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.
Working around arguably dumb regulations and making your customers happy in the process is not the same as defrauding your customers.
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.
The deal is to have plausible deniability and not get caught
Can you provide examples of YC startups that knowingly broke laws and just dealt with those issues later? I'm not very aware.
There's a sliding scale between fake it `till you make it and fraud.
> 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... )
fake it until you make it? at some point this attitudes of Silicon Valley start up will back fire.
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.
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.