Garry Tan

VCs, when it's just about the dollar, I guess the analogy would probably be like public company CEO of a media company.

You know, those people kind of their job is to only make the dollars go up and that's it at any cost.

Whereas when we're early, we don't have to be like that.

And in fact, if you try to do that early, when people don't have an idea yet, you'll kill it.

So how does it work?

People answer 12 questions.

1 percent get invited to a meeting?

Yeah, about three or four percent.

Three or four percent get invited to meet for 10 minutes.

Yeah, only one percent actually get an offer to be funded by us and we give them half a million dollars.

It is an investment, so we ended up owning seven to nine-ish percent of each company.

How much is it about the money versus what else YC does?

I mean, there are lots of places to get money at this point.

What you can't get anywhere else is actually a community of people.

And when you're early and you don't know what you're even going to build yet, the best thing you can do is surround yourself with other people who are actually builders who have been there.

And that needs to be sort of the safe space where you can talk about what you're doing.

And we try to enforce that actually.

It's beyond the fact that money is more readily available now than it used to be.

Is money less important now?

I think so, actually.