8 ms·
Delve removed from Y Combinator
- mememememememo 7mo ago404s for me
- OptionOfT 7mo agoThat's the point.
- mememememememo 7mo agoSorry! I thought it would be announcement. And it was subsequently taken down due to the HN interest.
- bcraven 7mo agoI think that's the point - they have been removed.
- gnabgib 7mo agoRelated: 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615434
- whilenot-dev 7mo agoMore likely related: Delve – Fake Compliance as a Service (836 points, 14 days ago, 323 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47444319
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- philip1209 7mo agoCan they keep their CISO out of jail?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- jaredsohn 7mo agoInterestingly, they show up in the company list. When you click the link it returns 404. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=delve https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=delve
- whilenot-dev 7mo agoProbably just a means of updating the Algolia index.
- cyrusradfar 7mo agoRelated from an hour earlier: Delve removed from YC website [archive.org] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405
- ChrisArchitect 7mo agoan example of why to avoid archive links in submissions (save 'em for comments), because the source link here will win.
- cyrusradfar 7mo agoThanks! felt crazy linking to a 404 ;) live and learn
- carabiner 7mo agoBye-bye tweet from founder: https://x.com/kocalars/status/2040262537166618887 https://x.com/kocalars/status/2040262537166618887 Notably YC hasn't wished them a farewell.
- philip1209 7mo agoAt least they put a ladder up that tree
- GaryBluto 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoBecause if they had the money to be honest about it they'd not be a start-up!
- shepherdjerred 7mo agoOracle, right?
- nurettin 7mo agoStriving to make the world a better place for us. Is what is implied.
- minimaxir 7mo agoIt 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso Saying it in 2026 just makes it sound more insincere than usual.
- mikert89 7mo agofunny thing about this tweet is the founder still couldnt stop herself from name dropping MIT
- rvz 7mo agoThere is no saving Delve after this. The only next product launch is an investigation.
- bilalq 7mo agoWhile 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 7mo agoThere's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.
- borski 7mo agoIgnoring 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 7mo agoLet 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.
- 7mo ago
- thoughthadlogin 7mo agoSure, 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 7mo agoYou’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 7mo agozenefits 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 7mo agocan't believe I almost spent 10 grand on this company a week before they blew up.
- everfrustrated 7mo agoThe two founders being early 20's with no background in compliance wasn't a red-flag?
- mememememememo 7mo agoPlus the 30u30 is now a signal.
- baggy_trough 7mo agoI didn't know about them or think to check into the founders.
- jacquesm 7mo ago"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 7mo agoWhile 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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo agoFraud as a service! The next big thing!!!
- cjbgkagh 7mo agoPresidential pardon insurance, like audit insurance but for breaking laws instead of filing taxes.
- maxbond 7mo agoI'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-service 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.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- fontain 7mo agoYC 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 7mo ago> 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 7mo ago
- sandeepkd 7mo agoIts 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 7mo agoCurious - in this situation, does delve return money to YC? Or YC simply writes off the investment
- rekttrader 7mo agoYa 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 7mo agoBased on?
- argee 7mo agoNeither. "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 7mo agoThe 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 7mo agoSomeone 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 https://x.com/___4o____/status/2040271468874076380 I have no direct knowledge of the accuracy of any of this. This is not my account.
- minimaxir 7mo agoThe text implies it’s more due to the alleged license violation of a YC startup’s IP than the alleged fraud.
- kstrauser 7mo agoReally? 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 7mo agoIt is very clearly the fake audits.
- blast 7mo agofriday news dump tho
- hbbio 7mo agoThis other profile is still up: https://www.forbes.com/profile/delve/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/delve/ 30U30 never ceases to amaze.
- avaer 7mo agoI 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 7mo agoNot sure it's exclusively a U30 thing. When it comes to grift and fraud, a well known 79 year old comes to mind.
- pdpi 7mo agoI'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 7mo agoWho rapes and bombs schools full of U18 children.
- Ekaros 7mo agoThat is just what the O18 want in there. Last one also got their role because that. Doing it in public on camera.
