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aiisahik 13 hours ago [-]
80% of Compliance has always been a performative box checking exercise.
They delivered the product that every company wanted - make the box checking faster.
mizzao 12 hours ago [-]
Okay, so who are we supposed to go to for SOC 2 compliance now if any number of the compliance automation companies might be charging 5 figures to do it fradulently?
Spooky23 8 hours ago [-]
Pay to play and keep selling. Understand the liabilities and cover your ass, address the biggest risks.
The point of SOC2 is really demonstrate that you have controls. The other fake compliance areas are scarier for sure. You used to see really blatant issues — I recall early SaaS companies pitching to my enterprise with sales engineers showing me customer data.
Microsoft refused to provide diagrams to the Feds detailing how Azure works. They got the FedRAMP High stamp anyway, because they already sold it to half the Fed. That’s more real… as a situation where a Chinese hacker could compromise data in a dedicated “government cloud” by compromising a certificate in an onprem dev environment should be impossible… yet it happened.
nerdsniper 10 hours ago [-]
If you want to do it right, hire a CPA who takes it seriously and spend the time to complete it in-house and fully understand it. Then engage one of the big 4 to sign off on it. The big 4 don’t offer much for SOC2 above what Delve does, it’s all smoke and mirrors unless you personally take it seriously.
subscribed 8 hours ago [-]
Big four have been caught approving fraudulent accounts too, so why not SOC? :)
littlestymaar 44 minutes ago [-]
> 80% of Compliance has always been a performative box checking exercise.
You're making the same mistake as most people do: it's 80% box checking but that doesn't make it performative, the box checking is here so that the dude who checked the box become legally responsible for what's happening if they haven't done what they said they did.
If you didn't check that box you could always claim you didn't know you weren't supposed to do what you did. As soon as you've checked “yes, I'm doing things in the approved way”, this excuse disappears.
orochimaaru 13 hours ago [-]
There is a legal liability that comes with the bow checking. Nobody cares about box checking. Everyone cares about legal liability.
gzread 4 hours ago [-]
These days, nobody cares about legal liability, which is the likelihood of losing a lawsuit if there's a lawsuit, either. They only care about actual lawsuits against their company. They have noticed they're pretty rare and if the company's going to go under it's going to go under anyway, so might as well take the extra profits from not worrying about it
littlestymaar 41 minutes ago [-]
If someone checked one box, and the company goes under because of a lawsuit linked to not doing what this box said, then the individual who checked that box becomes personally liable of the damages done to the shareholders asset (the value of the company).
You don't want to be in this position, really. And that's the whole point of compliance.
madaxe_again 12 hours ago [-]
Nah. I’m gonna name some names.
I had a client in the compliance space - they handle detailed product information for Apple, Boeing, BAE systems, Philips, Siemens - you know, nothing important, just literally classified material and incredibly sensitive corporate material.
Anyway. We did ISO27001. We did it well, audited by Lloyds register, reputable stuff all the way down. Built actual meaningful processes.
Anyway, a massive PE entity bought them in a hostile takeover, fired everybody, binned the ISMS, moved to some “compliance” goons.
I saw the box ticking chicanery as it happened - as after firing everyone they of course didn’t follow the off boarding process, so I retained full access to their JIRA. I only lost access a year later when atlassian terminated the account for non-payment.
Nobody actually gives a shit, about anything.
nerdsniper 10 hours ago [-]
> I’m gonna name some names.
*Doesn’t name any names.*
Not that I want you to, I feel it would open you up to libel exposure. But can we both acknowledge that you didn’t name the entity that coasted through their audit?
azan_ 2 minutes ago [-]
He technically did name many names:
> Apple, Boeing, BAE systems, Philips, Siemens
badc0ffee 6 hours ago [-]
He didn't say when he was gonna name some names.
madaxe_again 10 hours ago [-]
I did, and then I thought twice. Let’s say it’s a synonym for a piece of non-reflective geology.
zoklet-enjoyer 8 hours ago [-]
I always think of obsidian when I see their name and that's reflective
itsankur 5 hours ago [-]
pretty sure he means blackstone or blackrock
seabass-salmon 28 seconds ago [-]
I'd have guessed Iron Mountain
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
Until someone rich and powerful gets ripped off -- then, suddenly, lots of people care a lot.
Ucalegon 10 hours ago [-]
>Nobody actually gives a shit, about anything.
That's the case until there is the threat of discovery. The real issue is if the PE firm bought the company for the value of the IP and any damages awarded was included in the 'cost of business', which is why liability needs to be extended to those persons who make that decision, not just the corporate entity.
orochimaaru 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah - probably. Didn’t Microsoft have Chinese engineers work classified government stuff?
I guess if you have the muscle to brush off legal action from the govt you’re ok. If you’re an unsuspecting startup - that could be a problem.
> These are starting points only: customers are responsible for reviewing, modifying, and finalizing their own materials. Draft templates are not the same as “pre-filled evidence.”
Yeah, ok. BRB to start a bank where I template everyone a billion dollars, its up to you to be honest with how much money you have.
svat 12 hours ago [-]
> “Non-denial denial” is a term of art in PR. Never read one? They’re fun.
To me this is the money shot (but it takes a couple of passes to understand):
> No small amount of criticism of LLMs is downstream of past decisions to reify form over function, resulting in the substance having been optimized out. Now the LLM threatens to make the form available in seconds
ctxc 2 hours ago [-]
Had to do a double take, but true
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
*Actual fun may vary.
mizzao 12 hours ago [-]
> "If there are more attacks to respond to we will do so."
Wow, what a way to end the document.
Qasaur 12 hours ago [-]
They’ve possibly dug an even deeper hole now.
None of their ISO 27001 certificates, aside from the premium one-offs with the vCISO, are accredited by any reputable ISO accreditation body. I would even argue that IAS, who accredited Prescient Security (mentioned as a reputable body in the article), has a questionable reputation and certainly gives off a pay-to-play impression.
You can look up the names of their partners below. The one body I found that is on the register (Accorp) is accredited by UAF, a known cert-mill accreditation body, and I’m not even sure it’s the same Accorp that Delve has partnered with.
For reference, you want a ISO certificate issued by a body accredited by UKAS (UK gov. adjacent non-profit), ANAB (ANSI), or equivalent, all government-recognised. This is normally the first thing I check whenever someone claims ISO 27001 certification and it is a great heuristic to validate certification rigour.
Shockingly low levels of DD by everyone involved here.
adgjlsfhk1 9 hours ago [-]
wow! they confirmed it in the last paragraph. "we are investigating possible leaks", not "we have filed a libel suit". A leak means an insider spilled the beans
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
This response is just... simply... terrible.
"Below are just some of the many inaccuracies in the story and then the truth."
"[G]iven how competitive this industry is, attacks like this sadly come with the territory."
"We are actively investigating any leaks and are still reviewing the Substack. If there are more attacks to respond to we will do so."
When you have a PR problem, you don't hire your marketing intern to write the response. You hire a PR consultant. Their funders' Rolodexes are probably full of them. If the Board approved the response, I'd be frankly shocked.
sebmellen 13 hours ago [-]
There's a deep lack of accountability here for their marketing statements. For example, "get SOC 2 compliant in days," which I would consider to be false advertising.
That, plus their willingness to arrange an essentially fraudulent auditor network (try to find who the real CPA is behind Accorp, for example), and also massively upcharge the prices of the SOC reports that they offered as a bundled service within the platform. There was no separation here. Del is the transfer agent. Del was always the intermediary and the transfer agent. There is no independence in their default auditor relationships.
At very best, this is a massive AICPA transgression.
At worst, blatant fraud.
I would wager that discovery would show the latter.
CityOfThrowaway 13 hours ago [-]
This basically boils down to, "Sure, we recommended you work with scammy low-quality auditors, but if you actually use them it's your own fault... we're just an automation tool!"
In other words, I'm reading this as effectively a full admission that the claims are true but the company is saying not their responsibility.
Very, very bad.
jvwww 13 hours ago [-]
Where does it say we recommend you work with scammy low-quality auditors? They say that they use third party audit firms that are used by other compliance companies.
sebmellen 13 hours ago [-]
This is clearly false from what I've seen. If you read the source Substack article and look through the list of auditors they have, it is impossible to trace down who the US-based CPA is that's issuing the report. These firms, for all intents and purposes, do not really exist. They use shell addresses in Wyoming and Texas that are registered agent offices, etc.
