| ▲ | bilalq 3 hours 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. |
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| ▲ | olalonde an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Working around arguably dumb regulations and making your customers happy in the process is not the same as defrauding your customers. |
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| ▲ | arionhardison 28 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | While I agree with you, I also find myself wondering who draws the line. Given the current political atmosphere and its increasingly fluid relationship with "truth," I have to consider that the line for others may not be where it is for me — especially given the nuance buried in the details of many B2B deals. Their value prop had to be strong enough to get past YC, past the other founders in the batch, past due diligence. Given that, I'm no longer comfortable casting "fraud" as a clean binary. To be clear — I do genuinely believe they are a fraudulent company that lied and deserved to be removed. But introspectively, I have to sit with the fact that the space between "working around dumb regulations" and "outright fraud" is murkier than we'd like to admit. | |
| ▲ | worik 34 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Working around arguably dumb regulations... ...is breaking the law |
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| ▲ | borski 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Ignoring 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. |
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| ▲ | bilalq 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Let 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. | | | |
| ▲ | afavour 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure. 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 an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | The 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. |
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| ▲ | TurdF3rguson 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I 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. | | |
| ▲ | TurdF3rguson an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | | |
| ▲ | borski an hour ago | parent [-] | | I agree; I attempted to clarify that with my “not using words carefully” but that is a fair criticism of what I wrote. |
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| ▲ | worik 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk Not illegal here, but I hope you not complain when caught and fined. | |
| ▲ | jrflowers an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That’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. | | |
| ▲ | borski an hour ago | parent [-] | | I agreed with you; that is why I said I wasn’t being careful with my language. |
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| ▲ | tjwebbnorfolk 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There 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. |
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| ▲ | jrflowers an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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) |
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| ▲ | HaloZero 37 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I 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. |
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| ▲ | gmerc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught |
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| ▲ | sky2224 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Can you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very aware. |
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| ▲ | colechristensen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud. |
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| ▲ | MangoCoffee an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| fake it until you make it? at some point this attitudes of Silicon Valley start up will back fire. |
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| ▲ | KennyBlanken 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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_th... ) |
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| ▲ | Pxtl 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| They 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. |
