YC's Biggest Scandals

by laserduck • 2 months ago

266 94 2 months ago

danabramov2• 2 months ago

LLM-designed sites like this are always so pompous. The obnoxious format does a disservice to what you’re trying to present.

williamtrask2• 2 months ago

fwiw - i think the design looks good.

danabramov2• 2 months ago

I mean mostly the writing. The visual design is fine but the grandiose tone is clearly LLM, as well as attempt to be “data-driven” to an absurd degree.

The screaming “DAMAGE” blocks, “body count”, “(EXHIBIT)”, “7.8X MORE SCANDALS PER YEAR”, all of this looks extremely stupid, screams LLM, and undermines the points the authors want to make.

eiiot• 2 months ago

Sometimes I will see a domain on YC and immediately know it will be LLM-designed before clicking on the link. This was one of those projects. Wish they were more human and more understated.

Loughla3• 2 months ago

LLM designed webpages are fine. But they're just that. Fine.

They're bland and average. Almost like they are designed by a system inherently selecting the average over time.

I like people made pages better because there's generally a little more flavor of the designer. Unless it's like a wiki where I'm just digesting information, I'm looking for a little personal touch. Otherwise, what's the point? If the author or designer can't be bothered to actually put work in to the project, why should I put work into consuming it?

tibbar2• 2 months ago

Scrolling down, a bunch of these seem to just be "the startup shut down after getting customers", which doesn't seem particularly scandalous to me?

frakkingcylons• 2 months ago

If all that happened to your startup is that you couldn't get traction or compete, that's not a scandal.

asadm• 2 months ago

meh. someone butt-hurt from rejection would make something like this.

rohitpaulk• 2 months ago

Only a portion of these are "scandals", the rest are just usual startup failures.

EGreg• 2 months ago

I looked — 99% of them involve AI

theobeers3• 2 months ago

While I agree that YC appears rotten to the core at this point, it’s almost impossible to sustain a criticism of the accelerator because they make so many little investments. No matter what you accuse them of, they’ll dismiss it by saying you’re cherry-picking. I have to admit, it’s a brilliant strategy to avoid any kind of accountability.

contingencies• 2 months ago

Selling shovels baby! For a bonus move, create spatiotemporal nexus[0] for sheep-like investors to baaa together.

[0] demo day

tptacek6• 2 months ago

No, it's not impossible. All you have to do is make a case. Here, by the numbers, the case being made is a 3.9% failure rate, less than half of which is scandalous, all of which appear to boil down to "YC should have known better than to invest in these particular founders". Make a better case! If they're "rotten to the core", that should be easy.

I don't think the number of investments they make is your real hurdle here. I think it's that you'll have to confront people familiar with the status quo ante of YC.

theobeers3• 2 months ago

Mr. Ptacek, a) I have no affiliation with OP, and b) do you know what my actual position is (not presupposing that you care)? It's that I don't know anyone who has been inspired by anything that YC has funded in a very long time. The supermajority of these startups that don't make headlines for being scams is, in a way, even sadder.

I also think it's pointless to howl at the sky about how depressing this is. It's just the current reality of SV. I'm not going to pretend that what a16z is funding is any better (or worse).

hotfixguru• 2 months ago

DAMAGE: MIT LICENSE VIOLATED

.. what?

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

whiplash451• 2 months ago

You can violate the MIT license by forgetting to preserve it. Apparently this was the case here.

tptacek6• 2 months ago

So the damage here really is literally "MIT license violated".

jnovek• 2 months ago

As an alum from the ancient days I take issue with many of the companies that YC funds these days. Flock? 9 Mothers? This shit is dystopian and I hate that I’m somehow even tangentially associated with it.

ianm2183• 2 months ago

9 mothers appears to do defense from drones which seems completely ethical. What is dystopian about that?

levocardia• 2 months ago

Probably the worry that the jump from "we defend against slaughterbots" to "we built a better slaughterbot" is just around the corner

varenc• 2 months ago

They make a very fast "AI powered" turret shotgun. It automatically selects, aims, and shoots down targets. I imagine this is great for shooting down swarms of small fiber optic or autonomous drones impervious to electronic attacks. But automated weapons like this can easily pivot into uses besides anti-drone. Taking humans out of the loop on deadly kinetic weapons is concerning. But personally, I don't really see any other viable defense against small drone swarms.

delbronski3• 2 months ago

A company named 9 mothers, which sells a service to stop artificially intelligent machines from falling from sky and blowing up everything… funded by another company that lures smart young men and women with billionaire dreams that wreak havoc on society.

