YC's Biggest Scandals

llaserduck about 4 hours ago 28 commentsRead Article on ycombinator.fyi

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Discussion (28 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

raincole•9 minutes ago

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

fillskills•24 minutes 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•11 minutes 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...

adrianwaj•10 minutes 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"

- don't limit to YC

rohitpaulk•about 1 hour ago

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

jnovek•26 minutes 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.

ianm218•19 minutes ago

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

tibbar•about 1 hour 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?

LewisVerstappen•22 minutes ago

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

danabramov•about 1 hour ago

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

eiiot•26 minutes 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.

williamtrask•about 1 hour ago

fwiw - i think the design looks good.

danabramov•about 1 hour 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.

tibbar•about 1 hour ago

LLMs often seem to have trouble determining the severity of a bug/incident/problem in a vacuum. If you run an LLM over 1000 items in parallel and ask "is this bad," it will come up with reasons for it to be bad way more than it might if it were considering all 1000 at the same time.

tptacek•19 minutes 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•5 minutes ago

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

nextos•22 minutes 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.

andrewljohnson•20 minutes ago

Almost none of these seem like scams.

This list reminded me of Glowing Plant though. I backed that Kickstarter and was really hoping that one worked out. They pivoted to extra smelly plants before failing IIRC.

wewewedxfgdf•16 minutes ago

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

thekevan•13 minutes 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.

frakkingcylons•about 1 hour ago

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

hotfixguru•39 minutes ago

> DAMAGE: MIT LICENSE VIOLATED

.. what?

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

whiplash451•33 minutes ago

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

tptacek•15 minutes ago

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

EGreg•about 1 hour ago

I looked — 99% of them involve AI

yieldcrv•27 minutes ago

web2isgoinggreat

asadm•about 1 hour ago

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

theobeers•43 minutes 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.

tptacek•13 minutes 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.

contingencies•36 minutes ago

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