
SEC charges YouPlus and CEO with defrauding investors - chmaynard
https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2020-160
======
necubi
The glassdoor reviews are fun:

> Advice to potential investors and partners - check all numbers from CEO -
> it’s easy and you will be surprised.

> Facts about Youplus:

> \- 4+years old \- has no users and never had traction in both USA and India
> \- change of direction every 2-4 weeks \- no one cares about results

> CEO has a lot of energy and love to pitch whatever in his head to everyone
> in the office for hours in endless meetings. What he completely lacks is a
> solid vision, execution and just a common sense. His ego is tremendous — he
> despises other people’s opinions and if he asks for your opinion the only
> expected answer is “Awesome!”.

> Youplus is a toxic place to be for everyone with a self-respect.

(from October 2018)

> First of all they do not pay on time

> You can get fired in a second because they don't need you anymore

> Promises are not kept most of the time

(from Jun 2017)

~~~
darkhorse13
CEO honestly sounds like my ex-boss. He would literally waste hours of our
time on useless pitches and expect us to clap at the end.

~~~
saalweachter
Like basically trying to do a Steve Jobs new product announcement internally
before the products were developed?

~~~
darkhorse13
Pretty much. I think the main issue with people like this is that their
product visions keep on changing. So it becomes almost impossible for the tech
team to execute properly.

~~~
tossmeout
I worked for a CEO who did this once (the frequently-bombarding-the-team-with-
new-ideas thing, not the expecting-applause part). He was a good guy, and
talented in many areas, but he wasn't a great product leader.

He would let his excitement for some new idea take hold of him, and he would
share it with everyone without first taking the time to sit down and reconcile
how the feature fit into the rest of the app, what problems it solved,
possible alternative solutions to that problem, the cost and complexity of
implementing the feature, how the feature should be prioritized, etc.

This stuff and more is what sets good product people apart from mediocre
product people. The problem is that it's all invisible and optional, so
mediocre product people aren't even aware they're not doing it, and thus it's
easy for them to believe they're great product people when they really aren't.

At some point he got the message that he needed to stop disrupting the team
with these frequent ideas, so he switched to writing them out in gigantic
Google Docs that he'd send to people. At least that was async, so it was less
interruptive than him stopping at your desk, but it was still super time-
consuming to read his docs. Eventually the entire team started ignoring them.

~~~
isoskeles
I had a boss like this as well. It was at the first place I worked for after
moving to the Bay Area.

We were a very small company, so it wasn't hard to be nimble, but it was
exhausting to keep changing features or products we were working on, or never
having the opportunity to satisfyingly complete anything we worked on. It was
all the typical "lean startup" phrasing, disrupt, move fast and break things,
"pivot", the things you'd see as jokes in that tv show Silicon Valley. Our CEO
literally ended every single slide presentation with "We're going to change
the world."

I don't remember how many times we "pivoted" over my five months there, but
every single time it was just a new feature, we weren't actually changing
anything fundamental about the business proposal, the product, or the
customers. We also did not have solid metrics or any way of measuring the
success of new features, nor did we have any information that proved, for
example, existing customers wanted the new features (most obvious one was a
"like" button). The overall feeling was our CEO was just floundering, he
didn't have any coherent strategy.

Funny thing was, none of this made me leave. I finally decided to quit when he
hired someone who started scheduling meetings at 9am and nagging me to be in
at 9am despite performing well and having explicitly agreed to a much looser
schedule when I started.

Oddly, we also went to Google once for a hackathon. IMO our CEO fucking RUINED
that trip. The hackathon was supposed to be focused on using Google Play Store
in some capacity, I honestly can't remember it all because this was nearly a
decade ago. Our CEO was with us and insisted our team make a Google Play app
for 404 pages (we were supposed to change our 404 page during that sprint,
separate from the hackathon). And if that sounds dumb and incoherent, that's
because it was. I didn't even know what we were building, and I'm pretty sure
we left early to go work on our 404 page or some stupid shit like that. I'm
not joking, and I remember the blank stares of others in the room when our CEO
was trying to explain the idea of what we were going to build, nobody got it.
We didn't get it either.

Sorry, really meandering comment here but I completely forgot about that
experience until I started thinking about how that CEO didn't really know how
to focus or communicate a strategy.

