A lot of startups move fast with a small team.<p>You build something great and big corporation X wants to buy a subscription but you need to be certified.<p>Much of this is a good checklist but some of it is very european.<p>"Where is the risk register to track controls in your 7 person company?"<p>Now instead of doing what your team does best, you are doing paperwork theater for frameworks designed for a 100,000 employee enterprise.<p>You are documenting things nobody will read, making up processes that don't exist and translating the operations of a lean company into bureaucratic language.<p>What's needed is a variant of these standards for small teams, which is proportionate and pragmatic.
Question: how likely is it that a number of 20-year olds have the passion of solving the problem of compliance auditing? I can hardly imagine that I'd even be interested in taking a look at the domain. It's just... so mundane. Or maybe the alpha-type overachievers don't care about the domain but the opportunity?
Solving boring problems has been conventional startup wisdom for a long time. And a "mundane" startup might be more interesting than traditional high-paying jobs like finance/law/consulting. <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-theres-brass/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-...</a>
I work for a firm that develops custom software in regulated industries, and we have brilliant software & data engineers in their 20's working on compliance auditing, and more specifically "Compliance Management System health monitoring."<p>We've be able to use a lot of AI-assisted engineering and AI in the software to solve longstanding business challenges in this space.<p>I won't make assumptions about where you're located, but on the East Coast US it is big business among banks, utilities, healthcare, etc.
I've gone through this process and is this not a failure from the institute that are giving away these certifications for a fee without any due diligence?<p>intermediaries like delve have only amplified this failure.<p>it was obvious to anyone who was involved in this industry that, all of this is just security theatre with nothing really to back it up.
Love the depth of this post.<p>We were actually looking at it as well recently (we're using Drata). I was thinking "Cool, this looks like the next cool step forward". The claims didn't sound out of the world in my ears.<p>Every time an issue like this appears I wonder how many more undiscovered frauds are out there.
This was such as interesting read, but I found this link via LinkedIn rather than hackernews.<p>I would have expected this to be somewhere at the top right now given how deep the article digs and evidence seems legit.
I think it may be getting (intentionally?) suppressed from the homepage. Given this is a YCombinator website, I wouldn't rule that out.<p>Regardless, it's been an ongoing issue. I know a few involved companies — it takes basically 5 days to get a SOC 2 Type 2 report through Delve. And, of course, they market this way too: "SOC 2 in days". Unbelievable.
In case anyone hasn't seen my other posts about this:<p>(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.<p>(2) I looked into it and found that no moderator had touched either of the two submissions of the story, but that both submissions had set off HN's voting ring detector. (Whether there was a voting ring or not, I don't know - that software isn't perfect. It has held up well over the years though.)<p>(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.<p>(4) Why? Because we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of a story: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>. This is literally the #1 principle of moderation in the sense that it was the very first thing that pg drilled into me: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20pg%20chair&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>.<p>* <a href="https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/" rel="nofollow">https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/</a>
I see the submission time as an hour ago, so it actually looks like it got a second-chanced, i.e. boosted by the site admins.
It's a trending story on X. Was surprised there was no meaty discussion here on HN.
Surprised/not surprised that this is getting buried from the homepage
It got downweighted by HN's voting ring detector. Mods didn't touch it, except to place the story on the frontpage once we knew it existed.
I just got blocked by another YC founder (and potential investor in Delve?) for refuting his handwavey argument that "all compliance companies do this" [0] — this is beyond just marketing, it is active and blatant/intentional fraud. I don't see how it can be defended. But in that sense it is a major crisis for anyone who invested in the company.<p>[0]: <a href="https://x.com/kobyjconrad/status/2034843865396506864" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/kobyjconrad/status/2034843865396506864</a>
I remember having sales calls with them and the vibe was that it was "cheap and quick"... exactly what you want for your compliance
The only job of a test is to fail, so if you never see the page red it's not doing anything. It's refreshing to see this being called out instead of going with the flow because "everyone is doing so".
