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Back to Garry Tan on the Past, Present, and Future of YC, with Garry Tan.

What Share of Giant Startups Came From Y Combinator?

Garry Tan says Y Combinator is a managed marketplace for the smartest people starting the next companies, and he calls the setup a good thing. Y Combinator is about 20% of all companies worth $5 billion and up that started from 2012 and later. The share has stayed about 20% for 15 to 18 years because Y Combinator is a network effects business.

The marketplace view came from a concerted effort over the last two or three years. Garry Tan says most of his VC friends would agree. He wants a bigger share. Mark 2026 on the calendar: if he is successful in five or 10 years, he would like the share to be 30%, and he would like the share to be 50%. He asks why the share cannot be 30 or 40. The aim is a community of people you can trust who are there to support you, and the point is not the money.

Grokipedia·Garry Tan

Transcript

Garry Tan on the Past, Present, and Future of YC ·

The Peel with Turner Novak

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  1. How Did a Summer Internship Experiment Grow Y Combinator?On the show, Garry Tan says the program started as an experiment by Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston to give small amounts of money, almost…
  2. Why Did Garry Tan Call Going Direct the Counterbalance After Reporters Refused to Publish a Proposition?Garry Tan sent an understanding of an actual proposition to a number of reporters, and the reporters would not publish it.
  3. How Did Airbnb Make Y Combinator Write Bigger Checks?On The Peel, Dropbox becoming a billion-dollar startup around 2011 was called one lucky year.
  4. How Did Office Hours Turn Garry Tan Into an Investor?Garry Tan joined YC with no plan to invest. After he raised and quit his startup, he was really burnt out and needed to recuperate.
  5. How Did Coinbase Carry Initialized Fund One?Initialized Fund One was a $7 million fund that returned more than 55x DPI. Most of that return came from Coinbase and Instacart.
  6. Why Does Surviving Rejection Mark a Y Combinator Founder?Garry Tan says 99% of people who apply to Y Combinator end up getting a mortal ego wound by being rejected.
  7. How Many Y Combinator Applications Get Rejected?On The Peel, Y Combinator gets about 80,000 applications a year. Something like 78,500 of them are mortal wounds, the rejections handed out.
  8. Why Do Two Y Combinator Years Beat Twenty in Venture?Two or three years of YC time as a partner is equivalent to 20 years in venture. The 15 partners are practitioners of product market fit.
  9. Why Did Y Combinator Stretch the Batch to 13 Weeks?Garry Tan says Y Combinator just extended the program to 13 weeks. The team talks to people about how things went and what can be done better.
  10. How Did Bathroom Notes Get Airbnb Funded Early?The weekly growth chart on bathroom Post-it notes is why Airbnb raised from Sequoia before demo day.
  11. Why Did Y Combinator Build Bookface?Bookface is internal software at Y Combinator. On The Peel, Turner Novak had heard about Bookface and asked whether Garry Tan made it. Garry Tan said yes.

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