I'm getting the impression that a lot of people in this thread think this is because they violated an open-source license and saying things to the effect of, "they're just the ones who got caught". I also thought that was the scandal initially. (And when it comes to license violations, yes, there's absolutely more where that came from.)
But that's just the cherry on top. I don't think they're being thrown out because they violated a license. There are really serious fraud allegations. Allegedly they were rubber-stamping noncompliant customers, leaving them exposed to potential criminal liability under regulations like HIPPA.
Sure, most companies could add an About section and probably put this behind them pretty quickly. They could have even hired someone like Delve to assure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.
But Delve themselves can’t really do any of that. They’ve screwed up on a fundamental piece of their own business model. Their core offering *is* Compliance as a Service!
How could I trust their word that they’ll ensure my company is compliant? How could I trust their word that a company I’m doing business with is compliant? They can’t even handle their own Apache 2.0 licensed works, and that’s child’s play- relatively speaking. I’m supposed to trust that they can handle PCI and HIPPA and all the rest for other companies?
This is like having a dentist who doesn’t brush and floss their own teeth. Or a building inspector working out of a moldy office suite with exposed rebar. Or an editor with a personal website full of typos and grammatical errors. It’s a dealbreaker to anyone with common sense.
Unlike Zenefits, which had (allegedly?) committed fraud for part of their business in the interest of moving faster, and then Parker came back with Rippling…
These guys’ entire and actual business model was fraud.
I wonder if the kind of personality that gets you on 30U30 correlates with being willing to engage in massive fraud, and being able to get away with it for a minute.
Holmes, SBF, Shkreli, Charlie Javice, Ishan Wahi...
Someone leaked an internal Bookface chat from Garry Tan (YC CEO) saying:
We have asked Delve to leave YC.
YC is a community, not just an accelerator. The founders in our community have to trust each other, and we have to trust them. When that trust breaks down, there's really only one thing to do.
We're not going to get into the details publicly. We wish them well.
Its quite ironical and interesting at the same time, seems like there is a threshold size/impact beyond which everyone would come and save you, anything less and you will have to bear the consequences.
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.
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.
> 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)
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.
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.
"By combining the evidence I collected together with what the sim.ai team provided, I will show that Delve has stolen an open-source company’s tech by violating their license and then making a lot of money with it."
->
You mean like OpenAI, Anthropic and all these other 'unicorns'?
I'm happy we're all clear on how bad Delve is but in essence what they were doing is exactly the same as what these AI companies do.
While I despise the sham commercial LLMs have made out of intellectual property, I think Delve is one step worse than that. The technology behind LLMs is innovative, even if the data used to train them have ethically and legally dubious origins. Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.
The only thing that makes delve worse in my book is that they're selling compliance, they have zero excuses. But the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic even if they don't sell compliance do whitewash bulk copyright violations and they have valuations far in excess of Delve. Too big to fail I guess.
So they decide to drop this from their COO while their CEO has been doing all the talking on a friday night? Looks like YC told them they had to announce this and this was their least-viewable option.
I'm getting the impression that a lot of people in this thread think this is because they violated an open-source license and saying things to the effect of, "they're just the ones who got caught". I also thought that was the scandal initially. (And when it comes to license violations, yes, there's absolutely more where that came from.)
But that's just the cherry on top. I don't think they're being thrown out because they violated a license. There are really serious fraud allegations. Allegedly they were rubber-stamping noncompliant customers, leaving them exposed to potential criminal liability under regulations like HIPPA.
https://deepdelver.substack.com/p/delve-fake-compliance-as-a...
I've only skimmed this so I do not endorse these allegations, but I think it's context missing from this discussion.
It's not just about delve. It's about yc's model. YC encourages YC companies to trust other YC companies even though they are early.
If you can't trust your batch mates for something as crucial as compliance, the model doesn't work.
Sure, most companies could add an About section and probably put this behind them pretty quickly. They could have even hired someone like Delve to assure this kind of thing wouldn’t happen again.
But Delve themselves can’t really do any of that. They’ve screwed up on a fundamental piece of their own business model. Their core offering *is* Compliance as a Service!
