[route3]

In 2012, YC invested in a company InstallMonetizer[0] which, from my understanding, helps align software products with bundling other installers for additional revenue.

[0] http://www.crunchbase.com/organization/installmonetizer

[jacquesm]

That's by far the worst company they ever invested in.

See here for PG's take on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5092711

[anon1385]

Which basically boiled down to him trying to argue that people must want malware because they clicked through a deviously worded dialog box.

From building spam filters to funding a spam company. Building things people want? Ha!

I guess it's worth noting other YC partners in that thread also defending malware, for example Garry Tan: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5093746

It seems like the culture of spam and malware is deeply embedded in YC these days.

[cdr]

I dunno, there's a few contenders. Scribd was pretty bad. RapGenius was pretty bad in terms of the people.

Edit: Oh, and Quora, even if that wasn't much more than YC lending its name.

[ultramancool]

There's a wide variety of these "Pay-Per-Install" (PPI) type services, all of which profit by installing some form of malware on your machine. Sketchier services pay more, but also install stealthily rather than asking. Any kind is a pretty disturbing way to profit from your users. They're the kind of things you see script kiddies deploy to a small botnet. Not something you expect from a legitimate company.