YouSaid · the spoken record

Garry Tan

lines on the record: 166
first: 2025-04-29
most recent: 2025-04-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There's a new Google style sort of oligopoly that's emerging around who provides the AI models. But because it won't be, it probably won't be a monopoly, that's probably the best thing for the consumer and for actually every citizen of the world. You're going to have choice.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where they wanted to restrict open source, they wanted to restrict the number of different players. Sitting here a year after a lot of those attempts, I feel pretty good because it feels like there are five, maybe six labs, all of whom are competing in a fair market trying to deliver models that, you know, honestly any startup, anyone, any of us could just pick and choose. And there's no monopoly danger, there's no crazy pricing power that one person, one entity wields over the whole market. And so I think that that's actually really, really good. I think it's a much fairer playing field today. And then I think it's interesting because it's an interesting moment. I think that basically.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we had a little bit of a scare, I think, last year with AI regulation that was potentially premature. So, you know, there was sort of a moment maybe a year or two ago, and you sort of see it in the shades of it did make it into... Past a certain amount of mathematical operations, like that's banned or not banned, but we require all of this extra regulation. You have to report to the state. Like you better get a license. That felt like the early versions of potentially regulatory capture.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get fixed because there's no way, like, people don't care, no one's paying attention. Yeah, that's just one symptom out of a great many that is the result of, I don't know, basically treating people like hoarded resources instead of like they should, you know, the world is full of problems. Let's go solve those things.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma because I think the result is that, you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that the world is actually full of problems. Why are people sort of retired in place pulling down insane by average American standards absolutely insane salaries to build software that doesn't change, doesn't get better? Sometimes I sit there and I run into a bug in whether it's a Google product or an Apple product or Facebook or whatever. I'm like, this is an obvious bug. And I know that there are teams out there. There are people getting paid millions of dollars a year to make some of the worst software. And it will never get...”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is maybe a function of blitz scaling and using capital as a bludgeon like gone wrong. You can look at almost any of these companies. They probably hired way too many people. And at some point they were viewing smart people as maybe a hoarded resource that if you were playing some sort of adversarial StarCraft and you didn't want, you know, the ironic thing is like they themselves were not using the resources properly either, right?”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where neither the leader nor the executives have power or control or agency, and then you have everyone's disempowered, everyone is making the wrong choice. Retention is down, you're wasting money, you have lots and lots of people who are sort of working either against each other or not working at all. And that's, you know, I think a pretty crazy dysfunction that took hold across arguably every Silicon Valley company period. And it's still taken, it's still, you know, mainly in power at quite a few of those companies, actually. Though I think people are aware now that that's not the way to run your company.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all the different parts of this company, I'm not going to, you know, basically the classic advice for management is hire the best people you possibly can and then give them as much man as you possibly can. And then somehow that's going to result in good outcomes. And then I think in practice, and this is sort of the reaction that is turning out to create a lot of value across our community, certainly, but I think the memes are out there and it's actually changing the way people are running businesses. It's sort of a shade of what you were saying earlier with Brian Armstrong. Like, you know, you can sit back and allow your executives to sort of run amok. And, you know, if the founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, then it's actually a political game. And then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think they have an advantage, but it's not clear to me that they are conscious and aware and at the wheel enough to take real advantage of it because Have too many people. And then it's all, I mean, I think this is what founder mode is actually about. So last year we had a conference with Brian Chesky. We invited our top YC alums there. We brought Paul and Jessica back from England. And we had this one talk that wasn't even on the agenda. But I managed to text Brian Cesky of Airbnb and I got him to come and speak very openly and honestly in front of a crowd of about 200 of our absolute top alumni founders. And he spoke very eloquently and in a raw way about how your company ends up not quite being your own unless you are very explicit like, you know, this is actually my company. I am actually going to have a hand and a role to play.