's Report" and all test conclusions were already filled in before clients had even submitted their company descriptions...
Copy-paste templates. 493 out of 494 leaked SOC 2 reports (99.8%) had identical text, same grammatical errors, same nonsensical descriptions...

Craighead• 4 months ago

hipaa*

maxbond9• 4 months ago

Oops. Thanks for the correction.

ragall2• 4 months ago

But that's just the cherry on top.

That's not the right metaphor here.

maxbond9• 4 months ago

What should I have used instead?

PeterStuer• 4 months ago

You are overcomplicating this. They were ejected because they got caught. What for or how they got caught, does not matter.

maxbond9• 4 months ago

You are overcomplicating this. They were ejected because they got caught.

I don't see how "they got caught doing X" is more complicated than "they got caught doing Y", but at any rate think it's worth being correct and precise in order to reason from accurate premises. If you absorb a lot of false information you'll start coming to incorrect conclusions and it'll be difficult to understand why. It took me years to unlearn all the bullshit I absorbed from when I used to spent a lot of time watching History channel documentaries.

What for or how they got caught, does not matter.

So if they were ejected for jaywalking or for murder, that's all the same to you?

sandeepkd• 4 months ago

Its quite ironical and interesting at the same time, seems like there is a threshold size/impact beyond which everyone would come and save you, anything less and you will have to bear the consequences.

wenbin• 4 months ago

Curious - in this situation, does delve return money to YC? Or YC simply writes off the investment

rekttrader• 4 months ago

Ya it’s a total write down, I dunno how much they took from YC, if it was the standard deal this is just the cost of doing business.

DANmode2• 4 months ago

Based on?

argee• 4 months ago

Neither. "Leaving YC" or "being removed from Y combinator" really just means you (more precisely, your YC/HN account) loses access to internal resources like bookface. This does have the knock on effect of essentially isolating you from the community. It's not entirely a punishment, it can be as simple as you are a person who isn't working on a YC company anymore, for example.

This has zero bearing on equity, which would be a different conversation. In this case, I think the YC SAFE is likely to remain as-is, unless the founders choose to return the money, or YC chooses to levy a heavier allegation of fraud (which they don't seem to have done here).

raverbashing4• 4 months ago

The investment details really depends on the term sheet details

And I don't think this is just not "getting locked out of the website", but losing the YC "nod" is a greater deal in itself

everfrustrated2• 4 months ago

Someone 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 have no direct knowledge of the accuracy of any of this. This is not my account.

minimaxir4• 4 months ago

The text implies it’s more due to the alleged license violation of a YC startup’s IP than the alleged fraud.

kstrauser3• 4 months ago

Really? I know nothing about this other than what I've read here, but my first guess was the breakdown in trust means the allegations of fake audits.

BugsJustFindMe4• 4 months ago

"They've betrayed my trust but I wish them well" is an interesting statement.

margalabargala2• 4 months ago

"I wish them well" is an idiom for "I never want to see them again".

Kinda like "bless your heart", which means nothing of the sort.

dmos627• 4 months ago

Don't you wish well on people you don't want to associate with? It would be interesting if you didn't, imo.

altmanaltman• 4 months ago

"they can fuck off from where they came" would be a bit too intense even for Gary

dtf• 4 months ago

It's giving Gwyneth Paltrow at the conclusion of her ski crash trial.

saagarjha2• 4 months ago

Someone doing harm to you doesn't automatically mean you wish harm to them. Not that I necessarily take what Garry says at face value but it's definitely possible to unironically take this viewpoint.

raverbashing4• 4 months ago

It's the polite way of saying goodbye when you actually mean "eff off"

DonHopkins3• 4 months ago

Apparently Garry Tan has the same warm feelings and friendly relationship with Delve as Trump has with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump On Ghislaine Maxwell: "I Just Wish Her Well" | NBC News

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jC2jsRrzCrs

vr463• 4 months ago

"Bless their little hearts"

justin66• 4 months ago

“We’re keeping our distance but we still own a piece of their company” might have done it?

taikahessu• 4 months ago

Everyone one of us makes mistakes. Wish all well and see what the future brings.

