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Chapter 1: What is discussed at the start of this section?
Tetragrammaton.
I love technology and engineering and science because I would just spend every weekend as a kid reading things that were way, way above my pay grade. Like I didn't understand half of it, but I felt like I could. And it sort of brings us to today where the machines can help you learn. Were you a good student in school? Yeah. I mean, I didn't realize this at the time.
Like my childhood was so rough that I guess I viewed getting good grades and going to college and- Your way out. Yeah, that was the light at the end of the tunnel. That was always what I thought when I was a teenager. I was suicidal. I hated everything about, but when I was in my computer, I could go in my code cave and I had control.
Everything in my life outside of that was tumultuous and I just didn't know when I would catch a beating for no reason or whatever. But when I was in front of my computer or even when I was in school studying algebra or calculus, it's like, oh, the world is so beautiful and well-arranged and I can understand it. Yeah, order. Yeah. Yeah.
When you would be on your dad's computer, would you play games or would you build things? I guess games were my first love. What were the games then? Oh my gosh. Like Spy Hunter on the Atari, I guess. But I really loved adventure games like...
monkey island games or the indiana jones games the old sierra adventure games were really fun because i loved i didn't want just like the arcade i wanted a story like i loved sort of this idea that you could inhabit another person's life today what people play that i love is like you know red dead redemption 2 for instance one of the best games do you still play games yeah i love game i love those types of games
Because like the narrative story and you can inhabit someone else's world and reality, back then I viewed it as like a nice reprieve. What is Y Combinator? Y Combinator is at this point an institution where you apply on the internet and you don't have to know anyone or anything.
and you fill out 12 questions, record a one-minute video, and we have 16 partners who read those and watch the video and try to figure out who are the people who are going to build all of the technology for the next 20 years. How many people try to sign up? Yeah, it's 80,000 applications a year for about 800 spots per year. We invite you to come to San Francisco. We'll meet you for 10 minutes.
It's usually two partners in there. 10 minutes goes really fast. It's really, we just want to know what are you doing and why is it going to be you who does it? What are the backgrounds of the two partners in the room? Usually, I mean, every partner at YC actually went through the program themselves and created a startup. And in a lot of ways, they made something people want.
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Chapter 2: How did Garry Tan's childhood influence his interest in technology?
So we went and did it. And then we're back trying to help the next generation go do that. Tell me about your experience of doing it. What do you remember from your 10 minutes? Oh man, I remember sitting down with the founder of YC, Paul Graham, and his other co-founders. They basically wanted to see the demo. And so my startup took a photo on an iPhone and emailed it, and then you got a blog.
And so that was very easy to demo. And then I think they got it immediately. So once someone understands what something is and why people would use it, that sort of answers the big question. On the first day of YC, you get a t-shirt that says, make something people want. And if you look at the 10 minutes, that's all we really care about. It's like, is this person going to make something?
And the craziest thing is like that's easier than ever now. Like everyone can make something. And then the second part has become much harder, much more important, much more difficult to get right, but much more important to get right. It's something people want. Was Paul Graham the founder of YC? Yeah, he was the founder. Tell me about him. Oh, he was sort of this really brilliant polymath.
I think you would really dig him. He wrote a book called Hackers and Painters, which is the perfect polymath book. You know, he's a hacker. But at the same time, I saw him recently. He was saying that he built one of the best classical art collections in all of England. He lives in England now. So it's... How cool is that? Like he literally wrote the book on Lisp.
Lisp is one of the most respected sort of hardcore programming language from the 70s. I would say that Lisp is sort of for programming languages what CBGBs was back in the day. Cool. I mean, it's just anyone who's legit. Ground zero. It's ground zero. It's legit. If you know how to program and care about the code, you know Lisp. And he wrote many books on Lisp, literally called On Lisp.
And so we went from there to a business where he said, how do I solve the money problem? He was a PhD at Harvard in computer science. And then afterwards, he said, well, I need to make my way in this world. And I'm not going to get there by painting. But I do know how to program. So how do I turn programming, which is its own craft and art into commerce. When was that?
I guess it was early to mid-1990s. He actually was one of the people who created the first web application. The web was new, but then he realized, well, I don't have to just make a static HTML page, I could just hook it up to a program. Today, you think about the web or the Internet or a computer program. It's synonymous with I open my browser and I'm going to go to this thing.
