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
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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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