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, I remember Jeff Bezos actually launched AWS at a YC startup school at Stanford campus in 2008, right, when I was starting my first company. So I think cloud really opened it up. And that's part of the reason why startups could be successful. You didn't need to raise $5,000, $10 million just to rack your server. And that's the other big shift. Like, I think in the past, it was very, very common to have Stanford MBAs or Harvard MBAs be the CEO. And then you would have to go get your hacker in a cage. You had to get your CTO. And there was sort of that split. And then now what we're seeing is, you know what? The CEO of the majority of YC companies. They are technical.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was true. That was even why Combinator in 2005 could exist. I remember working at a startup in 1999, 2000, or at internet consulting firms. And these were like million-dollar projects because you had to actually pay $100,000 or hundreds of thousands of dollars to Oracle. You had to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to your colo to wreck real servers. The cost.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be 15 people tops. And so that was relatively rare. And my prediction would be this becomes quite common. And my hope is that's actually a really good thing. Like this is sort of the silver lining to what has been really a decade of big tech, right? Like it's more and more centralized power. What might happen here is that, you know, and what we're actively trying to do at YC is we hope that there are thousands of companies that each can make hundreds of millions to billions of dollars and give consumers an incredible amount of choice. And we hope that that will be very different than sort of this, the opposite, I think, was increasingly true. Like we have fewer and fewer choices in operating systems, in web browsers, across the board. Like just more and more concentration of power intact.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then in the 2020s, especially by we're in the mid 2020s now, I think that we are seeing incredible revenue growth with way fewer people. And that's very remarkable. We have companies basically going from zero to $6 million in revenue in six months. We have companies going from $0 to $12 million a year in revenue in 12 months, right? And with under a dozen people, usually five or six people. And so that's brand new. The result of large language models and intelligence on TAP. And so that's a big change. Like, you know, I think we are seeing companies that in the next year or two will get 250, $100 million a year in revenue really with maybe 10 people.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think Reid Hoffman wrote a whole book about it. It was definitely true in the time of Uber. So that was sort of a moment when interest rates were descending and then these sort of international, increasingly international marketplaces, these sort of offline to online marketplaces like Uber in cars or delivery, or you could say Instacart, DoorDash. You could throw in Lyft. There was sort of this whole wave of the top startups were marketplace startups, but also in software too, this idea that scale could be used as a bludgeon, that the network effects grow sort of exponentially and then because you could have access to more and more capital, whoever raised more money would have won. And I feel like that was extremely true in that era, sort of the 2010s.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest thing that is increasingly true and we're seeing a lot of examples of it in the last year is blitz scaling for AI might not be a thing.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that's what I want. I think that if YC is the shelling point for earnest, friendly, ambitious nerds to steal something from I have a friend on Twitter who goes by visa con. And he has a whole book on it. I think it's called Friendly Ambitious Nerd, if you look it up. I mean, I think that that's what YC by definition should be attracting. And, you know, Brian Armstrong is like the best, one of the best founders I've ever met and gotten the chance to work with and fund. And I think the world desperately needs more people like that, where, you know, in the background, just like consistent doing the right thing, trying to attract the right people, like chop wood, carry water, that's it.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, amazing. And I think those guys are, by definition, extremely earnest. I don't think it's an affectation. I think it's legit and serious. Those guys did everything. It's their thing, right? Work on high class problems with high class people. That's very, very simple. Just do it the right way, right?”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My hope is that people who look, you know, if you just look at Brian Armstrong versus SBF, I'm hoping that young people listening to this right now take that to heart. It's like the things that actually win. And going back to Buffett, I went to their sort of conclave in Omaha. Oh, yeah.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even humble in that respect, I'm trying to do this thing, the opposite. I mean, and it's surprising because I don't know if people associate that with Silicon Valley startups, but I see that in the founders that are the most successful and most durable. I see it in Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, which is fascinating because that's definitely not the trait that you would apply to most crypto founders. And I would use Sam Bankman Fried as sort of the opposite of that. Brian Armstrong is an incredibly earnest founder who literally read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper and said,”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly sincere, I think. Basically, what you see is what you get. Like you're not trying to be something else. It's like authentic, but like”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, the number one thing that I want that comes to mind for me is maybe it's even surprising because that's not a word that you might associate with Silicon Valley founders. I think of the word Ernest. What does Ernest mean?”