Startup Stories - Mixergy #2281 Garry Tan: Y Combinator Startups Growing 5X Faster – Here’s What Changed
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Oct 17, 2025 
Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator and co-founder of Posterous, shares groundbreaking insights on the dramatic growth of startups. He reveals that AI has transformed software into a necessity, skyrocketing revenue growth from 2–4% to an astonishing 10–20% weekly. Tan also discusses the advantages of vertical startups, the importance of tailored AI applications, and how AI lowers barriers for non-technical founders. He emphasizes the current golden age for startups as AI unlocks new opportunities for innovation and success.
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AI Made Software Urgent
- AI turned software from a "nice to have" into an urgent necessity for buyers.
- Demonstrations now convert prospects into immediate customers who ask, "When can you start?"
Casetext's Long Run To Readiness
- Garry recounts working with Jay (Jake) Keller of Casetext during his early YC days when they indexed legal documents.
- The product grew via SEO and built a corpus and moat that later became crucial when LLMs matured.
Scaling Laws Turned Toys Into Tools
- Early LLMs hallucinated and were unusable for high-stakes domains like law.
- Scaling laws and more data/compute created a clear path from toy models to useful systems.
