Unofficial YC record cataloguing expelled companies, open-source thieves, SPAC disasters, and quiet shutdowns across Garry Tan’s accelerator tenure.
Key Takeaways
Delve fabricated 493+ SOC 2 audit reports, sold fraud to fellow YC companies via circular trust, and was expelled in 2026 after Insight Partners scrubbed their $32M blog post.
PearAI and Pickle both stripped open-source attribution – PearAI mass-replaced Continue.dev references, Pickle relicensed GPLv3 code as Apache 2.0 before community pressure reversed it.
Naive (YC S25) raised $2M+ rebranding Paperclip, a 41K-star MIT-licensed agent framework, as proprietary – stripping license and attribution with only thin Stripe/Composio wrappers added.
Convoy raised $1B+, hit a $3.8B valuation, then sold to Flexport for $16M 18 months later; Embark Trucks SPAC’d at $5.2B with zero revenue before a 99% stock collapse.
Central’s CEO posed as a Warp customer for six months to extract payroll playbook details, then launched a clone – YC funded Central anyway in S24 despite Warp already being in portfolio.
Hacker News Comment Review
Commenters pushed back hard on the framing: several entries are ordinary startup failures, not scandals, diluting the genuine fraud cases like Delve and Medobed.
The site’s format drew criticism as LLM-generated and pompous, with the presentation style seen as undermining credibility of real wrongdoing it documents.
Underlying sentiment splits between “legitimate accountability resource” and “rejection-fueled hit piece” – no commenter disputed specific factual claims in the source.
Notable Comments
@danabramov: “LLM-designed sites like this are always so pompous” – format critique, not a factual dispute.
@tibbar: flags that shutdowns-after-customers are included as scandals, weakening the stronger fraud entries.