There is a lot of serious allegations in here. But some of these complaints apply to most SOC 2 compliance services. For example: it points out that Delve provides pre-filled documents and encourages you to accept them as is. In my experience that is typical. I have seen companies just rubber stamp pre-created documents that describe IT processes that do not accurately reflect actual policy because the MBA[1] running the project didn't want to pull in IT and had no idea what any of it meant.<p>[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
Delve did not even try to fake the reports well. They could have used AI tooling to write somewhat plausible Assertions of Management, but they just dropped in clear form submissions to the reports they provided. Here is an example from Cluely:<p>> <i>We have prepared the accompanying description of Cluely, Inc., system titled "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." throughout the period June 27, 2025 - September 27, 2025(description), based on the criteria set forth in the Description Criteria DC Section 200 2018 Description Criteria for a Description of a Service Organization’s System in a SOC 2 Report (description criteria).</i><p>> <i>The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful when assessing the risks arising from interactions with Cluely, Inc. system, particularly information about the suitability of design and operating effectiveness of Cluely, Inc. controls to meet the criteria related to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy set forth in TSP Section 100, 2017 Trust Services Principles and Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy (applicable trust services criteria).</i><p>I mean, just re-read this sentence:<p>> <i>The description is intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that may be useful</i><p>It makes no sense at all.<p>Someone implemented the code to automate this report mill, and didn't think to even smooth it out with an LLM! There was clear intent here.<p>To imagine that an auditor reviewed and stamped this as a coherent body of work beggars belief.
Forbes 30u30 pipeline remains undefeated.<p>How did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.
This is the next one...<p><a href="https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035024494663016532" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035024494663016532</a>
Trust me, you can lie and get away with it if you go through YC and dropped out of a top university. Garry Tan blocked me on X for pointing this out. It's a big club, and you ain't in it!<p>Fortunately, some of the old-YC spirit seems to be alive here on HN still.
> How did none of this come up during diligence?<p>The article states that, "Even though we knew we’d technically be lying about our security to anyone we sent these policies to for review ... we decided to adopt these policies because we simply didn’t have the bandwidth to rewrite them all manually."
You mean from the beginning? They could’ve just done it properly initially then moved to this scam process later
Dishonesty is high signal for VC<p>Like no one characterizes it like that, but this is the same business where you can tell a story about hiring a bunch of college friends to pretend to be your employees so a client comes to your "office" and thinks you're a legitimate business. And instead of looking in horror at how casually you'll lie to get business it's seen as scrappy and whimsical.
Compliance is something that no one ever wants and everybody hates. Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"<p>Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility.<p>The regulator can ask whether you are compliant. You can present certificate from Delve or someone else and that's the end of it.
I don't want to work wherever you do your thing. Software as a service means you provide a service, and you should take your responsibility to protect your customer's data super seriously. Compliance frameworks are one useful tool among many to support this effort. It helps us identify gaps, identify risks, make improvements. It also give us a way to communicate what we do to our partners. The behavior described in the medium post is fraud, pure and simple.<p>I am a founder, and my ambition includes meeting the highest possible standards for my customers.
Not a single person wakes up in the morning thinking they wish to pay taxes and rent and do the laundry the other stuff that has to be done. I would be nice to smoke weed and play video games all day and order the deliveries.<p>Some things just have to be done.
> Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"<p>Somehow I doubt that you are in the B2B/Enterprise space. When you're pitching demos and you hear from people "we really wish we could buy your product but we can't because Finance won't approve the expenditure unless you get XYZ-123", and you hear that over and over again because that is the real-world industry that you live in, then you better believe that there are founders who wake up in the morning wishing that.<p>You clearly have no understanding of what compliance does. Compliance does not "shift responsibility". Compliance is you demonstrating to your customers that you give enough of a shit that you're willing to pay the table stakes to sit at the table. You can complain that the game has table stakes, but all worthwhile games have them.
When I worked in cybersecurity I had a similar realization. No one cared about security posture. They cared about insurance policies. People hired us to shift blame instead of improve security posture. this is not terribly different
This is why I've said for years: If you want to drive best practices and policy with companies you can only do it with liability. Particularly non-insurable and non-tax deductible liability. If a company can't offload civil or criminal penalties to their insurance company and take the tax write down, they suddenly start caring about it.<p>That said, this should be used sparingly; as it embeds a behavior deep. If that behavior later no longer makes sense it can be extremely costly to change it later.
I think it's subtly different than that.<p>Companies <i>do</i> want to be secure. They try, and they often fail because it's <i>hard</i>.<p>They hire auditors to find problems <i>and</i> to shift blame. But since they only have 30 days to fix the problems that are found, it's going to see a <i>lot</i> like they only care about shifting the blame. Because at that point, they only care about passing that audit.<p>Right after that, though, they start caring about security again.<p>How do I know? 19 years experience going through those audits on the company side. For 11 months of the year, it was clear the boss cared about security. For that 1 month during the 'free retest' period, they only cared about passing that audit.