4b11b4• 4 months ago

The gstack is also pretty interesting.. well, not really

brookst2• 4 months ago

It’s what you say to establish it’s a professional action taken for business reasons.

jappgar• 3 months ago

they're all in the betraying trust industry so they can't take it personally

empathy_m• 4 months ago

Is this the first time Bookface screenshots have been published publicly?

blast• 4 months ago

friday news dump tho

mememememememo4• 4 months ago

404s for me

OptionOfT• 4 months ago

That's the point.

mememememememo4• 4 months ago

Sorry! I thought it would be announcement. And it was subsequently taken down due to the HN interest.

bcraven• 4 months ago

I think that's the point - they have been removed.

hbbio• 4 months ago

This other profile is still up:

https://www.forbes.com/profile/delve/

30U30 never ceases to amaze.

avaer• 4 months ago

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...

rapind• 4 months ago

Not sure it's exclusively a U30 thing. When it comes to grift and fraud, a well known 79 year old comes to mind.

gmd63• 4 months ago

When ambitious competitors who can't accept loss or normalcy enter into a field that's saturated with skilled rule-abiding players, they'll cheat.

Hypercompetitive fields will always surface cheaters given enough time. Then regulations pile on to fight the cheating, which makes it harder for honest people to do the good work.

We do not punish cheaters like these as much as we should.

kstrauser3• 4 months ago

You know, after all this time Lucas Duplan doesn't seem so bad. His hubristic sin was posing for a photo burning fake hundred dollar bills. That just seems like a random Tuesday now.

malthaus• 4 months ago

"that gets you on", ie. the kind of personality that literally pays & hustles to be featured on such a list to fuel their own ego?

colour me surprised

people still seem to think that forbes scouts the world for the best talents instead of the lists being basically a paid ad

raverbashing4• 4 months ago

Yes? I mean, 30U30 has probably some, let's say, "PR steering" behind it

Not "Pay2Win" but possibly something less involved

vr463• 4 months ago

When the stakes are high, non-compliance with the rules or the law might be worth the risk, see professional athletes and drug cheats, right?

Karma and integrity seem to be treated as an overdraft. But these folks are hardly held back by the systems they work in.

TrackerFF• 4 months ago

If I remember correctly, you need to be nominated by someone to be considered for the 30U30 list. Some of the people on those lists will literally run their own campaigns to get on the list, meaning that they'll pay people to nominate them, pay PR firms to run stories and campaigns. Other people do seemingly nothing, and just get nominated by legit people that admire them.

So, I'm fairly certain lists like that will attract some amount of unscrupulous narcissists.

pessimizer2• 4 months ago

The 30 Under 30 Fraud Watch

https://30u30.fyi/

GaryBluto2• 4 months ago

30U30D30

vr463• 4 months ago

30 Under 30 to Life

Forbes MOST WANTED

nfw2• 4 months ago

It'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.

jmcgough2• 4 months ago

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.

LunaSea• 4 months ago

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.

worik3• 4 months ago

It can work under the umbrella of some sort of coordinator

That looks like what happened here.

redanddead5• 4 months ago

this is a teachable moment for yc, maybe the cost of investing in a sour apple is a lot more than half a mil, maybe there's a brand or reputational cost, even in places you least expect it right, these two seemingly had everything laid out for them by investors, did they even come up with compliance? who told them to work on that? now look what happened, it's like everyone cant get far enough fast enough now. What about their lead investor insight partners? what's that conversation like?

it's all just very strange and stupid, ironically from the the startup posing as auditors..

robotswantdata• 4 months ago

Seems crazy that anyone (startups and buyers) would trust these guys for audit.

Shows the “compliance theatre” of what SOC2 has become

progbits• 4 months ago

It's always been one.

Every single technical auditor I've dealt with has been majorly incompetent and wanted to do things that would decrease security. And these were not some cheap bottom of the barrel companies but the big "industry leaders".

phplovesong• 4 months ago

Classic. I knew this would happen ever sine i first saw Delve on YC. I was right to trust my gut, and never used their product.

redanddead5• 4 months ago

it felt very forced from the start, there was no iteration, narrative or pivots

who got these kids into compliance? cause it wasn't them

jmcgough2• 4 months ago

Turns out you can't "fake it til you make it" with SOC2 compliance.

cleansy• 4 months ago

Fake it til you make it [into the news for fraud allegations].

jrflowers5• 4 months ago

On the one hand the company that was selling companies pre-made “You’re hipaa compliant” pdfs was doing fraud, but on the other hand the companies that were buying “We’re hipaa compliant” pdfs that said they had implemented compliance measures that they definitely hadn’t were also doing fr

apt-apt-apt-apt• 4 months ago

Not surprising that Cluely is using them.. they were probably like, what we're compliant, sure if you say so

SanjayMehta• 4 months ago

Orwellian memory hole engaged.

