[HN Gopher] Delve removed from Y Combinator
___________________________________________________________________
Delve removed from Y Combinator
Author : carabiner
Score : 464 points
Date : 2026-04-04 01:37 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ycombinator.com)
| gnabgib wrote:
| 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-dev wrote:
| More likely related: _Delve - Fake Compliance as a Service_
| (836 points, 14 days ago, 323 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319
| jaredsohn wrote:
| Interestingly, they show up in the company list. When you click
| the link it returns 404.
|
| https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=delve
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| Probably just a means of updating the Algolia index.
| philip1209 wrote:
| Can they keep their CISO out of jail?
| cyrusradfar wrote:
| Related from an hour earlier: Delve removed from YC website
| [archive.org] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| an example of why to avoid archive links in submissions (save
| 'em for comments), because the source link here will win.
| carabiner wrote:
| Bye-bye tweet from founder:
| https://x.com/kocalars/status/2040262537166618887
|
| Notably YC hasn't wished them a farewell.
| philip1209 wrote:
| At least they put a ladder up that tree
| GaryBluto wrote:
| > 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."
| bombcar wrote:
| Because if they had the money to be honest about it they'd
| not be a start-up!
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Oracle, right?
| nurettin wrote:
| Striving to make the world a better place _for us_. Is what
| is implied.
| minimaxir wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| funny thing about this tweet is the founder still couldnt stop
| herself from name dropping MIT
| carabiner wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| There is no saving Delve after this.
|
| The only next product launch is an investigation.
| bilalq wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and
| fraud.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Yeah, fraud is what happens when you don't make it.
| rvnx wrote:
| Laws don't apply to you if you are big enough (e.g. AI
| companies)
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| bilalq wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| Yeah, precisely.
| redanddead wrote:
| that's defrauding the customer
|
| this will literally get them in court
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| > 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.
| borski wrote:
| I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk. Technically,
| you're right that that is also breaking the law. I wasn't
| being careful with my words.
|
| How and why matters, though.
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| There is a difference between "fake it till you make it"
| and "blatant widespread fraud", but the line is blurrier
| than many startups would like to admit.
| TurdF3rguson wrote:
| > How and why matters, though.
|
| How and why you break a law matters (to a judge / jury).
| Whether you frame it as "ignoring" vs "breaking" in your
| legal defense, not so much.
| borski wrote:
| I agree; I attempted to clarify that with my "not using
| words carefully" but that is a fair criticism of what I
| wrote.
| jrflowers wrote:
| That's not how words work. This sentence
|
| > I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk.
|
| Means the exact same thing as "I intentionally break
| jaywalking laws every day". They are equivalent
| sentences.
| borski wrote:
| I agreed with you; that is why I said I wasn't being
| careful with my language.
| jrflowers wrote:
| What does that mean
| worik wrote:
| > I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk
|
| Not illegal here, but I hope you not complain when caught
| and fined.
| kaashif wrote:
| Jaywalking was illegal in NYC until 2025 but literally
| every crossing had people doing it constantly. This is
| not figurative, it actually is literal.
|
| Including people doing it in front of police. Including
| the police themselves!
|
| The law only existed for police to harass and fine blacks
| and Latinos. And indeed, that was how it was struck down.
|
| It is critical to a just society that victims of unjust
| laws or uneven enforcement complain!
| afavour wrote:
| > 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.
| borski wrote:
| Sure. Technically and legally, you're right.
|
| In reality, it makes quite a difference if public opinion
| is on your side or not.
|
| "We decided to commit fraud by providing fake compliance
| reports" reads very differently from "we let homeowners
| make money by renting a room"
| bpodgursky wrote:
| The difference is that Airbnb customers used Airbnb because
| they thought hotel regulations were dumb and overbearing
| (or at least, they didn't care about the laws). Delve
| customers were literally trying to obey the law and Delve
| (allegedly) lied to them about it.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught
| sky2224 wrote:
| Can you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke
| laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very
| aware.
| bix6 wrote:
| Airbnb, DoorDash
| antonvs wrote:
| Uber
| el_io wrote:
| Uber is not YC backed.
| antonvs wrote:
| Oh my context window is apparently too small
| nerdsniper wrote:
| Lyft, rather:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969487
| Pxtl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Working around arguably dumb regulations and making your
| customers happy in the process is not the same as defrauding
| your customers.
| worik wrote:
| > Working around arguably dumb regulations...
|
| ...is breaking the law
| kaashif wrote:
| Yes, but there is a difference between:
|
| 1. Customers want to do something, you help them do it, but
| it's illegal.
|
| 2. Customers want to do something, you tell them you did
| it, but you were lying and defrauding them.
| miki123211 wrote:
| And
|
| 3. Customers want to do something, you help them do it,
| and nobody has done it before, so whether it's legal or
| not is kind of up in the air.
