YC's Biggest Scandals
ycombinator.fyiYC 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.
There's something ironic about vibe-coding an anti-YC site. They're why OpenAI exists!
Ooof. Thats a statement.
OpenAI has their own fair share of critiques, I'd be careful lifting them up as a shining example.
Wait you mean the open ai nonprofit company that doesn't offer open models and is now for profit isn't a good example of a trustworthy company? What?
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.
>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.
He used to work at Palantir. You pretty much have to have shit moral views to be okay with that
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.
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.
If YC had a chance of being a "religion of sorts" it would have been about Paul Graham, that ship sailed a decade ago.
It apparently already is, just trying to say something marginally critical about YC will enrage the zealots of social mobility with their metaphorical pitchforks. But yeah, thinking back, it's not a religion, it's already a cult.
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?
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.
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...
Only a portion of these are "scandals", the rest are just usual startup failures.
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
Putting things that are clearly not scandals damages the credibility of this site and masks the actual scandals.
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.
9 mothers appears to do defense from drones which seems completely ethical. What is dystopian about that?
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.
is it in a rimworld mod
If it was, I'm pretty sure we could all agree it wouldn't be used against mechanoids.
Probably the worry that the jump from "we defend against slaughterbots" to "we built a better slaughterbot" is just around the corner
... so don't defend against the slaughterbots?
(I don't know anything about the company we're discussing here, but this is a weird premise.)
That means 18 year olds will get splattered. I'm not for that. The kids who die in the military are just kids, regardless of their job. They aren't personally responsible for the shit orders they get.
The problem is that anything made for defense is almost inherently useful for offense, and the US is not the most trustworthy government right now. It's, sadly, not inconceivable that an automatic turret mounted shotgun could be put to use against human people across the globe, or even human people who are citizens of the US.
Sorry, so what's your position here? Are you for or against people working on anti-combat-drone technology?
The comment you're replying to is pointing out the oddity of being anti-good-thing because somebody might one day invert their company's mission entirely.
I missed the sarcasm in OP's post, I guess. I read it as a flat comment to not have the technology.
I don’t understand this whole idea that we are going to not having drone and autonomous weapons. Ukraine is being fought with drones. It’s the first drone war. 300k people have died in the Russian side alone. 1 million casualties.
How do you suggest we stop the lessons from the first major drone war from spreading? With hope? Prayers? The terrifying thing about it is - the US is actually already behind on this technology, China can build 1000x more drones than the whole West.
Many civilians have seen how drones were used in Lebanon and Gaza, and hesitate to trust Western leadership with that type of kill chain.
It's a borderline certainty that 9 Mothers employees will eventually contribute to the death of an innocent protestor or journalist that opposed the state.
Would you rather everyone except NATO had these capabilities?
I'm saying it is a slippery slope. Look at General Atomics, whose employees are accomplices to war crimes.
"My drones are only for killing terrorists" is always the rose-tinted glasses used to frame murder. The pushback is 100% expected.
you’re referring to this? https://wilpfus.org/merchants-of-death-war-crimes-tribunal-a...
Dude we haven’t even solved human manual slaughter in schools so surely adding auto shotguns to schools is a no brainer after the first incident.
Terminal society this is.
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.
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.
I mean killer drones are absolutely dystopian but they already exist. This critique is like the common Bay Area tactic of pretending homeless don't exist because they are inconvenient.
There is tons of offensive capability companies YC has invested in they seem like a more appropriate target. I feel like most people want there to be protection from drone swarms.
Yeah, but the whole thing is still dystopian. If there was a company A planting mind controlling chips in your mind, and company B selling a service to destroy those chips… neither company makes the whole thing less dystopian.
In this situation company B is clearly making the world less dystopian then.
But anyway - the parent comment is upset about YC investing in a defense company that isn’t doing offensive systems because they find the idea that dystopian weapon exist at all uncomfortable. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones -- including mitigating their effect -- is therefore dystopian in itself, even if it is combating that dystopia? Sort of a tarring by contextual environment? I suppose by that reasoning a socialist is a capitalist because even though they fight capitalism they live in a capitalist society.
I'm not really following.
“It sounds like you feel that autonomous killer drones are a dystopia, and that anything related to the drones“
Yes!!! What do you think a dystopia is? The entire world of 1984 is a dystopia. Just cause there’s a company making money to “combat” that dystopia doesn’t make the thing any less dystopian.
That sounds like a fallacy of composition to me.
That some element of the world is dystopian means the world is therefore dystopian.
And if the world is dystopian, then every element of it is dystopian: no element of the world is not dystopian.
It's an interesting "poison the well" type of argument, but it also means that if one accepts that all of human history has had dystopian elements (chemical weapons, slavery, feudalism, etc etc), that therefore the world has always been dystopian, and that then therefore everything in the world has also always been dystopian. And you've created a label that includes everything that has ever existed and excludes none of it, which is meaningless.
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."
"Official archive" it says.
Seems unofficial. Actually, the domain name is probably a trademark violation.
This is one of the most annoying click-baity mechanism I have ever come across.
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...
If all that happened to your startup is that you couldn't get traction or compete, that's not a scandal.
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.
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
I like that too. And by "like", I mean "absolutely can't stand." Made the site unusable for me.
LLM-designed sites like this are always so pompous. The obnoxious format does a disservice to what you’re trying to present.
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.
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?
fwiw - i think the design looks good.
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.
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.
I do agree. The Gary Tan takedown page is equally sensational, kinda for no reason? There’s a lot to rag on with Gary, but this webpage makes it seemed like he killed a guy or something.
it will be fine if we all take ivermectin
Yeah, we know how the economy would look like if the society considers business failures "scandals."
We need more ambitious risk taking and more people "in the arena".
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...
This is definitely made by some bitter YC reject. Amazing the vitriol of those types
The scandals/year page has a little more umph to it than the main page https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline
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.
Between every surface being a link and the needless redacted text flourishes, this site is kind of awful to navigate on mobile.
Beyond awful, and it's LLM slop.
- 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
If you do mass investment then it's almost impossible for everything to go perfectly.
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
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.
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.
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!
to be fair, compared to what I have seen go on in finance, government, and media, these scandals are endearingly tame.
At least make the Ripping post about Deel…
I looked — 99% of them involve AI
You can violate the MIT license by forgetting to preserve it. Apparently this was the case here.
So the damage here really is literally "MIT license violated".
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.
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?
meh. someone butt-hurt from rejection would make something like this.
In the US, it's not a real scandal unless the scammers can cash out the story rights to Netflix
No the biggest ycombinator scandal is Scam Altman
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.
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.
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).
I genuinely don't understand what you find depressing about it. That's what I'm saying. It's not hard to make a case for why it is; you just have to actually do it, unlike what this page is trying to do.
(And, side note, a16z is definitely not the status quo ante of YC.)
What am I supposed to say to that? If you think the argument that you believe I’m trying to make (which I couldn’t guess if you put a gun to my head) would be easy to make, and that I’m just not doing so, then you’d be better off engaging in discourse with an imaginary but more competent interlocutor.
You said "it’s almost impossible to sustain a criticism of the accelerator because they make so many little investments." I responded, no, it isn't. You claim YC is "rotten to the core", so it should be easy to make some colorable critical argument. You're reacting as if that's a baffling request, which, you have a right to be baffled, but your bafflement works against your original argument.
Nobody's reading this but you and me at this point, so we might as well call it here.
Selling shovels baby! For a bonus move, create spatiotemporal nexus[0] for sheep-like investors to baaa together.
[0] demo day
Those are ONLY the public ones, I wonder how much more is swiped under the rug