Garry Tan

Summary

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

Episode: Garry Tan
Date: May 13, 2026
Host: Rick Rubin
Guest: Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator

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Overview

This episode features Garry Tan, tech entrepreneur, investor, and President of Y Combinator (YC). Garry reflects on his journey from a technology-obsessed kid to a leader in Silicon Valley, diving deep into themes of technological revolutions, the future of AI, the evolution of startups, and personal vulnerability. The episode is rich with practical advice, YC insights, and candid reflections on the interplay between personal drive and creative success.

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Table of Contents

1. Garry's Early Life and Tech Fascination (00:24–02:15)
2. Inside Y Combinator: Mission and Process (02:15–04:18)
3. Paul Graham, Hackers, and the Philosophy of YC (04:18–06:32)
4. Evolution of Venture Capital and YC’s Distinctiveness (06:32–08:57)
5. AI Revolution: Coding, Openness, and Personal Agents (09:04–14:30)
6. Tech Revolutions Garry Has Lived Through (14:30–38:28)
7. YC’s Culture: Competition, Alums, and 13-week Program (37:54–43:10)
8. Coming Back to Lead Y Combinator (43:10–49:06)
9. Giving Away Knowledge—Open Source Ethos at YC (49:06–53:38)
10. Finding Unique Ideas & Spotting Extraordinary Founders (52:12–57:18)
11. Silicon Valley, Government, and Founders’ Traits (57:18–61:43)
12. Startup Waves, AI, and Organizational Evolution (61:43–66:32)
13. Open Source, Social Media, and the Value of Building (71:27–75:28)
14. AI’s Present and Future Impact (75:28–77:16)
15. YC Success Stories: Big Ideas and Surprising Wins (80:35–82:53)
16. YC 3.0: Focus and Lean Operations (82:07–83:57)
17. Personal Reflections: Parenting, Drive, and Agency (86:36–116:56)
18. Finding the Source: Advice on Agency and Creative Life (117:59–124:17)
19. Memorable Quotes & Standout Moments

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Key Sections & Insights

Garry's Early Life and Tech Fascination (00:24–02:15) <a name="early-life"></a>

• Garry describes escaping a tumultuous childhood through technology:
  • “When I was in my computer, I could go in my code cave and I had control … the world is so beautiful and well arranged and I can understand it.” (Gary Tan, 00:42)
• Early love for adventure games and storytelling – Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, Sierra games.

Inside Y Combinator: Mission and Process (02:15–04:18) <a name="yc-mission-process"></a>

• YC is an institution open to anyone, not just the connected:
  • “You fill out 12 questions, record a one-minute video. We have 16 partners who…try to figure out who are the people who are going to build all of the technology for the next 20 years.” (Gary Tan, 02:17)
• Acceptance: 80,000 applicants for 800 spots/year; only 1% get offers.
• “On the first day of YC, you get a T-shirt: it says, 'Make something people want.'”

Paul Graham, Hackers, and the Philosophy of YC (04:18–06:32) <a name="paul-graham"></a>

• Paul Graham (PG), YC’s founder, is revered as a polymath, writer, and code craftsman.
• “Lisp is to programming languages what CBGB's was… It's ground zero. It's legit. If you know how to program…you know Lisp.” (Gary Tan, 05:04)
• Graham’s essays and “solving the money problem” philosophy.

Evolution of Venture Capital and YC’s Distinctiveness (06:32–08:57) <a name="vc-distinct"></a>

• Traditional VC was banker-driven; now best investors are former builders.
• YC’s major differentiator is community, not just capital.
  • “What you can't get anywhere else is actually a community of people ... a safe space where you can talk about what you're doing.” (Gary Tan, 08:34)

AI Revolution: Coding, Openness, and Personal Agents (09:04–14:30) <a name="ai-revolution"></a>

• Explosion in coding productivity since Anthropic’s Opus 4.5 and code generation models in late 2025.
• Garry’s open source projects: Gstack (30,000 daily users), Gbrain (a personalized AI memory system).
• The open-source movement: “Would you want to own a version of that AI from the movie Her…or would you want to use it controlled by the corporations?” (Gary Tan, 11:34)
• Aspiring to bring the AI personal computer moment to the masses.

Tech Revolutions Garry Has Lived Through (14:30–38:28) <a name="tech-revolutions"></a>

• Personal Computer revolution (“I learned to type before I learned to write.”)
• Internet revolution (“The first story I wrote was in Wordstar 3.3 on an IBM PCXT.”)
• Early web—cold-called to land a design job at age 14 (see story at 27:30).
• Rise of E-commerce (helping build Apple’s first online store).
• Social networks and Web 2.0's evolution.
  • “Each of these things … changed everything and are all still living now.” (Interviewer, 31:25)

YC’s Culture: Competition, Alums, and 13-week Program (37:54–43:10) <a name="yc-culture"></a>

• The program is an immersive, near-sacred experience, not just an “educational product.”
  • “The YC batch done right is a little bit more like a revival or an experience...” (Gary Tan, 38:46)
• Importance of intentional space and focus – “just making intentional space in your life...the only thing that matters is: do we make a thing that people want?”
• Healthy competition among founders spurs rapid development.

Coming Back to Lead Y Combinator (43:10–49:06) <a name="yc-return"></a>

• Garry left a successful fund to return at Paul Graham’s request; describes the pivotal dinner where Sam Altman expressed desire to take over YC.
• Reflections on rivalry and missed opportunities (Sam’s early focus on AGI).
• “You were the Salieri and Sam was the Mozart ... he heard it and he saw it... That's the future … and it was one of the fundamental lessons for me.” (Gary Tan, 47:03)

Giving Away Knowledge—Open Source Ethos at YC (49:06–53:38) <a name="open-source"></a>

• YC openly shares curriculum; other accelerators use their materials.
• “We give away all the advice for free... We want to just like arm people with the knowledge to go and create this stuff.” (Gary Tan, 49:41)

Finding Unique Ideas & Spotting Extraordinary Founders (52:12–57:18) <a name="spotting-founders"></a>

• Most applicants pitch similar ideas; true standouts are unique and often work on the fringes (e.g., space fusion).
• Spotting high-agency, “connected to the source” individuals is key.
  • “When you meet people like that ... you got some sort of nuclear reactor in there. Just don’t lose containment.” (Gary Tan, 56:13)

Silicon Valley, Government, and Founders’ Traits (57:18–61:43) <a name="silicon-valley"></a>

• Silicon Valley = "earnest nerds" making things people want; deep roots in postwar research and defense funding.
• Government played a critical role in foundational tech (Internet, TCP/IP).
• YC likes founders who are earnest (not hucksters) and have genuine intent.

Startup Waves, AI, and Organizational Evolution (61:43–66:32) <a name="startup-waves"></a>

• Each tech wave moves from “blue ocean” (opportunity everywhere) to “red ocean” (crowded, competitive).
• AI is “making everything blue again”—opening new possibilities.
• Deployment of AI-powered summarizers and tools is accelerating YC’s ability to coach and advise startups.

Open Source, Social Media, and the Value of Building (71:27–75:28) <a name="open-source-social"></a>

• Open-source projects like Supabase may outgrow giants like AWS.
• "Linus Torvalds walks on water."
• Social media: “You have to have a lot more cognitive armor around yourself ... how do you tell the difference between something genuinely good for you and something that isn’t?” (Gary Tan, 74:25)

AI’s Present and Future Impact (75:28–77:16) <a name="ai-impact"></a>

• AI is only at “1%” of its world-changing potential—usage inequities due to model access and cost.
• Open source will be critical to democratizing AI.

YC Success Stories: Big Ideas and Surprising Wins (80:35–82:53) <a name="success-stories"></a>

• Airbnb’s original pitch (“people staying in strangers’ homes”) seemed crazy.
• “You look down and it happens”—the joy of seeing founders’ visions realized.
• YC’s core focus is funding early stage founder programs, not sprawling VC vehicles.

YC 3.0: Focus and Lean Operations (82:07–83:57) <a name="focus-lean"></a>

• YC 3.0, Garry’s vision: intense focus on the initial startup journey, saying “no” to distractions, and continuous improvement via zero-based accounting.

Personal Reflections: Parenting, Drive, and Agency (86:36–116:56) <a name="personal-reflections"></a>

• Technology, machines, and the infinite book analogy—computers as successors to print in the democratization of knowledge.
• Garry discusses the balance between personal fire, childhood trauma, therapy, and leadership.
• Vulnerable moment: “Now, like I have a rage and a fire inside me ... I can go into that room and I got it.” (Gary Tan, 113:15)
• Strategies and struggles with channeling drive without burning out oneself or loved ones.
• Navigating faith, atheism, and a sense of cosmic mission.

Finding the Source: Advice on Agency and Creative Life (117:59–124:17) <a name="finding-source"></a>

• Garry’s biggest early mistake: not believing in himself (turning down Palantir equity).
• The need to listen to one’s own voice, not just media or mentors: “Slay your mentors. Not literally, but just in your mind...” (Gary Tan, 122:08)
• Finding people “connected to the source” and trusting their internal drive, even if it’s misunderstood by others.

