YC's Biggest Scandals

93•laserduck•4h ago

Comments

danabramov•1h ago

LLM-designed sites like this are always so pompous. The obnoxious format does a disservice to what you’re trying to present.

williamtrask•1h ago

fwiw - i think the design looks good.

danabramov•58m ago

I 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•51m ago

LLMs 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.

eiiot•28m ago

Sometimes 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.

tibbar•58m ago

Scrolling 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•54m ago

If all that happened to your startup is that you couldn't get traction or compete, that's not a scandal.

asadm•54m ago

meh. someone butt-hurt from rejection would make something like this.

rohitpaulk•53m ago

Only a portion of these are "scandals", the rest are just usual startup failures.

jnovek•28m ago

As 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•21m ago

9 mothers appears to do defense from drones which seems completely ethical. What is dystopian about that?

EGreg•49m ago

I looked — 99% of them involve AI

theobeers•45m ago

While 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•38m ago

Selling shovels baby! For a bonus move, create spatiotemporal nexus[0] for sheep-like investors to baaa together.

[0] demo day

tptacek•15m ago

No, 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.

hotfixguru•41m ago

> DAMAGE: MIT LICENSE VIOLATED

.. what?

https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

whiplash451•35m ago

You can violate the MIT license by forgetting to preserve it. Apparently this was the case here.

tptacek•17m ago

So the damage here really is literally "MIT license violated".

yieldcrv•29m ago

web2isgoinggreat

fillskills•25m ago

Some 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•13m ago

A 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...

LewisVerstappen•24m ago

Putting things that are clearly not scandals damages the credibility of this site and masks the actual scandals.

nextos•24m ago

uBiome is probably the biggest one: https://ycombinator.fyi/exhibit/ubiome

A shame, because the idea was good. And, with a bit of patience, it was doable.

andrewljohnson•22m ago

Almost none of these seem like scams.

This list reminded me of Glowing Plant though. I backed that Kickstarter and was really hoping that one worked out. They pivoted to extra smelly plants before failing IIRC.

tptacek•21m ago

YC 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•7m ago

There's something ironic about vibe-coding an anti-YC site. They're why OpenAI exists!

wewewedxfgdf•18m ago

If you do mass investment then it's almost impossible for everything to go perfectly.

thekevan•15m ago

I 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.

adrianwaj•12m 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"

- don't limit to YC

raincole•11m ago

Yeah, we know how the economy would look like if the society considers business failures "scandals."

off-and-on•6m ago

This is one of the most annoying click-baity mechanism I have ever come across.

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YC's Biggest Scandals

Comments

Hardware Attestation as Monopoly Enabler

Incident Report: CVE-2024-YIKES

Local AI needs to be the norm

Traces Of Humanity

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

Lakebase architecture delivers faster Postgres writes

I returned to AWS and was reminded why I left

Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider

Louis Rossmann offers to pay legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer

What's a mathematician to do? (2010)

YC's Biggest Scandals

Idempotency is easy until the second request is different

Show HN: An index of indie web/blog indexes

Eight More 8-bit Era Microprocessors (2024)

Shunting-Yard Animation

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

The One Dollar Counterfeiter

Show HN: Building a web server in assembly to give my life (a lack of) meaning

Think Linear Algebra (2023)

Task Paralysis and AI

Walking slower? Your ears, not your knees, might be the problem

Spain has become one of Europe’s cheapest power markets

Casio S100X Japanese Lacquer Edition (JP Page Only)

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring

The River Otter's Remarkable Comeback

GitHub is sinking

I’ve banned query strings

The locals don't know

We see something that works, and then we understand it

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