Y Combinator Pulls Support for AI Startup After Video Emerges of Boss Barking at Human Worker, Calling Him "Number 17"

Yahoo

26-02-2025

Scientific Management, sometimes called "Taylorism" after its founder, Frederick W. Taylor, is the idea that human workers can be fine-tuned to be more efficient. If a garment factory worker could make a shirt two seconds quicker by standing instead of sitting, then a Taylorist boss would have them stand, because those two seconds per shirt add up over time.
That was back in the 1880s, but lately Taylorism hasn't just been surviving — it's thriving, as wireless gadgets and management software allow bosses to monitor workers in ways Taylor could only dream of.
For examples, look at Amazon's tracking wristbands for its warehouse workers, UPS fitting its trucks with cameras — but not air conditioning — and monitoring software that follows remote workers at home.
Add to that list a startup called Optifye, a Y Combinator-backed venture that's "building AI performance monitoring for factory workers, boosting line efficiency for manufacturing companies." The company is founded by two undergrads from Duke university who brag that their families "run manufacturing companies."
The surveillance platform caused a firestorm on the internet this week after a demo video surfaced showing a supervisor use the software to hone in on a worker who he referred to as "Number 17" instead of a human name, berating him for poor performance on the factory line. According to the demo, Optifye represents each worker with a numbered rectangle, colored green if performance is up and red if performance is down.
"Hey Number 17, what's going on man?" Optifye's co-founder Kushal Mohta asks his theoretical sweatshop pawn. "You're in the red... You haven't hit your hourly output even once and you had 11.4 percent efficiency. This is really bad."
The worker responds that he's just been having a rough day. Mohta zooms out onto number 17's day-by-day profile, showing a calendar of red squares. "Rough day? More like a rough month," he retorts.
The video was panned across the web, including on Y Combinator's own Hacker News blog.
"Basically modern slavery," wrote one user there. "They were missing a whip robot there as well, and maybe a drum playing robot."
"I want to see the rest of the story where the boss fires him and is visited by three ghosts," one user posted on X-formerly-Twitter.
The backlash was so fierce that Y Combinator — a startup incubator that's backed ventures like Reddit, Doordash and Instacart — pulled its announcement and demo video down, and deleted some Optifye videos on social media.
Y Combinator still lists the panopticon-as-service startup as active on its website, though, where it refers to the factory floor — a place where workers trade huge chunks of their lives to earn a living — as a "black box," meaning a system producing products for unknown reasons.
It's a dehumanizing sales pitch, to say the least.
Unfortunately for workers around the world, public backlash only goes so far when profits are on the line.
"Software like this already exists, is being used, and factory managers want this," wrote Vedant Nair, a founder whose robotics startup was backed by Y Combinator. He's not far off.
Indeed, corporations like Walmart, Delta, Starbucks, and Chevron are already partnering with AI monitoring companies like Aware to surveil workers for thought crimes like talking about unions, wages, and working conditions.
In the early 1900s, Frederick Taylor and his boys weren't afraid to brag that scientific management would bring about the "degradation of workmen into obedient oxen under the direction of a small body of experts — into men debarred from creative participation in their work." (see page 461 of Scientific Management in American Industry, basically the Taylorist manifesto).
In 2025, their spirit lives on — now embodied by 20 year old startup bros backed by millionaire venture capitalists. Oh, how the times change.
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