9 ms·

This fabrication is by the folks behind LendEDU (YC W16).

by eugene_chen 8y ago

kenning 8y ago
woof
- ryan-allen 8y ago
  woof
kolpa 8y ago
Dishonesty "when it doesn't matter, in the eye of the investor" is a YC requirement: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html """ Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. """
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  There's a big difference between knowing when to break the rules, which Altman and Graham advocate, and being commercially dishonest like LendEDU has been. Even putting aside the ethics, there are industries you fuck around with rules in and then there's consumer lending.
  - Avshalom 8y ago
    There isn't really, or at least the difference is almost always argued/decided post hoc.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > the difference is almost always argued/decided post hoc At the margin, yes. LendEDU's behaviour, here, is far from the margin. One element is in choosing sensible battles. Uber and Airbnb fought municipal governments. Zenefits got creative with states and Theranos with the federal government. They (EDIT: Uber and Airbnb) each also fought their battles in a way that made (a) investors money and (b) consumers happy. In this case, the ones being deceived are the consumers. In the process of being sold lending products. That's stupid, desperate rule breaking.
      - cowsandmilk 8y ago
        How did Theranos do either of those? Their faked results gave health scares to many, and didn’t detect health problems in others. That isn’t making consumers happy. And I’m pretty sure Theranos’s investors have not made money.
        JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > How did Theranos do either of those? Pardon me, I mis-spoke. I was using Uber and Airbnb as (limited) examples of productive rule breaking and Zenefits and Theranos as counter-examples of imprudent illegality.
        ZeroGravitas 8y ago
        Uber have a string of other issues, from threatening journalists to writing software to evade law enforcement oversight, which places them in the bad example bucket.
        xg15 8y ago
        The "productive rule-making" of those two companies contributed to a worldwide rent crisis (Airbnb) and attempted to undermine labor laws (Uber). Local governments and labor organisations are still busy dealing with those consequences. If you "break the rules that don't matter" and leave the resulting mess for others to solve, that's not "naughty", it's just plain amoral.
- badcede 8y ago
  That's not a requirement, what it describes is not dishonesty, nor does it use that word. Nor does the phrase you put in quotation marks appear in the essay. Who's being dishonest here?
  - blackbagboys 8y ago
    In practice, this is what breaking 'rules that don't matter' looks like - you break the rules that don't matter to you, but those rules were probably put in place for a reason.
    - hailk 8y ago
      > but those rules were probably put in place for a reason. Assuming that lawmaking systems are altruistic and incapable of folly. In practice that doesn't work
      - blackbagboys 8y ago
        Rules and regulations require trade-offs. The YC types that run these companies notice the inefficiencies resulting from these trade-offs, recognize the opportunity to profit from them and arrogantly assume they have the right to ignore any rule they can't immediately see the harm in breaking; either because they aren't / wouldn't be affected by the negative externalities the rule is mitigating, so they don't understand why it exists, or, more often than not, because they don't really give a fuck about anything other than making money and being big-time shot-callers.
        icebraining 8y ago
        You're still assuming that all rules are mitigating negative externalities. I find your faith in government amazing, and I'm no libertarian.
        blackbagboys 8y ago
        Can you offer any recent examples of start-ups routinely breaking the law where nearly everyone is in agreement that their law-breaking has no negative social effect? Again, all rules involve trade-offs. It may be that those trade-offs or preferentially unfairly benefit some special interest group or otherwise aren't worth the cost to society, but it's not up to profit-seeking hucksters to unilaterally make that determination.
- taneq 8y ago
  This seems like a highly irresponsible thing for someone like PG to be saying. He's held up as a leader of and role model for the startup community. It's far too ambiguous and, while I believe he meant "don't be limited by tradition or get caught up in red tape", it's far too easy to mis-read as "the ends justify the means" and could be used by startup founders to justify all manner of shady behaviour.
  - ShabbosGoy 8y ago
    The thing is, neither position is very useful (in the sense of information gain) as startup advice. You could break the rules and get killed by regulation, or you could play it safe and never have a chance to innovate. Concepts like validated learning and kaizen are more useful IMO.
- needToSay 8y ago
  Pg is known racist cunt, a nigger
- himom 8y ago
  It’s a moral imperative to be dishonest to a woman if pumps her state, but it’s immoral to con a grandmother out of her life savings based on a false premise like “my research will cure all cancers.”
  - kbenson 8y ago
    > It’s a moral imperative to be dishonest to a woman if pumps her state It's not. And if you do this, you're likely doing it at least as much for yourself and the increase in social capital you are afforded for playing along as you are to actually make the other person feel better. The truly honest person or the person that really was just looking to help the other the most would probably look for a middle ground where more truth was used, while possibly attempting to minimize pain. This doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this), but at least own up to "pumping her state" because you get benefits for being the one that did the "pumping".
    - icebraining 8y ago
      It's interesting how your post is essentially agreeing with the parent poster ("doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this)"), while lambasting them for some presumed selfish motivation of the act, which you have no way of knowing.
      - kbenson 8y ago
        I'm simply pointing out it's not a moral imperative, and the sexism I inferred (correctly or not) should be offset at least by the knowledge of what you're getting out of it. That is, the lambasting is purely about paying more attention to the transactional nature of these things, instead of viewing them as a matter of someone gives, and someone takes. The "doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this)" portion is mainly about societal transactions in general. If you stop, you'll be ostracized unless you have enough capital of one form or another that it doesn't matter.
  - circlefavshape 8y ago
    "pump her state" What on earth does that mean?
gnicholas 8y ago
If this is true, how is it not the top comment? Or at least higher up? Seems like it is one of the most relevant pieces of info for a HN reader.
- adjkant 8y ago
  This is a great additional article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-spokesman-was-a-fake.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-spok... This seems 100% true.
urda 8y ago
How is this not higher up? How has YC not responded yet? This is a pretty serious situation.
- Animats 8y ago
  Fake news, financed by YCombinator. For real. Who will believe a YC company spokesperson now?

