Summary

I estimate that 1-2% of $100M+ YCombinator-backed companies have faced serious allegations of fraud.

Details

• I’m interested in better understanding the base rates of fraud in high-growth companies. YCombinator is a convenience sample for “high-growth companies”, as they are relatively public about who they back, and act as a filter for e.g. “obviously fraudulent” companies.
• I was able to find 3 companies which closed due to (alleged) fraud, two more which had their business substantially impacted by fraud claims, and three which had mild business impacts from fraud claims.
• YCombinator has incubated 3,951 companies, which gives a naïve rate of ~0.1% of companies having major allegations of fraud.
• I estimate that there are around 400 YCombinator-incubated companies with a valuation over $100M.^[1] 3 of the 5 companies with major fraud had $100M+ valuations, implying that 3/400 = 1% of $100M+ companies have major fraud charges. I think that this 1% number is probably more useful than the previous 0.1% number, because I expect that many smaller companies were fraudulent but no one bothered to charge them or report on it.
• I also wouldn’t be surprised to learn if I missed some cases, though I’d be surprised if I missed more than half of the $100M+ cases.
• So overall, I estimate that maybe 1-2% of $100M+ YCombinator-backed companies have faced serious charges of fraud.

Additional Comments

• It’s notable that almost half of the companies on this list are financial services, which I believe makes them overrepresented.
• I expect that YCombinator is better at filtering out fraudulent companies than other angel investors, but they are also more likely to generate highly valuable companies. I’m not sure how these factors balance out, but would guess that they are roughly equal, implying that 1-2% of all high-growth $100M+ companies face serious fraud charges.

Data

I would like to thank Oli Habryka for pointing me to about half of these examples.

Addendum: Founder Fraud

I additionally came across 2 founders of YCombinator-backed companies who were charged with fraud unrelated to their business:

1. Aaron Swartz
   1. Cofounder of Reddit
   2. Charged with wire fraud for breaking the copyright on academic papers
2. Ilya Lichtenstein
   1. Charged with hacking bitfinex
   2. Cofounded mixrank
   3. As far as I can tell, there are no charges that mixrank did anything bad

1. ^{^}

    In this list YCombinator publishes of their most valuable companies, the one closest to the bottom that I can find a public valuation estimate for is Fampay, ranked #311, with a valuation of $150-170M. I think the difference in valuation between companies at the bottom of this list is relatively small, for example Drchrono (#269) was acquired for $180M. Additionally, there are 13 publicly traded YCombinator companies with a market capitalization above $100 million. So I’m going to guess that there are around 400 companies with a $100M+ valuation, but I’m not sure.

2. ^{^}

    I can’t find information about their valuation, but they raised $3 million at their most recent round and I would expect that this was in exchange for a 20-50% stake

3. ^{^}

    Using the same 20-50% heuristic as with Stablegains, applied to their $4.2 million series A

4. ^{^}

    Same heuristic, applied to their $10.8 million series A

5. ^{^}

    They have not raised outside the initial YCombinator investment, which generally values companies at $1.8 million

6. ^{^}

    Standard heuristic, applied to their $56.4 million series A