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'm like, that's crazy. Like, I'm really glad that YC exists now because even if YC today is basically a thing that is for first timers, we do have second timers apply. We do accept them, but we primarily think of the half a million dollars. It really is for people who are starting out. And it's kind of hilarious. Like, I have no product right now for people who are, you know, for my YC alums. And maybe that's okay. That's our gift to the rest of Sandhill Road because they're the ones who are going to be the fund returners for all of the rest of Sandhill Road.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If anything, it's a little surprising that it's only 40%. You would have guessed maybe that was 80, but the thing he said after that really shocked me. He said, did you know that of those 40%, 60% of those people, the people who created unicorns the last 10 years are YC alumni?”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think that that's what Paul Graham's essay about being a cockroach actually is. And that's why 25% of the people who reach some form of product market fit at YC do it in year five or later. It's like they don't quit year one. They don't quit year two. They are learning and growing. I have one other really crazy stat that I'm thinking about all the time right now. There's a founder, there's a VC actually. His name is Ali Tamasab. He works at Data Collective. He wrote a book called Super Founders. And I get this email from him out of the blue. He says, did you know that about 40% of the unicorns from the last 10 years in the world were started by multi-time serial founders? And was like, okay, that's a cool stat. Like, makes sense. Like multi-time founders are, you know, they know a lot more. They have networks. They have access to capital. Like that's not a surprising stat.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At the end of the day, you look down and did you create something of great value? Like, did you with your hands and did you assemble people and capital and create something that when all is said and done, solve some real problem, put people together? Is there real enterprise value? And that's the weighing machine. And the way that YC makes money, the way that the founders make money, it's all aligned at that point. Like, yeah, there's a way to hack the hack. And I don't really know what the endgame is on the other stuff. It's just very short term. Whereas, you know, on a 5, 10, 15-year basis, like if you are nose to the grindstone earnestly working on the thing, you will succeed.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“About and what Warren Buffett talks about around all of these things are in the short term popularity contests. But in the end, all that matters is the weighing machine. So you can raise your Series A, you can throw amazing parties, TechCrunch can write about you, all these Twitter anands can fet you as like the next greatest thing and you could get hundreds of thousands of followers on X or whatever, but you know,”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, what my hope is, I feel like when Paul and Jessica created YC for my, I went through the program myself in 2008 and I came out transformed. And then that's very explicitly what I want to happen for people who go through the batch today. It isn't just like show up to a bunch of dinners and network with some people who happen to be much deeper than that. Like I want people to come in maybe with the default worldview and then I want them to come out with a very radically different worldview. I want someone who is much more earnest, someone who is not necessarily trying to sort of like hack the hack. They're trying to, you know, and I think this mirrors what you were saying from, you know, rest in peace Charlie Munger talked about.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of need, it takes a village. You sort of need to be around lots and lots of people for whom that is true, that has been true. And I think that maybe that's actually one of the reasons why see startups are much more successful. Other people give as much money or, you know, as you said, like venture capital, VC firms tend to give a lot more money. I mean, there are clones of YC right now that give like twice as much money, for instance, but I don't think that they're going to see this level of success because they're not going to have as earnest people who become as formidable around you. Like it's actually a process.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a very gingerly way, open that first box and hope, hope, hope that I have a gold nugget. And then, you know, I almost don't want to know that there isn't a gold nugget in there. Like I'm so afraid of rejection. It's sort of remarkable how often high school and family and the 10,000 hours of human training people get from their childhoods comes up and Paul Graham's essays. I always think about that because I think that most people's backgrounds just don't prepare them for sale. It's a very unnatural thing to do sales. But then the sooner that you acquire those skills, like the more free you become. And what Spencer says about those 100 boxes is instead of like being incredibly afraid of getting an F or nothing's going to happen to you. Just like flip open all hundred boxes immediately. You should aggressively try to get to a no.