Bratmon• 4 months ago

Fairly inevitable. Like all YC companies, they were total frauds, but they made the cardinal mistake of defrauding other YC companies instead of the general public. Bad move.

big-chungus4• 4 months ago

An I the only one who has 404 not found when I click the link

_morgs_• 4 months ago

That's the point...

edm0nd• 4 months ago

which means it was removed...which is the entire point of the post bruv

mememememememo4• 4 months ago

This is where I'd actually appreciate "blog spam" i.e. a quick post to mention the URL, link to archive to show what was there before and explain the significance.

yyds666• 4 months ago

Great to see them take action. I'm waiting for cambioml next. A married couple notorious for fraud that apparently relocated to ME as a result. That's outside of the terrible treatment of ripping off interviewees (see: https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1n7cdua/got_a_devop...). Won't even comment on other stories I've heard related to them screwing over employees/cofounders.

jazzpush22• 4 months ago

That reddit thread is brutal, knowingly making interviewees pay hundreds of dollars to interview in this economy is messed up.

redanddead5• 4 months ago

Damn. Deepmind, Stanford, Berkeley, only to end up doc parsing for Applied Systems/Ezlynx, and scamming redditors

anovikov2• 4 months ago

Interesting! 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".

rvnx4• 4 months ago

As early investors, did YC benefit from the fraud at the expense of the newer investors ?

anovikov2• 4 months ago

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.

orf• 4 months ago

What one? There’s little risk of naming the startup.

bboreham• 4 months ago

From @patio11 a week ago: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...

jazzpush22• 4 months ago

Pretty disgusting behavior from the founders just posting as normal on linkedin/twitter as if this is run-of-the-mill. Fraudsters need to be nipped in the bud, lest we get trump-like scenarios.

kshri24• 4 months ago

YC needs to go back to how it was. Choosing those who know what they are doing, and have been in the game for long and not blindly choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.

And please stop investing in slop/wrappers. They do not solve World's problems.

I feel there has been complacency set into investing in general where investors are chasing quick money (first crypto and now AI slop) over solving hard/grueling problems that take a long time to fix but have huge returns down the line.

And we have a lot of tough problems that still need solving. AI won't magically fix that, despite being a great tool.

rvz2• 4 months ago

Agreed.

embedding-shape• 4 months ago

Yeah, used to be that a lot of companies in the batches made more or less sense, or you could at least see how they'd made sense if they managed to successfully reach their vision, even if it many times was a bit wishy-washy.

YC since then seems to have moved into a "spray and pray" approach where the ideas don't matter at all, they're 150% in on the "We invest in founders" idea now, almost too much, although I know that's always been a thing they've thought about. But all the batches since some years ago are just so uninspired and seem to be quick cash grabs, or obviously acquisition targets, rather than "solve a problem you experience yourself" which seemed to be much more popular (and realistic) before.

an0malous• 4 months ago

It starts from the top

whoknowsidont2• 4 months ago

choose those who have graduated from tier-1 institutions. University degrees mean nothing at the end of the day.

It means everything for YC's model.

YC does not care about the software.

They care about the founders.

YC's model and ecosystem is explicitly designed to be a who's who club of interconnected founders that are very, very encouraged to """rely""" on each other when building their companies.

YC uses a lot of double speak regarding this ecosystem, but if you explained the concept to a layman on the street they'd tell you exactly what this concept is in just a very few, very blunt words.

Elite-class founders and lots of cheap, imported, or "passionate" labor.

Let's get real here folks.

DaedalusII2• 4 months ago

yes obvious but this is not a secret, its the whole point of yc

yc is explicitly an imitation of harvard , right down to calling people 'alumni'

this is how to find supertalent. much like american idol it works well but not for everyone

redanddead5• 4 months ago

waiting on the cluely scandal next

Devasta• 4 months ago

YC invests in military startups, they have no problem killing people if it would make them money. What makes a fake HIPPA compliance cert worse than that?

thaumasiotes2• 4 months ago

The headline here says "Delve removed from Y Combinator", but the link doesn't go to a statement by Y Combinator. It goes to a 404.