How could I trust their word that they’ll ensure my company is compliant? How could I trust their word that a company I’m doing business with is compliant? They can’t even handle their own Apache 2.0 licensed works, and that’s child’s play- relatively speaking. I’m supposed to trust that they can handle PCI and HIPPA and all the rest for other companies?
This is like having a dentist who doesn’t brush and floss their own teeth. Or a building inspector working out of a moldy office suite with exposed rebar. Or an editor with a personal website full of typos and grammatical errors. It’s a dealbreaker to anyone with common sense.
You’re right, you can’t.
Unlike Zenefits, which had (allegedly?) committed fraud for part of their business in the interest of moving faster, and then Parker came back with Rippling…
These guys’ entire and actual business model was fraud.
This other profile is still up:
https://www.forbes.com/profile/delve/
30U30 never ceases to amaze.
I wonder if the kind of personality that gets you on 30U30 correlates with being willing to engage in massive fraud, and being able to get away with it for a minute.
Holmes, SBF, Shkreli, Charlie Javice, Ishan Wahi...
Someone leaked an internal Bookface chat from Garry Tan (YC CEO) saying:
https://x.com/___4o____/status/2040271468874076380I have no direct knowledge of the accuracy of any of this. This is not my account.
Related: Delve allegedly forked an open-source tool and sold it as its own (295 points, yesterday, 153 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47615434
Curious - in this situation, does delve return money to YC? Or YC simply writes off the investment
Interestingly, they show up in the company list. When you click the link it returns 404.
https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/?query=delve
Its quite ironical and interesting at the same time, seems like there is a threshold size/impact beyond which everyone would come and save you, anything less and you will have to bear the consequences.
Related from an hour earlier: Delve removed from YC website [archive.org] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47634405
an example of why to avoid archive links in submissions (save 'em for comments), because the source link here will win.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, precisely.
> 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.
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”
> 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)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Can you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very aware.
Airbnb, DoorDash
Uber
The deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught
> 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... )
There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.
Yeah, fraud is what happens when you don't make it.
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.
404s for me
I think that's the point - they have been removed.
That's the point.
Sorry! I thought it would be announcement. And it was subsequently taken down due to the HN interest.
"By combining the evidence I collected together with what the sim.ai team provided, I will show that Delve has stolen an open-source company’s tech by violating their license and then making a lot of money with it."
->
You mean like OpenAI, Anthropic and all these other 'unicorns'?
I'm happy we're all clear on how bad Delve is but in essence what they were doing is exactly the same as what these AI companies do.
While I despise the sham commercial LLMs have made out of intellectual property, I think Delve is one step worse than that. The technology behind LLMs is innovative, even if the data used to train them have ethically and legally dubious origins. Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.
The only thing that makes delve worse in my book is that they're selling compliance, they have zero excuses. But the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic even if they don't sell compliance do whitewash bulk copyright violations and they have valuations far in excess of Delve. Too big to fail I guess.
> Delve doesn’t even have the ability to claim anything they’ve done as original, unless you count fraud as a service.
I'd wager there's some prior art...
Fraud as a service! The next big thing!!!
Presidential pardon insurance, like audit insurance but for breaking laws instead of filing taxes.
Can they keep their CISO out of jail?
Bye-bye tweet from founder: https://x.com/kocalars/status/2040262537166618887
Notably YC hasn't wished them a farewell.
> striving to make the world a better place.
Why do all start-ups say this? I don't think there are many companies publicly saying "We're going to go 'scorched earth' on everybody."
Because if they had the money to be honest about it they'd not be a start-up!
Oracle, right?
So they decide to drop this from their COO while their CEO has been doing all the talking on a friday night? Looks like YC told them they had to announce this and this was their least-viewable option.
funny thing about this tweet is the founder still couldnt stop herself from name dropping MIT
Much like their soc audits, her time at MIT was also incomplete. Still doesn’t stop them from cosplaying as a grad though!
Look at this series of tweets from her
> One interesting observation I’ve noticed is a lot of top founders did oddly strong at math from a young age.
https://x.com/kocalars/status/2027076198002553159
barf emoji
At least they put a ladder up that tree
There is no saving Delve after this.
The only next product launch is an investigation.
friday news dump tho
can't believe I almost spent 10 grand on this company a week before they blew up.
The two founders being early 20's with no background in compliance wasn't a red-flag?
Plus the 30u30 is now a signal.