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Notable Quotes & Standout Moments <a name="quotes"></a>

• On Technology as Escape and Order:
  “When I was in my computer, I could go in my code cave and I had control... outside of that was tumultuous ... the world is so beautiful and well arranged and I can understand it.” – Garry Tan (00:42)
• On Openness and Control in AI:
  “Would you want to own a version of that AI from the movie Her where you have control... or would you want to use it controlled by the corporations?” (11:34)
• On What Makes a Great Founder:
  “You have to be about something... you got some sort of nuclear reactor in there. Just don't lose containment.” (56:13)
• On the Continual Evolution of Founders:
  “I feel like I'm still in the process of blooming as it is right now.” (45:42)
• On Trauma, Ambition, and Therapy:
  “Now, like I have a rage and a fire inside me... I can go into that room and I got it.” (113:15)
• On Open Sourcing Knowledge:
  “We give away all the advice for free...there's 2 million subscribers on [our YouTube].” (49:41)
• On Agency and Belief:
  “I didn’t believe in myself. I didn’t believe that my skills were valuable. I thought that...having a job at Microsoft was like a gift..." (119:55)
• On the Flow of Innovation:
  “People who are...like you or Paul Graham, they are in the flow ... the things you read about from media ... are second and third hand retellings..." (120:14)

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Memorable Moments with Timestamps

• YC Application Process Insight (02:17–02:49)
  80,000 applications, 800 spots, “just want to know: what are you doing and why is it you who does it?”
• Open Source AI Movement & Gbrain (09:54–12:37)
  “Imagine this AI, but instead of the AI that some corporation owns and uses it to surveil you, it's like you literally own it.”
• The Homebrew AI Revolution (14:09–14:30)
  “The Homebrew Computer Club for AI is happening right now. Anyone can actually come in and be a player.”
• Early Web and Cold Calling for Jobs (27:30–30:17)
  “The funny thing about the Internet is on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog or a 12-year-old.”
• On Meeting Truly Exceptional Founders (55:56–56:33)
  “It's even beyond thought. It's some other thing.”
• Advice for Founders and Agency (122:08–124:17)
  “Slay your mentors ... I want to actively find people who are like, they're making their own connections and they're building their own world models ... you're over the target, keep going.”

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Additional Highlights

• AI as a Multimodal Revolution:
  Each model (Claude, Codex, Deep Seq) has its own “personality,” and task-matching is becoming normal (93:22–95:01).
• Balancing Personal and Professional Growth:
  Garry’s therapy and attempt to “integrate the fire” without self-destruction or neglecting family (111:39–116:25).
• Government’s Role in Tech:
  Positive story of regulatory assistance for YC hardware startup Knox Metals (104:46–105:57).
• Advice to the Next Generation:
  If he were 16 today: “I’d probably try to go to Stanford at least for a couple years … my whole 20s were this delayed adolescence and I had to figure out who I was.” (107:19)

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Conclusion

Garry Tan’s Tetragrammaton appearance is a wide-ranging meditation on technology, agency, mentorship, vulnerability, and the future of innovation. With practical stories and philosophical depth, Garry champions a builder-first, open-access world—and delivers encouragement (and caution) to those forging their own paths.

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For more: Tetragrammaton.com

Transcript

[Narrator]

Tetragrammaton.

[Gary Tan]

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.

[Interviewer]

Were you a good student in school?

[Gary Tan]

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, that was my. Yeah, that was the light at the end of the tunnel. That was always what I thought when I was a teenager. Like, 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. And 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.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Order.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

When you would be on your dad's computer, would you play games or would you build things?

[Gary Tan]

I guess games were my first love.

[Interviewer]

What were the games then?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, my gosh, like Spy Hunter on the Atari, I guess. But I really loved adventure games like the 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.

[Interviewer]

You still play games?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, I love games. I love those types of games because, like the narrative story and you can inhabit someone else's world in reality. It's. Back then I viewed it as like a nice reprieve.

[Interviewer]

What is Y Combinator?

[Gary Tan]

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.

[Interviewer]

How many people try to sign up?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, it's 80,000 applications a year for about 800 spots.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Gary Tan]

Per year. We invite you to come to San Francisco. We'll meet you for 10 minutes. It's usually two partners in there and 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?

[Interviewer]

What are the backgrounds of the two partners in the room?

[Gary Tan]

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. So we went and did it and then we're back trying to help the next generation go do that.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your experience of doing it. What do you remember from your 10 minutes?

[Gary Tan]

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, you just 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, it 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.

[Interviewer]

Was Paul Graham the founder of yc?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, he was the founder.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about him.

[Gary Tan]

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 CBGB's was back in the day.

[Interviewer]

Cool.

[Gary Tan]

I mean, it's just anyone who's legit.

[Interviewer]

Ground zero.

[Gary Tan]

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 that from there to business where he said, how do I solve the money Problem, you know, 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. So how do I turn programming, which is its own craft and art, into commerce?

[Interviewer]

And when was that?

[Gary Tan]

I guess it was like early to mid-1990s. So he actually was one of the people who created the first web application.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Gary Tan]

So 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, and it's synonymous with I open my browser and I'm going to go to this thing. But here he was the first person to actually cook that up.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's amazing.

[Gary Tan]

And it was to make what ended up becoming Yahoo Stores. So it was, 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. Is it like an ideology? It could be a religion.

[Interviewer]

It seems productive.

[Gary Tan]

And, yeah, that's what we're trying to make it.

[Interviewer]

How is it different than other VC offerings?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, VC is a very interesting thing because to me, it feels like it's stuck in 1970s or the 80s. VC didn't exist, really, going back more than 50 years. And then the legends of the space, they're sort of. I felt like they're bankers. You know, they're all dressed up and buttoned up. You ever hear the story of, like, Fairchild Semiconductor? I think they literally wrote a bunch of letters to a bunch of bankers they knew in New York. And then one of the people who replied was Arthur Rock, who was also the guy who ended up funding Apple later.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Gary Tan]

And so there's a long lineage of that, but I think it's like, really evolved from that. I think today the best investors in the world are people who are actually former builders instead of bankers. And I think that vibe matters a lot. There's a lot more to the world than just the dollars and cents. Like, the dollars and cents come after you make something people want.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

So I think if I had to describe, like, well, you know, is YC just another VC. 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 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.

[Interviewer]

So how does it work? People answer 12 questions. 1% get invited to a meeting. Is that.

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah, about 3 or 4%.

[Interviewer]

3 or 4% get invited to meet for 10 minutes.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, yeah. Only 1% actually get an offer to be funded by us and we give them half a million dollars. It is an investment. So we end up owning 7 to 9 ish percent of each company.

[Interviewer]

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

[Gary Tan]

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 a safe space where you can talk about what you're doing. And we try to enforce that actually.

[Interviewer]

Beyond the fact that money is more readily available now than it used to be. Is money less important now?

[Gary Tan]

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 Codegen 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. And 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 20 2013.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Gary Tan]

So imagine like if there were a hundred people in this room.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

This room would be packed to the gills. Like 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 Gstack, 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 gbrain, which is my knowledge memory system.

[Interviewer]

Explain what it is.

[Gary Tan]

So there's this crazy thing happening where obviously codegen happens. You can use something like Claude code to write a hundred times more software than you did before.

[Interviewer]

Does the fact that you were an expert coder in the past make a difference or no?

[Gary Tan]

I think it helps a lot, actually. Claude code was sort of the first revolution from November. And then now there's this new phenomenon that only happens 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?

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

Would you want to own a version of that AI from the movie her where you have control of the AI or would you want to use it controlled by the corporations?

[Interviewer]

Oh, obviously it's always better to control things yourself.

[Gary Tan]

So that's why openclaw is so powerful. I use this example all the time. I mean, do you use an iPhone?

[Interviewer]

I do.

[Gary Tan]

Do you use Siri?

[Interviewer]

I don't.

[Gary Tan]

No one uses it. And the reason why is it turns out Apple isn't great at doing that stuff. But what if I told you that I'm going to release like an open source version of it that actually works? And that's what I've basically been working on the last 11 days. Like if this thing, that's what gbrain is, it'll actually connect into your email contacts, calendar. It read my Apple Notes for like the last 18 years. It read my emails, it went and looked at my calendar for the last 18 years and then it mapped everything. It looked up all the people I've met, It actually checked up on them and be like, here, this, you know, you met this person a few years ago. This is what they're up to now.

[Interviewer]

Amazing.

[Gary Tan]

So imagine this AI, but instead of the AI that some corporation owns and uses it to surveil you, it's like you literally own it. You own the code, you own the data, nobody else has access to it. And then you can actually tell it to do stuff and you can program it yourself. So yeah, we're in the middle and

[Interviewer]

you don't need to know how to code to do it. Is that correct?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, I'm trying to figure out how to make it so that anyone can do it. So that's what, that's some of the experiment that I'm in the middle of right now. So I released this 11 days ago. It's got 8,000 stars on GitHub. The analogy we've been using is when the Apple II came out by Apple, the thing that made Apple as a company was it was actually the first commercial usable version that a non engineer could use of a personal computer. That moment hasn't happened yet for AI Right now it's still corporate, it's still very, very expensive. It requires a lot of customization. You have to hire all these engineers to run it for. And then this maps to how computers were back in the 70s. Exactly like Steve Jobs literally grew up and lived in that moment in age when him and Steve Wozniak were sitting in a garage in Mountain View creating Apple Computer. They were at this moment where they had to solder a breadboard to create the Apple one.

