
My personal story on the unethical behaviors of a Silicon Valley accelerator - taken_username
https://medium.com/@OmidAminfar/my-personal-story-on-the-unethical-behaviors-of-a-silicon-valley-accelerator-e3818609021#.ph9y6hmyc
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mikestew
From my reading, the accelerator came across as disorganized and perhaps a bit
over their head. I might even go with "not completely honest/upfront". But I'd
need more evidence before I'd write them off as "unethical" or a "scam".

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diziet
Did they take a large equity share with onerous terms? It seems like things
were somewhat disorganized and ad hoc, though you might have missed some
information by not attending the sessions / etc.

Perhaps the program didn't fully deliver on providing a lot of value to the
company, but that's certainly not unethical or fraudulent.

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londons_explore
I consider an AI startup to actually be one of the lowest risk kinds of
startup.

Your costs are your time for 6 months making a product, and a few thousand
dollars worth of AWS credits or GPU's.

That's it - you don't need a big team, special agreements, risk of
warehouses/products. You don't need to run a loss-leading service to attract
users or pay marketing costs.

As soon as you find the first user for your tech, the signing of that first
agreement will immediately make you cashflow positive.

It's the ideal startup, and one of the few types of startup I would recommend
self-funding entirely.

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valuearb
The complaints seem sort of vague and whiny. Like not going to sessions
because the first one wasn't useful because they somehow "knew" the others
wouldn't be useful. Tell us how you knew that, otherwise it just sounds like
you had a tantrum.

And if you aren't going to sessions, why should the Accelerator invest further
time and energy in you?

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beaconstudios
unless you have evidence that this accelerator committed fraud, I'd probably
hold off on directly accusing them of scamming. I'm not a lawyer, but that
seems like dangerous legal territory.

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ivraatiems
It's perfectly legal to express your opinion that something is a scam. It's
also legal to claim something is a scam based on your personal knowledge of a
situation. It's only illegal (defamatory) to claim something is fraudulent if
you know that it actually is not and are knowingly presenting false facts.
IANAL, but I don't see how this post fails that test, unless the author is
lying and knows it.

