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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 s
by bilalq 6mo ago
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 6mo agoThere's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.
- borski 6mo 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 6mo 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.
- borski 6mo agoYeah, precisely.
- redanddead 6mo agothat's defrauding the customer this will literally get them in court
- TurdF3rguson 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoI 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 6mo agoThere 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.
- jrflowers 6mo agoThat’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.
- TurdF3rguson 6mo ago> 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.
- afavour 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoSure. 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 6mo agoThe 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 6mo ago> 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 6mo agoThe deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught
- sky2224 6mo agoCan you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very aware.
- bix6 6mo agoAirbnb, DoorDash
- antonvs 6mo agoUber
- el_io 6mo agoUber is not YC backed.
- antonvs 6mo agoOh my context window is apparently too small
- nerdsniper 6mo agoLyft, rather: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46969487
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- Pxtl 6mo agoThey 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 6mo ago> 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_the_biggest_accounting_scandals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals#List_of_th... )
- olalonde 6mo agoWorking around arguably dumb regulations and making your customers happy in the process is not the same as defrauding your customers.
- worik 6mo ago> Working around arguably dumb regulations... ...is breaking the law
- kaashif 6mo agoYes, 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 6mo agoAnd 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 6mo agoIs 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.
- kaashif 6mo agoYes, I just described the difference. It is clearly different because in one case you are not guilty of fraud. Being guilty of a crime plus fraud is obviously worse than just being guilty of the crime. Breaking the law by stealing a loaf of bread is obviously different to killing one million people but "both boil down to breaking the law" - I'm not sure that comment contains that much information.
- MangoCoffee 6mo agofake it until you make it? at some point this attitudes of Silicon Valley start up will back fire.
- HaloZero 6mo agoI 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.