[Interviewer]

And before that it was these giant

[Gary Tan]

room sized computers and nobody could, no normal human being could have one for themselves.

[Interviewer]

Only institutions and corporations.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, so we're exactly at that moment again and at a much more powerful sort of technology. I think personal computers did revolutionize the world. And then this is like the next revolution. It's happening right now. The Homebrew Computer Club for AI is happening right now. And anyone can actually come in and be a player and a part of this next revolution.

[Interviewer]

Tell me every tech revolution you've lived through.

[Gary Tan]

Oh my God. I mean, well, I was born in 1981, so I guess I was born during the personal computer revolution. My first computer with my dad. Because my dad really loved. I mean in retrospect I really thank him for being really into that because yeah, it's super lucky. Worked out. Yeah. I remember hearing about Kanye early on, like managed to get some early audio equipment and that was actually a part of becoming someone who can make music. So I feel like me getting a PCXT when I was five years old. I didn't learn how to write with a pen until later I learned how to type. And the first story I ever wrote was I think in Wordstar 3.3 on a IBM PCXT, which is very funny. But yeah, the personal computer was a really big idea before, only Digital or IBM or just these giant organizations like your university or giant corporation you worked at would let you timeshare. And it was like very, very limited and it couldn't do a lot of stuff. It's kind of funny because we're sort of exactly in that age with AI

[Interviewer]

and you see a time when that will be democratized.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, that's the open claw moment. Like I think that that's happening. That revolution is happening right now. I think a lot of people, a billion people are using ChatGPT. And the wild thing that I see that a lot of people in tech are seeing, just beginning to see. I mean, there's probably a thousand of us in the world that really believe this, but everyone is going to run their own AI agent that is totally under their control that they program.

[Interviewer]

Will it still be connected to either ChatGPT or Anthropic or. Not necessarily.

[Gary Tan]

Not necessarily. For now I think it will be. But the hope is you'll be able to choose. I think that that's actually going to be one of the big enduring questions in the next few years. There's sort of this nightmare scenario where one company or one entity or just one government has control of the biggest and best and only super intelligence. And I think in that unipolar world, really, really bad things will happen. But the good news right now is it doesn't look like we're on that trajectory yet.

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[Interviewer]

What are your thoughts on bias in AI?

[Gary Tan]

This is where control matters a lot. So. And actually this is a very interesting debate, right. There will be people out there who say there should only be one AI and I want to control it. All right.

[Interviewer]

There'll always be people like that.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. There's sort of like the One World Government people.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And then there's the sort of renegade people who are like, no, no, no, I want to be a pirate. I don't want to join the Navy. I want to be a pirate. And personally I'm team pirate. So I think that personal responsibility, personal liberty and personal computing and personal.

[Interviewer]

The idea that the thing that's right for one person is right for everybody else is a crazy idea.

[Gary Tan]

I definitely don't want to live in that world.

[Interviewer]

It's a dehumanizing idea.

[Gary Tan]

Totally. So. And I think we have choices right now. And that's why I think the personal AI movement is really, really important.

[Interviewer]

Now. There was an open source AI that came from China maybe a year ago.

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Those are model companies like Deep Seq or Quen.

[Interviewer]

How did that change things?

[Gary Tan]

When they appeared, it scared the crap out of everyone. And Nvidia stock went down by 10%. And I bought on that day, which was funny. So I think there are two things happening. One is that it's good for the pirates, it's good for Team Liberty because it showed that there can't be just one. There can be many, many model companies out there. And that's going to be really important. But the second thing that is scary and maybe bad is that the reason why the Chinese companies are able to do that is they're actually stealing the intelligence right out of the giant American model companies. So two things can be true at once. It can be true that ironically, Chinese companies that are operating outside of the American and Northern American and European hegemony of copyright law can do this and then they can Release it. And then at the same time, they're sort of doing a thing that is not totally clear that should be legal or good.

[Interviewer]

Aren't all the American companies built on stolen material as well, though?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, that's a strong argument. Yeah. I mean, you could say that's fair use. And, you know, it's kind of odd for the big model companies to come and say, actually, this is just our copyright.

[Interviewer]

They didn't write anything, they didn't create anything, they just bunched it up.

[Gary Tan]

That's right. Yeah. They brought it together.

[Interviewer]

Aggregated it.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. So. And you know, on the one hand, we're all really, really. Well, not everyone's glad that they did it, but, you know, I think that it's clear that there is a lot of value to it. It's a really powerful tool. And then that's the debate as we're sitting here. It gives me pause that Sam Altman had not one, but two different violent incidents at his home in San Francisco.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about that. I don't know anything about that.

[Gary Tan]

Someone threw a Molotov cocktail at his house. And then literally the next day, after all of the news media published photos of his house and the address, there was a drive by shooting.

[Interviewer]

Wow.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. I mean, no one hurt, obviously, just property damage.

[Interviewer]

Why does the mainstream media have such a hatred of technology?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, on the one hand, it sort of makes sense. The mainstream media has really suffered from the death of ads. You can trace it to journalism being actually broken down by. I don't know why people don't give Craigslist a little bit more shit for this, actually. I mean, you can directly trace the decline of add revenue to newspapers to Craigslist. And on the other hand, I think people are pretty happy that they can go to Craigslist and sell their toaster and Craigslist is free. So I think there's a lot of paradoxes in how technology comes out into the world right now. And that's a good one. That's. What are you supposed to do? Like, were we supposed to protect the newspapers? Were there supposed to be laws that prevented this from happening? On the other hand, Craigslist is free. And it's giving a service that people are using that is way superior to having to call up the newspaper and pay $20 just to sell your car or something like that. So what should the rules be? Things change. Is that okay? And then I always think about, are you familiar with this funny management book? It's who Moved My Cheese?

[Interviewer]

No, I know the title, but I Haven't read it?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, I mean, you don't need to read it because that's basically the whole thing. I think it's just people literally don't want their cheese to be moved. And technology is the primary cheese mover in society. And so it makes sense that people are very upset with tech people.

[Interviewer]

Is there a world in the future where all pieces of content can be on the blockchain and then when they're integrated into AI, you know, where things are coming from?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, basically a lot of it is, what are the laws around it? How do we get people paid? What do we do about it? For a while, there's this idea that artists should be paid via things like Patreon, which I actually invested in. I mean, I met Jack Conti and Sam Yam. I think they were actually right out of college. I mean, they were college roommates. And one is a great musician and one is a great computer scientist.

[Interviewer]

How'd they get the idea for Patreon, do you know?

[Gary Tan]

I think Jack had a band called Pamplamous and He was on YouTube and he just basically, I think this was about when Kickstarter happened. But Kickstarter had a problem, which is if you're running a band, you're not making products, you're not making one off things. You don't want to sell a T shirt, a new T shirt every week just to make money. So he says, why don't we just do that? How about the straight up patronage model? Like, I really like this musician, I really like this artist. Let me just pay them $10 a month. So I think Patreon just continues to grow and that's a great model for sort of squaring the circle.

[Interviewer]

Do they have competitions? Anyone else do what Patreon does?

[Gary Tan]

I think they sort of have a good look of what's going on right now. But Kickstarter still exists, And I think GoFundMe still exists. And there are lots of different things, but Patreon, I think, has just brought together all the people who are super creative, who just want patronage. And my crazy idea for UDI is actually that shouldn't we just expand that? There's sort of big, big, deep debate about what are all the people going to do when AI comes and takes the jobs. And I guess my answer is one, I think people are going to do a lot more cool stuff to serve each other. Not just make something people want, but make a whole lot of stuff that people want. That's sort of my first answer, and then my second Answer is the something people want part doesn't have to be just more enterprise B2B software. 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, is it 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.

[Interviewer]

So after the personal computer revolution, what was the next one that you experienced?

[Gary Tan]

I think the next one was clearly the Internet. I mean, I remember like 1996 or so. Like I was like a freshman and high school running around and running Cat 5, 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.

[Interviewer]

Was it easy for you to get information in those days?