Not dystopian at all.

wrqvrwvq• 2 months ago

out of all the companies listed, yc would of course choose something like this. "wow you're going to defend american soldiers????" yc and this site are chinese ops run by the scummiest sinotrash on earth. steal millions and deliver vaporware? "oh sounds like a failed business". try to protect soldiers from drones? "oh sounds like you're the terminator highly unethical sar."

fragmede• 2 months ago

What is dystopian about needing drone defense? It's defense and not making attack drones, but personally, needing to have nets everywhere to protect against drone attacks is dystopian.

fillskills• 2 months ago

Some of these don't seem like "YC scandals": - Zenefits: A non-YC company put a spy in Zenefits. - Pebble: Still loved by many, just had black swan event of Apple launching a better product - Cruise: Looks very much like a GM issue.

argee• 2 months ago

A YC company (Deel) put a spy in a YC company (Rippling). Is that what you’re talking about? I can’t tell. Is there another incident?

https://www.rippling.com/blog/deel-admits-it-paid-spy-in-new...

LewisVerstappen• 2 months ago

Putting things that are clearly not scandals damages the credibility of this site and masks the actual scandals.

nextos• 2 months ago

uBiome is probably the biggest one: https://ycombinator.fyi/exhibit/ubiome

A shame, because the idea was good. And, with a bit of patience, it was doable.

tptacek6• 2 months ago

YC has funded over 5000 companies, and this page catalogs 39 that failed, many of which, on the sites own terms, are simply business failures, with no additional drama. I don't think the authors of the site realize the case they're actually making here.

dadrian• 2 months ago

There's something ironic about vibe-coding an anti-YC site. They're why OpenAI exists!

bigyabai4• 2 months ago

OpenAI has their own fair share of critiques, I'd be careful lifting them up as a shining example.

wheelerwj• 2 months ago

Ooof. Thats a statement.

gchamonlive2• 2 months ago

Which is why these critical pieces are important, so that this proportion doesn't increase. YC should stand these criticisms lest it become a religion of sorts.

benoau• 2 months ago

If YC had a chance of being a "religion of sorts" it would have been about Paul Graham, that ship sailed a decade ago.

notahacker• 2 months ago

it mostly seems to be targeting Garry Tan by suggesting that there are vastly more under his leadership.

But yeah, if you're going to consider startups that just never made enough money as a scandal, then Garry and his predecessors presided over rather a lot more (as would be expected from any accelerator). And if you're not, some harmless AI startup that never made much money or some entity that didn't do anything except sue someone else for their bad behaviour isn't really in the same ballpark as Zenefits or the consumer investment scams YC funded.

Especially if you're going to call this data analysis https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline

I think a FuckedCompany style overview of everything Ycombinator would be fun (and probably not overly flattering to Garry Tan) but I guess that would take more effort.

ksec• 2 months ago

it mostly seems to be targeting Garry Tan

He is rather unpopular in some circles due to his political opinions. So I am not surprised.

NoGravitas• 2 months ago

I didn't read all of them, but none of the ones I read were simply business failures; most of them were selling snake oil or non-existent software as a service, or were productizing someone else's open source project while violating their license. That is to say, they were committing various kinds of fraud. Now, it's arguable whether YC could have detected all of these frauds or had a duty to do so, but the page is, to me, extremely valuable for providing examples of the ways in which the tech economy is basically a grift nowadays.

wewewedxfgdf• 2 months ago

If you do mass investment then it's almost impossible for everything to go perfectly.

thekevan• 2 months ago

I wish there was a way to see how many grifters YC has under their umbrella compared to the general population of startups in general.

My gut says the general population has a larger percentage.

adrianwaj• 2 months ago

- allow claiming of each by founders

- release source code of each and have new section: "twinned"

- enable domain, trademark and socials acquisition and have new section: "revisited"

- enable full acquisition (including business name) and have new section: "returned"

- previous 3 becomes "legacy" or "sequel"

- don't limit to YC

raincole• 2 months ago

Yeah, we know how the economy would look like if the society considers business failures "scandals."

jackfischer• 2 months ago

We need more ambitious risk taking and more people "in the arena".

off-and-on• 2 months ago

This is one of the most annoying click-baity mechanism I have ever come across.

dang• 2 months ago

Of course we normally edit clickbait titles, but we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story*, so I've refrained from doing that here.

