Garry Tan
speaker
1,293 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 7 Aug
Garry Tan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 9 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
All right.
So why don't we start out, backstage we were saying, you know, one of the cool ways to think about this event is like, you know, this room is actually full of people who are just like us, but when we were 18 or 20 or, you know, there's some 16 year olds in this audience, you know?
Let's jump to your story.
I mean, you came up always really smart, like Math Olympiad.
Jump us to the Alex of that time.
What were you feeling?
What were you thinking?
And what drove you down this road?
I guess you worked with Jared Friedman at the time.
Yes.
And you came in with actually a very different idea than what ended up becoming Scale.
I guess selling data at the time, you know, large language models were not even, had not really come to the fore yet.
But self-driving cars were sort of coming up and computer vision suddenly became, so that was sort of the first market, is that right?
It seems like that's actually a real good case study in first principles thinking, right?
You can't start a company by opening the pages of the Wall Street Journal and saying, well, this data's hot.
We're going to go work on that.
You literally couldn't have started scale that way.
You had to start from simple statements that are about the world that you know to be true and then sort of building something for that.
It seems like one of the things you got incredibly great at was you start with this kernel of like we believe X and nobody else believes it.
But then the mechanics of building the business are talking to investors and convincing them and not letting them demoralize you.
Showing 661–680 of 1,293 · page 34 of 65
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