alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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There's quite a good summary of the allegations here https://www.reddit.com/r/startups/comments/1rz15ui/i_will_no...
>Pre-written audit conclusions. The "Independent Service Auditor's Report" and all test conclusions were already filled in before clients had even submitted their company descriptions...
>Copy-paste templates. 493 out of 494 leaked SOC 2 reports (99.8%) had identical text, same grammatical errors, same nonsensical descriptions...
There's an excellent podcast and writeup on this from Patrick mcKenzie, which explains the story in more detail, including an interpretation of their statement and background on why this is a scandal in the first place.
https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/delve-into-co...
I came across a top tier compliance auditor doing the same thing recently. I tried to talk to them about it and rather than approaching this from a constructive point of view they wanted to know the name of the company that got certified so they could decertify them and essentially asked me to break my NDA. That wasn't going to happen, I wanted to have a far more structural conversation about this and how they probably ended up missing some major items (such as: having non-technical auditors). They weren't interested. They were not at all interested in improving their processes, they were only interested in protecting their reputation.
I'm seriously disgusted about this because this was one of the very few auditors that we held in pretty high esteem.
Pay-to-play is all too common, and I think that there is a baked in conflict of interest in the whole model.
lol strongly agree it is just cherry on top. In big tech they also copy but just copy in a smart way so I don't believe that's the reason they got removed.
YC has no problem with morally questionable behavior, many YC startups do things that are just as shady. YC is, ultimately, not responsible for what these startups choose to do. Delve’s problem is that they betrayed so many other YC companies in the process. An important value of being in YC is access to a ready-made customer base. The licensing issue is nothing compared to their fake audits but it is an affront to the YC community, hence, kicked from the community.
I’m sure if Delve has only engaged in fraudulent audits or had only resold another YC company’s product, they would have been allowed to stay, the problem is all of that combined pissed off enough other YC companies.