I’m curious: you ask for receipts but are sure stuff gets shady. What does that look like “without the receipts”?
The extremes are likely too wild to be true, and I think it’s highly unlikely this activity transpires on the YC Slack or BookFace, but I could absolutely believe calls and messaging takes place between what are now startup power brokers, whether that’s founders, VCs, or PR folks, to shape the narrative and drive towards specific objectives.
I'm just saying that human nature is, unfortunately, somewhat inclined to do shady things when a lot of money and power is on the line. Silicon Valley is definitely not immune to this reality. That's all I mean.
Given the amount of publicized cases where high-profile companies had unethical behavior at the founding level (Facebook, Apple, Twitter), I think it's naive to assume any company makes it to that level while maintaining 100% ethical decision making.
Be careful with this sort of reasoning for the sake of false negatives. Under this lens only 0.001% of all actual incidences of what he's describing would be deemed as enough proof (your bar effectively requires testimony under oath and document subpoena).
Obviously, I'm not saying the case is made in the other direction. Given this is all the information that we'll get we have to take into consideration our intuition, his incentives, his reputation, etc. I'm personally not so comfy dismissing it with a "need more proof" stamp.
I'm not trying to dismiss it, merely trying to open the door for more evidence. Such as emails with redacted identifying info where VCs are saying what's going on and why they won't fund him.
I agree there's a risk of raising the bar too high, but it's also a scenario where he has a financial incentive to paint Stripe in a bad light and he's also trying to make character accusations about actual people. The bar *should* be quite high imo.
I'm sure stuff gets shady, but still, the absence of evidence severely weakens his case.