[Gary Tan]

We still had the Yellow Pages. You know, my, 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 like web design awards as a 12 or 13 year old. And then by then I said, well if I'm a, 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 award winning web designer. I'm looking for a job. Are you guys hiring web designers? And so I got that first job, rode my bike about two miles over to Infilane, this tiny little three room office. The main tech guy was this guy named Andy McCrae who's like bearded Unix programmer, like just grizzled, really new as classic cto. And then the CEO was this guy named David Hillstrom and he had the slicked back hair and he had like the finance shirt that had the white collar but then like the blue stripes underneath and then the pleated khakis and like the suspenders. And he was a fascinating guy, honestly. Like he taught me the value of look someone in the eye and a strong handshake. And that was something that wasn't something my dad was going to teach me because he never learned that. He couldn't figure that part out, you know, so this is really interesting. Motley Crue. At home, everything was a mess and then I could ride my bike and go to work. And you were like quirky, super smart people who weren't yelling at each other, just getting things done and making city websites, you know, like serving the public good. And we were doing it by just typing in front of a computer. And there was a designer I got to work. My first designer I ever got to work with was named Jackie. I feel bad, I don't remember her last name. I feel like I learned everything about design from her. She taught me this thing called the squint test.

[Interviewer]

How much older was she than you?

[Gary Tan]

I think she was. Must, must have been 55. Like she was.

[Interviewer]

So she was a grown up. And you were 14?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, I was 14. Like I was just sitting right next to you.

[Interviewer]

Consider her like a mentor.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, absolutely, yeah. I mean so many mentors. I mean the universe seems to just unfold and it's like here's, here's someone you need to learn from. You just have to answer the call. I guess you just have to be like present.

[Interviewer]

And what was the next one after the Internet?

[Gary Tan]

Oh my God, the Internet was so big. So the funny, funny thing about me is I learned how to make websites. I cold called to get my first engineering like learn. My first job where I learned to code was this design firm called Adjacency in San Francisco run by now. My friend Andrew Sather, his story was crazy. He just cold, he didn't cold email because Fortune 500s didn't have email. He would cold send these beautiful graphic design briefs of what the Internet could do for these giant brands and he signed them as an 18 or 20 year old out of University of Wisconsin. Great idea in 1998, like just had

[Interviewer]

a vision for what it could be.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. So back then websites didn't look like the way they do now. They looked like dinky, ridiculous like under construction signs and gray backgrounds. So Andrew Sather figured out how to make full page bleed websites that look like magazines. And that was the thing they figured out, which I love. I mean I only say this because at every moment in technology like there is like a cult of the new that creates value in a way that is just astonishing.

[Interviewer]

Each of these things that you're describing changed everything and are all still living now.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, I mean I think about, I mean sitting here in Shangri La, this is the place that so many songs were born right now. Right. And so whether it's music or art or movies or frankly code code is one of those things actually. So. And I got to work with these legends who they came up with it. So Andrew Sather created the first Apple E commerce store on the Internet for Steve Jobs. And so I got to work at that. What's the store? Oh, they sold. You literally just went to apple.com, it was a brand new idea back then to be able to do E commerce.

[Interviewer]

Selling Apple devices online.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. So you could buy an imac. And so it was this beautiful imac. I mean I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Like Apple was the, this thing up in the sky. Yeah, they made beautiful products, you know.

[Interviewer]

And before that, where would you have to go to get one?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, you'd have to go to an Apple store. Oh, I guess Apple stores didn't exist yet. Oh shoot.

[Interviewer]

It was probably hard to get.

[Gary Tan]

I don't. Yeah, you'd have to go to a

[Interviewer]

retailer and I imagine in many places in the country there wouldn't be a retailer.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, that's right. And you couldn't go online to buy it. So it's like. Yeah, it's unfathomable that all these Things that we take for granted were created by people no different than you or me. I think that's like a straight up Steve Jobs quote. That's what he said.

[Interviewer]

It's true.

[Gary Tan]

He said once you realize that, like, you'll never be the same.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. It's not special, people doing these things.

[Gary Tan]

Yes. I mean, they are special, but everyone's a little bit special.

[Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

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[Interviewer]

Next revolution.

[Gary Tan]

Oh my God. So after the Internet, sort of a toss up between social, I would say Facebook was a big deal for sure. Social media. And that happened because of the web. The funny story for me is I learned how to make all these web pages and then I thought that the web was dead. So it was like I was 2003, a computer engineering major at Stanford, graduated no startups. Like I couldn't. All the startups were dead. In 2003, Web 1.0 had already crashed. It's funny, one of the summers I [e-mail] I mean, earlier we were talking about venture capital. In retrospect, that's the kind of venture capital that was bad. When you go in and sort of astroturf a business idea with someone who is a suit and not a builder, you get an idea like that. I think it was a men's magazine, some like 20 page PowerPoint about like all buzzwords. It's basically like mediated from a new sphere of people who are just disconnected. Like here's a bunch of abstractions and if it's hot, if it sounds hot, then I better get ahead of it. But that's like trying to navigate while you're blind. And what a builder can do is they know how this stuff is Built, they got eyes, they can see. So you can just see like, hey, there's this thing over here. I'm going to go build that thing. And then they build it and then it's awesome.

[Interviewer]

So would you say the best VCs today are the ones who are the builders?

[Gary Tan]

I would say so, yeah. I mean, that's just sort of necessary, especially early stage. It just doesn't make sense that you could be that good an investor without being a builder first.

[Interviewer]

How different do the ideas change from an initial pitch until the thing that ends up being successful in the world?

[Gary Tan]

There's some of. A little bit of both. Someone like Tony Hsu from Doordash, that's what they were and that's what they were always. And then they were like little adjustments along the way. They said, we're going to be the best food delivery. And then the micro pivot there was like. As everyone else was working on cities, they said, oh, we're going to do suburbs. And just that little shift allowed them to grow really, really fast and beat everyone else. Sometimes it's like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase, he came in and said, I believe that bitcoin is going to be really, really big. And then he just worked backwards from that. And so the first version of what he built, I think it was called BitBank. All he was trying to do actually initially was build a bitcoin client for the phone. And then this is like the act of the founder. You know, you're out there, you're trying to make this thing, and then you realize, oh, it's not going to work. You know, the whole bitcoin client can't fit on an Android phone. And even if it did, you'd have to sit there, leave it plugged in for five hours a day just to make it usable. I mean, okay, that's not going to work. Let's turn around and make it work on a server. And then he did that and it again didn't work. And he said, well, why? It's actually really hard to get bitcoin. I built a thing that holds bitcoin, but how do you actually get it in there? And then he went and did that and it became Coinbase.

[Interviewer]

So amazing.

[Gary Tan]

So these things always evolve, they always change. And really great founders seem to be able to just ask the first principles questions and then go after that thing.

[Interviewer]

Walk me through the 13 week program.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah, we're in week two right now of the spring batch. Honestly, most of the first 10 weeks is just building. So you come in and this is fresh in my head. We just went through the basics, and it's funny how much you have to do the basics, but we have a bunch of really experienced, successful former founders who are coming back and doing YC again. Alums. And it's funny to watch them have to go back to beginner mind.

[Interviewer]

So these are people who are going through the program a second time.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, totally. So some of our best founders, like Parker Conrad of Rippling, came back through a second time. And increasingly alums are coming back and doing YC again.

[Interviewer]

Do you think they're doing it for a nostalgic reason or because they get something specifically by doing it?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, I think the YC batch done right is a little bit more like a revival or an experience than an educational product or something like that. I think it's an experience. And then our reality is constructed entirely with other people. And so the number one value the first few weeks is actually disconnecting from your normal rhythm and saying, okay, I displaced my entire life. I am coming over here, I'm intentionally going to work on this company and I'm going to create a thing for other people to the exclusion of everything else. And I'm going to focus on just that. And that alone is so valuable because otherwise, you know, the first thing we say is, like, in every other context, your best friend calls you and needs to move and needs your help that weekend. Now you've got an excuse.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And the answer is, sorry, it's always tomorrow. Yeah, right now I'm doing a thing. And so it's kind of funny how much just making intentional space in your life is just that. And then doing it in sort of like an encounter session style way. It's like you're with all these other people and every single week you see their struggles and what they're going through and the evolution in their thinking. And then about week three or four, it starts becoming, oh, it's working for them. Am I behind?

[Interviewer]

Would you say it's competitive or more like everyone inspires everyone else?

[Gary Tan]

Ideally, it's the latter. Sometimes it's competitive. What's funny is my YC batch we had, one of my fraternity brothers from Stanford actually was in my very YC batch. But our startup idea was post an email and get a blog. Theirs was post an email and get a photo on a photo frame. And so we were competitive with them. Like, I knew that they were going to launch and we were going to. We needed to launch first. You know, Parker Conrad talks about that during his batch for Zenefits, he was doing health insurance for business. And there was another company called Simply Insured. And boy, did that light a fire under his ass to make that company 10 times faster and better than his competitor. Yeah, so mostly I want it to inspire. But on the other hand, a little competition never hurt anyone.

[Interviewer]

And it sounds like that's like real world direct competition in those cases.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

Which you will have to encounter.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, that's super real.

[Interviewer]

So it's different than, well, he's building something really different than me, but I want to be as good as him.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, that's right. A lot of this is the 13 weeks is a lot about trying to get people to focus on the thing that really matters instead of how do I raise more money from VCs, how do I impress the finance bro? None of that matters. The only thing matters is do we make a thing that people want?

