Flock was valued at $7.5 billion last year, and it's probably worth more now. It's absolutely one of YCombinator's success stories.

YCombinator's goal is to make a lot of money by causing there to be more startups, and therefore more successor startups. "Make the world a better place" is not one of their success metrics. They're investors, not altruists.

It's only a success if all you care about is money.

This is YC we're talking about. They'd fund payday loans with organs as collateral for African orphans if they could. Seriously, they have NO scruples.

(And yes, I know where I am.)

That sounds like honest business compared to getting paid by the government to circumvent the laws that prevent the state from spying on it's own citizens at scale.

Yes. Therefore, for Y Combinator, this is a success story.

Which is all a great deal of people in America care about, yes.

They could also care about mass surveillance.

They do. The political and economic environment (edit: in the US) is currently supporting the idea that mass surveillance is an extremely lucrative investment opportunity.

Never.

We should not expect any VC no matter how big or small to care.

never, it is a shining success when viewed through the eyes of venture capital

The new leadership (Tan) is utterly shameless and free of moral constraints. I wouldn't count on it.

Yeah, the idea that YC will disown unfettered capitalism seems dreamy.

It prints money and harvest data, the holy grail basically, why would they remove it

Why would they? There’s no “pro-social” enforcement in their funding terms, so they’re just as “morals aren’t applicable to profit” as any off-the-shelf C-corp is. If they required their startups to found B-corps then I’d understand trying to apply human ethical concerns to them, but they don’t, so human morals simply don't apply.