|
| E.G. Uber exploited a legal loophole that distinguished
| the kind of taxi service you hail on the street from the
| kind of taxi service you call on a phone.
|
| The latter were much less regulated, and usually much
| more exclusive and pandering to a richer crowd. Nobody
| really knew which kind Uber should be classified as, it
| was the first kind in practice (same customer base as
| normal taxis) but the second in theory (ordered, not
| hailed).
| NeutralCrane wrote:
| Is there? At the end of the day both boil down to
| breaking the law. It's not better to break the law
| because someone paid you to do so.
| arionhardison wrote:
| 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.
| pm90 wrote:
| The vast majority of crimes are still being prosecuted as
| such. You have to reach a certain size/notoriety and money
| to buy a POTUS pardon; I doubt that matters for a
| relatively unknown outfit like Delve.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| fake it until you make it? at some point this attitudes of
| Silicon Valley start up will back fire.
| HaloZero wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| borski wrote:
| 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.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| 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_trough wrote:
| can't believe I almost spent 10 grand on this company a week
| before they blew up.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| The two founders being early 20's with no background in
| compliance wasn't a red-flag?
| mememememememo wrote:
| Plus the 30u30 is now a signal.
| baggy_trough wrote:
| I didn't know about them or think to check into the founders.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Fraud as a service! The next big thing!!!
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Presidential pardon insurance, like audit insurance but for
| breaking laws instead of filing taxes.
| maxbond wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| hdgvhicv wrote:
| The "I just have the arsonist the match, I didn't tel him
| to strike it" approach of tech bros has caused untold
| damage to the world over the last 20 Years.
| bartvk wrote:
| I'm not saying you're wrong, but a blanket "untold
| damage" statement won't carry an argument here, you need
| to be specific.
| TZubiri wrote:
| But then it wouldn't be untold
| senko wrote:
| > YC has a lot to answer for in the damage it's wreaked
| over the years.
|
| What damage is that? (excluding the present case)
| officialchicken wrote:
| > What damage is that? (excluding the present case)
|
| That seems to be an introspective question.
| 1attice wrote:
| Extrospection is valid spection
| barry-cotter wrote:
| They're responsible for the existence of scribd. Not
| aware of any other obviously socially net negative
| companies.
| transcriptase wrote:
| For the uninformed what's the deal with scribd?
| tim333 wrote:
| Scribd are quite annoying. The pitch was "the YouTube for
| documents" allowing stuff to be posted and shared but
| they tend to try and get subscription money off you to
| see anything unlike the likes of YouTube.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Scribd scrapes the web of all the .PDFs that it can find,
| then gates them behind a paywall and SEOs their way to
| the top of Google's rankings. That's it, that's all they
| do. They run a zero value tollbooth with other peoples'
| IP, taking advantage of users who don't have the search-
| fu to hunt down the documents themselves.
|
| They should pretty much die in a grease fire.
| energy123 wrote:
| Reddit
| Zak wrote:
| I think when making the claim a company is a net
| negative, it's necessary to explore what would have
| happened if the company hadn't been founded.
|
| I find it unlikely, for example that there would not be a
| dominant centralized forum platform. People would have
| certainly started problematic communities on the dominant
| platform, and it's unlikely a platform with strict
| moderation would have gained dominance before 2015 or so.
| I do think a dominant player would have been established
| by 2015.
|
| Do you think whatever you see as harmful about Reddit
| would not have occurred if the company didn't exist?
| energy123 wrote:
| It would have happened more slowly at least, delaying the
| increase in populism, nihilism and depression in the
| Western world, the anglosphere in particular.
| toyg wrote:
| That's mostly imputable to Facebook, Twitter, and
| Instagram. Reddit is a footnote in the mainstream, which
| is dominated by those 3.
| energy123 wrote:
| Given the number of Reddit users across the Anglosphere,
| I disagree that Reddit is not a major contributor.
| Zak wrote:
| What traits specific to Reddit as opposed to a
| hypothetical generic alternative forum platform do you
| think are major contributors to those social trends?
| energy123 wrote:
| Recommendation engine pushing users into ideological
| bubbles, public voting mechanism creating incentive for
| conformity which then creates purity spirals, lack of
| moderation.
| Zak wrote:
| Early Reddit had a recommended tab, but that didn't last
| long. The current recommendation features are relatively
| recent - this decade at least.
|
| It would surprise me if the winner in that space didn't
| have a public voting mechanism. Digg, Reddit's early
| major competitor had one, and heavy-handed moderation
| surrounding the HD-DVD decryption key leak was one of the
| major inflection points that drove users from Digg to
| Reddit. Stricter moderation during that time period would
| have been a losing strategy.