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, how hard it is. And I mean, like it or not, the ideal founder is someone who has lived like 20 lifetimes and has the skills of 20 people. And the thing is, you know, you can't get that. And so probably the first conference that we had, the first mini-conference we have when we welcomed the batch in is the sales mini conference. And essentially it is don't run away from the no. Spencer Skates of amplitude has this great analogy that he told some companies when he came by to speak recently that I've been thinking a lot about, which is sales is about, you know, having a hundred boxes in front of you and maybe five or six of those boxes has a gold nugget in them. And if you haven't done sales before, you think, I really, I'm going to gingerly.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess some of it is like, are you only going to sell to five eyes? Because I really liked what MIT put out recently. They were very clear. They said MIT is an institution and that institution is an American institution. And so being very clear about that, I thought was totally the right move for MIT. And I think that YC needs to be an institution of similar character.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's going to make money, but I don't want to live in a world where it is that easy to get people on these drugs. Like they're ultimately methamphetamines. And, you know, these are controlled substances. And this is the wrong vibe. Like, we didn't not like the vibe that we got from the founders of that company. I hope that YC continues that way, and I think it will. Ultimately, we want people, we want people who are, I mean, ultimately trying to be benevolent at least, you know.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, if it's scary, but might or probably will be good, I think we want to fund them. And certainly there are things that would be bad for society but are likely to make money. And the history is our partners are everyone's independent. We have a process that is very predicated on if you're a general partner at YC, you pretty much can fund what you want. We run it by each other to make sure you sort of double check like the thinking. But I think we're pretty aligned there. Like there are lots of examples of maybe five or six years ago there was a rash of telehealth companies that are focused on, for instance, ADHD meds. And I distinctly remember one of our partners, Gustav Allstromer. He met that team and he said, you know what? We're not going to fund these guys.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideology. And it's also where they are most likely to succeed. Society and certainly America is not serving society the right way if we're getting in the way of these smart people trying to solve these problems, trying to build the future.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. I think what I want for San Francisco, for instance, is I think the rent should be lower. subsidizing demand, we actually need to increase supply fairly radically, actually, and that just hasn't happened. I think I was looking at it for the entire last calendar year, I think maybe Scott Wiener had just posted this on X that literally there were no new housing starts in all of San Francisco proper for the last year. So how are we supposed to actually bring down the rents and make this place actually livable if San Francisco is the microcosm where people build the future and it is sort of the siren song for 150 IQ people who are very, very ambitious and have our techno-optimistic”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if it's one thing that you could do, it's be around people and be in the place where making something brand new is in the water.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the brightest. Ideally, you stay here. One thing we spotted is that the teams that come to San Francisco and then stay in San Francisco or the Bay Area, they actually double their chance of becoming a unicorn.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, at YC, what we hope is that people actually come to San Francisco. And we do strongly advocate that they stay, but it's no requirement. And then what we hope is that if they do leave, they end up bringing the networks and know-how and culture and frankly vibes, and they bring it back to all the other startup hubs in the world. And I think that that's some of the stuff that has actually come about. I mean, Monzo was started by now my partner Tom Blomfield. He's a partner at YC Now, but he started multiple startups and a few of them, multiple unicorns actually, and both of them are some of the biggest companies in London, for instance. So what we hope is that San Francisco becomes sort of really Athens or Rome, send us your best.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that that's probably the biggest danger to people who want to be founders. I mean, I think I've seen Peter Teal talk about this. Like, he doesn't really want people who want to start startups. From my perspective, it's certainly much better to find people who have a problem in the world that they feel like they can solve and they can use technology to solve. And that's like sort of a more earnest way to look at it. And if you look at the histories of some of the things that are the biggest in the world, they actually start like that. You know, there are lots of interviews with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak saying, you know, I never meant to start a company or ever wanted to make money. All I wanted to do was make a computer for me and my friends. And so many, many more people kept coming to me saying, can you build me a computer? And they just like a cat were pulling.