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.
I know it can be shocking to some people to learn this, but you can make money ethically.
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."
But you'd think that would include doing sufficient due-diligence and steering their companies away from scams or unethical activities no?
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.
* 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")
[1] Reserved Checkouts: https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/clearcase/11.0.0?topic=ucm-check...
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.
Thanks to coding agents, now we can have engineers who do neither
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