| dangus wrote:
| This is like saying "that guy would have died eventually
| if I didn't murder him."
|
| The corporate shield for accountability is so annoying in
| this way. Nobody's ever responsible for things that they
| did as human beings.
| Zak wrote:
| This comment assumes both that Reddit is harmful and the
| outcomes were predictable. The former is debatable, but I
| am sure the latter is not true; the founders of Reddit
| didn't know what they were building.
|
| They thought it was a social bookmarking thing for people
| to find and share blog posts. It didn't even have
| comments for the first half year. For two more years,
| self-posts only existed as a hack where the poster had to
| predict the post's ID to make it link to itself. User-
| created subreddits didn't show up until about 2.5 years
| after the site launched.
| dangus wrote:
| I'm pretty sure all endless scroll social media has been
| scientifically proven to be harmful. Reddit also runs a
| 1:1 copy of TikTok.
|
| I don't really care to defend the morality of extremely
| wealthy VC firms like YC. They know the enshittification
| process that happens with 100% of the companies they
| fund.
|
| They could create companies with charters and ownership
| structures that ensure they exist to better the world and
| make good products as their binding guiding principals,
| but they choose not to.
|
| More fun with this subject: https://theonion.com/sam-
| altman-if-i-dont-end-the-world-some...
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| Airbnb
| roysting wrote:
| Flock
| user_7832 wrote:
| How about the privacy darling Flock?
| madaxe_again wrote:
| 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_.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| JasonHEIN wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| bob1029 wrote:
| You should check out the banking industry sometime if you'd
| like to interact with a competent auditor.
|
| Compliance gets taken quite seriously in an industry where
| one of your principal regulatory bodies has the power to
| unilaterally absorb your business and defenestrate your
| entire leadership team in the middle of the night.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They could. But they don't.
|
| I've seen this up close. The regulatory bodies as a rule
| are understaffed, overworked and underpaid. I'm sure
| they'd love to do a much better job but the reality is
| that there are just too many ways to give them busywork
| allowing the real crap to go unnoticed until it is (much)
| too late.
| close04 wrote:
| Because they're put there as a box ticking exercise
| without ever being given the power or resources to be
| able to do damage or negatively impact the bottom line of
| the big rule breakers. It's just supposed to maintain the
| appearance of doing something without ever supporting
| these activities for real. For the most part they are a
| true Potemkin village. If the risk is diffuse (just some
| average Joe suckers will lose money) I wouldn't hold my
| breath that anyone is controlling for real.
| arianvanp wrote:
| If you care about this stuff you need to in-house auditing
| and do your own audits with people who care. Then get
| certified by an external auditor for the paper.
|
| You can start very lightweight with doing spec driven
| development with the help of AI if you're at a size where
| you can't afford that. It's better than nothing.
|
| But the important part is you, as a company, should
| inherently care.
|
| If you rely on an auditor feedback loop to get compliant
| you've already lost.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| This function exists in every publicly traded public
| company, and is called internal audit.
|
| It has the potential to be incredibly impactful, but
| often devolves into box ticking (like many compliance
| functions).
|
| And it's really hard to find technical people to do the
| work, as it's generally perceived as a cost centre so
| tends not to get budget.
| ownagefool wrote:
| Nobody really tries to get technical people to do the
| work.
|
| Like cool, it's a great idea and would potentially
| produce positive results if done well, but the roles pay
| half the engineering roles, and the interviews are
| stacked towards compliance frameworks.
|
| There's very little ability to fix a large public company
| when HR is involved
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Speaking as a technical (data) person currently working
| in internal audit for a not quite public company, it's
| not entirely uncommon.
|
| I do agree that the pay isn't great, but it's the fact
| that it's considered a cost centre that's been the issue
| for me.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Everything except for sales tends to be seen as a cost
| centre. It's ridiculous.
| pxc wrote:
| Maybe it should be treated like on-call duty and have the
| load spread between existing engineers on some kind of
| schedule, maybe with some extra comp as incentive because
| it's boring and will take more effort/time in the "easy
| case" compared to pager duty.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| To be honest, I would even go further: if you think
| certification equals security, you are even more lost.
|
| So many controls are dubious, sometimes even actively
| harmful for some set-ups/situations.
|
| And even moreso, it's also perfectly feasible to pass the
| gates with a burning pile of trash.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And they do not track the industry at all, at best
| they'll help you win the war of five years ago.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| Imagine my face when I had to take periodic backups of
| stateless, immutable read-only filesystem, non-root
| containers for "compliance".