But he was the first person to actually hook that up. Yeah. That's amazing. And it was to make what ended up becoming Yahoo Stores. So, you know, helping other people build businesses and online businesses. I didn't have the words of, I need to solve the money problem until I read it in his essays. And I found his essays on the internet. Now all my friends are sort of in that world.
People sort of talk about YC as a little bit of a cult, I guess. But I think about it a lot because is it a cult? Is it like an ideology? It could be a religion. It seems productive. Yeah. That's what we're trying to make it. How is it different than other VC offerings?
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Chapter 3: What is Y Combinator and how does it operate?
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. The wild thing now is like the act of being able to do the craft suddenly became a hundred to a thousand times more important.
The joke is Thanksgiving of 2025 was this totally insane shift in the way coding and code gen works. So Anthropic released its Opus 4.5 model and The world shook, but no one noticed until they're only starting to notice now. I noticed in January where I started coding again after a hiatus from 2013. Right now, I am about to do about 100x
the amount of work coding, writing software that people can use than the whole year of 2013. Wow. So imagine if there were 100 people in this room, this room would be packed to the gills. You probably couldn't fit 100 people in the room that we're sitting in. But that's how it feels when I'm sitting in front of a computer right now. I've released two different open source projects in the last
60 days. One of it, which G Stack is actually used by 30,000 people every single day right now. And it's free. I just gave it away. And then 11 days ago, I released another thing called G Brain, which is my knowledge memory system. Explain what it is. So. There's this crazy thing happening where obviously code gen happens.
You can use something like Cloud Code to write a 100 times more software than you did before. Does the fact that you were an expert coder in the past make a difference or no? I think it helps a lot actually. Cloud Code was the first revolution from November, and then now there's this new phenomenon that only happened since November, I would say.
where there's this other thing called OpenClaw, which OpenAI just bought. And it's an open source package though. So I think they basically just kind of brought the people in. Started by this guy named Peter Steinberger. I mean, it's a social movement at this point. It's actually very anti-corporate. It's like the definition of open source from the bottom up. And I'm a total believer in it now.
The ridiculous thing is I dressed up in a lobster suit for our podcast, The Light Cone. And the internet didn't seem to like that very much, but I didn't care. But I actually at that moment wearing the lobster suit, it was more kind of a joke to me. I didn't really get that there was this new phenomenon called open claw. And now I get it. I see the religion. So do you know the movie Her?
Yeah.
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Chapter 4: How does Garry Tan view the evolution of venture capital?
It doesn't have to be that. It could be more music. It could be more art. It could be more fun parties. I was hearing about Ari Emanuel. I heard that he was starting to buy all of these big like live event things. That's so brilliant. Actually, that's going to where the puck's going to be. Because suddenly when everyone has all this free time, they're going to want to have fun.
They're going to want to go to parties, want to have interesting experiences. They're going to want to experience being a human more than being a drone worker. Wasn't it Aldous Huxley who talked about, you know, all of this technology will eventually result in a 20 hour work week.
and it hasn't happened yet but maybe now now is the time so after the personal computer revolution what was the next one that you experienced i think the next one was clearly the internet i mean i remember Like 1996 or so, I was like a freshman in high school running around and running Cat5 networking cable all around my high school on Net Day.
Al Gore was running around talking about like the information superhighway is going to change everything. And it did. Like he was right, actually. I grew up in Fremont, which was the first place in the entire country to get cable modems. So I could run a Linux box in my bedroom, and I did. And I learned how to make websites and program them. And that was super fun, honestly.
I mean, basically, Paul Graham did it the first time. And then by the time I did it, it was like maybe 1995, 96. And everyone was starting to do it. Was it easy for you to get information in those days?
Yeah.
We still had the yellow pages. My funny story is my first job, we were living in apartments and I looked around and I looked at my brother, who was three or four at the time, and I was like, man, I don't want us to grow up in an apartment. The American dream is that we should live in a house. So how do we do that? And then I look down at my feet, and there's a stack of yellow pages.
My parents are kind of hoarders, so I don't know. There's like a whole bunch of yellow pages. I picked up one. I flipped it to the internet section. I learned how to make web pages. The funny thing about the internet is on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog or a 12-year-old. So I won all these web design awards as a 12 or 13-year-old.