Is there reason to believe that Delve has been removed from Y Combinator, the organization, or is this more an announcement that Delve has been removed from Y Combinator's website?

fg137• 4 months ago

404 == "removed from Y combinator"

thaumasiotes2• 4 months ago

Meaning what?

your_challenger• 4 months ago

I mean this is not the first time a YC company has stolen an open source project.

EdwardDiego• 4 months ago

But they "set the record straight"? Right? It was just a malicious actor who stole data from their system!

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

https://delve.co/blog/delve-sets-the-record-straight-on-anon...

dankobgd• 4 months ago

The only good delve is the go debugger

greenchair• 4 months ago

streissand effect in action, surprised this thread was allowed to live.

mgraczyk4• 4 months ago

Having gone through the SOC2 process multiple times and having worked with and read SOC2 reports from many public companies, it's difficult for me to understand the outrage.

The specific fraud allegations are bad (lying about US based auditors) but it's completely normal and common for soc2 reports to be templates with no company specific information. It would be unusual for reports to include anything about the specific information found during an observation window as some have suggested.

SOC2 is basically fake and it isn't possible in practice to fail to be compliant. You really can apply the same template to all companies and automate the audit process.

petcat• 4 months ago

There are typically two soc2 reports generated from an audit. The first is the one for general use, often just shared publicly. This is probably what you look at from public companies that you have no binding relationship with. The other is the restricted use report which details all the findings and controls. That is typically only shared under NDA.

mgraczyk4• 4 months ago

I haven't seen that and all the reports I got were under nda

ramraj07• 4 months ago

We have done SOC2 and it's not fake. Its real and enforced some good practices and we spent a lot of time collecting evidence and submitting it. You can take it seriously or you can choose not to.

mgraczyk4• 4 months ago

What evidence did you collect that was not automated?

RIMR• 4 months ago

it's difficult for me to understand the outrage.

It's pretty simple. Compliance is legally important, and faking compliance exposes companies to extraordinary legal liability. Being lied to about your compliance warrants outrage.

SOC2 is basically fake

This isn't true, but if it were, it would justify outrage in its own right.

mgraczyk4• 4 months ago

I don't understand in what sense they faked the process. What I've heard described is substantially similar to other SOC2 processes I've seen

And yes SOC2 is fake. Have you ever heard of a startup failing to get soc2 or doing more than a few hours of work to get into compliance?

penguoir• 4 months ago

Here is Delve’s defence to the whistleblower

https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims

joenot443• 4 months ago

Wow, that writing is... earnest?

Below are just some of the many inaccuracies in the story and then the truth.
The Substack inaccurately said Delve relies on “Indian certification mills operating through front companies” and cannot pass legitimate audits. This too is not accurate.

At least it's not GPT but my goodness - you can definitely sense the panic. I think Karun is a little worried.

whoknowsidont2• 4 months ago

This thread is going to use very dressed up and lofty language discussing the issue, in order for the express purpose of dancing around the fundamental issue here.

Y Combinator as a concept, and all of its "children" are rotten to the core.

Every single company is "evil" in some form, and not in the usual "private companies are big baddies" kind of way. They grossly and recklessly violate laws and ethical boundaries day in and day out.

The sooner people are even willing to entertain this, the sooner we can have actual conversation around these issues.

cmiles8• 4 months ago

Sadly looks like another example of “fake it till you make it” in highly regulated industries is playing with fire.

fredgrott• 4 months ago

hmm, how is this not like when Sam Altman was kicked out?

Post now seems deleted.....

Well, can see why...if its fraud you only post it when results of investigation by 3rd party is in due to defame concerns...

paulddraper• 4 months ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405

dataspencer• 4 months ago

They delved too greedily and too deep.

xdavidliu• 4 months ago

404 not found

"delve removed from y combinator" removed from y combinator

jrflowers5• 4 months ago

I like that this sets the precedent that if you want people on HN to believe that they’ve dropped any arbitrary company you just have to point to a convincing-looking url on the ycombinator domain and the 404 signals that you are both correct and following the rules.

gina12231• 3 months ago

We need a page to whistleblower dishonest startups. I know a startup where one of the cofounders is literally illegally working for it. We have people working in cafes getting into trouble but not start up cofounders raising tons of money. Seems so unfair.I am pretty sure the female in the husband-wife pair does not have authorization to work.

Delve removed from Y Combinator

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