YC's Biggest Scandals
YC’s Biggest Scandals
YC 最大的丑闻
(FEATURED FAILURE) Delve
(重点失败案例) Delve
Kicked out of YC. 493+ fabricated audit reports. Sold fraud to fellow YC companies. Claimed to automate SOC 2 and ISO compliance auditing with AI. Whistleblower revealed the platform auto-generated identical passing audit reports with keyboard-mashed test data before clients even uploaded anything. CEO was caught on tape asking an auditor ‘does your firm actually look at our platform?’ Focused on selling to other YC companies who trusted the YC brand — the circular trust network weaponized. Insight Partners scrubbed their $32M investment blog post. YC officially expelled Delve in 2026. Investor Adam Cochran called it proof that YC has ‘no technical acumen to evaluate claims’ under Garry Tan’s leadership.
被 YC 开除。伪造了 493 多份审计报告，并将欺诈产品卖给其他 YC 初创公司。该公司声称利用 AI 自动化 SOC 2 和 ISO 合规审计。举报人揭露，该平台在客户上传任何数据之前，就自动生成了内容完全相同、且包含乱码测试数据的“通过”审计报告。CEO 在录音中被抓包询问审计师：“你们公司真的会看我们的平台吗？”他们专注于向信任 YC 品牌的其他 YC 公司销售产品——这是一种被武器化的循环信任网络。Insight Partners 删除了他们 3200 万美元的投资博客文章。YC 于 2026 年正式将 Delve 除名。投资者 Adam Cochran 称，这证明了在 Garry Tan 的领导下，YC “缺乏评估技术声明的敏锐度”。
(BATCH S24) Central
(S24 批次) Central
Signed up as a Warp customer, stole the playbook, launched a clone. Central’s CEO signed up as a customer of fellow YC company Warp in 2023 under ‘Central Business Applications Inc.’ Spent six months asking how tax compliance works, what registered agents are, how multi-state filings work — then churned and launched an identical payroll startup with Warp’s exact marketing copy, down to the tagline ‘designed for founders, not HR’. YC funded them anyway in S24, despite Warp already being in the portfolio. Central got acqui-hired by Mercury in April 2026. Warp CEO Ayush Sharma publicly called them out: ‘gg no re.’
注册成为 Warp 的客户，窃取其商业模式，并推出了一个克隆产品。Central 的 CEO 在 2023 年以“Central Business Applications Inc.”的名义注册成为 YC 同门公司 Warp 的客户。他花了六个月时间询问税务合规如何运作、什么是注册代理人、多州申报如何处理——随后流失并推出了一个完全相同的薪资初创公司，甚至连营销文案都照搬 Warp，包括“为创始人设计，而非为 HR 设计”这句标语。尽管 Warp 已经在 YC 的投资组合中，YC 还是在 S24 批次资助了他们。Central 于 2026 年 4 月被 Mercury 收购。Warp CEO Ayush Sharma 公开指责他们：“gg no re（游戏结束，没得玩了）。”
(BATCH X25) Naive
(X25 批次) Naive
Raised $2M+ selling “autonomous AI employees.” The platform is a 41K-star MIT-licensed OSS framework with Stripe bolted on. Naive (YC S25) raised $2M+ marketing themselves as builders of “autonomous AI employees.” Public investigation by @NotOnKetamine traced the entire underlying platform to Paperclip — a 41K-star MIT-licensed open source agent framework — with Naive having stripped attribution and rebranded the original code as proprietary. The additions on top of Paperclip were thin: Stripe billing wrappers ($0.50/credit), domain/email provisioning for agents, phone/SMS via standard providers, and a Composio integration layer. The OSS license required attribution and license preservation; Naive shipped neither. The investigation surfaced screenshots, curl-verifiable evidence, and side-by-side comparisons. As of April 2026, the company has not publicly responded to the receipts.
融资超过 200 万美元，兜售“自主 AI 员工”。该平台实际上是一个拥有 4.1 万星标、采用 MIT 协议的开源框架，只是外挂了一个 Stripe 支付接口。Naive (YC S25) 融资 200 多万美元，自称是“自主 AI 员工”的构建者。@NotOnKetamine 的公开调查追踪到其底层平台完全源自 Paperclip——一个拥有 4.1 万星标的 MIT 协议开源代理框架——而 Naive 删除了原作者署名，并将原始代码重新包装为私有产品。他们在 Paperclip 之上的改进非常单薄：Stripe 计费封装（每积分 0.50 美元）、代理的域名/电子邮件配置、通过标准提供商提供的电话/短信功能，以及一个 Composio 集成层。开源协议要求署名并保留许可声明，但 Naive 两者皆未做到。调查展示了截图、可验证的 curl 命令证据以及并排对比。截至 2026 年 4 月，该公司尚未对这些证据做出公开回应。
(BATCH W24) Wuri
(W24 批次) Wuri
AI-generated visual novel platform. Pivoted to enterprise AI, then died as foundation models commoditized the UI layer in twelve months. Wuri pitched converting 500M+ Wattpad-style text stories into Webtoon-style visual novels via generative AI. Founders ex-Flipkart, ex-Bain. The wrapper-thin differentiation collapsed when GPT-4 / Sora / image-gen foundation models shipped equivalent capability for free, eroding any pricing power Wuri had layered on top. Pivoted from consumer reader app to enterprise AI offerings in 2024. Quietly shut down in 2025. YC profile remains up but flagged Inactive in the directory. The Wuri arc is the median Tan-era Indian AI YC: thin GenAI wrapper, fast pivot, quiet death.
