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YC's Biggest Scandals
- LewisVerstappen 5mo agoPutting things that are clearly not scandals damages the credibility of this site and masks the actual scandals.
- wewewedxfgdf 5mo agoIf you do mass investment then it's almost impossible for everything to go perfectly.
- danabramov 5mo agoLLM-designed sites like this are always so pompous. The obnoxious format does a disservice to what you’re trying to present.
- williamtrask 5mo agofwiw - i think the design looks good.
- danabramov 5mo agoI 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.
- tibbar 5mo agoLLMs 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.
- The_Blade 5mo agoit will be fine if we all take ivermectin
- AirMax98 5mo agoI 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.
- eiiot 5mo agoSometimes 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.
- Loughla 5mo agoLLM 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?
- tibbar 5mo agoScrolling down, a bunch of these seem to just be "the startup shut down after getting customers", which doesn't seem particularly scandalous to me?
- frakkingcylons 5mo agoIf all that happened to your startup is that you couldn't get traction or compete, that's not a scandal.
- asadm 5mo agomeh. someone butt-hurt from rejection would make something like this.
- rohitpaulk 5mo agoOnly a portion of these are "scandals", the rest are just usual startup failures.
- EGreg 5mo agoI looked — 99% of them involve AI
- theobeers 5mo agoWhile 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.
- contingencies 5mo agoSelling shovels baby! For a bonus move, create spatiotemporal nexus[0] for sheep-like investors to baaa together. [0] demo day
- sieabahlpark 5mo ago[dead]
- tptacek 5mo agoNo, 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.
- theobeers 5mo agoMr. 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).
- tptacek 5mo ago
- hotfixguru 5mo ago> DAMAGE: MIT LICENSE VIOLATED .. what? https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/ https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/
- whiplash451 5mo agoYou can violate the MIT license by forgetting to preserve it. Apparently this was the case here.
- tptacek 5mo agoSo the damage here really is literally "MIT license violated".
- yieldcrv 5mo ago[flagged]
- jnovek 5mo agoAs 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.
- ianm218 5mo ago9 mothers appears to do defense from drones which seems completely ethical. What is dystopian about that?
- levocardia 5mo agoProbably the worry that the jump from "we defend against slaughterbots" to "we built a better slaughterbot" is just around the corner
- tptacek 5mo ago... 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.)
- Loughla 5mo agoThat 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.
- kranke155 5mo agoI 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.
- fillskills 5mo agoSome 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.
- argee 5mo agoA 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-defense https://www.rippling.com/blog/deel-admits-it-paid-spy-in-new...
- nextos 5mo agouBiome is probably the biggest one: https://ycombinator.fyi/exhibit/ubiome https://ycombinator.fyi/exhibit/ubiome A shame, because the idea was good. And, with a bit of patience, it was doable.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- thekevan 5mo agoI 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.
- tptacek 5mo agoYC 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.
- dadrian 5mo agoThere's something ironic about vibe-coding an anti-YC site. They're why OpenAI exists!
- bigyabai 5mo agoOpenAI has their own fair share of critiques, I'd be careful lifting them up as a shining example.
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoWait 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?
- TiredOfLife 5mo agohttps://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-oss-120b https://developers.openai.com/api/docs/models/gpt-oss-120b
- 2ndorderthought 5mo agoAugust 2025.
- wheelerwj 5mo agoOoof. Thats a statement.
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
- adrianwaj 5mo ago- 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
- raincole 5mo agoYeah, we know how the economy would look like if the society considers business failures "scandals."
- jackfischer 5mo agoWe need more ambitious risk taking and more people "in the arena".
- off-and-on 5mo agoThis is one of the most annoying click-baity mechanism I have ever come across.
- dang 5mo agoOf 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&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- orliesaurus 5mo agoThose are ONLY the public ones, I wonder how much more is swiped under the rug
- datagram 5mo agoBetween every surface being a link and the needless redacted text flourishes, this site is kind of awful to navigate on mobile.
- toxik 5mo agoBeyond awful, and it's LLM slop.
- andrewrn 5mo agoThis is definitely made by some bitter YC reject. Amazing the vitriol of those types
- islewis 5mo agoPretty 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
- super256 5mo agohttp://30u30.fyi http://30u30.fyi http://termsofservice.fyi http://termsofservice.fyi http://ycombinator.fyi http://ycombinator.fyi All their sites are similar slop.
- corobo 5mo agoI 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
- seattle_spring 5mo agoI like that too. And by "like", I mean "absolutely can't stand." Made the site unusable for me.
- dangoodmanUT 5mo agoSeems 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...
- austin-cheney 5mo agoMost 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.
- williamtrask 5mo agoThe scandals/year page has a little more umph to it than the main page https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline https://ycombinator.fyi/timeline
- nubg 5mo agoCool 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.
- unreal37 5mo ago"Official archive" it says. Seems unofficial. Actually, the domain name is probably a trademark violation.
- throw03172019 5mo agoAt least make the Ripping post about Deel…
- trunkiedozer 5mo agoNo the biggest ycombinator scandal is Scam Altman
- hedayet 5mo agoIn the US, it's not a real scandal unless the scammers can cash out the story rights to Netflix
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- wg0 5mo agoI 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?
- moomoo11 5mo agoagree 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
- motohagiography 5mo agoto be fair, compared to what I have seen go on in finance, government, and media, these scandals are endearingly tame.
- mikesabat 5mo agoI'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.
- globalnode 5mo agonot 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!