The lofty goals are pretty much always puffery we can discount because most people find it distasteful to say "well, the main reason I want to go into this business is I think it's high-margin and I can make a lot of money at it." I doubt they openly set out with an intention to flagrantly violate the law, but I don't find it unlikely that they didn't have much qualm about skating close to where they imagined the line was on the theory that they could establish themselves before the regulators caught up with them -- after all, this is precisely the strategy that worked well for YouTube, Uber, or AirBnb.
Ok, so you now seem to be conceding they likely didn’t lie or have intent to defraud people at the beginning, in which case we now have no major disagreement about this topic.
The rest of the comment is commentary about the nature of contemporary startups and VC, including some mind-reading into the true motives of everyone who starts a company, not just LendUp. Obviously you’re entitled to your views on this but it’s all rather nebulous narrative that can be invoked any time to try and win a debate when there’s no clear evidence relevant to the specific topic of discussion.
I think I’ve learned all the can be learned here. Thanks for the discussion.
> Ok, so you now seem to be conceding they likely didn’t lie or have intent to defraud people at the beginning
I feel like the first sentence of the post you're replying to says the opposite of "they likely didn't lie" and I wouldn't say I have "conceded they likely didn't intend to defraud people" either. I said they likely didn't intend to flagrantly violate the law, which is altogether a different claim.
That first sentence is mind-reading. It demonstrates nothing but your own ideology and imagination.
So, nobody in the subthread has demonstrated that the LendUp founders or YC were guilty of any wrongdoing or malicious intent in 2011-12. All we have is conjecture based on people’s previously held feelings on YC and Silicon Valley.
Now, where I am it’s Christmas Eve, which I’m off to enjoy. Best wishes to you.
But your original notion was that "Occam's razor" simply proved that my suggestion was far less likely than yours; now you've shifted the goalposts to a standard that's impossible to meet. Anyway, I suppose I will take "I'm too busy having a great life to continue this discussion" as an improvement over "Ah, you are too slow to realize that you've actually agreed with everything I said" when I did nothing of the sort.
There’s a strong theme here of assuming the worst possible motivations in people and responding to the worst interpretations of people’s words and actions; first in the case of the company’s founders, which is my main point of contention with your position, but then also in response to my comments, which is not just bad-faith debating but a breach of the HN guidelines.
I note that twice in the above comment, you’ve put statements in quotes as if they were things I wrote when I clearly wrote nothing of the sort. If you can’t engage in a discussion by simply addressing things that were actually written, it’s time to stop commenting.
My comment about it being Christmas Eve was a way of noting the fact that it’s a time when most of us who are in parts of the world that celebrate Christmas probably have better and kinder things to do than perpetuate arguments like this.
As for your apparently-continuing claim that Occam’s razor supports your argument: your central claim seems to rely on the assumption that most company founders are dishonest in their stated intentions to do right by customers, and that we should assume that founders are lying when they claim that.
If I’m wrong that that’s your position, you’re welcome to clarify, but please do so without further ad hominem attacks. If it is your position, OK, but I profoundly disagree, and I point out that that it’s not the kind of uncontroversial, accepted fact that puts your argument on solid ground. But sure, you’re welcome to believe it.
For what it’s worth, my own position comes from a belief, and at least 10 years of looking very closely at the phenomenon, that most people are essentially good and well-intentioned, and when they do wrong it’s not just that they’re inherently dishonest or evil, it’s due to reasons that are important to understand, if nothing else so we can avoid getting into situations where we’d end up doing those kinds of wrong thing ourselves.
This is why I push back against scapegoating rage fests when I see them on HN; only if we’re willing understand and dispassionately reflect on how and why people do wrong can we expect people, including ourselves to do good.