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it crashes, and then sometimes you have to go and do your next startup, or, I don't know, sometimes people just go off and become VCs after that, and that's okay too.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see that in people, and then often that will kill their startup. They take their eye off the ball, angel investing. If you're a startup founder and suddenly people have heard of you and people try to add you as a scout, like people kill their startups all the time by that just by taking their eye off the ball.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Spot that kind of stuff. It's like, oh no, no. Like, maybe don't do that. Like, you know, let's go back to product market actually building and then iterating on that, getting customers long-term retention, all of those things are the fundamentals and everything else is like the trappings of success. And those will always feel what's funny is like in other communities, all of those things will always feel more present to hand and they're easier. Like you can just get it. Like you're on stage keynoting or even doing the podcast game. I feel like guilty. It's kind of funny.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah That was definitely true for me. I mean, without that, I feel like what my, I mean, I had a really great community at the end of the day. My fellow Stanford grads, but I guess the weird thing to say is that being around people who are really earnestly trying to build helps 10x more, the default startup scenario out there is not about signal. It's about the noise. Like you're playing for these other things, like how much money can I raise and what high status investor? Some people sort of float off and they become scensters. They're like, oh, let me try to get a lot of followers on Twitter. That's the most important thing. And then what we really try to do at YC during the batch and then afterwards and, you know, in our office hours working with companies is like when we”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Manage people effectively, give feedback. And so the wild thing is, I mean, sometimes it takes five years for those things to come together.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess, myths of venture. One of the myths of venture maybe 10, 15 years ago, was that within nine months of funding a company, you will know whether or not that company was good or bad. And going back to that stat, about half of companies that go through YC will end up raising a series A. That's much higher than any other preceder seed sort of situation that I know of. But about a quarter of those who raise the Series A, they do it in year five or later. And that's a function of like, we're funding 22-year-olds, 19-year-olds, 24-year-olds. I mean, we're funding people who are so young that sometimes they've never shipped software before. Sometimes they're fresh off of an internship. It takes three to five years to mature. To learn how to iterate on software, how to deliver really high quality software, how to manage people, how to”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think some of it is, well, we find out in 10 years, if anything, I think that the unicorn rate has gone up over time, you know, 10, 15 years ago, I think it was closer to maybe three and a half to four percent, and now we're around 5.5%. Some batches from the maybe 2017, 2018 are pushing 8 to 10%. Some of those companies in that area in that vintage, about 50% of companies end up raising what looks like a series A. And then the wild thing about it is it actually takes a long time for people to get there.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess what? Like, that's 10 years from now, or sometimes 15 or 20 years from now. It all starts out very low status and all the way in the weeds. Like you're answering sort of relatively simple questions and you're giving relatively small amounts of money.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. You know what it is, though? I spent seven years actually away from YC before coming back a couple years ago. So I ended up, I think, in the top 10 of the Forbes Midas list as my final year before coming back to YC. And why haven't other people, you know, we ask this all the time, why haven't other people come for us? I think there are lots of people who are doing various things that might work. I guess so far people sort of lose interest or, you know, float off and go do higher status things. Working with founders when they're just right at the beginning and just an idea is actually relatively low status work because it's very high status to work with a company that is worth $50 or $100 billion now.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, what's great is I don't want to compete with Sequoia or Benchmark or Andreessen Horowitz or they're our friends, honestly. Done right, like we're much earlier than everyone else because we want to actually give them half a million dollars.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, definitely all the time. I mean, I think that's the trickiest thing. I think the system itself will always produce both false positives and false negatives because it is only 10 minutes.”
2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source