[jacquesm]

Thank you for this note, good to see YCs position on stuff like this.

But to clarify the point the OP made about being 'naughty' had to do with a different part of the narrative, the one where promises were made to customers, not the part where they do not pay the withheld payroll taxes (the illegal component).

[calibraxis]

That's YC's public-facing position, almost certainly not its real position.

Virtually every corporation I know regularly lies. Structurally. This is because speech is an act, and they pursue actions which maximize profit (and/or marketshare); and deal with competitors who have the same basic incentives. If they didn't lie, they'd often be replaced by those who do.

[jacquesm]

I'm not exactly in the YC alumni camp (even though I know plenty of them) and I think that you're way off base here.

YC has made a couple of such statements in the past and from what I've seen they stand by them both in further communications and in actions.

I recall PGs writings about installmonetizer as one example, and a few others which I won't be repeating here to avoid tearing open old wounds.

In general, of all the start-up accelerators out there YC is by far the most transparent about what kind of behavior they are proud to be associated with and what kind of behavior is definitely un-acceptable and they are not afraid of making that known, to past, present and future YC alumni alike.

If you don't believe me read: http://www.ycombinator.com/ethics/

And then come up with instances where YC has continued to back a company that violated those rules willingly.

The OP is by his own admission clearly in violation of a whole bunch of those and has a number of very hard choices to make (resignation being one option).

[calibraxis]

Fine; you think I'm off base, but that's not my problem. :)

Contrast your emphasis on a couple statements for PUBLIC consumption, vs. the article's claim: "One of the big values of Y Combinator was that we were able to hear strictly off-the-record stories of many successful startups' WFIO [‘We’re Fucked, It’s Over’] moments."

In any case, many of us have been inside corporations, and observed the clear dynamics.

[jacquesm]

I have a few of those WFIO stories myself and I would not air them because there is no use crying over spilt milk and I like to protect the reputations of my co-founders and employees alike.

That's perfectly ok. You're not required to spill the beans or air your dirty laundry in situations like this.

In fact, the whole thread here is because the OP decided to come clean (for some value of 'clean') about all this, and as with any communication of this nature it has multiple components: communicating the state of affairs, trying to control the narrative and performing a service for other entrepreneurs in terms of warning them for pitfalls they might not be aware of.

It should not be lost on you that you are using that as a way to discount the rest, but you have no insight there at all so you're not in a position to draw such conclusions.

If you have information that is not currently public and that corroborates your view then more power to you but all I see is a huge assumption. You are extrapolating from the companies that you know to a company that you apparently do not know. Just like people companies should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, generalizations are usually pointless.

[calibraxis]

No problem if you disagree; just a couple observations:

- any "shock" people have about corporations/investors routinely lying is hopefully fake. Or at least brief.

- simply read the charts and see how transparently YC misleads those who don't think through basic statistics: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/03/04...

[jacquesm]

Now we're solidly into threadjacking territory, we're not going to make this about gender in start-ups. You can argue about that until the cows come home, it has nothing to do with the subject at hand, which is the activities of the founders of YC and their relationship with YC. To know more about the subject you want to pull this thread into you'd have to know a ton more about the YC applicant pool than is publicly available and since there is not much good any company can do in this respect it's considered a minefield. For the record, all the people working for me are females, the start-ups that I've founded all had at least one female in the founder group and yet none of that proves anything. I'm sure you could make a pretty graph out of that.