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's hilarious :)
|
| Ook goeiemorgen...
| subscribed wrote:
| Maybe that's just a goid moment to review your _policy_.
| About a half of our compute is exactly that, and we just
| don't have to do this sort of backups, that'd be silly.
|
| We don't deal with the military though, only fintech
| (prime brokers and major banks, funds) some government.
| Plenty of certifications (have someone all site all year
| round),!no silliness.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| But companies don't _care_. They don 't want compliance
| for feel goods, they want compliance because their
| partners require it. They do the minimum amount required
| to check the box
| Aurornis wrote:
| Caring about security and comparing about some of the
| arbitrary hoops you have to jump through for some of
| these compliance regimes don't always overlap as much as
| you'd expect.
|
| I've been at companies where we cared deeply about
| security, but certain compliance things felt like
| gimmicks on the side. We absolutely wanted to to do the
| minimum required to check that box so we could get back
| to the real work.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| The industry is paid to provide a fig leaf for shady
| practices. Everyone knows what's going on, no one is going
| to do anything about it unless governments step in and give
| regulators more resources and more teeth, and "errors" lead
| to prosecutions and jail time.
|
| None of those are likely.
|
| This is the industry that missed Enron, WorldCom, Wirecard,
| Lehman, and many others.
| noir_lord wrote:
| I suspect many AI startups will be on that list in 2-5
| years.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Have you considered whistleblowing?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes. But I'm not working at either company and I'm 99.9%
| sure that it would lead to absolutely nothing other than a
| lot of misery for myself. The NDA's I sign have some pretty
| stiff penalties attached. I was actually hoping to see my
| trust in the auditing company confirmed and I'm still more
| than a little bit annoyed that they did not respond in a
| more constructive way.
|
| My response however is a simple one: I used to steer (a lot
| of) business their way and I have stopped doing that.
| maxbond wrote:
| Wouldn't it require a huge leap of faith for them to
| admit the audit was improper in order to have that
| discussion? Who's to say you aren't recording?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've already established that it was improper. It's up to
| them to make the most of that knowledge and then to
| determine of this is a singleton or an example of a class
| that has more representation. In that sense it is free to
| them, I'm under absolutely no obligation to provide them
| with a service. But I'm willing to expend the time and
| effort required to get them to make the most of it. What
| I'm not going to do is to allow them to play the blame
| game or 'shoot the messenger'.
| maxbond wrote:
| I didn't mean it as a criticism, I think giving them the
| opportunity to improve and refusing to offer a scapegoat
| were both standup things to do. I'm just wondering if
| they were ever in a position to take that opportunity.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hard to tell. But given that it was their legal
| department contacting me I think you know the answer to
| that one.
| madaxe_again wrote:
| Similar boat. Seen the same shenanigans being played with
| actors who really should know better - everything from
| military secrets to medical data, and absolutely YOLOing
| it with an audit mill. I have it on good authority that
| there are superuser credentials floating around for their
| production systems that they've lost track of.
|
| And no, I won't whistleblow either, as it would mostly be
| me that would face repercussions, and I am unafraid to
| say that I am a coward.
|
| We choose the battles we fight, and I'd like to believe
| that ultimately, entropy will defeat them without me
| lifting a finger.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| 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.
| buran77 wrote:
| > 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.
| peyton wrote:
| To be fair, I'm not sure blatant lying in investor
| updates alone constitutes fraud. There needs to be harm
| (or the intent thereof) AFAIK. The other party needs to
| be using that information to make a decision. If you give
| me a dollar and then later I tell you I'm actually
| Beyonce, is that fraud? Or am I just a lying sonofabitch?
| ikidd wrote:
| It's encouraging future investment on a false pretext.
| I'd say that's fraud.
| brookst wrote:
| If I give you a dollar and you say it's being spent
| wisely, Beyonce loves the product, you're about to land
| Taylor Swift as pro bono public ambassador... yeah that's
| fraud.
| woadwarrior01 wrote:
| Lying in investor update was merely the tip of the
| iceberg. There was lots more, fabricating customer
| traction pre-investment, paying oneself back-pay for
| months spent twiddling thumbs pre-investment (before I
| was involved), etc.
|
| My lesson from the whole kerfuffle was that investors (at
| least the ones I'd dealt with) prefer hustle over
| integrity and execution abilities.
| miki123211 wrote:
| 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...
| whatever1 wrote:
| All LLMs do this, yet nobody bats an eye.
| tankenmate wrote:
| LLMs can't be held legally liable, only the people who use
| them.
| tim333 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| hipaa*
| maxbond wrote:
| Oops. Thanks for the correction.
| ragall wrote:
| > But that's just the cherry on top.
|
| That's not the right metaphor here.
| maxbond wrote:
| What should I have used instead?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| You are overcomplicating this. They were ejected because they
| got caught. What for or how they got caught, does not matter.
| maxbond wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Curious - in this situation, does delve return money to YC? Or YC
| simply writes off the investment
| rekttrader wrote:
| 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.
| DANmode wrote:
| Based on?
| argee wrote:
| 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).