AI 生成视觉小说平台。转型为企业级 AI，随后因基础模型在十二个月内将 UI 层商品化而倒闭。Wuri 曾提议通过生成式 AI 将 5 亿多篇 Wattpad 风格的文本故事转化为 Webtoon 风格的视觉小说。创始人来自 Flipkart 和贝恩咨询。当 GPT-4、Sora 和图像生成基础模型免费提供同等功能时，Wuri 那层薄薄的差异化优势瞬间崩塌，削弱了其在之上构建的任何定价权。2024 年从消费者阅读应用转型为企业 AI 服务。2025 年悄然倒闭。YC 个人资料页面依然存在，但被标记为“不活跃”。Wuri 的轨迹是 Tan 时代印度 AI 类 YC 项目的典型缩影：薄薄的生成式 AI 外壳、快速转型、悄无声息地死亡。
(BATCH W24) Double Finance
(W24 批次) Double Finance
“0% expense ratio” robo-advisor. Hit $10M AUM in Dec 2024, shut down twelve months later. YC slug then recycled for the founder’s next pivot — with Garry Tan as primary partner. Double pitched itself as a Wealthfront/Betterment killer offering direct indexing for $1/month. Founder JJ Maxwell (ex-Liftoff Influence) and growth lead Mark Wai (ex-Tesla, ex-Facebook). After crossing $10M AUM in December 2024, the company quietly shut down a year later — and the YC slug double-2 was repurposed for Maxwell’s next venture (an AI ad-generation startup called Polished) with Garry Tan named primary YC partner. Maxwell wrote a “Lessons from Building (and Closing) Double Finance” HN post. The slug-recycling-into-pivot pattern is itself a Tan-era artifact: the same YC company URL now points at a different product with different unit economics, while clients had to be wound down or transferred.
“0% 费用率”机器人投顾。2024 年 12 月管理资产规模（AUM）达到 1000 万美元，十二个月后倒闭。YC 的项目链接随后被回收用于创始人的下一次转型——Garry Tan 担任主要合伙人。Double 自诩为 Wealthfront/Betterment 的终结者，提供每月 1 美元的直接指数化投资服务。创始人 JJ Maxwell（前 Liftoff Influence）和增长负责人 Mark Wai（前 Tesla、前 Facebook）。在 2024 年 12 月 AUM 突破 1000 万美元后，该公司一年后悄然倒闭——而其 YC 链接 double-2 被重新用于 Maxwell 的下一个项目（一个名为 Polished 的 AI 广告生成初创公司），Garry Tan 被列为主要 YC 合伙人。Maxwell 在 Hacker News 上写了一篇《构建（并关闭）Double Finance 的教训》。这种“回收链接用于转型”的模式本身就是 Tan 时代的产物：同一个 YC 公司 URL 现在指向一个具有不同单位经济效益的完全不同的产品，而原有的客户不得不被清算或转移。
(BATCH F24) PearAI
(F24 批次) PearAI
Forked an open-source code editor, slapped their name on it, called it a startup. On Day 1 of YC Demo Day, the internet noticed that PearAI had forked Continue.dev’s open source code editor, mass-replaced all ‘Continue’ references with ‘PearAI’, and slapped on a fake license written by ChatGPT. The ‘Pear Enterprise License’ became a meme. YC had to publish a blog post ‘correcting the record.’ Founders apologized and pivoted. The license was generated by AI. The irony was not lost.
分叉了一个开源代码编辑器，贴上自己的名字，就称其为初创公司。在 YC Demo Day 的第一天，互联网用户发现 PearAI 分叉了 Continue.dev 的开源代码编辑器，将所有“Continue”引用批量替换为“PearAI”，并贴上了一份由 ChatGPT 编写的虚假许可证。“Pear 企业许可证”成了一个梗。YC 不得不发布一篇博客文章来“纠正记录”。创始人们道歉并转型。那份许可证是 AI 生成的，这种讽刺意味显而易见。