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Comment by jlevy | Hacker News Reader

As internal counsel for YC, it was very upsetting to learn about the ongoing troubles at Amicus. It was particularly distressing to hear about the payroll tax issues, given that YC has funded excellent companies that specialize in accounting and payroll for small businesses, such as Indinero and Zenpayroll. The tone of Seth's post suggest that YC has supported Seth in all of his recent actions. That is not true -- YC supports its companies through good times and bad, but we do not support illegality. For example, in paragraph 3 Seth writes that PG looks for founders that are "naughty" and writes about levels of rule-breaking. YC's principal tenets are to "make something people want" and "talk and listen to users/customers" -- YC may promote a culture of disruption, but that does not mean neglecting payroll taxes and breaking rules.

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"The tone of Seth's post suggest that YC has supported Seth in all of his recent actions. That is not true -- YC supports its companies through good times and bad, but we do not support illegality."

FWIW I didn't get that impression from the post. Here's what I assume he was referring to:

"4. Naughtiness

Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination."

http://www.paulgraham.com/founders.html

I think not paying taxes would obviously fall in the "rules that matter" category.

Good to see YC step forward on this. I'm not a HN regular, but I've been following this thread all day because I have a friend who worked at Amicus, and several others who have worked with their software. I know there are always many sides to any story. I wasn't there, just like most of you weren't there, but all I can say is Seth's version of this story does NOT fit with what I've heard, and everything I've heard has been from honest, cool people who - unlike Seth - don't have a history of lying about really important shit.

Seth absolutely deserves to have a forum to tell his version of the story, but I find it more than a little annoying that after everything he's done, he's still able to leverage his position as a YC Founder to ensure that his version of the story gets more attention than anyone else's.

Based on everything I've heard, I'd say this post is essentially about admitting to lesser crimes so the world forgives him before we even know what he really did or did not do.

I'd urge the media powers that be to try and get some former employees, investors,customers, etc., on the record. And if they don't, then all of us should probably just move along and forget about this guy. Sounds like he already duped a lot of people into believing in him - I for one don't intend to be his next victim.

I'm curious; what have you heard that makes these sound like lesser crimes? I feel like from my reading of this, it sounds like he's admitting to being pretty dishonest in a lot of ways (though obviously weasel-worded), so I'm curious what more we're not hearing about; if this is supposed to make him look better, then whatever's left must be pretty bad!

I don't want to spread rumors, and everything I've heard has been second hand at best. I just know that there were a lot of good people at Amicus, and a lot of good organizations relying on the software, and now they are all screwed.

> Seth absolutely deserves to have a forum to tell his version of the story, but I find it more than a little annoying that after everything he's done, he's still able to leverage his position as a YC Founder to ensure that his version of the story gets more attention than anyone else's.

I'm really interested to hear about the other side of the story. Any links?

The person I know who was at Amicus would definitely never go on the record about this stuff, so no, no links. All I'm saying is that I'm shocked by how many people here are willing to take this guy at his word without hearing from anyone else, given the kind of pathological lying he himself admits to in his blog post.

Soon.

Who was the first victim?

The company who received the feature they were told that they would have?

Is it wrong to employ Machiavellian tactics in order to help LGBT groups further advance the rights of those oppressed?

No way to know who the first victim was, because behavior like this usually starts when people are very young. Also, you set up a HN account JUST to respond to my comment? hmmmmm... I created an account just to comment on this story, because I know people who were affected by this. Clearly you have a connection to this as well.

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).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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...

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.

Didn't discuss gender; just pointed out that Washington Post called out YC's blatantly misleading stats.

(Since you're passionately discussing oppression, hopefully one day women will work for themselves, not "working for YOU". That is, needing to rent their bodies to guys like you, via labor markets. Anyway, thanks for everyone's time.)

I've worked for women and there are two women currently on my payroll. Would you rather they were unemployed? And as to them working for themselves I fully agree with you, which is exactly why I am assisting one of the two with her entrepreneurial ambitions. You're really totally out of touch here and I seriously wonder what it is that you are trying to achieve with all your un-founded mudslinging.

Also, you don't speak for everyone here, just for yourself.

As tlrobinson and jacquesm noted, I certainly didn't mean to imply that YC in any way supports companies not paying payroll taxes -- as I advise in the post, companies shouldn't cut corners when it comes to that stuff.

It's ironic to me that payroll taxes (which theoretically exist for the employee's benefit) have forced a promising and growing company to lay off staff. Have you tried hiring a tax attorney to negotiate with the IRS? Often they will waive some of the penalties and allow payment plans.

This I find hard. This thread is a major eye-opener, quite heavily dividing the HN world. No one thinks Seth/Amicus did well here, but there is a world of difference between supporting a company or founder and condoning illegality.

This smacks of hanging someone out to dry. And that bothers me, unless you have much more backstory with Amicus than is obvious here.

This thread has shaken me - I initially sided with OP because he sounded a great deal like me - and I respected the effort such honesty takes.

I am not sadly a man of great personal integrity. I vow never to lie but only because I have found it leads to more stress and trouble than the alternative. Always being honest I am working up to - ChuckM's grandfather sets a high bar.

Ultimately I have no insight into this case, no idea who's story is more close to reality. But I value openness and admitting of mistakes - it makes my own stumblings more bearable.

So I respect Seth for opening up here. He may well lose this company, he may well suffer prosecution for back taxes. And he should take his licks. But if he has dealt openly and honestly with his investors and employees he will I expect be back again, backed by investors who will this time insist on a firm of good accountants

Incompetency in administration may be a crime, but it's more forgivable than lying.

The naughtiness he is referring to is clearly not the mistake they made in not paying payroll tax. He mentions later that it is about offering features that did not exist yet, which is very common.

I think that you misunderstood his post (even though you may have more information than I do).

The end note is indeed ambiguous, but the body of the post of the post is more detailed and I had understood that he was talking about the alumni rather than YC itself.

I’ve been most surprised by the outpouring of support from other entrepreneurs (mainly from the Y Combinator network) who heard we might be going through tough times, and reached out just to let me know they were there for me.

Besides that, the he mentions YC and pg as inspiration, throughout the post, but there's no mention of an active support.

What more, he claims that the taxes issue was an oversight rather than an willful decision. It is thus irresponsibility rather than naughtiness, which requires intentionality. Also he doesn't try to justify it as pg-defined naughty behavior.

I am happy that you think I misunderstood his post (and yes I have more information than many about the situation). When I read the post I thought it was implicit that YC supported Seth fully. That is not the case. There are mentions of YC throughout the post, and a couple of references to the YC network. I was hoping to clarify that the YC network doesn't automatically include YC. My one example may have been misconstrued and there are many parts and sides to this story. As long as it is clear that there is not unconditional support at YC for Seth's handling of the situation, then that is all that matters.

You could have at least called the founder and asked what he meant, instead of bashing him here. You could have asked him to add more clarification in his blog which might have ensured that what your pointing to is not implied.

You guys are growing and its important to scale your communication as well.

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