| raverbashing wrote:
| 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
| everfrustrated wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The text implies it's more due to the alleged license violation
| of a YC startup's IP than the alleged fraud.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| It is very clearly the fake audits.
| neya wrote:
| Hi, sorry, just new to this entire story, could you
| please share light on the fake audits? Trying to
| understand what exactly happened.
| bombcar wrote:
| https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-
| as-a...
| neya wrote:
| Thanks!
| minimaxir wrote:
| I was half-joking, but if YC has a legal issue resulting
| from the alleged fraud (unclear currently), kicking out the
| company for the lesser infraction would make more sense.
| FreakLegion wrote:
| Investors aren't on the hook for the bad behavior of
| companies they invest in. Quite the opposite: Defrauding
| investors (and acquirers, and creditors) is commonly the
| thing that lands people like Elizabeth Holmes in prison.
| rvnx wrote:
| Ycombinator may have financially benefited from the scam
| operations since the company subsequently raised funds.
|
| Considering they do due diligence before investment and
| are experts in IT and legal, how could they not know what
| is the business model when it was the unique selling
| point ?
| FreakLegion wrote:
| Because Delve defrauded them.
| rvnx wrote:
| Yeah, yeah... of course, of course... like telehealth
| companies prescribing GLP-1 Ozempic/Wegovy where there is
| one doctor for 10000 patients. Totally sounds legit.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| "They've betrayed my trust but I wish them well" is an
| interesting statement.
| margalabargala wrote:
| "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.
| DANmode wrote:
| but _should it be_?
| huhkerrf wrote:
| Why do non-Southerners keep insisting on this? Bless your
| heart can be said sincerely or ironically, like pretty much
| any other phrase.
| maxbond wrote:
| The ironic usage makes for compelling dialogue and
| comports with stereotypes about Southerners as
| formal/restrained. So that's what ends up on television.
| At least that is how I think I came about having that
| impression.
| margalabargala wrote:
| You mean kinds like "I wish them well" here?
|
| My comment is an internet comment about idioms, not a
| comprehensive linguistic treatise.
|
| You seem like you're looking for something to be upset
| about. I wish you well.
| ubertaco wrote:
| Yeah, I get this a lot, especially from non-southern in-
| laws who think it's a hoot that they've "cracked the
| code" and can "speak southern". Being repeatedpy
| stereotyped to your face gets old pretty quick.
|
| For folks who don't know, here's the best explanation I
| can offer from growing up in the Atlanta area (but well
| outside the perimeter):
|
| "Bless your heart" is most commonly an expression of
| sympathy.
|
| Sometimes, it's sympathetic towards the hardship
| someone's going through (e.g. "and right after his
| grandma passed, bless his heart.")
|
| Sometimes it's sympathetic to the trouble someone went
| through (e.g. "oh bless your heart, you didn't have to go
| out of your way to bring extra! Thank you so much!")
|
| And yes, sometimes it's an expression of sympathy for the
| fact that life must be hard for you because of your
| ignorance, stubbornness, stupidity, or arrogance (or some
| other such stunting quality) (e.g. "and he thinks he can
| graduate from Tech with those grades, bless his heart,"
| or "bless his heart, I just don't think he's ever had
| anyone tell him no in his entire life.")
| cbarrick wrote:
| Yeah, it's a pretty versatile phrase that's hard to
| explain. But it does often have a connotation of
| childishness or naivety, even when used sincerely.
|
| It is often used an expression of thanks or appreciation,
| but I associate that more with an elder speaking to
| someone younger.
|
| Most of the time, it is an genuine expression of true
| empathy, but it's not uncommon to be used as a passive
| aggressive expression of false empathy. It's that
| childish connotation that give it the extra bite when
| used passive aggressively.
|
| And that plausible deniability, where the phrase is used
| in a genuine context often enough that sometimes you
| can't tell that someone is throwing shade, is very much a
| reflection of southern culture.
|
| Source: Grew up in Georgia and North Carolina, with some
| family in Alabama.
| dmos62 wrote:
| Don't you wish well on people you don't want to associate
| with? It would be interesting if you didn't, imo.
| latexr wrote:
| > people you don't want to associate with
|
| That's an oversimplification of what your parent comment
| said, which was someone who has _betrayed your trust_.
|
| > It would be interesting if you didn't
|
| Why? What's interesting about it? You don't have to
| actively wish harm on people who harmed you, but there's
| nothing strange about not wishing them well.
| dmos62 wrote:
| You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing wellness
| are activities while not wishing anything is just the
| default passive state. To me the default posture is not
| indifference, but wishing wellness.
|
| We throw around words like "interesting", which is a
| subtle way to say "not normal", which is a subtle way to
| say that that's not how we would behave and that we think
| that others shouldn't behave that way either. So I take
| back what I said about what is interesting to me, and
| I'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well to
| others, regardless of their actions or repercussions you
| impose on them.