This fabrication is by the folks behind LendEDU (YC W16).

kenning 8y ago

woof

ryan-allen 8y ago
woof

kolpa 8y ago

Dishonesty "when it doesn't matter, in the eye of the investor" is a YC requirement: http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html """ Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. Sam Altman of Loopt is one of the most successful alumni, so we asked him what question we could put on the Y Combinator application that would help us discover more people like him. He said to ask about a time when they'd hacked something to their advantage—hacked in the sense of beating the system, not breaking into computers. It has become one of the questions we pay most attention to when judging applications. """

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
There's a big difference between knowing when to break the rules, which Altman and Graham advocate, and being commercially dishonest like LendEDU has been. Even putting aside the ethics, there are industries you fuck around with rules in and then there's consumer lending.
- Avshalom 8y ago
  There isn't really, or at least the difference is almost always argued/decided post hoc.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > the difference is almost always argued/decided post hoc At the margin, yes. LendEDU's behaviour, here, is far from the margin. One element is in choosing sensible battles. Uber and Airbnb fought municipal governments. Zenefits got creative with states and Theranos with the federal government. They (EDIT: Uber and Airbnb) each also fought their battles in a way that made (a) investors money and (b) consumers happy. In this case, the ones being deceived are the consumers. In the process of being sold lending products. That's stupid, desperate rule breaking.
    - cowsandmilk 8y ago
      How did Theranos do either of those? Their faked results gave health scares to many, and didn’t detect health problems in others. That isn’t making consumers happy. And I’m pretty sure Theranos’s investors have not made money.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > How did Theranos do either of those? Pardon me, I mis-spoke. I was using Uber and Airbnb as (limited) examples of productive rule breaking and Zenefits and Theranos as counter-examples of imprudent illegality.
        ZeroGravitas 8y ago
        Uber have a string of other issues, from threatening journalists to writing software to evade law enforcement oversight, which places them in the bad example bucket.
        xg15 8y ago
        The "productive rule-making" of those two companies contributed to a worldwide rent crisis (Airbnb) and attempted to undermine labor laws (Uber). Local governments and labor organisations are still busy dealing with those consequences. If you "break the rules that don't matter" and leave the resulting mess for others to solve, that's not "naughty", it's just plain amoral.
badcede 8y ago
That's not a requirement, what it describes is not dishonesty, nor does it use that word. Nor does the phrase you put in quotation marks appear in the essay. Who's being dishonest here?
- blackbagboys 8y ago
  In practice, this is what breaking 'rules that don't matter' looks like - you break the rules that don't matter to you, but those rules were probably put in place for a reason.
  - hailk 8y ago
    > but those rules were probably put in place for a reason. Assuming that lawmaking systems are altruistic and incapable of folly. In practice that doesn't work
    - blackbagboys 8y ago
      Rules and regulations require trade-offs. The YC types that run these companies notice the inefficiencies resulting from these trade-offs, recognize the opportunity to profit from them and arrogantly assume they have the right to ignore any rule they can't immediately see the harm in breaking; either because they aren't / wouldn't be affected by the negative externalities the rule is mitigating, so they don't understand why it exists, or, more often than not, because they don't really give a fuck about anything other than making money and being big-time shot-callers.