- DonHopkins 7mo agoSpeak 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.
- nfw2 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoThey'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 7mo agoIt'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 7mo agoMaybe someone should start an auditing company for YC... oh
- financetechbro 7mo agoThere is too much friction in the audit process… someone needs to solve this
- worik 7mo agoIt can work under the umbrella of some sort of coordinator That looks like what happened here.
- redanddead 7mo agothis 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..
- phplovesong 7mo agoClassic. 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 7mo agoit 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 7mo agoTurns out you can't "fake it til you make it" with SOC2 compliance.
- getverdict 7mo ago[dead]
- jrflowers 7mo agoOn 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 7mo agoNot surprising that Cluely is using them.. they were probably like, what we're compliant, sure if you say so
- SanjayMehta 7mo agoOrwellian memory hole engaged.
- Bratmon 7mo agoFairly 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 7mo agoAn I the only one who has 404 not found when I click the link
- _morgs_ 7mo agoThat's the point...
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- edm0nd 7mo agowhich means it was removed...which is the entire point of the post bruv
- mememememememo 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoGreat 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_devops_to_do_at_home_challenge_is_it_scam/ 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 7mo agoThat reddit thread is brutal, knowingly making interviewees pay hundreds of dollars to interview in this economy is messed up.
- redanddead 7mo agoDamn. Deepmind, Stanford, Berkeley, only to end up doc parsing for Applied Systems/Ezlynx, and scamming redditors
- anovikov 7mo agoInteresting! 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 7mo agoAs early investors, did YC benefit from the fraud at the expense of the newer investors ?
- anovikov 7mo agoNope. 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 7mo agoWhat one? There’s little risk of naming the startup.
- bboreham 7mo agoFrom @patio11 a week ago: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-compliance-theatre/ https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...
- jazzpush2 7mo agoPretty 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 7mo agoYC 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 7mo agoAgreed.
- embedding-shape 7mo agoYeah, 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 7mo agoIt starts from the top
- whoknowsidont 7mo ago>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.
- redanddead 7mo agowaiting on the cluely scandal next
- dfordp11 7mo ago[dead]
- mt18 7mo ago[dead]
- Devasta 7mo agoYC 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?
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 7mo agoThe 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 7mo ago404 == "removed from Y combinator"
- thaumasiotes 7mo agoMeaning what?
- your_challenger 7mo agoI mean this is not the first time a YC company has stolen an open source project.
- EdwardDiego 7mo agoBut 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-anonymous-attacks https://delve.co/blog/delve-sets-the-record-straight-on-anon...
- dankobgd 7mo agoThe only good delve is the go debugger
- greenchair 7mo agostreissand effect in action, surprised this thread was allowed to live.
- mgraczyk 7mo agoHaving 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 7mo agoThere 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 7mo agoI haven't seen that and all the reports I got were under nda
- ramraj07 7mo agoWe 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 7mo agoWhat evidence did you collect that was not automated?
- yearolinuxdsktp 7mo agoA 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)
- penguoir 7mo agoHere is Delve’s defence to the whistleblower https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims
- joenot443 7mo agoWow, 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.
- ewuhic 7mo ago[dead]
- whoknowsidont 7mo agoThis 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 7mo agoSadly looks like another example of “fake it till you make it” in highly regulated industries is playing with fire.
- fredgrott 7mo agohmm, 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 7mo agoDuplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405
- bongripper 7mo ago[dead]
- dataspencer 7mo agoThey delved too greedily and too deep.
- xdavidliu 7mo ago> 404 not found "delve removed from y combinator" removed from y combinator
- jrflowers 7mo agoI like that this sets the precedent that if you want people on HN to believe that they’ve dropped any arbitrary company you just have to point to a convincing-looking url on the ycombinator domain and the 404 signals that you are both correct and following the rules.
- gina12231 6mo agoWe need a page to whistleblower dishonest startups. I know a startup where one of the cofounders is literally illegally working for it. We have people working in cafes getting into trouble but not start up cofounders raising tons of money. Seems so unfair.I am pretty sure the female in the husband-wife pair does not have authorization to work.