YC's Biggest Scandals

danabramov

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

tibbar

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

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

asadm

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

rohitpaulk

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

EGreg

I looked — 99% of them involve AI

theobeers

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.

hotfixguru

> DAMAGE: MIT LICENSE VIOLATED .. what? https://choosealicense.com/licenses/mit/

jnovek

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.

fillskills

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.

LewisVerstappen

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

nextos

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.

tptacek

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.

wewewedxfgdf

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

thekevan

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

- 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" - previous 3 becomes "legacy" or "sequel" - don't limit to YC

raincole

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

off-and-on

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

orliesaurus

Those are ONLY the public ones, I wonder how much more is swiped under the rug

datagram

Between every surface being a link and the needless redacted text flourishes, this site is kind of awful to navigate on mobile.