| HN Mirror

Eh.

Scamming their users mostly makes the Founders look bad.

NOT kicking them out is what would make YC look bad. I wouldn't expect it to happen immediately, though, if YC does an internal investigation to see whether any principals, mentors, or advisors are implicated in the unethical behavior as well, whether by commission (giving unethical advice) or omissions (such as failing to raise red flags).

YCs public track record in terms of self-reflection on possible errors in judgement isn't particularly encouraging though. From the outside the org seems to focus on evolutionary changes though certainly at a fairly rapid clip (which means that cultural norms are hard to establish and maintain, giving the "carriers" of non-normative behavior opportunities to wriggle around avoiding scrutiny. For new extensions of the program YC favors rapid experimentation and iteration, which may fail to establish compatible norms depending on who is leading the effort.

It is worth contrasting one of the more stable outposts for YC culture, this very Hacker News site. YC has a very strong policy regarding not just avoiding a conflict of interest when it comes to moderation of posts critical of YC, but moderators have been instructed to moderate those posts and discussions considerably less than would otherwise be indicated, to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest or self-dealing. That's a pretty strong commitment, and one that can be difficult to live up to (avoiding the appearance of a conflict of interest is a standard that judges are supposed to be held to, but not lawyers, for example). YC may or may not have always lived up to the spirit of that commitment (only insiders can know for sure), but it is reasonably plain that an ongoing effort is being made to live up to the letter of that commitment. Kudos to pg for establishing it early, and to dang for keeping it going.

The point I'm arriving at is that establishing and maintaining a cultural reference point like that is very difficult in an organization that is growing, changing, and sending out strange offshoots without a lot of explicit (even occasionally public) communication about similar bright lines and thou-shalt-nots, and outside of the HN context, we really haven't seen evidence for that.