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

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. Moving from two batches to four made each batch a little shorter, down to maybe 11 or 12 weeks. People needed a little more time, so Y Combinator added about two more weeks and set the program at 13.

The first nine to ten weeks are for finding product-market fit. The work is to get into the market, nail the messaging, figure out who the product is for, build it, and land a set of real customers. Sometimes the buyer is an enterprise. The first three to five customers matter a lot, and early sales set the tone for the whole company.

Developer tools behave like a consumer startup, with a total addressable market of about 20 million people. Garry Tan says CodeGen might push the figure to 200. AI infrastructure is growing really fast and keeps changing. Y Combinator is totally insane for infrastructure and cloud startups: look left and right at about 800 companies funded the prior year. All of them will reply to an email and at least give a fair shot. A reply is not a guarantee they will sign on.

Grokipedia·Garry Tan

Transcript

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

The Peel with Turner Novak

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  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.
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  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
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  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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