But really all you have to do is look at the reports themselves. They are so shoddily written that it's hard to believe any legitimate firm would issue them. If you Ctrl F for Clueley in this thread, you will see my comment with a sample excerpt from the assertion of management for one of their reports.
dove-3746 12 hours ago [-]
Present assurance definitely exists in the US. Outside of delve, I have seen their reports for vanta and it’s the same. it was 95% policy inspections and 5% loooked at a GRC tool.
paulryanrogers 8 hours ago [-]
I've used Prescient in the past and found them on par with others. Policy evidence is at most about 30%. Everything else is show-don't-tell. Either live screen shares, screenshots, non-policy documentation, or evidence from a shared vendor that's integrated into the environments and security tools (like Drata).
bigiain 9 hours ago [-]
I assume you mean this "Prescient Assurance? As detailed in this section of the post?
6.7 Misled auditor - Prescient
With this conclusion:
Looking at that report, there are clear signs that Delve either knowingly misled Prescient, or that Prescient accommodated Delve’s deficient process. Given their reputation and by the small number of Delve/Prescient reports out there, I’m assuming it is the former.
ibero 12 hours ago [-]
if you go through the original Substack post it’s clear the intention is to drive to those obfuscated auditors.
owebmaster 12 hours ago [-]
We or they? Choose one
joemi 12 hours ago [-]
It can be inferred the use of "we" was as a quote. The bigger issue is that they did not clearly indicate that they were quoting.
OsrsNeedsf2P 15 hours ago [-]
Even if this is a hit piece made by a competitor, the evidence put forwards is very damning:
> Conclusions present before customer signs or provides info
If false, the defamation damages here would be in the tens of millions. Huge respect to whoever stuck their neck out to post this.
otterley 12 hours ago [-]
In theory, yes, but you can't squeeze blood from a stone.
ersshh 1 days ago [-]
Forbes 30u30 pipeline remains undefeated.
How did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.
sebmellen 1 days ago [-]
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!
Fortunately, some of the old-YC spirit seems to be alive here on HN still.
jvwww 14 hours ago [-]
They likely barely had a product when they applied to YC. It's more interesting as to why this wasn't discovered (if it is even true) when they were raising their Series A.
gzread 4 hours ago [-]
Why would anyone actually care about this, as long as money is made?
rithdmc 17 hours ago [-]
> How did none of this come up during diligence?
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
duped 16 hours ago [-]
Dishonesty is high signal for VC
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.
cco 8 hours ago [-]
I think they're fairly open about looking for this signal, "be naughty" is one of their core tenants, no?
rooftopzen 11 hours ago [-]
Considering how YC companies are customers of other YC companies (presumably to lift ARR), how many YC companies have Delve compliance?
Should we worry about AI startup customer data…
halamadrid 1 days ago [-]
This was such as interesting read, but I found this link via LinkedIn rather than hackernews.
I would have expected this to be somewhere at the top right now given how deep the article digs and evidence seems legit.
sebmellen 1 days ago [-]
I think it may be getting (intentionally?) suppressed from the homepage. Given this is a YCombinator website, I wouldn't rule that out.
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.
dang 17 hours ago [-]
In case anyone hasn't seen my other posts about this:
(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
(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.)
(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.
>I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
To be fair, it seems you’re saying the submission was being suppressed, just not intentionally. Lots of props of course for transparency and reboosting the story
dang 9 hours ago [-]
When people use the word "suppressed" they usually mean that we were personally intervening to do something suppressive. This being the internet, they say that with supreme confidence whether it's true or not.
For example, the comment I was referring to, which was the first one I saw, said "It is being suppressed by @dang" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457010). You can't get more personal, definitive, or wrong than that.
muglug 15 hours ago [-]
TIL that voting ring detection exists
dang 14 hours ago [-]
HN would be an entirely different place if people could just arrange to get their stuff upvoted onto the front page! We've spent hundreds of hours working on this over the years. Still not perfect of course.
sebmellen 14 hours ago [-]
My theory is that a lot of people may have looked for a story like this on the home page and then searched ‘Delve’ to see if anything was submitted recently and then upvoted one of those recently submitted posts.
x0x0 12 hours ago [-]
in some slacks there are regular requests to upvote stuff.
andrewflnr 17 hours ago [-]
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.
20 hours ago [-]
instalabsai 1 days ago [-]
Surprised/not surprised that this is getting buried from the homepage
dang 17 hours ago [-]
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.
sebmellen 1 days ago [-]
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.
For those looking for help with SOC2 compliance, I had a good experience with another YC company, Vanta. That was some years ago so not sure if anything has changed since then but I would recommend checking them out.
lowkey_ 10 hours ago [-]
I had a pretty poor experience as a startup on Vanta. Maybe this is my own ignorance, but I told them when our contract was to renew that we do NOT want to renew. We were an early-stage startup soon to shut down and didn't need it. We never touched Vanta for 10 months before this, we never got SOC-2 (it was deprioritized). Not a single login in 10 months.
Nevertheless, they said it was: too late to opt out, that it can't be canceled or postponed, and then kept emailing us endlessly and sending to collections to pay them another $10K platform fee for the next year (more than we had in the company bank account).
I understand this with large corporations, but I don't think they're a good fit for startups.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
I like the Vanta people just fine and think it's a fine product, but I would not recommend it to startups looking to get SOC2.
Most startups should be doing way, way less than automation platforms like these tell them they need to do to get a SOC2 attestation.
dmix 12 hours ago [-]
Not every sales team can convince a big paying customer that SOC2 isn't important. Lots of B2B SaaS companies have to play the enterprise lawyer game to get big contracts.
akerl_ 12 hours ago [-]
This feels like a weird response to a comment recommending how to approach getting a SOC2, that links to a blog post about Fly.io's SOC2.
The pitch isn't "don't get a SOC2", or "convince big paying customers that SOC2 isn't important". It's "don't worry about SOC2 until a big paying customer says they'll make big payments if you get it, and when you do worry about it, don't let SOC2 compliance trick you into doing bonkers infrastructure things"
lelandbatey 12 hours ago [-]
Fly is not saying "just ignore SOC2 compliance". Fly is saying "yes, get SOC2, we had to become SOC2 compliant, and also, you can work with your auditor to achieve SOC2 compliance in a more sane way than if you just do whatever is recommended upfront."
Basically, they are saying that you should tailor your SOC2 implementation so that it's actually useful without being a horrible overbearing process, that you have that option and should take it.
sebmellen 13 hours ago [-]
YC has funded both Vanta and OneLeet. It's a shame they also funded a hype machine like Delve.
I would recommend both Vanta and OneLeet as good quality tools to work with, having used both. The founders of OneLeet are very accessible, and Vanta has all the integrations you would need as both a small startup and an enterprise-grade player.
Secureframe and Drata are other tools in a similar class that are also legitimate.
suriya-ganesh 17 hours ago [-]
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?
intermediaries like delve have only amplified this failure.
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.
amanhij 6 hours ago [-]
Lots of companies affected this, what blows my mind is when VC's were funding this how come no due-diligence was done on something as important as compliance. who even tries to scam on compliance like it's a known way to get caught.
solid_fuel 6 hours ago [-]
They're "AI Native". This maps with how the entire "AI revolution" has felt to me - like no due diligence has been done to validate the output of anything, and instead just the "AI" stamp is enough to satisfy investors.
laidoffamazon 6 hours ago [-]
I genuinely think this is because the elites like the MIT dropouts that started this company think the rest of us observers are stupid.
They have a billboard with the copy "Compliance before you tell your parents you dropped out of MIT"
Muromec 16 hours ago [-]
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".
hintymad 16 hours ago [-]
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?
wmf 16 hours ago [-]
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. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/12/06/where-theres-muck-...
busseio 16 hours ago [-]
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."
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.
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.
jazzyjackson 15 hours ago [-]
I think there are lots of 20 year olds with a passion for making money
hardwaregeek 15 hours ago [-]
I wonder if it's almost like a new version of management consulting. You hire/invest in a bunch of smart 20-somethings who seem generally intelligent with the idea that they'll "disrupt" an industry with their from-first principles approach. Do the 23 year old McKinsey consultants particularly care about their work? No, but the McKinsey name is a fast way to gain clout and access to executives. Ditto the YC name
ohmahjong 15 hours ago [-]
I'm in the industry (albeit not a 20-year old), and agree that the domain itself is incredibly dry.