[Interviewer]

Going hard must be much more palatable knowing in 13 weeks this is over.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, it is a process. I mean, most of the companies, the median company raises 2 to 3 million dollars. On the high end, people raise 10 to 20 million dollars after 13 weeks. So there are real stakes to the competition. And then just running people fast at a particular thing matters a lot. I've never seen anything speed founders up in such a profound way. I spent a couple years sort of in my wilderness years. I spent about, funny enough, it was seven years in the wilderness. It sounds ridiculous to call it the wilderness. I started my own VC fund that was very successful called Initialized. And during that time away from yc, I would try to do pre seed. I'd meet teams that I really loved and I'd give them half a million dollars and I'd say, go like, here's all the essays. Yeah. And I'd meet them every week, but they're in the co working space in the we work. And they're, you know, sitting there in the coffee room like hanging out the way they used to when they worked at Microsoft or something. And it's like it's not changed. You haven't changed anything yet. I imagine it's the same deal with just any creative profession. It's like, just get yourself out of the head. Out of your head.

[Sponsor/Advertisement Voice]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

Change your location, change the people you're with, change the way you think about things. And that's my only explanation. Like I would try to precede people and get them to speed up to startup speed, and it would never work. And then finally I'd get frustrated and say, okay, it's time for you to do yc. And if they were good enough to get into yc, then they would speed up and suddenly, magically, they would turn around and a year or two later, they'd be making $20 million a year in revenue or something.

[Interviewer]

How did it work out for you to get invited back to run yc?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, man, that was an intense experience because I was good to go. I had billions of dollars under management and I had built the firm myself. But the founder of yc, Paul Graham, asked me to come back.

[Interviewer]

Do you know why he picked you?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, here's a funny story. The story of Paul and Jessica is fascinating because pg, you would dig him so much. He's just connected to the Source Man. Everything about YC that he designed has that quality about it. It's thoughtful and not ostentatious and concise and spare. And I guess that's what brought me back. And then I think YC itself way exceeded his expectation for it. I think he's a billionaire many times over from starting YC. And it became sort of clear by what, 2013 or so that that was true.

[Interviewer]

How many years had he done it?

[Gary Tan]

Seven years at that point. So he himself went through a seven year journey starting and running yc. He had young children. And I didn't realize it at the time, but I was working at YC. I was sort of one of the projs. And then Sam Altman of OpenAI fame also came up through the first YC batch in 2005. Paul famously wrote an essay about him. He made a list of five tops founders of our generation. And he put Sam on that list when he had not created all the things that he's created since yet. So at the time, it was very controversial in our community because Sam, clearly

[Interviewer]

he could see it.

[Gary Tan]

PG's connected to the Source Man.

[Interviewer]

He called it.

[Gary Tan]

He called it. In 2013, PG brought me and Sam and my fellow managing partner, Harj Tagger out to dinner at Fuki Sushi. At the time, he was looking for successor, YC had become so big and so like an institution that it was too much work for him. And he never really intended on that being like the only thing he ever did for the rest of his life. Yeah, plus he had young kids. And so he went to each of us in turn and said, who do you think could run yc? Harj and I. I mean, Harj and I come from, I don't know, basically immigrant backgrounds. And for me, I've just been on. I'm a very Late bloomer. I feel like I'm still in the process of blooming as it is right now. Like, I'm still discover who the heck I am and how do I connect with that.

[Interviewer]

I hope that never ends because there's something beautiful about that.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah.

[Interviewer]

That's a great state to be in.

[Gary Tan]

That's true. I wish I did it earlier. That's the problem. Like, I would be more. Things would be better if they could always be better. But the point is, you know, Harge and I looked at PG and said, nobody, man. You got to do this forever. And in that dinner, Sam Altman said, I could do it. And he did it. He took it over, which was awesome. I remember.

[Interviewer]

And how long did he do that for?

[Gary Tan]

2013 through 2019. And then he basically. That was when OpenAI took a life of its own and Sam had to choose.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And honestly, like, as it happened, I have to give it to Sam. I have to. I have to say it. We were rivals, honestly. Sometimes he was kind of a jerk to me, but I realized that was just a part of the thing. That's part of the grand plan in the game, you know, he called it. I remember working for him in 2014 before I had decided to leave. And I said every meeting he'd come back and he'd be talking about AGI. Like, he met Elon, he met Larry and Sergey, and the world unfolded to him in a way, like when he became president of yc. I didn't understand it at the time. I'm like, hey, Sam, we're just trying to, like, fund some startups over here. Like, that's cool, but can we talk about this B2B SaaS thing? And then, I hate to say it, but I look at the 2014 version of myself and it's like, shoot, man. You were the Salieri and Sam was the Mozart. You know, he was there and he found he. He heard it and he saw it and he said, that's the future. And then we're going to go get it. I have to give it to him. He did it. And it was like one of the fundamental lessons for me in my life I think I'm trying to embrace. There was something that blocked me, closed me off to what was clearly going to happen, and I was there. So much of tech and so much of my life, day to day, is improv. It's like a yes. And you're sitting with founders, very creative people, and it's like, whoa. Instead of saying, no, it's not going to happen, I should be saying yes. And it's like, oh, yeah, how does it happen? And if it happens, what happens? And it's just funny to think about that 2014 snapshot. For me, sitting in the YC partner room with Sam and all the other partners who were working at YC at the time. Under Sam, the vibe was not, yes. And for Sam, the vibe was like, why is this guy doing this? And so that's actually one of the things that keeps me up. I run YC today and I want to run that room in a very different way. And I realize sometimes I'm the one who's bringing that, what the heck is going on? Energy. And like, people are thinking that about me. I think YC is very interesting.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like you might not want to use him as the example of how to do it.

[Gary Tan]

Maybe not. Yeah, I mean, I think he's learned a lot. I think he's become a different leader. I think that he. He's taking a lot of shit right now, and I really feel for him and his family. On the other hand, he doesn't deserve what he's getting right now.

[Interviewer]

Was it hard to go from a founder to doing something like running yc? Do you miss the day to day of your thing?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah. I get to have my cake and eat it too, at this point. Yeah. Because what.

[Interviewer]

I mean, because you're open sourcing things.

[Gary Tan]

I'm open sourcing it. And then honestly, it's turning into the next thing that will bring people in. Like, I found Paul Graham and YC because of Paul Graham's essays. And Paul Graham's essays are still about a third of all of the applications that come in.

[Interviewer]

When were the essays written?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, throughout his life, starting, I think, in the late 80s or early 90s.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about do things that don't scale.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah. I think a lot of the things that. The advice that you hear that we. I mean, some of it is like, we give away all the advice for free. That's been a long debated thing inside of YC. VCs don't do this. VCs like to say that this is an institution, closed ecosystem. Yeah, you got to get our money. And the only way we're going to teach you how to do anything is you got to come through us. And they're gatekeepers. And then I really want us to not be like that. And I think YC has never really been like that. You go to any other incubator or even any other VC that does this job and helps founders and look at their curriculum. It's all our stuff because we give it away on the YouTube channel. There's 2 million subscribers on there. And I think we want to just keep doing that. Honestly, we want to just like arm people with the knowledge to go and create this stuff. How cool is that right now?

[Interviewer]

That amazing.

[Gary Tan]

The tools are way more powerful now than ever, actually.

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[Interviewer]

How similar are the pictures that you get each semester? Are there a lot of the same idea?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, it's tons. And then the first thing we have to do is try to get them on something that's more unique to them.

[Interviewer]

And do you give feedback?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I mean the. One of the top things that we started doing the last two or three years once I came back is we have to meet people one on one. You know, a quarter of my team right now is in India and they're in New Delhi. These people are cracked, man. They're so smart. They're like 22 year olds. PhD candidates. And then the most interesting thing, my partner Ankit Gupta just put in Slack that I'm just like, that's fascinating. It's like they're just working on 2008 Web 2.0 ideas right now. They're like social networks and tutoring marketplaces. Which is very funny because in the history of yc, I feel like that's one of the most common ideas. I think the founder of Dropbox, famously, in what year was it? 2006, he was at MIT and he was working on a tutoring business and he met Paul and Jessica. And Paul and Jessica said, you're the right person to do a startup, but you should not work on tutoring, man. And then he ended up coming up with Dropbox. So it's very funny how same as it ever was. Like, people are still doing social networks and photo sharing apps and tutoring businesses, but they shouldn't. They need to work on things that are truly unique to them.

[Interviewer]

Do you get any really fringe ideas that are unlike everything else?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah, all the time. The craziest one, I really. That's doing well and might actually pull it off. There's a space fusion company.

[Interviewer]

What does that mean?

[Gary Tan]

Literally, there are these nuclear scientists at the national laboratories. They're in their late 30s, early 40s, but they'd been working on fusion at the national labs for years. And they came back with these simulations from their research. Fusion on the planet is very, very expensive due to gravity. But they have a simulation and a design that shows if you're in space, you can do real fusion at a scale that is actually viable. And they're basically. They have to see about it. It's kind of like falling in love. You're like, oh man, should I change my flight or, you know, it's like, this is off my plan, man. Like, this is not what I was trying to do, but like, I gotta see about a girl. Right? That's what it feels like for some of these founders.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that sounds great.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. So they're off. They raised, you know, I think four or five million dollars. And these are not normal beaten path, worked at Google, went to Stanford kind of people. They are actually the smartest possible scientists to do it. And in most cases in the world, like 99 out of 100 universes, those guys don't get to raise $5 million. But because YC exists, those guys are up and running. And if they succeed, we will have fusion in space, which is wild. And I don't know if it'll happen. Right. They don't even know if, if the simulations can actually happen in real life. But we have to see about it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, that's.

