
Ask HN: Shall I reveal founders cheating behavior to investors? - shootonce
I stayed at an &quot;AI&quot; startup for a few months and figured that the cofounders obtained investments by cheating investors. They took open source code from github repo of latest AI publication and run the code as demo showing to investors. They didn&#x27;t make any improvements to the code because they are incapable of doing it but they claim that&#x27;s their work. Ironically, investors believed them and invested millions.<p>I personally know one of the investors. Shall I tell them the truth?
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new299
There are a number of issues.

1\. Don't be too surprised if the investors don't care. Because a) as long as
they put a decent play together who cares? and b) what are they going to do?
sue them? that will make the investor look bad (they should have done DD) and
give them a bad rep (who would ideally want to take investment from an
investor who has a track record of suing you).

2\. If the investor has a board position it might be ok. But you're probably
under an NDA with the company. Disclosing this to the investor might be
violating that NDA and you should consider this.

I would probably mention in casually if you mention it at all. Like, you found
it interesting how that play worked out and were a bit surprised that they
could get funding using a publicly available demo. Probably I would make it
part of a wider discussion or something...

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calcsam
Are you prepare to look for a new job? If so, yes.

I would frame it slightly differently. I would set up coffee with the investor
you know. Ask them what they thought of the demo. Ask them if the demo was the
reason they invested. Ask them how large a role it played in their decision to
invest. Ask them if they believe the code in the demo is proprietary or open-
source. If the answers are different than the truth, re-do the demo in front
of them, including going to Github and cloning the repo.