The tech is quite interesting, thankfully.
From a customer perspective it's interesting - compliance sucks so much that even a slight improvement/automation goes a long way
victorbjorklund 14 hours ago [-]
I’m currently working on a KYC compliance startup. Loads of fun both technically and also KYC in it self. Most things can be fun and interesting to someone.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
> Question: how likely is it that a number of 20-year olds have the passion of solving the problem of compliance auditing?
It mentions that they had a medical scribe product and ran into HIPAA compliance issues with it, so it's not a leap to think someone might go "hey this stuff is what sunk us last time, I bet we're not the only people with that problem".
laidoffamazon 15 hours ago [-]
The problem may not be "intellectually interesting" to them at all, but building B2B SaaS does appeal to them from a lifestyle/prestige/pedigree perspective and will probably get them an exit to become a Venture investor even if they fail.
poupdich 14 hours ago [-]
[dead]
bob1029 15 hours ago [-]
Compliance isn't that hard once you stop looking for shortcuts and start spending time doing it correctly.
AWS is probably the best actual CaaS vendor out there. They have a product offering expressly designed to help their customers get through this jungle:
You are still responsible for everything on top of what AWS provides (software/configuration/policy), but their compliance package handles a massive portion of what you would otherwise have to do if you were on-prem. Physical security, hardware management, disaster recovery, et. al., you get essentially "for free".
codemog 14 hours ago [-]
> Compliance isn't that hard once you stop looking for shortcuts and start spending time doing it correctly.
Trying to understand how someone can have this perspective when it’s usually someone’s full time salaried job in a lot of companies.
Ucalegon 13 hours ago [-]
A lot of that comes down to the costs associated with not being compliant and/or the requirements of existing contracts/insurance policies, where having dedicated FTEs to compliance is a requirement. Compliance might not be hard for the person/people managing the program, however it might seem difficult or complex to the FTEs that have to build to those standards if they do not have a security or governance background.
Bewelge 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe they meant "Not hard != quickly done". I don't think many people think bureaucracy is especially difficult. It's just time consuming.
But frankly if they meant that, the statement doesn't really say anything at all. Because what in this world is hard if you stop taking shortcuts and spend time doing it correctly?
klausa 9 hours ago [-]
Cold fusion.
staticassertion 13 hours ago [-]
I assume they mean "getting a SOC2 report", which is the part that Delve attempts to automate. The maintenance of controls, adoption of new policy as the company evolves, etc, is what someone will do in the full time role and that Delve et al would do nothing to assist with.
mrsmrtss 15 hours ago [-]
I think that goes for any major cloud provider, not only AWS. But nothing is free, you pay a hefty premium to get this (compared to plain infra providers like Hetzner for example).
fareesh 16 hours ago [-]
A lot of startups move fast with a small team.
You build something great and big corporation X wants to buy a subscription but you need to be certified.
Much of this is a good checklist but some of it is very european.
"Where is the risk register to track controls in your 7 person company?"
Now instead of doing what your team does best, you are doing paperwork theater for frameworks designed for a 100,000 employee enterprise.
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.
What's needed is a variant of these standards for small teams, which is proportionate and pragmatic.
jordigg 15 hours ago [-]
SOC 2 is mostly about proving you do what your policies say, and there’s more flexibility than people think.
For small teams it doesn’t have to be heavyweight. A risk register can be a simple doc with a few real risks and mitigations.
That said, I agree there’s a lot of theater. For smaller companies and budgets, it often turns into rubber stamping. Auditors rely on the evidence you provide, so the report can look much cleaner than day to day reality.
Still, it has value. It forces you to formalize basic practices, and if you want those customers, you’re signing up for that level of scrutiny.
IgorPartola 15 hours ago [-]
Exactly this. But my question here is also: is there not a competitive advantage to a big enterprise that applies standards in a more intelligent way? You have a SaaS, I have a Fortune 500 company that could use your product but I cannot use it because my procurement process is as long and winding ad the Road to Hana. In the meantime my competitor has a smarter procurement process that takes into account the impact and risk involved in renting your software. Don’t they get a competitive advantage over me by having a better process and as a result getting better vendors?
mushufasa 15 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately in most cases the buyers have way more liability/risk using a small vendor than opportunity. Often this is coming from regulators in certain industries.
In scenarios where the company REALLY REALLY wants to buy the SaaS, they often will invest in the company, one of the reasons for which being to ensure they have the resources to go through all the red tape.
bartman 15 hours ago [-]
I’ve found CIS Controls v8.1 to be good and sane, with actual benefits to security. Level 1 is a solid base, and Level 2 is good for picking from depending on where risks exist in your business.
CIS Benchmarks are worth a look too: They’re best practices for securing typical cloud platforms, SaaS and OS.
1970-01-01 14 hours ago [-]
The risk register is ISO 27001. The "I" in ISO doesn't stand for Internet, it stands for international. You shouldn't be doing business with international customers if you don't have a risk register, which is why they're requesting it.
SkinTaco 13 hours ago [-]
Why is the line drawn at being international?
What is it about customers in Ethiopia that necessitates this? What is it about American (non-international) customers that doesn't require a register?
hsbauauvhabzb 11 hours ago [-]
Shouldn’t according to who? Who appointed ISO to say what should and shouldn’t be done?
phyzix5761 15 hours ago [-]
What is the purpose of a business though? To make profits for its owners. If the profit lies in doing all this corporate theater then that's the business. A company that focuses only on providing a service and product but ignores how their customer needs to use said service and product is going to go out of business.
eikenberry 15 hours ago [-]
That is "a" purpose of a business, but not the primary purpose. The primary purpose of business is to provide a service or product people want. You can want profits all day long but if you don't have something people want you don't have a business.
throttlebody 15 hours ago [-]
I would argue that profits are a result of what you do and not the purpose...
Obviously intertwined but that's why its important to pick something you like
kingjimmy 14 hours ago [-]
"is very european." ... aa yes consumer protections. very european.
ljm 15 hours ago [-]
Maybe you suouldn't be hacking due diligence if your team isn't ready for it
ceejayoz 15 hours ago [-]
Isn't ready for, or doesn't need?
I had to have meetings with… myself, at times, for compliance reasons.
michaelt 9 hours ago [-]
> Now instead of doing what your team does best, you are doing paperwork theater for frameworks designed for a 100,000 employee enterprise.
Have you considered that the kind of companies that demand SOC2 compliance would be happy to pay extra for SOC2 compliance, if you offered it as an optional add-on costing $200k per year?
bob778 8 hours ago [-]
$200k is more for FedRAMP or PROTECTED+, but I think you’d be able to create a “compliance” addon for $20k quite successfully.
Bombthecat 14 hours ago [-]
Going through this with a medical startup... We have like 2 developer. But to get investment, put the app online etc. We need to fill out those paperwork... For things which just don't exist...
sidewndr46 14 hours ago [-]
Isn't the point of the paperwork to get you to make those things exist?
troupo 12 hours ago [-]
> We need to fill out those paperwork... For things which just don't exist...
Things like what? HIPAA?
bradfox2 15 hours ago [-]
This is as designed to gatekeep these customers. Those in control of the checklists stand to benefit.
troupo 12 hours ago [-]
Translation: all your rules and regulations are crap, and we don't want to comply with any of them.
When in reality most rules and regulations are not crap, and you should care about them.
Especially when your startup advertises compliance with HIPAA (medical records), PCI-DSS (payments data) and a bunch of other data protection standards and regulations.
ozim 5 hours ago [-]
Most rules and regulations are not crap.
But whole compliance industry is crap.
One way they inflate expectations to extract money the other way they cut corners to rubber stamp BS to make it as cheap as possible for themselves.
cwal37 16 hours ago [-]
Delve seems clearly scummy, but dear god the author's company was also engaging in fraud with their own customers and just hoping to skate by.
"The trouble starts when you look at the answers Delve’s AI provided. Based on what your Delve policies claim, the questionnaire AI answers questions stating you have an MDM, had a 200 hour pen-test performed, and do regular backup restoration simulations. Tens of questions are answered like that. Great, you just lied to your vendor but at least you have a good shot at landing the deal. So what did we do? We kept our mouths shut."
Pretty rotten stuff. I went from energy into the software startup world and as I've gotten further down that road and energy has become more and more of a hot field I've encountered a depressing increase in that "just do it to make a deal" ethos, but in critical infrastructure.
