...is breaking the law
1. Customers want to do something, you help them do it, but it's illegal.
2. Customers want to do something, you tell them you did it, but you were lying and defrauding them.
3. Customers want to do something, you help them do it, and nobody has done it before, so whether it's legal or not is kind of up in the air.
E.G. Uber exploited a legal loophole that distinguished the kind of taxi service you hail on the street from the kind of taxi service you call on a phone.
The latter were much less regulated, and usually much more exclusive and pandering to a richer crowd. Nobody really knew which kind Uber should be classified as, it was the first kind in practice (same customer base as normal taxis) but the second in theory (ordered, not hailed).
It is clearly different because in one case you are not guilty of fraud.
Being guilty of a crime plus fraud is obviously worse than just being guilty of the crime.
Breaking the law by stealing a loaf of bread is obviously different to killing one million people but "both boil down to breaking the law" - I'm not sure that comment contains that much information.
Their value prop had to be strong enough to get past YC, past the other founders in the batch, past due diligence. Given that, I'm no longer comfortable casting "fraud" as a clean binary.
To be clear — I do genuinely believe they are a fraudulent company that lied and deserved to be removed. But introspectively, I have to sit with the fact that the space between "working around dumb regulations" and "outright fraud" is murkier than we'd like to admit.
Also, there was no “endgame.” They weren’t trying to change the law; they were exclusively breaking it for profit.
But I agree that Delve is a special case and should naturally be held to a higher standard here because their whole business is around being compliant with the law. When most other startups break the law, they do it to get an advantage over competition. Delve did it in a way that sacrificed their core value towards customers.
this will literally get them in court
Huh? In a legal sense I'm pretty sure they're the same thing.
How and why matters, though.
How and why you break a law matters (to a judge / jury). Whether you frame it as "ignoring" vs "breaking" in your legal defense, not so much.
> I ignore the law every day when I jaywalk.
Means the exact same thing as “I intentionally break jaywalking laws every day”. They are equivalent sentences.
Not illegal here, but I hope you not complain when caught and fined.
Including people doing it in front of police. Including the police themselves!
The law only existed for police to harass and fine blacks and Latinos. And indeed, that was how it was struck down.
It is critical to a just society that victims of unjust laws or uneven enforcement complain!
This is something Airbnb has facilitated for a very long time, no? And Uber, back when it started.
From a legal perspective I don’t see that it matters whether you’re trying to change the law or not. You’re either following it or breaking it.
In reality, it makes quite a difference if public opinion is on your side or not.
“We decided to commit fraud by providing fake compliance reports” reads very differently from “we let homeowners make money by renting a room”
This is like a line from a Naked Gun movie. The only way that this sentence could be true linguistically is if the party doesn’t break the law that they’re ignoring (e.g. I could ignore the rule against perpetuities while drunk driving through a zoo)
Like, it's a company that sells AI-slop powered regulatory compliance. How many laws do you think the "fake it ill you make it and you'll never make it" AI will break? But "regulatory compliance" is laws that startups hate, so breaking them is good.
Copyright and the copyleft licenses built upon it are the laws that support the software industry instead of just making sure innocent people aren't hurt by all this innovating and disrupting.
Anderson Consulting er I mean "Accenture": "Hey, that's our job!"
PWC: "Yeah! Fuck off!"
KPMG: "Damn straight!"
Ernst & Young: "What they said."
Deloitte & Touche: "Ditto."
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accounting_scandals#List_of_th... )