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Comment by ersshh

2 months ago

Forbes 30u30 pipeline remains undefeated.

How did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.

12 comments

ersshh

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sebmellen  2 months ago

Trust me, you can lie and get away with it if you go through YC and dropped out of a top university. Garry Tan blocked me on X for pointing this out. It's a big club, and you ain't in it!

Fortunately, some of the old-YC spirit seems to be alive here on HN still.

  • jvwww  2 months ago

    They likely barely had a product when they applied to YC. It's more interesting as to why this wasn't discovered (if it is even true) when they were raising their Series A.

    • sebmellen  2 months ago

      Well that's what I'm saying. The problem is if you went through YCombinator there's very little diligence when raising your Series A. I've seen it happen for a couple of startups that I was tangentially involved in.

duped  2 months ago

Dishonesty is high signal for VC

Like no one characterizes it like that, but this is the same business where you can tell a story about hiring a bunch of college friends to pretend to be your employees so a client comes to your "office" and thinks you're a legitimate business. And instead of looking in horror at how casually you'll lie to get business it's seen as scrappy and whimsical.

  • cco  2 months ago

    I think they're fairly open about looking for this signal, "be naughty" is one of their core tenants, no?

  • jmuguy  2 months ago

    They probably saw good results with this back when everyone could take a piece of Craiglist's business and make a billion bucks. Now you're just left with the ethos of cheating your way to the top without a real business to attach it to.

rithdmc  2 months ago

> How did none of this come up during diligence?

The article states that, "Even though we knew we’d technically be lying about our security to anyone we sent these policies to for review ... we decided to adopt these policies because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite them all manually."

JoshuaDavid  2 months ago

FWIW I think the 30u30 to fraud pipeline is overstated. There are 600 people on the American Forbes 30u30 list every year (it's "30 under 30 each year in each of 20 categories"), with 20ish notable instances of fraud, so maybe a quarter percent of the people on the 30u30 list will later become famous for fraud.

  • MisterSandman  2 months ago

    I think the pipeline is not really about the 30u30 list as a whole, but about the cover of the magazine, which I feel has had a very high rate of fraud.