One of my FAANG security projects incidentally helped with some compliance efforts (I made very sure it was incidental, constantly said things like "I am thrilled that I can help you guys achieve your goals but I wanna be clear that I don't give a shit about compliance and I won't be allowing it to influence the direction of my product" in meetings, it must have been extremely annoying to work with me).<p>At some point I was asked to look over the documents for the compliance definition and it was really hilarious. I had to give my engineering perspective on which aspects of the requirements we were and weren't meeting.<p>But they were stuff like "you must have logs". "You must authenticate users". "You must log failed authentication attempts".<p>Did we fulfill these requirements? It's a meaningless question. Unless you were literally running an open door telnet service or something you could interpret the questions so as to support any answer you wanted to give.<p>So I just had to be like "do you want me to say yes?" and they did, so I said yes. Nothing productive was ever achieved during that engagement.
Maybe no one wakes up wanting to deal with compliance, but it you found a company that has legal or moral obligations to be compliant with these standards, you sure have signed yourself up for it. Passing the responsibility off to some other company is, quite simply, irresponsible.
> Passing the responsibility off to some other company is, quite simply, irresponsible.<p>Then do not pass the responsibility. But here's the trick: the regulator would like to see an audit done by a firm and purchasing audit services is exactly that: passing responsibility. So legally you can't be compliant unless you passed responsibility.
These compliance companies are not primarily tasked with auditing, as this article makes very clear. Delve is in control of the auditing process in a way that is inappropriate and unusual for this industry. The work that the company with these obligations should be doing themselves is generating the Section 3 description and the controls. The auditor then independently verifies their compliance with the controls. Thats a clear delineation of responsibilty, IMO
Problem is, compliance is often detrimental to the cause. You want to encrypt users' data at rest? Illegal. You must store users data in a way prescribed by the law and it is extremely cumbersome, outdated and insecure.
there needs to be a fund with an ethos of "move slowly and do things accurately"
The fund is called customers. The independent regulator is called the AICPA. It really comes down to who is paying attention<p>SOC2 is as useful as a privacy policy at protecting your data. It’s all humans following human incentives.
The United States military?
There are a few, roughly.<p>Like the best options in most categories, they don’t spend a bunch of money or time on brand presence, advertising.<p><i>You</i> simply find <i>them</i>.
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/soc2/comments/1q7u90o/real_or_fake_the_delve_scandal_or_conspiracy/?share_id=GpurrXbOAejcAflAQK8j1&utm_content=1&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/soc2/comments/1q7u90o/real_or_fake_...</a>
I've been talking about this for a while now. For those of you thinking... Oh, I use a "good" company... think otherwise.<p><a href="https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1946302651383329081" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1946302651383329081</a><p>The whole thing is a racket.
Notice how none of Delve's affiliates on X are posting anything after that Substack post. Probably their lawyers told them not to say anything further.<p>What does that tell you about the scam that was unveiled?<p>Not good.
Well now we know how Cluely and friends can claim to be SOC2 compliant.
vibe compliance
Major red flag with this should have been that their expensive marketing predicated heavily on them being MIT dropouts instead of any expertise in the space
> No custom tailoring, no AI guidance, no real automation. Just pre-populated forms that required you to click “save”.<p>I hate that I've become this cynical, but it's gotten to the point where reading the "no x, no y, just z" construct makes me assume that writing is AI generated (and then I immediately stop caring about reading it)
wow, cannot imagine now companies that tool the compliance, and get deals just to be fake. uff...
wow you guys really delved into this
Great write up. What makes this interesting...I thought it was cool what they were doing...but also seemed too good to be true. I went ahead a booked a demo call with them. Great personas. Very friendly. Can't say they had all the answers, but they did bring a CISO on the last meeting, which seemed a bit scripted. They also never disclosed any breaches, even after I asked them. Yikes. Good luck to the orgs that went through all that process.
All this evidence seems pretty legit. I found this on LinkedIn and came here to post, but noticed it had already been posted. Surprised I didn’t see it on HN front page.
I miss 2010s YC until like 2017 ish when crypto sort of just caused a massive decline across the board.<p>I guess it is great if you're a grifter/scammer or looking to just sell off to a FANG.
How does this not reach the front page?
We just found out about this story and the submissions of it. It looks like it didn't make the front page because it set off HN's voting ring detector.<p>Mods didn't touch either thread except (1) we merged the duplicate discussions and (2) we rolled back the voting ring penalty so that the story would be on the frontpage.<p>This is in keeping with the principle that we moderate stories less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story. That's been the case since the beginning, and I've posted about it dozens of times: <a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...</a>.
Respectfully, I think there may be an issue with your voting ring detection, which is that if multiple people try to submit the same article and are redirected to an existing post and they upvote it, that might be setting off the voting ring alert. Can you check that?<p>I would imagine that's what happened here.