Like, no, former Apple PM who learned about an interconnection queue from ChatGPT last week, you are not going to fix the grid, and even moreso you can't "just do X and ask forgiveness later", not in electricity.
OsrsNeedsf2P 15 hours ago [-]
At least they had the balls to post it
cwal37 14 hours ago [-]
Per the piece, they only began to step away from Delve once they realized they couldn't close the deals they wanted and their hand was forced by outside asks.
And then also it took a rather large data leak later on to provide extra ammunition to decide and go forward with publishing this.
I'm glad they did, but there are a bunch of steps in between pure balls/altruism and what actually happened based on the blog.
ibero 12 hours ago [-]
uh isn’t the data leaker the necessary accelerant and necessary component to validate against the rest of the ecosystem? isn’t that what triggered the communication and coordination between multiple delve customers?
sebmellen 17 hours ago [-]
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:
> 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).
> 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 mean, just re-read this sentence:
> 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
It makes no sense at all.
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.
To imagine that an auditor reviewed and stamped this as a coherent body of work beggars belief.
stringtoint 17 hours ago [-]
Love the depth of this post.
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.
Every time an issue like this appears I wonder how many more undiscovered frauds are out there.
AFF87 19 hours ago [-]
I remember having sales calls with them and the vibe was that it was "cheap and quick"... exactly what you want for your compliance
icedchai 12 hours ago [-]
Most people only care about compliance if it stops them from closing a deal. I was at a startup where some enterprise said we needed a SOC 2. The founder talked them out of it by giving them a discount if they'd waive the requirement.
joshstrange 8 minutes ago [-]
My company is tiny (just me) and at one point a client sent over a questionnaire that I needed to fill out. Half the things I already did, about 1/4th I did right then so I could check the box (added features/reports/etc), and the last 1/4th I looked into (including SOC2) and decided I’d rather lose the deal than try to do those things. I was completely truthful in the questionnaire and for those sections I just put “We can provide this but it costs extra”.
I ended up getting the contract and they never asked for those extra things. I guess that’s kind of the same thing your founder did but in reverse. Discount to skip it vs it will cost more to add it.
To be clear, I think most of the questionnaire was just “we want these answers on file”, I’m not in an industry where most of what they asked for is reasonable/needed. Though it scared the hell out of me when I got it because SOC2 (and some other things they asked about) is not cheap. Literally 1-2x the cost of the service I was selling. All for something I consider a _very_ small step about snake oil.
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!"
Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility.
The regulator can ask whether you are compliant. You can present certificate from Delve or someone else and that's the end of it.
bedatadriven 16 hours ago [-]
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.
I am a founder, and my ambition includes meeting the highest possible standards for my customers.
xtracto 15 hours ago [-]
I've done a mix of SOC2, ISO27001 and PCI L1 for 3 different startups. 2 of them b2b. All certified 100% and fully compliant.
The problem with the current frameworks is that the "controls" are so asinine and auditors so hard headed, that getting certified becomes a matter of "checking the box" .
Particularly most of those frameworks REQUIRE maintaining so much paper red tape that make a 10 person startup want to kill themselves. And in addition the costs are stupid high for startups that are just "starting up".
On the flip side, how many large companies have we seen that have all the SOCs, ISOS and whatnot certifications, and they get pwn3d and their data stolen or exposed.
It tells you that a place being certified doesn't guarantee shit.
The reality is that large companies ask for certs as a CYA mechanism: the "security" department of LargeCo, asks for the compliance cert so that when shit hits the fan, they can say "not my fault, they told me they were compliant"
The good thing is that with the new Bullshit generators (llm) this certifification/compliance process will collapse.
bedatadriven 3 hours ago [-]
Well, yes, but that's the point of many contracts, they are often designed to shift risk to parties that are better equipped to handle those risks. We run our app on GCP because as a 20 person company I don't want to be responsible for physical security and a million other risks.
With ISO27001 or SOC 2, I have more information about the other party's ability to manage those risks than just taking their word for it. I'm trusting a third party auditor to vouch for them.
Fraud undermines all kinds of relationships and yes LLMs make it worse. The last job we opened I got hundreds of perfect cover letters asserting the candidates met all of the criteria. Bah.
My perhaps naive hope is that a few of these companies involved will face criminal fraud charges and we will start to develop new reflexes as a society that just bc LLMs making lying very very easy, there are still consequences.
Muromec 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Some things just have to be done.
egorfine 16 hours ago [-]
> thinking they wish to pay taxes
Wellll this is not always the case. I have moved from a shithole country to a nice one and oh boy I am crying in gratitude every month that I pay taxes. Because it is every day that I can see my money working for me in the environment.
But your point stands.
Muromec 16 hours ago [-]
As a person who moved to a high-tax country I understand the sentiment. It's usually lost on the people who were always there paying those taxes. Somehow it often doesn't click that they get something in return.
The same applies to all the audit and bureaucracy stuff. Does it do something? If you don't feel it does, does it mean it's not? I don't know really, but I hope somebody is rotating their key material as they provided in their security posture.
kakacik 16 hours ago [-]
There are well-used tax money, then there are stupidly burned tax money on ie buying favors of some part of population before elections, financing blindly without any checks social security programs that get abused to no end, or simply plain old corruption.
I love bringing Switzerland up to annoy most of western/northern Europeans since their success is so obvious and undeniable while going in very different direction than most of Europe. Low to low-medium taxes, yet state budgets are frequently in positive numbers, there is no end to money spend on infra projects, train infra, but also rather strong social programs (just not ridiculously bad as mentioned above), top notch free healthcare and education. VAT taxes are 2-8% instead of 20-23% in all countries around. Country simply works(TM) because population is not hard comfort-zone-addicted and entitled bunch of spoiled whiny kids, they work relatively hard and it brings results, consistently and long term. They don't work more than americans nor asians, but thats enough for their prosperity.
Do you think lets say a heavy tax burden in say Italy, or even France (not even going more into southern or eastern EU since that would be a small book) is really used well and efficiently? I visit those places frequently and it certainly doesn't seem that way. Random examples - Italy has garbage everywhere, people drive to highway stops to drop it there (so the wind blows it all around). Infrastructure seems like from 80s, with added age. From people dealing with bureaucracy there - its stuck in 19th century, direct approach will get you often nowhere. France - most communist state in western Europe, heck in all Europe, sans Belarus maybe. Yet if you talk to people, they are constantly pissed off at government, never happy with society or state they live in. I don't blame them, listening to French colleagues complain is often rather sad experience. Not something you read in travel guides, do you.
Muromec 14 hours ago [-]
>Low to low-medium taxes, yet state budgets are frequently in positive numbers
>because population is not hard comfort-zone-addicted and entitled bunch of spoiled whiny kids
I'm not sure why would I need lower taxes in exchange for more work. This somehow feels like a scam.
hermanzegerman 14 hours ago [-]
Well let's see how good that Swiss Model would work as a big normal state, and not as a small tax haven, smaller than the State of Baden-Württemberg living off those surrounding states (siphoning up wealthy people, who got rich in those countries, and also their academics, that they didn't have to pay the education for)
KPGv2 16 hours ago [-]
It doesn't hurt that Swiss immigration is very difficult to get through, and they have all that Holocaust money no Nazi or dead Jewish victim is ever going to come claim.
Duhck 17 hours ago [-]
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
leeter 16 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
robocat 14 hours ago [-]
> Particularly non-insurable and non-tax deductible liability
Too often liabilities exceed assets, or the liabilities are externalised.
Liability doesn't work as an incentive for many risks. For uncommon but extreme risks, it can be better to roll the dice on company failure than regularly pay low amounts for mitigation.
It is especially effective to ignore liabilities when a company has poor profitability anyways.
And then you see major companies sidestep the costs of their liabilities (plenty of examples after security failures, but also companies like Johnson&Johnson).
bjackman 17 hours ago [-]
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).
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.
But they were stuff like "you must have logs". "You must authenticate users". "You must log failed authentication attempts".
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.
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.
wccrawford 16 hours ago [-]
I think it's subtly different than that.
Companies do want to be secure. They try, and they often fail because it's hard.
They hire auditors to find problems and to shift blame. But since they only have 30 days to fix the problems that are found, it's going to see a lot like they only care about shifting the blame. Because at that point, they only care about passing that audit.
Right after that, though, they start caring about security again.
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.
solatic 16 hours ago [-]
> Not a single founder wakes up in the morning thinking to themselves: "oh I wish I could make my company XYZ-123 compliant!"
