Item — HN Reader

Many YC companies do bad things, and I guess they do so independently. There may well be repercussions for the most egregious cases, but I suspect a lot of ill-behaviour simply flies under the radar.

For example only yesterday I got spam from an YC company, Polymath, and I replied back asking where they got my details from - no response yet. Once I get something I'll make a GDPR subject access request, then a deletion request. I hope the overhead of that causes them to rethink their spamming campaign.

But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.

3 comments

I have also gotten spammed by a YC startup, but they spammed an email that I use in git commits, and lead with "I saw your fork of $POPULAR_PROJECT, pretty cool!" or something like that and then continued to pester me with their drip program even as I replied asking them to never email me again.

> Many YC companies do bad things,

My comment was not about doing a generic bad thing - it was about scammy behavior in particular (which ties to the Delve incident). YC depends on the VC ecosystem to fund its companies, and no VC wants to be scammed. If a reputation of cultivating/condoning/obliviousness scammers takes root, that would be bad for business.

> But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.

I am not complaining, or even expecting a moral decision. I'm legitimately curious how this will shake out, for purely capitalistic, reputation-management reasons.

Good luck with referring to GDPR. Try clicking through YC startup list and see how many load GA and other trackers onto their landing pages without a consent banner or even a privacy policy sometimes. It’s baffling.