Given that not all of the "scandals" listed on that page are even YC companies, the minimum we'd normally do is add a question mark to the end of the title, but I'm going to refrain from that too.

* https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

orliesaurus• 2 months ago

Those are ONLY the public ones, I wonder how much more is swiped under the rug

datagram• 2 months ago

Between every surface being a link and the needless redacted text flourishes, this site is kind of awful to navigate on mobile.

toxik• 2 months ago

Beyond awful, and it's LLM slop.

islewis• 2 months ago

Pretty clearly slop, with some of the scandals make no sense. Take Ripplings "scandal":

Parker Conrad's redemption arc after Zenefits hit a plot twist when Rippling sued competitor Deel for planting an undercover spy inside Rippling who was paid €5,000/month by Deel's CEO to steal trade secrets . The DOJ opened a criminal investigation. Deel allegedly ran the same playbook at crypto HR startup Toku. YC uses Rippling for their own HR — awkward.

I am curious what the motivation for creating this was

super256• 2 months ago

http://30u30.fyi

http://termsofservice.fyi

http://ycombinator.fyi

All their sites are similar slop.

corobo• 2 months ago

I like how you need to tap the spoiler tags to show the text which works as a link to the individual page where you need to again unveil the spoilers

seattle_spring• 2 months ago

I like that too. And by "like", I mean "absolutely can't stand." Made the site unusable for me.

dangoodmanUT• 2 months ago

Seems like AI slop. They list Rippling, and the description starts with Parker Conrad, but the rest of it is about Deel:

Rippling
Parker Conrad's redemption arc after Zenefits hit a plot twist when Rippling sued competitor Deel for planting an undercover spy inside Rippling who was paid €5,000/month by Deel's CEO to steal trade secrets. The DOJ opened a criminal investigation. Deel allegedly ran the same playbook at crypto HR startup Toku. YC uses Rippling for their own HR — awkward.

Per this description Rippling did nothing wrong here, all about Deel...

andrewrn• 2 months ago

This is definitely made by some bitter YC reject. Amazing the vitriol of those types

austin-cheney• 2 months ago

Most of these scandals look like repackaged AI. It’s like there is no real business under any of these with the only real value in raising venture capital.

williamtrask2• 2 months ago

The scandals/year page has a little more umph to it than the main page https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline

nubg• 2 months ago

Cool idea, but totally botched by making LLMs generate the descriptions. I feel defrauded for my time. Might as well put ycombinator.fyi on ycombinator.fyi.

unreal37• 2 months ago

"Official archive" it says.

Seems unofficial. Actually, the domain name is probably a trademark violation.

throw03172019• 2 months ago

At least make the Ripping post about Deel…

hedayet• 2 months ago

In the US, it's not a real scandal unless the scammers can cash out the story rights to Netflix

trunkiedozer• 2 months ago

No the biggest ycombinator scandal is Scam Altman

wg0• 2 months ago

I have a weird question on a tangent. If you spend 100k daily, it will take you 27 years to burn a billon dollar. Make it 3 billion and age expectancy around 80 years. What are you going to do with 100 billion net worth? Money that you cannot spend in your life time and there's no guarantee your offspring can handle well.

No theology, that's all mythology anyway. Just a thought.

I guess mostly it is about ego and vanity. I am better, superior, powerful and more capable and smart then you are. About 100 billion dollar smarter than you are?

moomoo11• 2 months ago

agree with the other commenter.. YC has funded more than 5000 companies. I feel like this is a massive stretch and unfair

regardless, the biggest flex you can do these days is bootstrap and own 100% of your company as long as you can

motohagiography• 2 months ago

to be fair, compared to what I have seen go on in finance, government, and media, these scandals are endearingly tame.

mikesabat• 2 months ago

I'm doing this with my son. Dcflagproject.com

Replit for the website (he did the first 80%), Gemini to make the flyers and he'll be walking the neighborhood and talking to neighbors.

globalnode• 2 months ago

not sure theres any value in criticizing yc on their own platform. not that i think theres much to criticize. they provide an essential service in connecting money to computer based business ideas. overall i think they do a good job and the news forum keeps it interesting for readers while serving a dual purpose. its a great idea. my only gripe is that its not emulated in many other countries!

YC's Biggest Scandals

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