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.
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.
kobieps 16 hours ago [-]
This
tfrancisl 17 hours ago [-]
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.
egorfine 16 hours ago [-]
> Passing the responsibility off to some other company is, quite simply, irresponsible.
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.
tfrancisl 16 hours ago [-]
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
egorfine 16 hours ago [-]
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.
ErroneousBosh 12 hours ago [-]
Here's me founding a company and thinking "Shit I really need to be on ITIL 4 and ISO9000 before I even consider taking this to market", but I guess we move in different circles.
throwaway2016a 17 hours ago [-]
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.
[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
hrimfaxi 17 hours ago [-]
Giving you template device management policies is one thing, it's a whole other thing to say you don't have to have board meetings and generating fake minutes.
throwaway2016a 17 hours ago [-]
100%, accepting pre-generated board meeting notes is egregious. This whole thing is awful and I am in no way defending it. The opposite, I think other compliance as a service companies also need to be scrutinized as well.
icedchai 11 hours ago [-]
Many small companies operate without any formal board meetings.
Not every company is a Delaware C corp.
x0x0 16 hours ago [-]
If you aren't either having the minimal meetings or written consents per the requirements for the delaware C, something outside Delve's hands has gone off the rails...
whatinthenote 15 hours ago [-]
Doesn't seem like a problem with SOC 2 compliance, seems like a problem where a company appointed someone who is not suited to handle a SOC 2 project.
As for the pre-filled stuff, that's what other SOC 2 companies mean when they try to sell you "compliance in a box." Not that bad if the company is starting from scratch (<1 year), but not realistic for a company that has an existing IT footprint.
However, the allegations here is that it is fraud. An "AI" company acting as a front for certification mills.
whatinthenote 12 hours ago [-]
It feels like I'm screaming into the void, but compliance work is bad is because people make it so.
Willfully paying for a service that offers SOC 2 reports at 1/5th the usual rate and delivers them in days instead of months and deluding themselves (and others) that it's a proper audit.
Taking cookie cutter policies/controls jamming it into your org without any awareness whatsoever. Acting surprised when employees complain about draconian rules and the audit process is a pain because you wanted to take the shortcut.
Why can't people just do it the proper way the first time? Pay for a reputable auditing firm, write your own policies and implement controls that map to the actual organization, do a gap assessment with the auditing firm so that both parties is aligned on expectations, and spend the necessary time to undergo the audit. Getting it should be a milestone if you actually take it seriously and have a modicum of professionalism.
In my eyes, audits should be a trust exercise. You trust that your organization is organized in a way that meets standards (by doing the work) and the auditors trust that you aren't faking your evidence. As someone who has to regularly vet countless new software purchases, SOC 2 actually serves a role. Does anyone have a better idea of getting third party validation of how another company operates? Like sending them tons of questionnaires is the solution?
All this just breaks that trust by facilitating certification mills. Another example of fraud stemming from a country that churns out fake degrees, fake papers, fake conferences, and fake references.
chromatin 15 hours ago [-]
> Delve was founded in 2023 by Karun Kaushik and Selin Kocalar, both Forbes 30 Under 30 members and MIT dropouts who met as freshmen.
Forbes 30 under 30 remains undefeated
dsr_ 15 hours ago [-]
The methodology questions remain:
does Forbes have a great method for identifying future felons?
do future felons push harder to come to Forbes' attention?
does being on the Forbes list unduly influence founders to commit felonies?
zelphirkalt 15 hours ago [-]
What is it with the dropouts and unethical businesses? It is almost as if dropping out makes them do things, and without credentials, those things are the things others will not do.
love2read 15 hours ago [-]
Interesting that the author (and "the others in his network") seem to only be concerned about the complete illegitimacy of their certs when they were already exposed and now they want to stand up and say they are the good guys for "exposing" Delve.
ipython 15 hours ago [-]
> the price quickly dropped to just $6,000 when they realized we were serious about going elsewhere, and they would throw in ISO 27001 and a 200 hour penetration test as well.
I'm sorry, but... $6,000 / 200 == $30 / hour? Just assuming the value of the actual certifications is $zero?
Wouldn't that raise some serious red flags?
codegeek 15 hours ago [-]
$6000 for both SOC 2 and ISO 27001 with Pen tests ? lol. I paid over $8k just for ISO 27001 for our small company and have been quoted a lot more for SOC 2.
frankfrank13 14 hours ago [-]
I can understand two 20 year olds committing fraud. I can't understand a team of engineers PRE-PUBLISHING A TRUST REPORT before a single field has been filled out. This is worse than fraud, its poor craftsmanship.
fantasizr 18 hours ago [-]
there needs to be a fund with an ethos of "move slowly and do things accurately"
sunir 18 hours ago [-]
The fund is called customers. The independent regulator is called the AICPA. It really comes down to who is paying attention
SOC2 is as useful as a privacy policy at protecting your data. It’s all humans following human incentives.
Spivak 17 hours ago [-]
The value of SOC2 is that it does take some experience to be able to plausibly fake the evidence which weeds out people that truly have no idea what they're doing. It also provides a blueprint of the stuff you should be doing if you actually care.
But beyond that it's not worth a whole lot.
fantasizr 16 hours ago [-]
yeah it's funny to see some defense of this practice as "well the whole thing is pointless anyway so nothing is lost by defrauding folks". Pretty hollow argument
wrqvrwvq 9 hours ago [-]
yes, the equivalent of looking at api spec and saying it's pointless because there's no implementation.
I feel like in the last five years all prior knowledge and art wrt infosecurity was lost from the "dev community". My guess is that hackers have an embarrassment of exploits and are being unusually quiet. I expect a series of major breaches/hacks over the next few months that are ignored and it just becomes normal to have all of your customer data dumped onto the public web. For example, the digital banking system could go under, and most kids would just download some new crypto app. It won't really matter that nothing replaces the dollar or our global banking infrastructure. The zeroing out of the financial system would just be the "coyote suddenly being affected by gravity".
neutronicus 17 hours ago [-]
The United States military?
hrimfaxi 17 hours ago [-]
Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
DANmode 17 hours ago [-]
There are a few, roughly.
Like the best options in most categories, they don’t spend a bunch of money or time on brand presence, advertising.
You simply find them.
laidoffamazon 21 hours ago [-]
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
throwaway290 4 hours ago [-]
> The reason we felt the way we did was due to how little actual work any of us had to perform to become ‘compliant’, combined with a product practically devoid of any real AI
Guys guys, if only it had some of that real AI it would be all good!!
debarshri 12 hours ago [-]
This could be AI's globe.com moment
dove-3746 12 hours ago [-]
Did they ever address why they had access to everyone’s SOC reports??
llmslave 14 hours ago [-]
People dont fully know it, but alot of capital in society gets accumulated by people with the right look, instead of with actual ability. In many cases, these startups start out as fraud, and hope to become real. VCs know this.
But the tragedy is that there is a fixed pie of capital to be allocated, and so when they allocate to people like this, it steals opportunity from someone else
gmerc 18 hours ago [-]
Well now we know how Cluely and friends can claim to be SOC2 compliant.
latchkey 17 hours ago [-]
I've been talking about this for a while now. For those of you thinking... Oh, I use a "good" company... think otherwise.
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.
What does that tell you about the scam that was unveiled?
Not good.
JimDabell 18 hours ago [-]
The only thing it tells us is that they have received competent legal advice. Any counsel is going to tell you to shut up regardless of whether you are in the right or wrong.
9 hours ago [-]
upmind 13 hours ago [-]
What's the TLDR? Should one be worried if their business uses Delve?
jongjong 10 hours ago [-]
When I read the headline I thought "Fake compliance as a service" sounded like a great idea.
The rookie mistake they made is they forgot to bribe the regulators with promises of future job offers.
imaurer 16 hours ago [-]
vibe compliance
pkilgore 15 hours ago [-]
Slopliance?
fnord77 9 hours ago [-]
> High profile companies like those listed in the image above
Never heard of any of them except Loveable.
ohyoutravel 22 hours ago [-]
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.
sebmellen 18 hours ago [-]
It is being suppressed by @dang, I believe they may have a policy that allows suppression for bad YC-related news.
Yes, but your team claimed this set off "voting ring" behavior [0] and it was suppressed for nearly a day because of that. I am very curious how you determine what is, or is not, "voting ring" behavior. I believe Dang is responding in another thread about that.
