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Didn’t Homejoy Shut Down?

(medium.com)
1121 points alokedesai | 1 comments | 28 Oct 15 19:51 UTC | HN request time: 0.232s | source
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thaumaturgy ◴[28 Oct 15 20:29 UTC] No.10467160[source]▶
What's the big deal? Homejoy is just hacking startup downfunding... (/s)

I'd like to see some kind of stronger YC influence on ethics in the companies they fund. I realize that YC doesn't have any direct control over the companies, but it could be as simple as including good ethics in the traits they look for in startup founders.

A while back I started compiling a list of YC companies that spammed or otherwise behaved badly. It quickly got back-burnered by other projects, but there was AirBnB from W09, InstallMonetizer and SocialCam from W12, Zenefits from W13, Abacus and GetAirHelp from W14, Gradberry and OmniRef from W15 ... while so far it looks like the majority of YC startups are well-behaved, the trend was looking like there's a few in every batch that are willing to do shady things to meet their growth metrics.

Or, in Homejoy's case, maybe make a little more money while winding down.

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gkoberger ◴[28 Oct 15 21:18 UTC] No.10467496[source]▶
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.

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thaumaturgy ◴[28 Oct 15 21:31 UTC] No.10467577[source]▶
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.

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ericsidelis ◴[28 Oct 15 22:10 UTC] No.10467792[source]▶
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.

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1. thaumaturgy ◴[28 Oct 15 22:36 UTC] No.10467900[source]▶
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).