TRASHFUTURE The Tetsuo Economy feat. Wendy Liu
Mar 25, 2026
Wendy Liu, San Francisco billboard specialist and tech journalist, returns to unpack Delve and related Silicon Valley scandals. She describes Delve’s provocative SF ad campaign and what it claimed about automated compliance. The conversation traces fake audit evidence, troubling VC incentives, and how hype can crowd out durable infrastructure.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Billboards Can Mask Product Vacuity
- Delve used aggressive local advertising to signal legitimacy and scale despite having little real product depth.
- Wendy Liu found $750K–$1M in SF ads and repeat bus/column wraps that made the company highly visible to founders and investors.
Compliance Can't Be Magically Automated
- Delve marketed AI agents that allegedly automated SOC 2 and HIPAA compliance, promising days not months to certify.
- Riley and Wendy explain that compliance requires human auditing and remediation that can't be credibly automated by current AI agents.
Playful Billboards Target Founder Vanity
- Delve's billboards used playful startup culture lines like 'compliance done before your AI girlfriend breaks up with you' to attract founders.
- The ads included logos of client companies that, on inspection, were mostly other speculative AI startups.