Obviously we don't publish how HN's voting ring detector works. If we did, it would quickly stop working.
What matters in this case is (1) it's a software penalty that has nothing to do with the content of a story, (2) moderators didn't touch the submissions or even know they existed, and (3) once we did know that they existed, we merged the threads and placed the story on the frontpage - that is, we went out of our way to give this story more attention, not less - in keeping with the principle explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
frenchie4111 17 hours ago [-]
wow you guys really delved into this
asaiacai 8 hours ago [-]
lmao
claudiug 17 hours ago [-]
wow, cannot imagine now companies that tool the compliance, and get deals just to be fake. uff...
stuckkeys 16 hours ago [-]
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.
moomoo11 1 days ago [-]
I miss 2010s YC until like 2017 ish when crypto sort of just caused a massive decline across the board.
I guess it is great if you're a grifter/scammer or looking to just sell off to a FANG.
srikar_alter 18 hours ago [-]
agreed
iam_circuit 8 hours ago [-]
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ryguz 13 hours ago [-]
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jefftrebben 13 hours ago [-]
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rongupta 6 hours ago [-]
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aperture_hq 15 hours ago [-]
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advokatbard14 2 days ago [-]
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mygooch 8 hours ago [-]
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ManuelSuarez 1 days ago [-]
[dupe]
biggletiddies 17 hours ago [-]
Cluely and HockeyStack are scam companies too.
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.
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”.
Scams all around.
calderwoodra 16 hours ago [-]
Greptile is an awesome product, not sure where the scam is there
taintlord 13 hours ago [-]
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porridgeraisin 17 hours ago [-]
Wait what's the greptile story?
buttsack 16 hours ago [-]
It says right there, 7-day work weeks (no days off).
Also they were part of the cohort forcing workers to stay minimum until 9PM.
Like every AI company, their "product" is a Next.js website, OPENAI_API_KEY, and a Stripe checkout page.
porridgeraisin 16 hours ago [-]
Ah ok. What's with the "unpaid labour" part?
buttsack 13 hours ago [-]
It's also in the original post. Greptile, HockeyStack, and others from that cohort of 20-year old founders out of YC were having software engineer candidates come in day-in and day-out, staying until 9PM under the threat of being rejected if they left earlier.
They were not paid at all, they were working long-term on a "trial period". And yes it's very illegal. I was there and saw it first-hand.
The guys they had on trial periods - though I'm sure they were very intelligent - were not really firing on all cylinders if you know what I mean.
porridgeraisin 4 hours ago [-]
Yikes
gsibble 1 days ago [-]
How does this not reach the front page?
dang 18 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
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: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
sebmellen 17 hours ago [-]
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?
I would imagine that's what happened here.
dang 17 hours ago [-]
That's definitely not what happened here. The data would be quite different in that case.
Edit: 10% of the votes came from resubmissions of the URL. The other 90% came from other sources.
sebmellen 17 hours ago [-]
Curious to know! I submitted the duplicate article and most definitely did not work with any voting ring.
bigballsack 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 17 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
nedwin 18 hours ago [-]
It's on the front page for me?
slackfan 18 hours ago [-]
It does, but it's also a takedown of a YC-backed company.
Really great vetting there, guys.
stuckkeys 18 hours ago [-]
LOL -For a good minute the comments were not visible. Someone is playing RR.
dang 18 hours ago [-]
We were in the process of merging the threads. Actually tomhow had correctly merged them, but I misinterpreted which submission had been first and undid that. Then corrected my mistake.
Had you checked the other thread during that "good minute", you'd have seen that all the comments were intact.
slackfan 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
clitheads 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
LambdaComplex 18 hours ago [-]
> No custom tailoring, no AI guidance, no real automation. Just pre-populated forms that required you to click “save”.
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)
resiros 17 hours ago [-]
This seems like a hit job by a competitor. Really ruthless.
> 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.
Who leaked the audit reports? Who sent this email? Who is taking the time to write this analysis and kill the company?
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.
I think the main point is the collusion between delve and the auditors. Is the evidence for that clear?
emilycg 17 hours ago [-]
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.
SOC2 is supposed to give you an INDEPENDENT evaluation of the compliance of a company "are they doing what they say they are"
If the SOC2 report is just a pre-populated template, it is meaningless.
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.
OsrsNeedsf2P 15 hours ago [-]
Really curious what you're going to do, going forward. Will you be rejecting compliance certified with Delve? Will you be forcing your vendors to redo compliance?
sebmellen 17 hours ago [-]
Hit piece or not, the blatantly fraudulent behavior displayed by Delve is reprehensible.
And they didn't even try. Read this management assertion for one of the (known) affected companies:
> 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).
> 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).
cyrusradfar 17 hours ago [-]
There's no need for some conspiracy.
It's a juicy story to talk about that hits a lot of checkboxes that make it viral --
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
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.
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.
sebmellen 17 hours ago [-]
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.
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?
They delivered the product that every company wanted - make the box checking faster.
The point of SOC2 is really demonstrate that you have controls. The other fake compliance areas are scarier for sure. You used to see really blatant issues — I recall early SaaS companies pitching to my enterprise with sales engineers showing me customer data.
Microsoft refused to provide diagrams to the Feds detailing how Azure works. They got the FedRAMP High stamp anyway, because they already sold it to half the Fed. That’s more real… as a situation where a Chinese hacker could compromise data in a dedicated “government cloud” by compromising a certificate in an onprem dev environment should be impossible… yet it happened.
You're making the same mistake as most people do: it's 80% box checking but that doesn't make it performative, the box checking is here so that the dude who checked the box become legally responsible for what's happening if they haven't done what they said they did.
If you didn't check that box you could always claim you didn't know you weren't supposed to do what you did. As soon as you've checked “yes, I'm doing things in the approved way”, this excuse disappears.
You don't want to be in this position, really. And that's the whole point of compliance.
I had a client in the compliance space - they handle detailed product information for Apple, Boeing, BAE systems, Philips, Siemens - you know, nothing important, just literally classified material and incredibly sensitive corporate material.
Anyway. We did ISO27001. We did it well, audited by Lloyds register, reputable stuff all the way down. Built actual meaningful processes.
Anyway, a massive PE entity bought them in a hostile takeover, fired everybody, binned the ISMS, moved to some “compliance” goons.
I saw the box ticking chicanery as it happened - as after firing everyone they of course didn’t follow the off boarding process, so I retained full access to their JIRA. I only lost access a year later when atlassian terminated the account for non-payment.
Nobody actually gives a shit, about anything.
*Doesn’t name any names.*
Not that I want you to, I feel it would open you up to libel exposure. But can we both acknowledge that you didn’t name the entity that coasted through their audit?
That's the case until there is the threat of discovery. The real issue is if the PE firm bought the company for the value of the IP and any damages awarded was included in the 'cost of business', which is why liability needs to be extended to those persons who make that decision, not just the corporate entity.
I guess if you have the muscle to brush off legal action from the govt you’re ok. If you’re an unsuspecting startup - that could be a problem.
https://delve.co/blog/response-to-misleading-claims
Yeah, ok. BRB to start a bank where I template everyone a billion dollars, its up to you to be honest with how much money you have.
— patio11 about this response (https://x.com/patio11/status/2035115379169677717)
> No small amount of criticism of LLMs is downstream of past decisions to reify form over function, resulting in the substance having been optimized out. Now the LLM threatens to make the form available in seconds
Wow, what a way to end the document.
None of their ISO 27001 certificates, aside from the premium one-offs with the vCISO, are accredited by any reputable ISO accreditation body. I would even argue that IAS, who accredited Prescient Security (mentioned as a reputable body in the article), has a questionable reputation and certainly gives off a pay-to-play impression.
You can look up the names of their partners below. The one body I found that is on the register (Accorp) is accredited by UAF, a known cert-mill accreditation body, and I’m not even sure it’s the same Accorp that Delve has partnered with.
For reference, you want a ISO certificate issued by a body accredited by UKAS (UK gov. adjacent non-profit), ANAB (ANSI), or equivalent, all government-recognised. This is normally the first thing I check whenever someone claims ISO 27001 certification and it is a great heuristic to validate certification rigour.
https://www.iafcertsearch.org/search/certification-bodies
Shockingly low levels of DD by everyone involved here.
"Below are just some of the many inaccuracies in the story and then the truth."
"[G]iven how competitive this industry is, attacks like this sadly come with the territory."
