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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

The thing that strikes me as odd is how is it that Delve becomes an unicorn superstar (by iself), and the company they steal stuff off of, is much much less of a success story.

It would make more sense that the people who actually built the thing would do the thing better and do it first.

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I think in real life, cheaters win.

Without proper punishment, groups who "play fair" are at a strict disadvantage against those willing to break the rules.

At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules. All the mega successful companies (and people) seem to break a lot of rules to get there.

Conversely, the honest "play by the rules" groups can't be mega successful. Without punishment, the cheater always wins.

The words for this is "regulatory capture" and "deregulation". And yes, its been happening for a long time.

And now that right-wing groups are buying up all the media, we wont be hearing about it for much longer.

When politicians and pundits talk about deregulation the viewer is thinking about less hassle to set up a company or do inter state trade.

What really happens instead are ecological, ethical and financial stresses of all kind.

The U.S. has always idolized charismatic grifters. Tech revolutionized charisma, by showing that interpersonal charisma isn’t the correct filter: asociability, or perhaps the more familiar amorality, is. The ability of someone to extract and upstream value without engaging in ethics is correctly labeled as more important than being warm and friendly.

> At least in the US, we seem to be rapidly moving away from punishing groups for breaking the rules.

Famous recent example: prediction markets are unlawful under the Dodd-Frank's act but the Trump appointed CTFC's head has stated it will ignore it.

Actually building something useful and fun and spending your time convincing investors to give you enough money to maybe turn it into a profitable business some day are not really complimentary personality traits.

Steve Wozniak alone could've maybe built Apple without Steve Jobs, but his time would be wasted by doing something he (presumably) didn't enjoy very much and it would've been a much bumpier road.

Basically YC + MIT background is a license to raise infinite capital. So they just needed to check some revenue boxes etc.

YC backing. That's all it takes. Taken an existing idea that has legs (preferably one you find in Europe or Asia), then take it to the US, apply to YC and say you already have validation see 'startup x'.

> Adding to the awkwardness: Sim.ai was actually a Delve customer, Karabeg told TechCrunch. Both startups were grads of the startup accelerator Y Combinator, and Y Combinator alumni frequently buy each other’s products. So while Sim.ai paid Delve, Delve did not do the same for Sim.ai.

So it’s not all it takes.

<s>Cheating</s> sorry hustling and <s>bullshitting</s> sorry storytelling are more important.

It's a special level of disgusting, that's for sure. And I though Installmonetizer was pretty bad, this one goes well beyond that.

Even if the prospective investors smell a rat, they might decide that it's likely that a greater fool will arrive on the scene later - justifying investing in a known scam

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