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Comment by Nextgrid | Hacker News Reader

YC is the company that (to this day!) has Yotta - a borderline scam to take advantage of financially-illiterate people - on their website after the whole thing has completely blown up and most customers lost their savings: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/yotta

Oh, and now they have their own rendition of the "Aviator" game often advertised by unregulated Eastern-European online casinos: https://members.withyotta.com/moonshot/. You can't make this shit up!

I wrote off YC after this. Maybe early on it was a mark of quality and good due-diligence, but now I'd argue it's the outright opposite - if it's funded by YC, buyer beware.

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Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients. They make money, they're not a charity. Quality only matters insofar as it drives sales and doesn't create liabilities.

> doesn't create liabilities

But you'd think that would include doing sufficient due-diligence and steering their companies away from scams or unethical activities no?

>They make money, they're not a charity.

I know it can be shocking to some people to learn this, but you can make money ethically.

Unfortunately, that's not how someone gets that third comma in their net worth. The billionaires that so much of American society worship didn't make all of that money by being smart, kind, honest, or ethical. They made it by being dishonest, morally flexible, and ruthless.

Especially now, business ethics are for the "little people." The modern billionaire class no longer cares about even keeping up the appearance of decency.

There's a lot of "comfortably wealthy" available between "charity company" and "billionaire" which can be achieved ethically, though.

There absolutely is. If you're absolutely gunning to get a billion dollars you won't be comfortable with any amount of money.

These people are hungry ghosts.

>Unfortunately, that's not how someone gets that third comma in their net worth.

I just want to say I really like this "third comma" expression for billionaires.

> you can make money ethically

That's good, but what if the goal is min-maxing money making? Everything else becomes secondary.

> Did you not understand what YC was? They're essentially an investment bank that doesn't accept new clients.

They rather sell themselves as early-stage startup incubator.

See https://www.ycombinator.com/

"We help founders at their earliest stages regardless of their age."

"We improve the success rate of our startups."

"We give startups a huge fundraising advantage."

and https://www.ycombinator.com/about

"The overall goal of YC is to help startups really take off. They arrive at YC at all different stages. Some haven’t even started working yet, and others have been launched for a year or more. But whatever stage a startup is at when they arrive, our goal is to help them to be in dramatically better shape 3 months later."

What do you think a "startup incubator" does exactly?

The exchange the cache of their brand and access to their network + 50k and the company gives up 20% equity. That doesn’t sound too dissimilar from any other VC - their incentives are only loosely aligned to their portfolio companies.

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