| latexr wrote:
| > You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing wellness
| are activities while not wishing anything is just the
| default passive state.
|
| Not what I said.
|
| > To me the default posture is not indifference, but
| wishing wellness.
|
| Same here. I'm not convinced that's the default state for
| everyone, though. David Foster Wallace's "This is Water"
| comes to mind.
|
| > We throw around words like "interesting", which is a
| subtle way to say "not normal", which is a subtle way to
| say that that's not how we would behave and that we think
| that others shouldn't behave that way either.
|
| Sure, I get that. Though you're still answering as if
| what was in question was the neutral state of "people you
| don't associate with" rather than the negative state in
| question mentioned by your original parent comment of
| "someone who has wronged you".
|
| > I'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well to
| others, regardless of their actions or repercussions you
| impose on them.
|
| Interesting. No criticism on my part. My wish would
| rather be that we don't wrong each other (which,
| crucially, requires intentionality) in the first place.
| And while I don't typically wish ill on others, I don't
| think it's wrong to not wish well on those who cause
| harm. If you're a despot oppressing millions of people
| for your own selfish benefit, I don't really think
| wishing you well is a positive action.
|
| But again, no judgement, I was trying to understand your
| position, so thank you for clarifying. Have a nice
| weekend.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| > _You make it sound like wishing harm or wishing
| wellness are activities while not wishing anything is
| just the default passive state. To me the default posture
| is not indifference, but wishing wellness._
|
| It looks like you've misinterpreted both what I said and
| what latexr said. Allow me to clarify and reorient the
| conversation back to the original direction...
|
| First, neither of us is the universal subject. Your
| default feeling and my default feeling are not " _the_ "
| default feeling. There's no such thing as " _the_ "
| default feeling.
|
| Second, nothing I or they said has anything to do with
| any "default passive state", because this is not a
| "default passive" situation. The word "betray" here is
| important. "Betrayal" happens actively, not passively.
| Feel however you want to feel about your passive default
| situations. This situation is different.
|
| The only way someone can "betray" trust is by
| invalidating trust _on purpose_. If they harm you on
| purpose without trust, they have not betrayed any trust
| because there was none. If they invalidate trust
| accidentally, they have not " _betrayed_ " the trust.
| They only " _betray_ " your trust if you put trust in
| them and then they invalidate the trust _intentionally_.
|
| > _I 'll just say that I wish it was normal to wish well
| to others, regardless of their actions_
|
| How very noble. Anyway, sorry Siddhartha, if someone
| actively " _betrays_ " me they can go die in a fire. That
| has nothing to do with my "default passive" feeling about
| people.
| dmos62 wrote:
| I agree there's no universal default or normal. That was
| my point too. We are in agreement that betrayal and
| purposeful harmfulness don't have a default reaction. I
| expressed how I choose to react, and you expressed how
| you choose to react. Our choices don't match, and I think
| that's ok.
|
| I've not read Siddhartha. I take it you didn't like it.
| blitzar wrote:
| No, if I believed wishes, hopes and prayers affected
| anything why would I waste the finite quantity of them on
| random people let alone people I professionally separated
| myself from?
|
| As Donald Draper once said "I don't think about you at
| all."
| dmos62 wrote:
| If you would rewatch Mad Men, you might notice that
| Donald Draper is not well adjusted. It's not subtle
| either.
|
| What makes you say that wishes are finite? Do you ration
| them out to your loved ones?
| blitzar wrote:
| We have finite time, considering ones wishes towards
| someone takes a portion of that time even if it is a very
| small fraction of time.
| dmos62 wrote:
| If we get into it, I think that beliefs are a better
| abstraction that wishes. Beliefs structure relationships.
| How does a person believe that he relates to another
| person. So when I think of "wishing someone well", it's
| an English-language nuance that makes it an activity, but
| in reality it's a choice of what beliefs I hold. And, I
| find, the only beliefs that are a chore to carry around
| are those that don't serve me.
| altmanaltman wrote:
| "they can fuck off from where they came" would be a bit too
| intense even for Gary
| ethanwillis wrote:
| I guess if he told them "die slow motherfuckers" as he's
| told others that wouldn't be too intense for him.
| dtf wrote:
| It's giving Gwyneth Paltrow at the conclusion of her ski
| crash trial.
| saagarjha wrote:
| 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.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| "Betrayal" requires intent so it's not just any old harm.
|
| That may not _automatically_ mean you wish them harm in
| return, but I believe it would be very uncommon to not.
| raverbashing wrote:
| It's the polite way of saying goodbye when you actually mean
| "eff off"
| roysting wrote:
| People don't realize that the people at the top of
| organizations are effectively like politicians in
| democratic systems only the vote comes in confidence;
| usually manipulative, lying, and deceptive because they are
| inherently dependent on maintaining perception of the
| people they rely on and underpin their roles and power.
