Garry Tan

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. Y Combinator started becoming a thing, people started pretending to be Y Combinator companies, and there was no way to verify them.

Garry Tan says Y Combinator had a Google group or something. Vibe coding was not a thing back then, so Garry Tan real-coded Bookface in Rails. At the start, Bookface was actually just a Facebook. The name is a little bit of an inside joke from a skit on The Office. Garry Tan says the joke is of a certain generation, and Garry Tan likes it. The 22-year-olds do not watch any of the stuff that generation came up

The weekly growth chart on bathroom Post-it notes is why Airbnb raised from Sequoia before demo day. Garry Tan says they needed revenue on the site to grow 10% every single week, and they nailed it.

He says the number one thing is that objects in motion stay in motion, and objects at rest stay at rest. Y Combinator is the moment founders learn to run fast. Billion dollar companies look back when a thousand person company is going slow and try to tap the energy of the first week and the first eight weeks. Airbnb got rejected by all the legends too. Brian Chesky used to obscure who the people were. Mike Maples later posted that he was the one who said no. He is one of the biggest legends in v

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 be

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. Tom Blomfield created Monzo, worth billions of dollars and one of the top fintech companies in the world. People on the team have sold companies for hundreds of millions of dollars.

The reps are why the organization learns. A partner reads a thousand to two thousand applications every single year and writes 50 seed checks in a given year, sometimes 75. Pulling out the billion dollar idea for founders is hit or miss and requires inspiration. Paul Graham and Vinod Khosla are the standard, and all of the YC partners are in the top two to five percent in the

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. Between 700 and 800 companies get funded in a year, about 1%.

Asked whether 80,000 is per year, the answer is yes. A guess of 200, 250, or 300 companies per batch is met with the yearly total, between 700 and 800. The partner does not like handing the nos out, and the follow-up is please apply again. An Adventure Time meme the partner tries to post says getting rejected from Y Combinator is the first step to being accepted to Y Combinator.

Handing out the rejections keeps the partner up at night. The meme is the other half of the same point: apply aga

Garry Tan says 99% of people who apply to Y Combinator end up getting a mortal ego wound by being rejected. The rejections keep him up at night because the wound is not a good thing. Something like a third of the batch, and sometimes half of the batch, will have been rejected before getting in. The number has been going up. People quite commonly apply two to four times before they get in.

Y Combinator is always worried about over-rotating. Being too small can be bad, and being too big can be bad. Garry Tan says there are way more really capable founders being rejected right now. Y Combinator should not ask people to be rejected time after time. A founder who survives the mortal ego wound on

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 i

Initialized Fund One was a $7 million fund that returned more than 55x DPI. Most of that return came from Coinbase and Instacart.

The fund backed a hundred companies. The DPI on 98 of them added up to about 1x. Instacart was another 1x, and the fund could not take any pro rata because Sequoia did. On Coinbase, the fund took the pro rata in multiple rounds and ended up turning the fund 53x.

The power law is astonishing and unbelievable. Reading about a return like that and hearing about it still leaves it hard to believe until one company does nearly all the work.

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. He had no intention of ever becoming an investor, ever becoming a GP, or starting a VC fund.

It was still the era of consumer startups, when people said a co-founding team needed a designer. He was told he was a great designer and asked to help a bunch of YC companies design their homepages. He did so many office hours that his pet theory is maybe they saw how much work he was doing. They were already promoting other great people into investing partner, and they said they kind of needed to promote him too. He says he snuck right in. Asked whether he was actuall

On The Peel, Dropbox becoming a billion-dollar startup around 2011 was called one lucky year. Airbnb becoming a billion-dollar company in 2010 and 2011 was the second hit, and YC then went from giving founders $12,000 and $15,000 to $100,000, $120,000, and $175,000.

