YouSaid · the spoken record

Garry Tan

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166
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2025-04-29
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2025-04-29
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  1. “Be successful to do it, but then they had a mess of an interview. Like we didn't get any signal from it. We didn't understand or it seemed garbled. At the end of it, sometimes they're asking, oh, we just, you know, 10 minutes is too short. We need more time. And one of the things I feel like I learned from Paul was that if in 10 minutes you cannot actually understand what's going on, it means the person on the other end doesn't actually understand what's going on and there isn't anything to understand. Which is surprising.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “An incredible resume. They're like, had a PhD, are they studied under this famous person? Or they worked at Google or Facebook or all these really famous places. They had an impressive resume or they had the credentials of someone who I felt 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

  3. “Exactly. Or in AI today, one of the more important things is are people willing to pay? And today, because people are not selling software, they're increasingly actually selling intelligence. Like it or not, these are things that you could not buy before. Probably the most vulnerable things in the world today are things that you could farm out to an overseas call center. That's sort of like the low-hanging fruit today. And basically, how do you find things that people want and how do you actually provide it for them? And the remarkable thing is that that's why it only has to be 10 minutes. One of the things I feel like I learned from Paul Graham interviewing alongside him so many years was that sometimes I'd go through and this person would come in, they had”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “What a great startup ultimately is something real that people are willing to pay for that probably has durable moats that it doesn't mean that that company could actually become much bigger than you don't want to start a restaurant for instance because there's infinite competition for restaurants but you do want to start something like Airbnb that has network effects.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “A set of people that normally you might not ever hear of. It's like you're traveling. It's like you're traveling the idea maze with the people you're talking to. This is all over Zoom. And at the end of those 10 minutes, sometimes the 10 minutes becomes 15. You want to talk to people longer because that's what a great interview feels like to me. It feels like I'm a cat and I see a little yarn and I'm just pulling on the yarn. I'm just pulling on the thread because it's like this, there's something here, this person understands something about the world that actually makes sense to me. And I think what we're looking for is actual signal that there's a there, there. There's a real problem to be solved. There are people on that end who are willing to pay. And then working backwards.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “I guess the surprising thing that has worked over and over again ultimately is in those 10 minutes, either you learn a lot about both the founders and the market, or you don't. So we're looking for incredibly crisp communication. So I want to know what is it? And often the first thing I ask is not just what is it, but why are you working on it? Like I want to sort of understand where do this come from. Did you just read about it on the internet or a much better answer is, well, I spent a year working on this and I got all the way to the edge of what people know about this thing. And what's cool about the biographical is that then it invites more questions. The best interviews in 10 minutes, like you learn about an entire market, you learn 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

  7. “Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the best thing that we can do is actually brute force read. And on average, I think a group partner will read something like 1,000 to 1,500 applications for that cycle that they're working. So the best thing we can do is basically humans trying to make decisions, you know, which is maybe a little antithetical to the broader thing right now. And now it's let's just use AI for everything. But I think that the human element is still very important.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, we ourselves use software, but we also have 13 general partners who actually read applications and we watch the one-minute video you post. And the most important thing to me is that I want us to try the products. Sure, we can use the resume and people's careers and where they went to school, we're not going to throw that out. It's a factor in anything. But the most important thing to me is not necessarily the biography. It's actually, you know, what have you built? What can you build?”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And yeah, we have, you know, I think we have about a billion dollars a year in funding that comes into YC companies, and that's because the acceptance rate to get into YC is only 1%.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Earlier, just now, we were chatting about this podcast setup, but we spend a lot of time writing essays and putting out content on our YouTube channels and just trying to teach people how do you actually do this stuff. There's like a lot of mechanical knowledge about how do you incorporate or how do you raise money for the first time. And all of that is out there for free. On the other hand, I think of doing YC, being in the program. It's a 10-week program. We make everyone come to San Francisco now. At the end of it, it culminates in people raise.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “People like Steve Huffman, who ended up creating Reddit in that very first batch and selling that to Cond ⁇ Nast. And Dropbox, then Airbnb, then today, Coinbase, DoorDash, there are just so many companies that are incredible. I mean, Airbnb is this insane marketplace that houses way more people on any given night than the biggest hotel chains in the world. And it's like, on the one hand, unimaginable. On the other hand, that's the kind of thing that you can do. Like, you can just do things, which is wild. And so I think that that's why it works. We attract people who want to create those things and then we give them money and then more importantly, I think the know-how is, we give it away for free, actually. Go deeper.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “That the idea that someone could sit down in front of a computer and create a piece of software that a billion people could use turned out to be very contrarian and very right. And so today I think of YC as really, it's actually software events and media. I think you've had Naval Ravicant on before. And I think I remember distinctly Naval talking about like those are the few forms of extreme leverage you have in the world. And so I think white combinator is this crazy thing. It's like when people realize they could start a startup, they went on Google and they searched and they found Paul's essays and then throughout his essays they found Y Combinator and then YC started fighting.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “New thing that could really happen in the world. And that started very early. I mean, I think it started literally with the web itself. And that's why in 2005 he was able to get hundreds to thousands of really amazing applications from people who wanted to do what he did. And then the magic is it's only a 10-week program. I think he had only a dozen people in that very first program in 2005. And then out of that very first program, Sam Altman went through it. And Sam, I guess it's interesting. I mean, if you have a draw that is very profound, it will draw out of the world the people who that speaks to those people. And so you end up needing in society these like sort of shelling points for certain ideas.”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Program. So he was one of the first people to hook up a web request to an actual program in Unix. You know, today we call it CGI bin or all these different things. But he was so early on the web that it was a new idea to make software for the web that didn't require like some desktop thing that you had to use to configure the website. And so I think he's just always been an auto didact, a really great engineer, and then just a polymath. So I think that that's what really made YC. I mean, he wrote essays. He sort of attracted all the people in the world who wanted to do the thing that he wanted to do. And so I think Paul Graham and his essays became a shelling point for people who, this”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I guess I can't talk about YC without talking about Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston. I mean, it started because they're remarkable people. And Paul, when he started his company, I don't think he ever had the idea that he would ever become someone who created a thing like YC. He was just trying to help people and sort of follow his own interests, I think. He just said, I know how to make products and make software and make them in a way that people can use them. And then after he actually sold that company via Web was one of the first, you know, today we have Shopify via Web was sort of like the very first version of it. He actually basically created the first web browser based”

    2025-04-29 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan: Turning Ambitious Misfits into Founders · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “World is full of problems like 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, 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 fixed because people don't care. No one's paying attention. That's just one symptom out of a great many that is the result of basically treating people like hoarded resources. 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