|
| One way in which they do that is to ride or effectively are
| selected by the system for their mastery of the
| psychological trick of positivity and optimism that
| predisposes people to follow and trust, e.g., even when
| someone betrays you, you "wish them well.
|
| In such systems, courage and hard lines that enforce strict
| rules, discipline, and principles does not provide the
| leaders in that system the affordances and benefits of
| leadership. As has been indicated, the subject behaviors
| are not only not novel, nor are they unique. What
| precipitated this current action appears to be the
| egregious and probably violative nature of the behavior,
| not the behavior itself. The veneer of perception was
| pierced, which is the real trigger of action.
|
| Just use my saying what I just said above as an example,
| there will be people who have not even read this last
| paragraph and will it will have the urge to down vote what
| I said solely on the basis that they want to punish me, the
| messenger, because I'm pointing out things that are very
| much true and not saying it in a positive manner. It causes
| feelings of discomfort and especially in American society
| today where everything is geared towards positivity and
| good feelings opium, not bad feelings, even if you're being
| scammed or defrauded or lied to, you have to remain
| positive, say things in positive ways, be "constructive".
|
| I don't know if it's sustainable because it's such a con
| job at its very core, an abusive confidence trick,
| maintaining the perception of confidence and optimism to
| keep people happy and positive and optimistic regardless of
| red flags; however, we shall all find out one day if no one
| being able to deal with reality anymore if it's not wrapped
| some nicety, is sustainable. Hence, "They violated us/me"
| but "I wish them well". See, they are wished well, so
| everything is fine and we just removed the bad apple,
| nothing to see here, keep being positive as the telescreen
| instructs you to.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 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
| vr46 wrote:
| "Bless their little hearts"
| justin66 wrote:
| "We're keeping our distance but we still own a piece of their
| company" might have done it?
| taikahessu wrote:
| Everyone one of us makes mistakes. Wish all well and see what
| the future brings.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It wasn't a mistake, they did it on purpose.
| 4b11b4 wrote:
| The gstack is also pretty interesting.. well, not really
| brookst wrote:
| It's what you say to establish it's a professional action
| taken for business reasons.
| blast wrote:
| friday news dump tho
| mememememememo wrote:
| 404s for me
| OptionOfT wrote:
| That's the point.
| mememememememo wrote:
| Sorry! I thought it would be announcement. And it was
| subsequently taken down due to the HN interest.
| bcraven wrote:
| I think that's the point - they have been removed.
| hbbio wrote:
| This other profile is still up:
|
| https://www.forbes.com/profile/delve/
|
| 30U30 never ceases to amaze.
| avaer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not sure it's exclusively a U30 thing. When it comes to grift
| and fraud, a well known 79 year old comes to mind.
| pdpi wrote:
| I'd focus less on the U30 part, and more on the 30U, if
| that makes sense -- the problem is with people who seek
| that sort of attention (and that 79 year old certainly
| qualifies as wanting that sort of attention). For those
| people, their businesses are a means to an end in the most
| cynical way possible.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Who rapes and bombs schools full of U18 children.
| Ekaros wrote:
| That is just what the O18 want in there. Last one also
| got their role because that. Doing it in public on
| camera.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Speak for yourself. I'm O18 and I don't want him in there
| like you claim to. Most of his base claimed to be anti-
| pedo until they saw the evidence in the unredacted subset
| of the Epstein files that Congress legally forced him to
| release, and now suddenly they're pro-pedo (and pro-war
| and pro-bombing-schoolchildren). But you be you, and make
| baseless evidence-free false equivalence accusations
| against other people to justify the rapes and legally
| adjudicated sexual assault and pussy grabbing by the guy
| you as an "O18" claim you want in there.
| gmd63 wrote:
| 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.
| kstrauser wrote:
| 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.
| minimaxir wrote:
| Naming his startup "Clinkle" should have been a crime,
| though.
| kstrauser wrote:
| That was epicly horrid.
| malthaus wrote:
| "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
| raverbashing wrote:
| Yes? I mean, 30U30 has probably some, let's say, "PR
| steering" behind it
|
| Not "Pay2Win" but possibly something less involved
| vr46 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pessimizer wrote:
| The 30 Under 30 Fraud Watch
|
| https://30u30.fyi/
| GaryBluto wrote:
| 30U30D30
| vr46 wrote:
| 30 Under 30 to Life
|
| Forbes MOST WANTED
| nfw2 wrote:
| 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.
| jmcgough wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| ohashi wrote:
| Maybe someone should start an auditing company for YC... oh
| financetechbro wrote:
| There is too much friction in the audit process...
