Trade Dollars with other startups. Book it as revenue
- Services in kind is a pretty common business practice. You see this a lot at the SMB level especially outside of the US.
Small businesses are cash strapped. So you find someone who needs your services and you need their services. Instead of exchanging cash, you exchange invoices and do the work. You build them, say, a $5000 website, they perform, say, $5000 of landscaping.
At big boy levels this is often structured as “strategic partnership”.
The part that makes it not fraud is that both parties do actually do the work.
by titanomachy
3 subcomments
- Thank god, it's satire
https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revsw...
- I find this amusing: I'm from Poland, where after the VAT tax was introduced in the 1990s, there were famous "VAT carousel" crimes, with people ending up in prison. The basic idea was similar, except you also collected VAT refunds from the state.
If you search for "vat carousel" today, it seems this is still a thing.
- The best bit of tongue-in-cheek is in the FAQ:
> We take 2% of every swap. Then we swap our revenue with another platform.
by RobotToaster
4 subcomments
- Anyone else getting "SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP"
by clearstack
2 subcomments
- SEC calls this round-tripping. ASC 606 requires commercial substance — if both parties just book offsetting transactions, auditors flag the net cash flow as zero
by Frozen_Flame
1 subcomments
- What if instead of trading dollars I want to promise to trade dollars in the future? My investors need to see me capturing the market. Might even create some panic for added fun.
- I remember in the couple years before the dot com crash in 2000, there was a lot of satire being written which was being taken very seriously. You couldn't tell what was serious and what was humor because both were absurd.
- The FAQ is amazing....pre-legal haha
This is why substance over form is a thing in revenue accounting. Unless you're an American AI company ofc.
- Let no one have the excuse of "this was so unexpected" once it burns down.
by PeterStuer
1 subcomments
- It's weird to keep referring to these AI behemoths as "startups".
by theartfuldodger
0 subcomment
- Never seen that particular SSL error before!
by stego-tech
0 subcomment
- I don’t see anything topping the internet today better than this. Perfect, no notes.
by everfrustrated
0 subcomment
- AKA YC companies buying from each other.
by thelastgallon
0 subcomment
- I like this bit:
Read the whitepaper*
*there is no whitepaper
- Reinventing tax litigation from first principles
- Reminds me a bit of the NFT parody site https://nfd.miami
by pduggishetti
0 subcomment
- Do it among a group of companies to make it more legal, yc way
- Pre-legal. That is gold.
by sscaryterry
0 subcomment
- (Pending) Crime-as-a-Service
- Some of the text can't be read if opened in Firefox with dark mode as default. Kudos to you guys for making it anyway!
by frankfrank13
0 subcomment
- I interviewed at a startup, really early stage, who claimed to be on track for $100k ARR. We all know "ARR" is bullshit, but I didn't suspect the ~$10k monthly to be bullshit. It turns out this was $10k pre-discount, and this product was ~FREE for YC companies, who made up ~100% of this companies customer base. So revenue was $0, or very close to it.
- Interesting. It's probably a parody website as the comments say.
But wtf is up with Firefox? It doesn't like the site's SSL. Okay, they missed points 7, 18 and 24 to 31 in the current security theater checklist.
An error occurred during a connection to revswap.ai. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).
Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP
Whatever?
Hmm if i edit the link to http i get a cloudflare error page. Someone censoring?
And what does it say about the modern internet that the first two things i thought of are security theater and vendor censorship?
- This took me far too long to figure out that it was parody. I'm sure some VC has at least thought of building a SEC Violations as a Service platform. This is truly the dumbest timeline.
by randometc
1 subcomments
- Obligatory Michael Lewis quote, from Boomerang (2011):
> Yet another hedge fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: you have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that each is worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.
by debarshri
1 subcomments
- What are the types of ARR the platform support?
Can it also generate SOC2 certifications in days?
by felooboolooomba
0 subcomment
- Wouldn't "cookthebooks.ai" be a better name?
by baggachipz
0 subcomment
- Is there a way we can leverage the Gig Economy to book large gains?
- It’s down already. The fund exceeded its capacity.
- If you doubted that we are in a bubble…
by felipellrocha
1 subcomments
- This can’t be legal, can it?
- FAAS fraud as a service.
by desireco42
0 subcomment
- Domain is down?
- Isn't this highly illegal, and worst of all: this is cheating taxes ...
Let's just say if you really want to commit crimes, don't start with challenging the IRS. Just don't. There's so many horror stories about that.
by testing22321
2 subcomments
- I pay you a million dollars to eat dog shit.
You pay me a million dollars to eat dog shit.
The result? The GDP goes up two million and we both have shit eating grins.
by mytailorisrich
0 subcomment
- "This is a parody website. Any resemblance to real companies wash-trading their revenue is purely coincidental and also definitely happening."
by grey-area
1 subcomments
- Activities like this are a good sign of a bubble close to bursting. The circular deals Nvidia and OpenAI have done are good examples of this.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals
Hacker News