[Gary Tan]

We got to find out.

[Interviewer]

Are the people who get picked more likely to be the ones who come up with the idea that you've not heard before?

[Gary Tan]

The idea is a function of the people in those 10 minutes. If we don't learn anything, then it's probably a no. Really, really smart people. The people you really want, they're really high agency. And then they're also just so perceptive, I guess they're connected to the source. That's probably the hardest thing it's like you know it when you see it. Like you meet someone, it's like that person is connected to something beyond.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

They can feel it.

[Interviewer]

It's even beyond thought. It's some other thing.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. So when you meet people like that, I mean, when I met Brian Armstrong, I was like, oh, my God, there's something going on with that guy.

[Interviewer]

Typically, would you say, is it more about the person in the idea?

[Gary Tan]

I think it's more about the person. Yeah. What are they about? You have to be about something. You have to have a thing in you. And I realized, like, actually I can spot that in other people. You just spend time with people, and it's like, man, you got some sort of nuclear reactor in there. Just don't lose containment.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Let's figure out how to use it for good.

[Gary Tan]

That's right.

[Interviewer]

So if a founder gets accepted, what happens next?

[Gary Tan]

They move to San Francisco. I feel like San Francisco itself is a trip. It's so much more open. The number one thing that people describe when they come from any other place in the world and they come to San Francisco is that they're not weird anymore. If you came to do yc, they

[Interviewer]

don't feel like outsiders.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, they're insiders. Like, suddenly you're surrounded by people who believe that they can actually poke the universe and have it pop out someplace else. And there's very few places in the world where that really happens. Everywhere else, it's like Tall Poppy Syndrome. Don't try to do this. Who are you to even believe that you could do this?

[Interviewer]

What do you think makes Silicon Valley Silicon Valley?

[Gary Tan]

It's earnest nerds just making a thing that people want. And then how did the nerds end

[Interviewer]

up there in the first place?

[Gary Tan]

I guess you could argue there was, like, basically all the semiconductor people. Basically. It was post World War II. A lot of research and development happened. Hewlett Packard started out of Stanford Labs. There's just sort of this long percolating thing where you had very. The smartest people in the world collect in a particular place to do a particular thing.

[Interviewer]

Is there a government aspect of it or no?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, definitely. I mean, the Internet was all defense research. The Internet exists because DARPA gave a grant to experiment with communication systems that are more resilient than telephone if there's nuclear war. So if you needed that, then you needed something like tcpip, which is one of the basic protocols that runs the Internet today. And so that's why you had these UNIX mainframes at every university. And then they would make these links that were not, you know, normal, pick up the phone and call them or fax machine and things like that. It was literally what would you have to design? You'd have to design email. And so there is a deep, long history of defense and primary research dollars going into fun technology that then gets commercialized and then it becomes the thing that everyone uses.

[Interviewer]

If there was going to be a second Silicon Valley somewhere else in the world, where do you think that would be?

[Gary Tan]

I think New York City. Right now. The reason why we tell everyone to be in San Francisco is the rate of and likelihood of someone creating a company worth a billion dollars or more is 2.5x higher if they move to the San Francisco Bay area, and then it's about 2x higher if they're in New York City.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about the personality of the founders. Is there anything that you see that runs through many of them?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, the two traits that I really love to see. One is earnestness, which is very unusual as a trait. This definitely comes from Jessica Livingston in particular. There's this idea that the best founders are sort of hucksters. And I would say 90% of the people that really, really make it are not that they're actually very earnest about what they're trying to do. And this is in contrast to, like, cynical or like a snake oil salesman. We're always sort of fighting this, this war where there are always founders who sort of take it too far. There are always founders who do things that they shouldn't do. I guess the funniest thing to say would be the really, really good ones know how far to take it and not farther. And we just fund so many founders, period, that the ones that don't make it, a lot of times they don't make it because they went too far. And I'm still trying to figure out what to do about that, actually, because if you come down too hard, you're going to lose all the weirdos. But on the other hand, like, clearly you need to have some sort of consequence. And so we're trying to figure it out. YC is always growing, like, we seem to be growing like 10 or 20% too far. I mean, just straight up doing things that are legal or unethical. The hard part here is, like, the tournaments. Every market is so crowded, but I think they're all open again. So there's this sort of interesting time in startups where going back to the waves, you have anytime there's a new wave. We have this idea that it's a blue ocean. You could just do anything, literally anything, and it'd be awesome. Like if you did a social network in 2004 or 2005 and you were good, you could have killed Facebook. Any of those things could have happened. And then as time goes on, usually like five or 10 years in, the companies raise hundreds to billions of dollars, the revenue goes up. It goes from blue ocean to red ocean. Basically it's a blue ocean when nobody knows which end is up and there's no competition. And then anything that could be really, really big ends up becoming a red ocean. And that became more and more true over the last 15 years. And then AI has basically opened it up and everything's blue again.

[Interviewer]

It seems like it might be for a long time.

[Gary Tan]

No, we'll see. I mean, hard to say, even beyond next year. I think a lot of it depends on how much smarter the models get and at what rate. I don't like to be someone who wants technology to slow down, but right now, at the current rate, I feel good. 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, 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. So 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 is, 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, they're not going to, going to come willingly.

[Interviewer]

People don't know they want the wheel if they don't have the wheel.

[Gary Tan]

Exactly.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

So that's where it's like, oh, this is good news actually. 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.

[Interviewer]

Would you say most of the founders are building something personal or building something for a general problem?

[Gary Tan]

It always starts personal. That's sort of the. Do things that don't scale, right? Yeah, 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. 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 can 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, you know, like if you are just in there thinking about things, if you do good reps, you're going to be in the right place at the rate.

[Interviewer]

It's just a matter of time.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

What happens at the end of the 13 weeks?

[Gary Tan]

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 $5 million on the high end, like $20 million 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 close to 2.2 million per batch.

[Interviewer]

How important is the ability to pitch?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, it's super important. And 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. And what no one has figured out yet is that like, 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 circle back 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.

[Interviewer]

Explain what granola is.

[Gary Tan]

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 that you can take that and you can take that plus all the other ones you did, and you can diarize it. Meaning, like, you have an LLM, go line by line and say instead of the full text, it's like for every 10 or 20 minutes, it's like, this is what they talked about and this is what was interesting. And then you can take that and have another thing, another LLM, come and summarize all of it and then distill it into principles and like, the things that you would put in a book. The intelligence is already there and it's able to do that.

[Interviewer]

Do you think there's an issue with the ability to summarize where. Think of the difference between reading great piece of literature or the Cliff Notes. They're two different things.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, there's definitely a difference. Yes.

[Interviewer]

Do we lose something in the summarization economy that we now live in?

[Gary Tan]

I think the experience that we're hoping for with YC partners is actually the feeling that you should get is that, like, I don't get Groundhog Day anymore. And that's starting to be what we see at yc. So before, I had to be in every single conversation per se, and, like, teach them the basics. 1, 2, 3, 4. Now, instead, it's better because if I have our book Face agent, we have, like, our own AI agent that helps. Is starting to teach people these more basic things. Then when I see them, I actually know where someone is. And then we're talking about stuff that's quote unquote, out of distribution. We're always thinking AI in terms of like what's already in the model and what's already on the Internet versus what is new. That has never been before. And then all the alpha and all the things that are interesting, the things that make you alive, the things that connect you to the source, it's not in like playing the hits. I can play the hits all day. And like last year, that's what my day to day was like. That's what every partner was like. Every single day was like, oh, yeah, here's the two sentence pitch. This is what the two pitches.

[Interviewer]

Now that stuff's all covered, we can

[Gary Tan]

just spend all our time on like the new new and like, and the

[Interviewer]

specifics for each case.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, so that's really important. And so that's like sort of the thing that people should be really excited about. When we talk about how do we let society do more interesting things, I think we can embody it. It's like in your body, do you feel more excited to come to work and why? And for me, that answer is like, when I get to talk to new people about new things instead of talking about the same people to the same things. Right. And so that's where AI is super good news for people who are super creative and highly agentic. Like, if you have agency, you can design your day to be exactly like that. And then the second thing that I think is really important that we learned at YC is you have to write the prompts. So we almost did this to ourselves where we use AI to pick people and we have for many, many years. But the old AI and then the old AI was not smart. We call it feature based. It was literally just matrix math. It was before the transformer. It was before all of the crypt crazy stuff that happened. And that stuff was so dumb that it required like an incredible amount of data labeling. And then what we found was the 15 partners started becoming data labelers under the API. There's this very crazy idea that kind of Venkatesh Rao talks about. He's this Internet thinker that talked about all of the world is being recreated into these like uber or DoorDash sort of API lines. With AI, the danger is like, everyone in the organization is either above the API line or below it. You want to be above it. And then the ideal to me is as many people in the org as possible are above the API line. And what that concretely means is actually from my partner Pete Kuhman, who figured out actually we need to allow every person to own their own and change their own prompt. So when you use Google, for instance, and they have their AI product in your Gmail, it's kind of dumb and doesn't really do what you want. Well, that's because some Google engineer and PM who didn't live your life, who doesn't know anything about you and the things you care about, and they don't let you change it. Right. And so that's like a basic product problem. Like when you use this is the problem with closed source, this is a problem with corporate AI is that like all of it is hidden away. And this stuff is so powerful. This is why openclaw is blowing my mind. And it's so powerful. It's so obviously the future.