| someone needs to solve this
| worik wrote:
| It can work under the umbrella of some sort of coordinator
|
| That looks like what happened here.
| redanddead wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Seems crazy that anyone (startups and buyers) would trust these
| guys for audit.
|
| Shows the "compliance theatre" of what SOC2 has become
| progbits wrote:
| 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".
| raverbashing wrote:
| Never forget https://serverfault.com/questions/293217/our-
| security-audito...
| sheiyei wrote:
| Oh my, that is so funny and terrifying, but also exactly
| what my first expectation is for a consultancy firm
| phplovesong wrote:
| 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.
| redanddead wrote:
| 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
| jmcgough wrote:
| Turns out you can't "fake it til you make it" with SOC2
| compliance.
| cleansy wrote:
| Fake it til you make it [into the news for fraud allegations].
| jrflowers wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Not surprising that Cluely is using them.. they were probably
| like, what we're compliant, sure if you say so
| SanjayMehta wrote:
| Orwellian memory hole engaged.
| Bratmon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| An I the only one who has 404 not found when I click the link
| _morgs_ wrote:
| That's the point...
| edm0nd wrote:
| which means it was removed...which is the entire point of the
| post bruv
| mememememememo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| That reddit thread is brutal, knowingly making interviewees pay
| hundreds of dollars to interview in this economy is messed up.
| redanddead wrote:
| Damn. Deepmind, Stanford, Berkeley, only to end up doc parsing
| for Applied Systems/Ezlynx, and scamming redditors
| anovikov wrote:
| 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".
| rvnx wrote:
| As early investors, did YC benefit from the fraud at the
| expense of the newer investors ?
| anovikov wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| What one? There's little risk of naming the startup.
| bboreham wrote:
| From @patio11 a week ago:
| https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| rvz wrote:
| Agreed.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It starts from the top
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| >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.
| DaedalusII wrote:
| 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
| redanddead wrote:
| waiting on the cluely scandal next
| Devasta wrote:
| 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?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 404 == "removed from Y combinator"
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Meaning what?
| your_challenger wrote:
| I mean this is not the first time a YC company has stolen an open
| source project.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| The only good delve is the go debugger
| greenchair wrote:
| streissand effect in action, surprised this thread was allowed to
| live.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I haven't seen that and all the reports I got were under nda
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 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.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| What evidence did you collect that was not automated?
| yearolinuxdsktp wrote:
| A startup might have trouble with, and might not have
| enough automation for:
|
| - proving churned customer data was deleted completely and
| within the agreed-on period of time - - not
| enough to have a record - - auditors will ask
| you to prove the data is not laying around
|
| - proving all changes shipped are reviewed and linked to
| tracked work
|
| - proving branch rules are set to require PRs and prohibit
| changing history on release/trunk branches
| - - auditors will ask you to show live that you can't
| approve your own changes - - some auditors might
| ask you for an audit log to prove no unexpected branch rule
| changes occurred --- depending on the observation period,
| you might have to build your own audit log capture to prove
| this
|
| - proving you performed penetration testing
|
| - proving you performed a disaster recovery test in
| production with the frequency you claim (e.g. annually)
| - - running a DR test might be more than a few hours
| depending on your data size and level of infra automation
| - - this is often something that startups are ready to
| execute, but don't invest a lot of time automating
|
| - proving you have and enforce full-disk-encryption on all
| your employee laptops - - this is automated
| with MDM but a startup might not be running an MDM yet
|
| - proving you are rotating credentials on the frequency you
| ascribe to in your policies - - automated
| reports are available for some credentials, e.g. AWS keys,
| but takes more work for smaller vendors - - even
| with AWS, you might discover you forgot to rotate
| something, and it might be because it's non-trivial to
| execute
|
| - perform quarterly access reviews - - some
| systems are more difficult/time consuming to inspect
| against your employee and permissions list - -
| ideally this is automated, but often times at a startup,
| you might not have fully automated authorization and access
| control, such that when employees change teams or leave the
| company, that you get notified and don't miss it
|
| - proving that you act on performance or reliability alerts
| - - auditors will ask you to show live some examples of
| past alerts and that someone handled it - -
| auditors will often ask you to show live that these alerts
| are consistently configured for all your production system
| --- startups might not have the alerting and PagerDuty-like
| setup be fully automated (e.g. with Terraform)
| RIMR wrote:
| >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.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Here is Delve's defence to the whistleblower
|
| https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims
| joenot443 wrote:
| 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.
| whoknowsidont wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sadly looks like another example of "fake it till you make it" in
| highly regulated industries is playing with fire.
| fredgrott wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405
| dataspencer wrote:
| They delved too greedily and too deep.
| xdavidliu wrote:
| > 404 not found
|
| "delve removed from y combinator" removed from y combinator
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