The Evolution and Impact of Y Combinator

This week I sat down with Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator. YC has funded 5,000+ startups including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Rippling, and Reddit, among others that have totaled $600B in combined valuation.

Garry is a designer, engineer, and investor in early stage startups. Previously Founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that was earliest in Coinbase and Instacart. Before that, Garry was a partner at Y Combinator where he invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies at the earliest stage. He previously co-founded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions (acquired by Twitter).

Garry is a builder at heart.

We covered:

• Running YC like a founder
• Advice for founders
• Picking winners
• What changes because of AI
• YC being the “YC of hard tech”
• Public service

Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(0:25) Running YC like a founder

(6:25) Focusing on growth and prosperity

(12:40) Incredible pick rate

(14:34) Role of the Group Partner

(19:21) Lean vs fat startups

(20:53) Archetypes of special founders

(25:18) Rule changes because of AI

(33:00) YC being the “YC of hard tech”

(37:40) Community and political involvement

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