[Interviewer]

If you build something great in open source, isn't it possible over time that it grows into a business?

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah. YC has funded some of the biggest open source wins. Supabase, for instance. I use it all the time. And that started as an open source project. And then usually you make money on hosting. And they're going to be one of the biggest. I think someday they might be bigger than AWS personally. Wow.

[Interviewer]

They're in the same business as aws?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, they help people store their data.

[Interviewer]

Cool.

[Gary Tan]

And so now they're about to go hyperbolic because suddenly everyone and their mama is going to have their own personal G brain or they're going to have their own personal agents and that agent has to store its data someplace and it's probably going to be Supabase. And that started as an open source project that did not necessarily have any intention of being commercial. And then it just turned out to be this huge thing. And it doesn't have to be like that. A lot of people like in open source are like Linus Torvalds from Linux. And that's also awesome. Like that guy walks on water. And you know, I think every person on the planet owes Linus Torvalds like an incredible thank you for what he created.

[Interviewer]

How did social media change the world?

[Gary Tan]

I think the black pill on social media is that it's somehow like destroying democracy or changing the way in a bad way, like how people are thinking. But I don't believe that. I really think that people believe all the things that you see on social media before. It's just that you would never see it before. The result though is that you have to have a lot more cognitive armor around yourself and what you allow in. And I'm trying to teach that to my 6 and 10 year old right now.

[Interviewer]

Is it working?

[Gary Tan]

I don't know. I hope so. They're really addicted to YouTube. I feel terrible that that's true. I'm sure a lot of parents are struggling with that.

[Interviewer]

There's so much great stuff on YouTube though. I mean, you can learn anything on YouTube.

[Gary Tan]

And so that's what I'm trying to teach them around social media. And I think they're starting to get it. My 10 year old, my 6 year old does not get it yet. My 10 year old I think is starting to get it that like, look, everyone in the world has to solve the money problem for themselves and sometimes they have to go and make this YouTube content and sometimes they are doing it in a way that informs you and helps you and teaches you something and it's fun and interesting and so those things are cool. Watch those shows. But then there are all these other people who they're trying to solve their money problem but like in a way that hurts you or is lying to you or is just telling you what you want to hear, but is not actually something that's going to help you. And the defining thing about social media is that you have to be able to know the difference between those two things. And if I could snap my fingers and teach the children of the entire world one thing, it'd probably be that how do you tell the difference between something that is genuinely good for you and something that isn't?

[Interviewer]

I wonder if you could have your AI agent organize that, organize YouTube accordingly.

[Gary Tan]

I will add that to my list of.

[Interviewer]

Right. If you do do that, please send it to me because I'd like to watch that as well.

[Gary Tan]

It's actually been a startup that we've been trying to fund it, Y Combinator too. So we'll fund it. Yeah. Social media is so powerful and it's scary. Again, it's like the ultimate cheese mover.

[Interviewer]

How did it impact your life?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, now I have like 750,000 followers on X and it feels like this giant swinging hammer and then once in while it's really, really terrible. But most of the time it's quite awesome. I feel really thankful that the startup world has let me basically shill all the things that I really care about and believe in. And I think that's unusual actually. But I guess it's sort of a covenant. Like anything that I shill is not just shill for shill stake. It's actually I'm trying to hold myself to that standard that I'm trying to teach my kids to which is like, okay, everything I post.

[Interviewer]

You want to turn people onto stuff that you like.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Improves your life.

[Gary Tan]

If it improves my life, I want them to have it.

[Interviewer]

How has AI already changed the world?

[Gary Tan]

I think it's 1% of the way into changing the world right now. I mean, you have a billion people using it, so that's pretty wild. On the other hand, maybe 1% of those people have actually really touched the new type of AI that I was talking about in November of last year, mainly because it's so expensive. But the good news is it's going to get cheaper spending time with AI researchers. The thing that really jumps out at me is to what degree the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed yet. William Gibson said that from a neuromancer. That's where we're living in right now. The models that cost $200 a month right now are smarter than 99% of human beings. And I think less than 1% of that billion people have really touched it or experienced it. I think that that's something we probably need to work on. I realize now the 16 or 14 year old version of me needs to have access to that model today. The sort of vibe coding and all the open source that I've been doing, it actually does cost a lot, I think. There was a tweet from both, both Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk about this. Like the people who are way out on the edge, like my friends and, you know, Peter steinberger, creator of OpenClaw, the reason why he was able to do that was he was so successful in his career that he could just spend a million dollars a year on tokens and not feel it and it'd be okay. But like, how many people in the world could really do that? Like really not very many people.

[Interviewer]

Is there not an open source way to do it now? That would be cheaper.

[Gary Tan]

It's almost there. But honestly, it's still expensive. It's still expensive, you know, so we're

[Interviewer]

talking about years away or months away.

[Gary Tan]

I think it's years away still, like what you can do today, spending a million dollars a year on tokens. At that point, you're talking about doing the work of like a hundred people. So this would normally cost you like a million dollars is a multiplier to like hundreds of millions of dollars in software value, right? Or billions even. And that's happening for, I don't know, a thousand people on the planet right now. And then the good news from the AI researchers is that it Turns out, like these much smaller, cheaper models, they can be a lot smarter. And I think that's where open source comes into play. That's how that's going to happen. Yeah, there's sort of this difficult interplay right now where a lot of lawyers in America want to say we should ban Chinese models. And then the awkward thing about that is that will actually play exactly into this other. Like there's only one player in the entire world that has access to the best models in the world, and that would be quite disastrous.

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[Interviewer]

For some of the YC success stories, how far out did some of the ideas sound when pitched?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, Bitcoin, I think coinbase clearly was. I mean, doordash seemed kind of crazy. Airbnb was probably the most famous one. Brian Chesky's on my board now. When he came to do his YC interview, Paul Graham said, like, what? People are going to stay in each other's homes? Who does this? Who would do this? Yeah, and we don't think about that so much anymore. We just say, oh, that's an Airbnb. My favorite story about Brian Chesky is when they started it, it wasn't called Airbnb. It was called Airbed and Breakfast. And it was literally an airbed and they had to provide breakfast. And at some point when it was starting to take off, someone came in and said, well, I don't have an air bed, but could I do a real bed. And he said, well, we are airbed and breakfast. What if you buy an airbed and put it on top of the bed? So funny. And then at some point I was like, oh, no, no, no. Yeah, it's just, yeah, go for it. Just do it. And, you know, that turned out to be the much bigger market.

[Interviewer]

Are you ever surprised by what the YC founders can accomplish?

[Gary Tan]

All the time. It's wild. I mean, it just happens all the time.

[Interviewer]

It must be a great feeling.

[Gary Tan]

I mean, there's no. No feeling like it. To sit down with someone and they're like, I have this vision. I have a belief in how the world should work. And then you look down and it happens.

[Interviewer]

Did you change anything when you took over?

[Gary Tan]

The biggest change was that I turned it back into not a vc, but actually focused on the initial early startup founder program. So when I came in, YC had sort of gone from as if Google became Alphabet. When you do a Googled Alphabet moment, it's like, oh, yeah, we're doing like eight different things and we have eight different CEOs all working on different things. And you had something that was very successful. That was the engine of it. And I just had to come back and say, we're actually going to focus on the one thing that made YC great and that's going to be the

[Interviewer]

special and that no one else is doing.

[Gary Tan]

Really. There are other VCs, there are people who can do your Series A or B and you just got to focus. Focus is saying no. And that was hard.

[Interviewer]

How do you see it evolving over time?

[Gary Tan]

Right now I'm just trying to see through the next year or two. I think of that meme on the Internet where everyone in the world is dancing and then there's this one lonely person in the corner and they're alone. And it's like AI is changing everything. And then everyone's dancing. Everyone's just doing their thing. Like, they don't know. I think it's called literally the they don't know meme. Right now we're just trying to figure out, how do we change ourselves. We always built software to make YC awesome that when Pulgram first started taking applications, he famously made his own software. He would go on the website and he made his own web app that would allow them to review thousands of applications. And now we're sort of in that next moment going back to this AI tutor that will teach you how to vibe code. What if it also helped us figure out and identify the people who should get get million dollar token grants.

[Interviewer]

That'd be great.