      - icebraining 8y ago
        You're still assuming that all rules are mitigating negative externalities. I find your faith in government amazing, and I'm no libertarian.
        blackbagboys 8y ago
        Can you offer any recent examples of start-ups routinely breaking the law where nearly everyone is in agreement that their law-breaking has no negative social effect? Again, all rules involve trade-offs. It may be that those trade-offs or preferentially unfairly benefit some special interest group or otherwise aren't worth the cost to society, but it's not up to profit-seeking hucksters to unilaterally make that determination.
taneq 8y ago
This seems like a highly irresponsible thing for someone like PG to be saying. He's held up as a leader of and role model for the startup community. It's far too ambiguous and, while I believe he meant "don't be limited by tradition or get caught up in red tape", it's far too easy to mis-read as "the ends justify the means" and could be used by startup founders to justify all manner of shady behaviour.
- ShabbosGoy 8y ago
  The thing is, neither position is very useful (in the sense of information gain) as startup advice. You could break the rules and get killed by regulation, or you could play it safe and never have a chance to innovate. Concepts like validated learning and kaizen are more useful IMO.
needToSay 8y ago
Pg is known racist cunt, a nigger
himom 8y ago
It’s a moral imperative to be dishonest to a woman if pumps her state, but it’s immoral to con a grandmother out of her life savings based on a false premise like “my research will cure all cancers.”
- kbenson 8y ago
  > It’s a moral imperative to be dishonest to a woman if pumps her state It's not. And if you do this, you're likely doing it at least as much for yourself and the increase in social capital you are afforded for playing along as you are to actually make the other person feel better. The truly honest person or the person that really was just looking to help the other the most would probably look for a middle ground where more truth was used, while possibly attempting to minimize pain. This doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this), but at least own up to "pumping her state" because you get benefits for being the one that did the "pumping".
  - icebraining 8y ago
    It's interesting how your post is essentially agreeing with the parent poster ("doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this)"), while lambasting them for some presumed selfish motivation of the act, which you have no way of knowing.
    - kbenson 8y ago
      I'm simply pointing out it's not a moral imperative, and the sexism I inferred (correctly or not) should be offset at least by the knowledge of what you're getting out of it. That is, the lambasting is purely about paying more attention to the transactional nature of these things, instead of viewing them as a matter of someone gives, and someone takes. The "doesn't necessarily mean stop doing it (society runs on this)" portion is mainly about societal transactions in general. If you stop, you'll be ostracized unless you have enough capital of one form or another that it doesn't matter.
- circlefavshape 8y ago
  "pump her state" What on earth does that mean?

gnicholas 8y ago

If this is true, how is it not the top comment? Or at least higher up? Seems like it is one of the most relevant pieces of info for a HN reader.

adjkant 8y ago
This is a great additional article: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-spokesman-was-a-fake.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/25/lendedu-ceo-says-survey-spok... This seems 100% true.

urda 8y ago

How is this not higher up? How has YC not responded yet? This is a pretty serious situation.

Animats 8y ago
Fake news, financed by YCombinator. For real. Who will believe a YC company spokesperson now?