"We are actively investigating any leaks and are still reviewing the Substack. If there are more attacks to respond to we will do so."
When you have a PR problem, you don't hire your marketing intern to write the response. You hire a PR consultant. Their funders' Rolodexes are probably full of them. If the Board approved the response, I'd be frankly shocked.
That, plus their willingness to arrange an essentially fraudulent auditor network (try to find who the real CPA is behind Accorp, for example), and also massively upcharge the prices of the SOC reports that they offered as a bundled service within the platform. There was no separation here. Del is the transfer agent. Del was always the intermediary and the transfer agent. There is no independence in their default auditor relationships.
At very best, this is a massive AICPA transgression.
At worst, blatant fraud.
I would wager that discovery would show the latter.
In other words, I'm reading this as effectively a full admission that the claims are true but the company is saying not their responsibility.
Very, very bad.
But really all you have to do is look at the reports themselves. They are so shoddily written that it's hard to believe any legitimate firm would issue them. If you Ctrl F for Clueley in this thread, you will see my comment with a sample excerpt from the assertion of management for one of their reports.
6.7 Misled auditor - Prescient
With this conclusion:
Looking at that report, there are clear signs that Delve either knowingly misled Prescient, or that Prescient accommodated Delve’s deficient process. Given their reputation and by the small number of Delve/Prescient reports out there, I’m assuming it is the former.
> Conclusions present before customer signs or provides info
If false, the defamation damages here would be in the tens of millions. Huge respect to whoever stuck their neck out to post this.
How did none of this come up during diligence? Feels like a prime example of too good to be true.
Fortunately, some of the old-YC spirit seems to be alive here on HN still.
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."
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/2035024494663016532
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.
Should we worry about AI startup customer data…
I would have expected this to be somewhere at the top right now given how deep the article digs and evidence seems legit.
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.
(1) I had no idea this story existed and woke up to claims that I was obviously* suppressing it.
(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.)
(3) We merged the two discussions and placed the merged thread on the front page.
(4) Why? Because we moderate HN less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is part of a story: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu.... This is literally the #1 principle of moderation in the sense that it was the very first thing that pg drilled into me: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/
To be fair, it seems you’re saying the submission was being suppressed, just not intentionally. Lots of props of course for transparency and reboosting the story
For example, the comment I was referring to, which was the first one I saw, said "It is being suppressed by @dang" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457010). You can't get more personal, definitive, or wrong than that.
[0]: https://x.com/kobyjconrad/status/2034843865396506864
Nevertheless, they said it was: too late to opt out, that it can't be canceled or postponed, and then kept emailing us endlessly and sending to collections to pay them another $10K platform fee for the next year (more than we had in the company bank account).
I understand this with large corporations, but I don't think they're a good fit for startups.
https://fly.io/blog/soc2-the-screenshots-will-continue-until...
Most startups should be doing way, way less than automation platforms like these tell them they need to do to get a SOC2 attestation.
The pitch isn't "don't get a SOC2", or "convince big paying customers that SOC2 isn't important". It's "don't worry about SOC2 until a big paying customer says they'll make big payments if you get it, and when you do worry about it, don't let SOC2 compliance trick you into doing bonkers infrastructure things"
Basically, they are saying that you should tailor your SOC2 implementation so that it's actually useful without being a horrible overbearing process, that you have that option and should take it.
I would recommend both Vanta and OneLeet as good quality tools to work with, having used both. The founders of OneLeet are very accessible, and Vanta has all the integrations you would need as both a small startup and an enterprise-grade player.
Secureframe and Drata are other tools in a similar class that are also legitimate.
intermediaries like delve have only amplified this failure.
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.
They have a billboard with the copy "Compliance before you tell your parents you dropped out of MIT"
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.
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.
The tech is quite interesting, thankfully.
From a customer perspective it's interesting - compliance sucks so much that even a slight improvement/automation goes a long way
It mentions that they had a medical scribe product and ran into HIPAA compliance issues with it, so it's not a leap to think someone might go "hey this stuff is what sunk us last time, I bet we're not the only people with that problem".
AWS is probably the best actual CaaS vendor out there. They have a product offering expressly designed to help their customers get through this jungle:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/artifact/latest/ug/what-is-aws-a...
You are still responsible for everything on top of what AWS provides (software/configuration/policy), but their compliance package handles a massive portion of what you would otherwise have to do if you were on-prem. Physical security, hardware management, disaster recovery, et. al., you get essentially "for free".
Trying to understand how someone can have this perspective when it’s usually someone’s full time salaried job in a lot of companies.
But frankly if they meant that, the statement doesn't really say anything at all. Because what in this world is hard if you stop taking shortcuts and spend time doing it correctly?
You build something great and big corporation X wants to buy a subscription but you need to be certified.
Much of this is a good checklist but some of it is very european.
"Where is the risk register to track controls in your 7 person company?"
Now instead of doing what your team does best, you are doing paperwork theater for frameworks designed for a 100,000 employee enterprise.
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.
What's needed is a variant of these standards for small teams, which is proportionate and pragmatic.
For small teams it doesn’t have to be heavyweight. A risk register can be a simple doc with a few real risks and mitigations.
That said, I agree there’s a lot of theater. For smaller companies and budgets, it often turns into rubber stamping. Auditors rely on the evidence you provide, so the report can look much cleaner than day to day reality.
Still, it has value. It forces you to formalize basic practices, and if you want those customers, you’re signing up for that level of scrutiny.
In scenarios where the company REALLY REALLY wants to buy the SaaS, they often will invest in the company, one of the reasons for which being to ensure they have the resources to go through all the red tape.
CIS Benchmarks are worth a look too: They’re best practices for securing typical cloud platforms, SaaS and OS.
What is it about customers in Ethiopia that necessitates this? What is it about American (non-international) customers that doesn't require a register?
I had to have meetings with… myself, at times, for compliance reasons.
Have you considered that the kind of companies that demand SOC2 compliance would be happy to pay extra for SOC2 compliance, if you offered it as an optional add-on costing $200k per year?
Things like what? HIPAA?
When in reality most rules and regulations are not crap, and you should care about them.
Especially when your startup advertises compliance with HIPAA (medical records), PCI-DSS (payments data) and a bunch of other data protection standards and regulations.
But whole compliance industry is crap.
One way they inflate expectations to extract money the other way they cut corners to rubber stamp BS to make it as cheap as possible for themselves.
"The trouble starts when you look at the answers Delve’s AI provided. Based on what your Delve policies claim, the questionnaire AI answers questions stating you have an MDM, had a 200 hour pen-test performed, and do regular backup restoration simulations. Tens of questions are answered like that. Great, you just lied to your vendor but at least you have a good shot at landing the deal. So what did we do? We kept our mouths shut."
Pretty rotten stuff. I went from energy into the software startup world and as I've gotten further down that road and energy has become more and more of a hot field I've encountered a depressing increase in that "just do it to make a deal" ethos, but in critical infrastructure.
Like, no, former Apple PM who learned about an interconnection queue from ChatGPT last week, you are not going to fix the grid, and even moreso you can't "just do X and ask forgiveness later", not in electricity.
And then also it took a rather large data leak later on to provide extra ammunition to decide and go forward with publishing this.
I'm glad they did, but there are a bunch of steps in between pure balls/altruism and what actually happened based on the blog.
> 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).
> 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 mean, just re-read this sentence:
> 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
It makes no sense at all.
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.
To imagine that an auditor reviewed and stamped this as a coherent body of work beggars belief.
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.
Every time an issue like this appears I wonder how many more undiscovered frauds are out there.
I ended up getting the contract and they never asked for those extra things. I guess that’s kind of the same thing your founder did but in reverse. Discount to skip it vs it will cost more to add it.
To be clear, I think most of the questionnaire was just “we want these answers on file”, I’m not in an industry where most of what they asked for is reasonable/needed. Though it scared the hell out of me when I got it because SOC2 (and some other things they asked about) is not cheap. Literally 1-2x the cost of the service I was selling. All for something I consider a _very_ small step about snake oil.
Thus providing compliance is really just paying someone to shift responsibility.
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 am a founder, and my ambition includes meeting the highest possible standards for my customers.
The problem with the current frameworks is that the "controls" are so asinine and auditors so hard headed, that getting certified becomes a matter of "checking the box" .
Particularly most of those frameworks REQUIRE maintaining so much paper red tape that make a 10 person startup want to kill themselves. And in addition the costs are stupid high for startups that are just "starting up".
