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Comment by reactordev

6 months ago

I would be running for the hills if I were YC. This is the kind of attitude that ends up in lawsuits.

27 comments

reactordev

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Nextgrid  6 months ago

YC is the company that (to this day!) has Yotta - a borderline scam to take advantage of financially-illiterate people - on their website after the whole thing has completely blown up and most customers lost their savings: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta

Oh, and now they have their own rendition of the "Aviator" game often advertised by unregulated Eastern-European online casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/. You can't make this shit up!

I wrote off YC after this. Maybe early on it was a mark of quality and good due-diligence, but now I'd argue it's the outright opposite - if it's funded by YC, buyer beware.

  • mathiaspoint  6 months ago

    Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients. They make money, they're not a charity. Quality only matters insofar as it drives sales and doesn't create liabilities.

    • aleph_minus_one  6 months ago

      > Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients.

      They rather sell themselves as early-stage startup incubator.

      See https://www.ycombinator.com/

      "We help founders at their earliest stages regardless of their age."

      "We improve the success rate of our startups."

      "We give startups a huge fundraising advantage."

      and https://www.ycombinator.com/about

      "The overall goal of YC is to help startups really take off. They arrive at YC at all different stages. Some haven’t even started working yet, and others have been launched for a year or more. But whatever stage a startup is at when they arrive, our goal is to help them to be in dramatically better shape 3 months later."

      2 replies →

    • Nextgrid  6 months ago

      > doesn't create liabilities

      But you'd think that would include doing sufficient due-diligence and steering their companies away from scams or unethical activities no?

gryfft  6 months ago

I thought tech companies were supposed to move fast and break stuff.

  • whilenot-dev  6 months ago

    I think that phrase was coined in an era when the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up. It caught up somewhat, but obviously there's still much leeway for improvement. Break all the wrong habits, rigid conventions and old traditions you want, just play along with the governing laws.

    • Nextgrid  6 months ago

      > the tech sector moved so fast that the prevailing law couldn't keep up

      That's an extremely charitable interpretation.

      A more realistic interpretation is that the law was up to date, just that enforcement couldn't keep up because 1) nobody expected such a brazen level of breaking the law and 2) justice doesn't really apply when you have enough capital.

      5 replies →

    • avisser  6 months ago

      IMO that phrase came about when old tech companies (the IBMs of the world) had

        * waterfall
  * design up-front
  * source control systems that
    * defaulted all files to read-only
    * required you to "check-out" files, potentially locking other devs out from editing them [1]
  * probably didn't have unit tests so "deploying to prod" meant "doing a full QA pass, done by human beings"
  * there was no CI/CD (We had "Build Engineers")

      In this context, pushing a change to SVN/git/hg, having tests run automatically, then having CI/CD push new code to production, all as a side-effect of one engineer push a button? That was moving fast, and occasionally, breaking the whole website. But we got better tests, better CI/CD, metrics, green/blue, ... We learned it was unequivocally better than the old way.

      [1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...

  • ksec  6 months ago

    > I thought tech companies were supposed to move fast and break stuff.

    This mentality is relatively new. Or more like invented by Facebook and got marketed the heck by PRs and marketing firms.

    And now we have people who code before they think.

    • gryfft  6 months ago

      > And now we have people who code before they think.

      Thanks to coding agents, now we can have engineers who do neither

weird-eye-issue  6 months ago

So what?

YC doesn't invest that much into any individual company and that's the most they would lose in the worst case scenario. So even if they behave badly they have a capped risk but unlimited upside

They're far more likely to just fail for other reasons, lawsuit is not going to happen regardless

immibis  6 months ago

Doesn't matter if you already made your money. And YC-funded companies are not YC. This is how business has always worked since the dawn of capitalism. All hugely successful businesses do illegal things.