[shawndrost]

One thing that's happening here is that YC believes "sloppy copy-paste is Good, Actually" more than you do. Maybe more than is polite to say in public. I don't mean to defend PearAI, which seems to be doing dumb and unacceptable things. But in YC's circles, if you say "I can't be bothered with legal" about something, they would be more likely to say "yeah makes sense" than "!!!".

If YC rejected everyone who was offended by sloppy shortcuts, they would not be YC, and they would have rejected many of their unicorns.

Shortcuts are core to the professional practice of founding startups in the culture of YC. Even the sloppy kind that offend people, like Airbnb's launch-era marketing that violated Craigslist's TOS, or Reddit's founders posting under fake accounts. The message of YC during the program is that you have exactly one job: make your key metric (revenue, users, whatever) grow 5%-10% week-over-week. When founders internalize this, they often do work that contains shortcuts, including shortcuts which might offend people. It is a challenge for some people with a professional or personal aversion to sloppy shortcuts.

(This isn't to say that sloppy is the standard at YC. "Sweat the details until 100 users really love your product" is canonical YC wisdom. Time forces you to be sloppy on everything else. And if you tell a YC partner that you're just buying bot traffic to hit your numbers, they will tell you that is a dumb plan.)

[bambax]

Yes, you're right and I agree with you, but there's a difference between doing borderline things (and dealing with the consequences), and not giving a sh*t one way or the other. There's also a difference between "fake it until you make it" and trying to sell someone else's work as your own, that you didn't make and arguably don't even understand.

But in the end it's possible the only actual difference between a crook and a master of the universe is one got caught and the other didn't.