On the flip side, how many large companies have we seen that have all the SOCs, ISOS and whatnot certifications, and they get pwn3d and their data stolen or exposed.
It tells you that a place being certified doesn't guarantee shit.
The reality is that large companies ask for certs as a CYA mechanism: the "security" department of LargeCo, asks for the compliance cert so that when shit hits the fan, they can say "not my fault, they told me they were compliant"
The good thing is that with the new Bullshit generators (llm) this certifification/compliance process will collapse.
With ISO27001 or SOC 2, I have more information about the other party's ability to manage those risks than just taking their word for it. I'm trusting a third party auditor to vouch for them.
Fraud undermines all kinds of relationships and yes LLMs make it worse. The last job we opened I got hundreds of perfect cover letters asserting the candidates met all of the criteria. Bah.
My perhaps naive hope is that a few of these companies involved will face criminal fraud charges and we will start to develop new reflexes as a society that just bc LLMs making lying very very easy, there are still consequences.
Some things just have to be done.
Wellll this is not always the case. I have moved from a shithole country to a nice one and oh boy I am crying in gratitude every month that I pay taxes. Because it is every day that I can see my money working for me in the environment.
But your point stands.
The same applies to all the audit and bureaucracy stuff. Does it do something? If you don't feel it does, does it mean it's not? I don't know really, but I hope somebody is rotating their key material as they provided in their security posture.
I love bringing Switzerland up to annoy most of western/northern Europeans since their success is so obvious and undeniable while going in very different direction than most of Europe. Low to low-medium taxes, yet state budgets are frequently in positive numbers, there is no end to money spend on infra projects, train infra, but also rather strong social programs (just not ridiculously bad as mentioned above), top notch free healthcare and education. VAT taxes are 2-8% instead of 20-23% in all countries around. Country simply works(TM) because population is not hard comfort-zone-addicted and entitled bunch of spoiled whiny kids, they work relatively hard and it brings results, consistently and long term. They don't work more than americans nor asians, but thats enough for their prosperity.
Do you think lets say a heavy tax burden in say Italy, or even France (not even going more into southern or eastern EU since that would be a small book) is really used well and efficiently? I visit those places frequently and it certainly doesn't seem that way. Random examples - Italy has garbage everywhere, people drive to highway stops to drop it there (so the wind blows it all around). Infrastructure seems like from 80s, with added age. From people dealing with bureaucracy there - its stuck in 19th century, direct approach will get you often nowhere. France - most communist state in western Europe, heck in all Europe, sans Belarus maybe. Yet if you talk to people, they are constantly pissed off at government, never happy with society or state they live in. I don't blame them, listening to French colleagues complain is often rather sad experience. Not something you read in travel guides, do you.
>because population is not hard comfort-zone-addicted and entitled bunch of spoiled whiny kids
I'm not sure why would I need lower taxes in exchange for more work. This somehow feels like a scam.
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.
Too often liabilities exceed assets, or the liabilities are externalised.
Liability doesn't work as an incentive for many risks. For uncommon but extreme risks, it can be better to roll the dice on company failure than regularly pay low amounts for mitigation.
It is especially effective to ignore liabilities when a company has poor profitability anyways.
And then you see major companies sidestep the costs of their liabilities (plenty of examples after security failures, but also companies like Johnson&Johnson).
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.
But they were stuff like "you must have logs". "You must authenticate users". "You must log failed authentication attempts".
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.
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.
Companies do want to be secure. They try, and they often fail because it's hard.
They hire auditors to find problems and to shift blame. But since they only have 30 days to fix the problems that are found, it's going to see a lot like they only care about shifting the blame. Because at that point, they only care about passing that audit.
Right after that, though, they start caring about security again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] No offense to MBA, just using it as a placeholder for: business stakeholder with no IT background.
Not every company is a Delaware C corp.
As for the pre-filled stuff, that's what other SOC 2 companies mean when they try to sell you "compliance in a box." Not that bad if the company is starting from scratch (<1 year), but not realistic for a company that has an existing IT footprint.
However, the allegations here is that it is fraud. An "AI" company acting as a front for certification mills.
Willfully paying for a service that offers SOC 2 reports at 1/5th the usual rate and delivers them in days instead of months and deluding themselves (and others) that it's a proper audit.
Taking cookie cutter policies/controls jamming it into your org without any awareness whatsoever. Acting surprised when employees complain about draconian rules and the audit process is a pain because you wanted to take the shortcut.
Why can't people just do it the proper way the first time? Pay for a reputable auditing firm, write your own policies and implement controls that map to the actual organization, do a gap assessment with the auditing firm so that both parties is aligned on expectations, and spend the necessary time to undergo the audit. Getting it should be a milestone if you actually take it seriously and have a modicum of professionalism.
In my eyes, audits should be a trust exercise. You trust that your organization is organized in a way that meets standards (by doing the work) and the auditors trust that you aren't faking your evidence. As someone who has to regularly vet countless new software purchases, SOC 2 actually serves a role. Does anyone have a better idea of getting third party validation of how another company operates? Like sending them tons of questionnaires is the solution?
All this just breaks that trust by facilitating certification mills. Another example of fraud stemming from a country that churns out fake degrees, fake papers, fake conferences, and fake references.
Forbes 30 under 30 remains undefeated
does Forbes have a great method for identifying future felons?
do future felons push harder to come to Forbes' attention?
does being on the Forbes list unduly influence founders to commit felonies?
I'm sorry, but... $6,000 / 200 == $30 / hour? Just assuming the value of the actual certifications is $zero?
Wouldn't that raise some serious red flags?
SOC2 is as useful as a privacy policy at protecting your data. It’s all humans following human incentives.
But beyond that it's not worth a whole lot.
I feel like in the last five years all prior knowledge and art wrt infosecurity was lost from the "dev community". My guess is that hackers have an embarrassment of exploits and are being unusually quiet. I expect a series of major breaches/hacks over the next few months that are ignored and it just becomes normal to have all of your customer data dumped onto the public web. For example, the digital banking system could go under, and most kids would just download some new crypto app. It won't really matter that nothing replaces the dollar or our global banking infrastructure. The zeroing out of the financial system would just be the "coyote suddenly being affected by gravity".
Like the best options in most categories, they don’t spend a bunch of money or time on brand presence, advertising.
You simply find them.
Guys guys, if only it had some of that real AI it would be all good!!
But the tragedy is that there is a fixed pie of capital to be allocated, and so when they allocate to people like this, it steals opportunity from someone else
https://x.com/HotAisle/status/1946302651383329081
The whole thing is a racket.
What does that tell you about the scam that was unveiled?
Not good.
The rookie mistake they made is they forgot to bribe the regulators with promises of future job offers.
Never heard of any of them except Loveable.
We've restored it to the front page now.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47457689
What matters in this case is (1) it's a software penalty that has nothing to do with the content of a story, (2) moderators didn't touch the submissions or even know they existed, and (3) once we did know that they existed, we merged the threads and placed the story on the frontpage - that is, we went out of our way to give this story more attention, not less - in keeping with the principle explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
I guess it is great if you're a grifter/scammer or looking to just sell off to a FANG.
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.
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”.
Scams all around.
Also they were part of the cohort forcing workers to stay minimum until 9PM.
Like every AI company, their "product" is a Next.js website, OPENAI_API_KEY, and a Stripe checkout page.
They were not paid at all, they were working long-term on a "trial period". And yes it's very illegal. I was there and saw it first-hand.
The guys they had on trial periods - though I'm sure they were very intelligent - were not really firing on all cylinders if you know what I mean.
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.
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: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu....
I would imagine that's what happened here.
Edit: 10% of the votes came from resubmissions of the URL. The other 90% came from other sources.
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.
Really great vetting there, guys.
Had you checked the other thread during that "good minute", you'd have seen that all the comments were intact.
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)
> 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.
Who leaked the audit reports? Who sent this email? Who is taking the time to write this analysis and kill the company?
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.
I think the main point is the collusion between delve and the auditors. Is the evidence for that clear?
SOC2 is supposed to give you an INDEPENDENT evaluation of the compliance of a company "are they doing what they say they are"
If the SOC2 report is just a pre-populated template, it is meaningless.
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.
And they didn't even try. Read this management assertion for one of the (known) affected companies:
> 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).
> 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).
It's a juicy story to talk about that hits a lot of checkboxes that make it viral --
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.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.
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?