> we moderate stories less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of the story<p>Nobody believes that, HN does extensive damage control, banning, flagging with alt accounts, specific story suppression, propaganda, and outright censorship.<p>This comment itself will be censored for countering your narrative not because it’s too toxic for the precious eyes of readers or violates any generally accepted ethics, but because censorship and propaganda are weapons of choice for an abusive unintelligent maniac like yourself.
Having been at this for 12 years I am pretty sure that the bulk of the community does in fact believe us when we say that, and even when we say other things as well.<p>There are a number of reasons why this is the case. One is that it is true. Another is that we've always treated the good will of the community as by far the biggest asset—in fact, the only asset—that HN has.
It's on the front page for me?
It does, but it's also a takedown of a YC-backed company.<p>Really great vetting there, guys.
Cluely and HockeyStack are scam companies too.<p>Cluely did the ChatGPT wrapper to cheat on interviews then sold the customer data to recruiters. The whole company promise is a scam, and useless since we have LLMs.<p>HockeyStack held contests for people to win cars etc and never delivered. They also lied about having revenues and a product when they had nothing built. Along with Greptile they were doing 7day weeks of unpaid labor from “trial periods”.<p>Scams all around.
Greptile is an awesome product, not sure where the scam is there
Wait what's the greptile story?
It says right there, 7-day work weeks (no days off).<p>Also they were part of the cohort forcing workers to stay minimum until 9PM.<p>Like every AI company, their "product" is a Next.js website, OPENAI_API_KEY, and a Stripe checkout page.
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This seems like a hit job by a competitor. Really ruthless.<p>> Two months ago, an email went out to a few hundred Delve clients informing them that Delve had leaked their audit reports, alongside other confidential information, through a Google spreadsheet that was publicly accessible.<p>Who leaked the audit reports? Who sent this email? Who is taking the time to write this analysis and kill the company?<p>In my opinion, the majority of the points in the article are no news. A compliance saas that offers templates for policies, all of them do. The AI is a chatbot, well who thought.<p>I think the main point is the collusion between delve and the auditors. Is the evidence for that clear?
The key problem is the audits and the auditors. I have independently verified for our vendors that they have the same templated SOC2 as all of the leaked reports, which is concerning because that shows the auditors did not actually validate the controls.<p>SOC2 is supposed to give you an INDEPENDENT evaluation of the compliance of a company "are they doing what they say they are"<p>If the SOC2 report is just a pre-populated template, it is meaningless.<p>It doesn't really matter the motivation of the "DeepDelver" - this has implications across all companies that rely on these vendors that have been "assessed" by Delve.
Hit piece or not, the blatantly fraudulent behavior displayed by Delve is reprehensible.<p>And they didn't even try. Read this management assertion for one of the (known) affected companies:<p>> <i>We have prepared the accompanying description of Cluely, Inc.,</i> system titled "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." <i>throughout the period June 27, 2025 - September 27, 2025(description), based on the criteria set forth in the Description Criteria DC Section 200 2018 Description Criteria for a Description of a Service Organization’s System in a SOC 2 Report (description criteria).</i><p>> <i>The description is</i> intended to provide users with information about the "Cluely is a desktop AI assistant to give you answers in real-time, when you need it." that <i>may be useful when assessing the risks arising from interactions with Cluely, Inc. system, particularly information about the suitability of design and operating effectiveness of Cluely, Inc. controls to meet the criteria related to Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy set forth in TSP Section 100, 2017 Trust Services Principles and Criteria for Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality and Privacy (applicable trust services criteria).</i>
There's no need for some conspiracy.<p>It's a juicy story to talk about that hits a lot of checkboxes that make it viral --<p><pre><code> 1. the hustle culture they promoted online was gross
2. they followed the 30u30 Forbes pattern like Liz Holmes, FTX, etc.
3. they're a YC co, so their's plenty of popular voices supporting them
</code></pre>
The 3rd isn't to slight the program but folks definitely slam any companies that seem to be in the moral gray area as a proof the program is nihilistic and a net negative. People like to shove mistakes in the face of "successful" folks like investors/VCs.<p>Finally, the security and compliance community is litigious by their nature and this startup, in general, was a net negative for a lot of people who do fractional / consulting work in security.
What's more surprising to me, as a layperson, is that I found this out and investigated their shady auditor network in late December. It didn't take much work.<p>Insight Partners invested in a 32 MILLION DOLLAR ROUND without any apparent shred of due diligence. What does that say about the VC market writ large?