~~~
darkhorse13
> Google Play app for 404 pages

Yikes

------
vkou
> According to the complaint, Shamim falsely told investors that YouPlus
> earned millions of dollars in annual revenue and had more than 100
> customers, including Fortune 500 companies. When one investor pressed Shamim
> for information substantiating those claims, Shamim allegedly provided the
> investor with falsified bank statements in an effort to conceal the fraud.
> The scheme allegedly unraveled in late 2019 when Shamim confessed to certain
> investors that YouPlus had in fact earned less than $500,000 and obtained
> only four paying customers from the company’s inception in 2013.

Seems to be just regular run-of-the-mill fraud.

Fake it till you make it is something to direct at your customers, or at your
product's implementation, not at people who are giving you their money, who
are protected by the SEC.

I assume that the firm will never be able to make a positive return for its
investors, which is why they invoked the nuclear option.

~~~
elliekelly
> Seems to be just regular run-of-the-mill fraud.

I’m surprised the DOJ hasn’t charged them with a crime yet. The money the SEC
is seeking has to be long gone right?

~~~
dragonwriter
> I’m surprised the DOJ hasn’t charged them with a crime yet.

When both civil SEC charges and criminal charges by DOJ emerge out of the same
act, the former is often well ahead of the latter, so, when civil charges are
filed without concurrent criminal charges, one shouldn’t read too much in to
it.

Though, as a reply points out, that separation does not actually apply in this
case.

EDIT: corrected error of ordering pointed out in a reply, and expanded
somewhat for clarity of intent.

~~~
etimberg
From the article

> In a parallel action, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District
> of California today announced criminal charges against Shamim.

------
irjustin
Sadly in most cases like these, the money's largely gone and very little is
left to make any 'round' of investors whole (usually the latest round comes
first).

A number of comments are asking why the investors do due diligence in checking
the numbers.

Before Series A (i.e. seed, seed+, bridge), asking for audited financials is
quite uncommon. The startup investment space largely works on trust, honesty,
and speed. It also works on 'stamps of approval', previous ventures,
accelerators (500, YC), investor networks (gain one, you gain a few others by
association).

It's easy to say, they should always ask for diligence/auditing, but that
slows things down in a space where speed to delivery means something. Less
time you can spend on fundraising the better and even w/o diligence you can
spend way too much time fundraising.

Not saying it's perfect, but it's the side of the double edge sword that's in
play. If defrauding happens too much then enough bad eggs will have ruined the
pot and audited financials will be required as a general practice.

------
whoisjuan
Honestly the investors are morons. Who doesn't do due diligence before
investing?

This communication says that the CEO only produced the false bank statements
when he was pressed about it. Seems like somebody snapped out of it, did the
due diligence that should have done in the first place before signing a check,
and realized that this was all smoke and mirrors.

~~~
itsoktocry
> _Who doesn 't do due diligence before investing?_

Theranos managed to suck in billionaires like Rupert Murdoch, Tim Draper and
Larry Ellison, executives at Safeway, the Walton Family and others. All
without working technology or a single peer-reviewed paper regarding their
work.

It happens _all the time_ , and is happening as we type this. How?

------
adrr
Curious why the investors didn’t do any diligence like requiring an audit as a
condition for funding. We saw the same thing with Theranos.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _why the investors didn’t do any diligence like requiring an audit_

This is an unusual ask. Founders forging bank statements simply isn’t common
enough to merit it.

~~~
adrr
At a previous company, we had it as a requirement for the round. Didn't bother
us because our book were clean and our growth wasn't fabricated. Company had a
successful exit by an acquisition .

At the current startup i am at, we do yearly audits that we share with our
investors. We have nothing to hide and our growth is real.

If company doesn't want to do an audit, they are hiding something. Founders
forging stuff is more common than you think. I've personally seen shady
accounting at two startups like fake contracts were nothing of value was
exchanged but saw the revenue booked. One of the startups was a vendor to
homestore.com were the CEO went to jail cooking the book but we were never
investigated being a private vc backed company. Though investors did fire the
founders and executive team after they forced an audit. SEC prosecuting these
cases is quite rare with privately held companies. This is the second case
that i know of.

------
davidbrennerjr
I think it's wrong to rationalize what YouPlus CEO did to investors by saying
he was like so many other people in startup culture; his actions don't
represent silicon valley. I wish more people would call out startups like
YouPlus when they take money from investors for the business they don't have
and for the technology that only exists inside their heads.

