Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

YC makes it very clear they will disavow any company or founder that acts unethically. YC is strict about very few things, but this was made clear in no uncertain terms (especially by Jessica). When things go bad, YC always gets involved – even if you don't read about it online.

Don't blame YC just yet. We don't know what happened here. Maybe Homejoy went into debt, had their assets seized, and lost control (like with GigaOM). Maybe the investors approved or forced a reincorporation under another name. Maybe Handy bought the assets and is quickly trying to stem off churn. Or, yeah, maybe something unethical happened. Until we know what happened, though, it's all speculation.

Is this a new policy? Because the company that prompted me to start the list, Zenefits, is still a Paul Graham darling: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/654377298234224640

Or, might be that our definitions of unethical don't match up 100%. I consider spam to be unethical, maybe you just mean more serious offenses.

Did YC ever disavow InstallMonetizer? (honest question)

I guess we all have different views on ethics, maybe I'm just used to seeing spam and tossing it out. I find it harmless now because I'm so used to getting it...but its interesting to see how offended people get when they see unsolicited virtual mail which can be deleted with a click of a button.

I'm actually more concerned about the actual spam in my real world mailbox that USPS dumps 3 times a week, no opt-out button there.

This thread is about "selling customer data", not "cold outreach."

But since you brought it up, cold outreach for B2B is not considered spam, as long as they comply with the following: https://www.leadfuze.com/cold-email-outreach-isnt-spam-heres...

Not everything legal is ethical, but in this case it seems more annoying than unethical. I hate cold outreach emails and my company doesn't send them, but concluding that YC doesn't care about being ethical because the former president of YC tweets about a company that sends cold outreach emails seems like a stretch.

Among my responsibilities is systems administration for hosted services for customers, including email. What is for you a minor nuisance is for me a major time-consuming headache. For instance, even with a top-of-the-line modern mail stack, including SpamAssassin and greylisting and so and so forth, enough spam was still getting through to customer inboxes that I've had to develop additional non-trivial software specifically for dealing with it.

I beat this drum occasionally because I don't want to have to pit my meager resources against the resources of someone like YCombinator who are willing to provide funding (and introductions to enormous amounts of even more funding) to companies that are OK with spamming.

And I'm not including B2B cold emails as "spam", even if they're written as a template, so long as there's an actual human behind them and they aren't being sent out en masse (for example, Locbox: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4672162).

You're right, I've veered some discussion away from the original topic, sorry. I wanted to focus more on YC's role in this, if any.

(As my final word on it however, Zenefits specifically was not sending "cold outreach emails", it was bona-fide spam. But, they're far from alone in this anyway, which was my main point.)

hmm... There were some previous threads about Zenefits where pretty much everyone (customer base mostly) that came in contact with Zenefits was unhappy for one reason for other. This seems to be a bit of a trend for them. The fact a VC is happy with the company simply shows the difference in incentives between investors in a company vs outsiders.

At this point I have been hearing this sorry excuse for twenty years. At least it once had the value of novelty.

Spam is illegal, so that's one good sign it might be unethical. About 90% of email is spam [1]; the reason you aren't spending all day "deleting with the click of a button" is that a lot of smart people and a lot of computing power are devoted to keeping most of that spam out of your inbox.

You should be thankful for the people who get offended about this stuff, because its only their reactions and their hard work that have kept email a usable medium.

[1] https://www.m3aawg.org/sites/default/files/document/M3AAWG_2...

You can opt out of some forms of real life "spam."

Info here - http://www.consumer.ftc.gov/articles/0262-stopping-unsolicit...

I've seen that before, but it's essentially the opposite of disavowing isn't it? He's doing quite a bit of rationalizing and misdirecting in that post, IMO.

At the time, I remember being incredibly disappointed to see him hide behind the EULA and "This one seems a matter of opinion." That's why it came to mind immediately and I was curious if YC ever took a more respectable position in the interim.

What happened with gigaOM?