Y Combinator‑backed AI startup is under fire after its founder offered instant interviews to partygoers who got company tattoos, then apologized

Summary

A startup founder said he offered instant interviews to anyone who got company tattoos at a recent event—and several people apparently took him up on it. Jordan Zietz, the CEO and cofounder of Y Combinator-backed startup LemonLime, said in a now-deleted LinkedIn post that seven people took him up on his offer and got tattoos from an artist the company brought along to a recent YC Startup School after party. In the deleted post, Zietz said the five-month old AI automation company hosted the event “to meet exceptional people, and find out which of them are just as crazy as we are.” Later in the post, he added that people looking to apply to the company “might want to take notes.” Still, after he raved about the event online, Zietz was immediately attacked by people who said he had gone too far, as well as others who wondered whether the difficult job market really merited going to such extremes to merely get an interview. “Imagine getting branded with the LemonLime logo for a job interview, then getting rejected,” wrote one user on X. “The job market cannot be this cooked that kids have to get permanent tattoos to get interviews,” wrote another. Zietz and Y Combinator did not immediately reply to Fortune ’s request for comment. The startup founder said the five-person company actually offered free tattoos to those who attended the event and nobody was forced to tattoo the startup’s logo on themselves. However, his deleted LinkedIn post explicitly offered the interview to anyone who got “a LemonLime tattoo,” specifically, not a tattoo of their choice. “What I thought would be a fun, memorable way to meet people was, in reality, reckless, and instead came across as tying a permanent tattoo to (sic) job opportunity, which showed poor judgement,” he wrote in the apology. All seven applicants remain in the interview process, and even Zietz and several LemonLime founding team members also got the tattoo themselves. Still, one of the people who got a tattoo at the event, and was featured in Zietz’s since-deleted LinkedIn post, startup founder Dimple Amitha Garuadapuri, wrote in a separate X post that while she did not, “almost everyone else got a LemonLime logo tattoo.” Garuadapuri, the founder of women’s health startup Stri Health, said she instead got an unspecified “personal” tattoo. “I love it,” she wrote in the post. Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril, said in a reply to Zietz’s apology on X that the young startup founder shouldn’t apologize because, “The critics will never be satisfied.” “I have no problem with adults deciding to get a tattoo. We’re also ready to cover associated removal costs with anyone facing any delayed regret,” he wrote.