Garry Tan was a software engineer at Palantir, employee number 10, and he designed the Palantir logo. Palantir had only 10 people and tried to hire YC alumni, which is how he found out about YC. YC started in 2006 and 2007. Back in 2007 and 2008 he already saw YC as where smart engineers went to start a company, and he wanted to be like Steve Huffman, Drew Houston, and James Lindenbaum, who created Heroku. Around 2011 Dropbox ha

Garry Tan sent an understanding of an actual proposition to a number of reporters, and the reporters would not publish it. The reporters did not think the proposition was noteworthy. The refusal astonished Garry Tan. Garry Tan says it does not feel like the media environment is designed to support the idea that tech should exist at all. Garry Tan thinks a positive role for tech is so unpopular with certain sets of people in society that the most mainstream business publications are starting to refuse to publish an argument against an asset seizure.

Garry Tan calls going direct on the internet the counterbalance. Garry Tan did not want to break the proposition on X. The conversation goes on

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 summer-internship style. His own batch paid only about $13,000. Twenty years in, YC is going on more than 100 billion-dollar companies.

People apply online, so a founder does not have to know anyone. YC accepts about 1% of the people who apply. Getting in brings half a million dollars for about seven percent of the company, and he says a YC partner matters more than the money. He is one of 15 people who select companies: they read the application, watch the video, meet the team for 10 minutes, and decide yes or no on half a million dollars within the

The best advice Garry Tan remembers came at sixteen, interning at an early digital agency in San Francisco. The founder later sold the company, Tan thinks for about fifty or eighty million dollars, and had worked on the first Apple online store. Tan learned Perl and database applications there, then asked how one person got everyone else to follow. The founder said counselors, professors, and parents would all push him to put a single title on a résumé, and that he should refuse the box. Learn design, front-end engineering, marketing, sales, psychology, media, and finance. A chief executive does not have to be the best at each of those. He does have to understand them well enough to lead.

Asked for a belief most people do not share, a cousin of Peter Thiel's interview question, Garry Tan rejects the idea that too much capital is chasing too few ideas and too few good people. He says the supply of real problems is basically unlimited, and that there are far more driven people than that line allows. He grants that the number is not literally infinite, because there are only so many people. He does believe that the right community and the right values let people change their own lives and the lives next to them. The responsibility, he says, sits with whoever builds those systems.

Kyle talks about a blog post he wrote in 2014 about a "high rate of learning" being the highest form of compensation at a startup and whether he still believes that today.

Garry Tan started his YouTube videos after he met Casey Neistat in person. He and his cofounder Alexis were already fans of Neistat's channel. After thinking about it, Tan decided video could hold the interests he actually has: music, film, and a direct relationship with what might be thousands of people, while he still gives founders specific advice. He is not describing an easy side project. He is describing a format that lets him talk to builders without waiting for them to find a blog post. The meeting with Neistat is the moment he names, not a gradual content plan.

Garry Tan says nobody understands parenthood until it happens to them. He cannot work the way he did in his twenties and early thirties, when he would put in hundred-hour weeks and optimize for the job at the expense of everything else. That schedule is not available once there is a family. His business partner Alexis is also a father, and Kyle Tibbitts asks about the balance in quarantine as well as in an ordinary month. Tan's answer is the lost weeks, not a claim that the work got easier. The constraint is the hours he will no longer spend, and he talks about it as a fact he had to learn in person.

Garry Tan points founders to Chris Dixon's essay on the idea maze. Dixon was an angel investor in Tan's 2008 startup. Tan describes the maze as a tournament. A lot of people enter, often trying similar problems, and then they disperse. Some hit a wall and the company dies. Some get closer to the center. He calls that picture a true north for how he chooses which founders to back. The morning of this conversation he had also posted a video on why now and why you. He treats those two questions as part of the same map, not as a separate pep talk.

Garry Tan says both sides of his family spent the twentieth century getting out. His mother's father ran textile factories in south China and had to abandon them in the Communist revolution. The family fled to Myanmar, turning whatever they could carry into gold so it would fit in a pocket. They fled again during an anti-Chinese rebellion. Tan says that history is part of why he understood Bitcoin very early. He thinks people in the West forget the privilege of stable institutions, and he says the coronavirus put that privilege back in view. He treats the family story as an advantage in how he sees risk, not as a detail from a résumé.

Garry shares a story about how he turned down the opportunity to start a company with his friends and Peter Thiel to stay at Microsoft and how that mistake cost him $200M.