And then by then, I said, well, that's a pretty good tagline. I could just start cold calling people on the internet. And so I found this company called Infolane. They, funny enough, made city websites. And they made like the city of Fremont website. And I thought that was cool. And I just cold called them and said, hey, my name's Gary. I'm 14 years old. I'm a award-winning web designer.
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Chapter 5: How is AI impacting the startup landscape?
It's progressing at a pretty fast clip, but it's not mind-blowingly so fast that startups can't exist or business can't exist. In fact, it's progressing slower than most AI researchers would say it should. I was sitting with Bob McGrew, who is Chief Research Officer at OpenAI, old friend of mine, and one of the first things he said when
They came up with O1 and the reasoning models was like they released it to the world and it's like nothing happened. And they thought, oh, well, we built it. Like they should all come right now. I was like, no, no, no. Like that happened like maybe a year, year and a half ago. We're only now actually bringing it to the business world. Like only now is it actually having an impact.
Chapter 6: What lessons can founders learn about innovation adoption?
Yeah. I mean, that's one of the lessons for founders. Even if you can be right, even if you created the thing that a billion people, they're going to use it and it's going to change their lives completely. Like you literally invented the wheel. You could invent the wheel and you still got to jam it down people's throats, man. It's like they're not going to come willingly.
People don't know they want the wheel if they don't have the wheel. Exactly. Yeah. So that's where it's like, oh, this is good news, actually.
Chapter 7: How does Garry Tan view the evolution of technology and startups?
Like someone invented the wheel. You know, someone invented the personal computer. But then. Now what? Yeah, you get to build it. You get to bring it to people and you get to be a part of that grand play. All the world is a stage. And at this point, you know, all the world is just being vibe coded.
Would you say most of the founders are building something personal or building something for a general problem? It always starts personal.
Chapter 8: What does Garry Tan believe is necessary for future founders?
That's sort of the do things that don't scale, right? Basically, a lot of the advice comes from, we just see people fail over and over again, and then we just sort of write down the notes. It's like, oh yeah, just don't do that. Like the reason why YC can be so helpful is there's about a thousand ways that startups fail and we've seen all of them and we can graph them on a mean distribution.
We just keep people from doing that. And then there's this classic line from Paul Graham, which has become more and more true, which is, as long as you don't die, you will succeed. Like it might take five years, it might take 10 years. Like if you are just in there thinking about things, if you do good reps, you're gonna be in the right place at the right time. It's just a matter of time. Yeah.
What happens at the end of the 13 weeks? So that's sort of when you go off and show the world what you got and you see whether the investors want to bite.
And we have about a billion and a half dollars of investors per year who come and they're investing on average, I mean, anywhere from a million and a half dollars to four or five million dollars on the high end, like 20 million dollars into any given company. I think the median has doubled since I came back to YC. It used to be about a million dollars raised at demo day.
Now it's closer to 2.2 million per batch. How important is the ability to pitch? It's super important. Then the funniest thing now though, is we used to spend so much time on that part. I mean, this is one of the subtle interesting things. I think that AI is becoming so good. We have these scripts that- Coaches people up. Literally, I mean, that's slash office hours, but for everything else.
This is actually a very interesting model that I think is going to happen across all of society, where we always think about code. All the businesses in the world right now think about like, oh, I need to build software. And that's like deterministic ones and zeros, right? And what no one has figured out yet is that it's not just the code, it's also the skills.
So the newest thing that's happening now is that the thing that used to be ineffable, the thing that I had to sit with someone and teach them this stuff, now that I say it, it sounds kind of scary and crazy, but I think it's becoming true that I can actually distill down what I know and what we've learned from like thousands and thousands of founders.
Our ability to do it is a thousand times better now because we actually can literally use Circleback or Granola and record our office hours. And we're doing it In the short term, just tactically, so it's like, oh yeah, this is what we talked about and this is what we should do. Explain what Granola is? Yeah. Circleback or Granola are these meeting recording agents.
I mean, there's a bunch out there. You can even go on ChatGPT apparently and click that microphone button and it'll just start recording and listening to your conversation and it'll summarize what you talked about. But the really crazy thing is you can take that and you can take that plus all the other ones you did
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