[Gary Tan]

I mean, that's what we're asking all the time. Basically we're here to try to help the people who are like us from when we were 18 to 30 or whatever, just earlier in our careers. How do we actually find those people and help them? And what would that look like today? And that's currently the plan. It's like, okay, well everything just changed. And everyone who could be a founder, well, they don't need to raise like a billion dollars anymore to build their dream. Like there are companies right now that have 10 or 20 people making hundreds of millions of dollars a year and soon to be billions. And that looks radically different than some of the wins that I talked to you about. Right. They don't to a T. Like if you look at the list of a hundred unicorn companies that YC has funded since 2005, there's something about getting to scale and having customers that forces you to have thousands and thousands of employees.

[Interviewer]

Until now.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. And then the thing is, some of those are really, really inefficient. Going back to like the Siri or even meta glasses analogy, you look at those organizations and they have like tens of thousands of people. It's like, why? And those people are really smart. Are they actually applying their brains and horsepower to like things that are real? Or are they going to have like really nice sashimi at lunch and it's sort of adult daycare? And that's not bad. I mean, honestly, these are amazing jobs. I have a lot of friends who are in those orgs and those are incredible jobs. But I also look at what they could be doing and what society like desperately needs human beings to do, which is to be even more in service to one another. How does that happen? How do we make that happen? And my fear is that society, built as it is, locks people away into default paths. Like just become a management consultant, go get your mba. This is safe. You'll get your pension, you'll have your nice vacations, drive your BMW. There's nothing wrong with that. And that's a great life. And I want more people to have that. On the other hand, there's so much more. God gave you this brain and God gave you these senses and we can do so much. And how do we do more? Like how do we serve each other more? Surely technology is not a bad thing in that it is a way to solve more problems for one another. And so I am like super pro technology and super pro markets because that's how I sort of score the circle.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about your relationship to machines.

[Gary Tan]

I love machines. I guess my ideology is that it does seem like humans came out of the bush. The reason why we get to sit here and sit in a beautiful place and talk about ideas instead of subsistence farming someplace is actually technology. It's fire, it's the wheel, and it's the personal computer. And then the Internet. This is sort of the unbroken chain. And it's not just machines. Would you call a book a machine? It's a tool.

[Interviewer]

It's a technology.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, it's a technology. There was this very influential documentary I saw on PBS called the Machine that Changed the World. It's like 1995, WGBH, Boston documentary about the personal computer. And in it, it talks about. That's what the computer is. It's an infinite book. But prehistory is before we can write stuff down. And it's lost. It's lost to the sands of time. Like, we have no understanding of how people lived and what people did and what they cared about until we invented papyrus and writing and the book. And then it accelerated with movable type, accelerated with Gutenberg. And so literacy went from like a tiny priesthood to suddenly everyone could do it. And that's the thing that recurs every single moment. That's what the personal computer was. And then that's what the iPhone and the mobile revolution. We didn't get to talk about that yet. It's like social media happened. Yeah, but. And you know what's funny is Facebook almost died because it almost missed mobile. Instagram happened, and Facebook had to buy Instagram because Instagram would have killed Facebook instead of Zuckerberg.

[Interviewer]

Facebook was a desktop application originally.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. It looked like bank software, you know.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And Kevin Systrom could have been Zuckerberg, but he sold too early, which is kind of crazy. That's sort of the history repeating itself. The Internet computer, it's the paperback computer. Suddenly the Internet connected computer, suddenly the iPhone, and then now AI, like the intelligent computer, it's accelerating. It's happening faster and faster. And I think that that's awesome. Like, I guess my personal story is that technology gave me everything that I have, and now I want everyone to have that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And for me, it's like you had to join a priesthood, Right. You had to study algebra, you had to get straight A's, you had to get into Stanford. I mean, I did anyway. Like, that was like my light at the end of the tunnel. But, like, my kids, like, I want them to do that. But I want them not because I want them to go into the top college. It's because I want them to love the knowledge itself. Right. And like, where we're going, I don't know if we're gonna need college per se. That was the old post industrial, like sort of 20th century version of everything. Like, here's your lane and like go down this path and like, don't ask questions.

[Interviewer]

It's like those lanes have broken down.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. But we have to come up with a new path.

[Interviewer]

Would you say you're an optimist in general?

[Gary Tan]

I think I have to be, yeah. I'm a techno optimist. I definitely believe that technology can and should serve other people.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And then where it doesn't, it's really not a technology problem. It's probably a broken markets problem. Literally. Why can't I have good Siri? It's because Apple won't allow a market to exist there. And we spend a lot of time in D.C. and in Sacramento right now trying to fight for that. Like, we need people to be able to start new things. And then any of the seams that are broken are obvious. It's like Siri is a perfect example. It's like the smartest AI has been around since November of last year. And Siri could be that smart. But is it that smart? It is not. And why? There's no market. Nobody created open access, and so we're using the most beautiful devices in the world and they're horribly crippled and they're broken in a way that it should not be broken.

[Interviewer]

Tell me about big tech versus small tech.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, little tech. I think basically Siri in a nutshell is exactly that. We funded a company called Beeper. My former YC partner Eric Niedzikovsky started that. It had a very simple vision that you should be able to have a single messaging service that is a superset of all of them. So iMessage and WhatsApp and Signal, like, great idea. Why do we have like five or six different apps? Like we should have one app. But he ran headlong into, there's no market for it. Apple says no and Meta says no. And why? For the good of the company, not for the good of the people.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like a good open source thing to make.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, totally. The thing is like, you can't even make it in open source because even if it were open source, if you're using Apple, you have to jailbreak it. Right. And is that legal? I think the DMCA actually has jailbreak rules that do Say that you're allowed to do it if it's on your own device, but they make it intentionally hard. So as a result, the best technology that we could have, we do not have. For what reason? For profits by big tech. And I think at the margins right now it doesn't matter. But like when you're talking about AGI and asi, like superintelligence is here, I think it starts to matter a lot. There's a really big debate happening in startups right now that I think is very interesting and I hope we have an answer for it. And that is the OpenAI's and the Anthropics and the Googles and Deepminds of the world. They have the world's smartest frontier AI. And then the big debate is, are they going to be open? Ongoing. As these models get smarter and smarter, it is possible for the access to the models to close. And then once that happens, what does it mean? Does it mean that I have to choose? I'm an anthropic person. Do we end up having these vertical walled gardens? I mean that's sort of what we have now. It'll just be a lot worse. Like today you have a green bubble, blue bubble. But why do we have that? It's just so that Apple has more profits. Again. It's sort of like the builder ethos versus the pointy headed manager finance bro ethos. It's like hey, these are two different things and like we're pro builder and if the builder wins it means the best technology gets in the hands of people faster and it also means little tech can thrive.

[Interviewer]

How different are the AI models today?

[Gary Tan]

They have very different personalities.

[Interviewer]

Would you use one for a particular job and a different one for a different job?

[Gary Tan]

Definitely, yeah. Claude Opus 4.6 is ADHD CEO. So he's really fun, like million miles per second ideas, really gets you really vibes with you. And then he actually talks out both sides of his mouth sometimes and he hallucinates and then can't keep track of really detailed things sometimes, but that's because his mind is going a mile a minute. And then Codex from OpenAI is sort of like the almost non verbal 200 IQ savant and so you're not going to get what it's trying to say. It doesn't really understand you either. But it's a machine intelligence that is raw smarts. And so one of the things that I use is I mainly talk to Claude and I use Claude code. But then in my Gstack skill I can go Codex. And then it sends it off to Codex, my 200 IQ friend. And when I have a problem or it gets stumped, or Claude just can't figure it out, it calls in its 200 IQ autistic buddy. And so, yeah, in a nutshell, Claude is ADHD and Codex is autism. And every one of these models has a very different personality. Deep Seq, I've discovered, is the conspiracy theorist. It's like you give it something, it's like, hey, did you notice this thing? It's like, fascinating.

[Interviewer]

That sounds really fun.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, it's really fun. I mean, everyone has a very different personality and that's a good thing. Like, I think having multiple models, it's sort of like iron sharpens iron.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

So I want as much diversity there as possible.

[Interviewer]

And GROK started much later than the others. Is it able to catch up?

[Gary Tan]

I hope so. I mean, I want more competition, but. But a lot of the people who built it have left. So I want it to win. I want as many options as possible. And Elon has all the GPUs, and so the interesting thing is, can he retain the people? And the thing is, there's always more smart people out there who could come and make that work. So, I mean, I'm rooting for them. The surprising thing is the APIs, they don't push the APIs very much. I think they're just trying to speedrun their way to ASI directly. I guess you'll see that also with the robots, like, they're sort of vertically integrated and probably as advanced as anyone, but, you know, we haven't seen the usage yet. So, I mean, I guess that's the grand experiment. Like, never bet against elon. And the SpaceX IPO is going to be pretty fantastic and epic for all of tech.

[Interviewer]

Should every company go public?

[Gary Tan]

I feel like that's the personal question of, for the founders and the shareholders. I guess what I'm seeing though is if you have built something valuable, there's a lot of secondary, like, people will just come and buy it. And the difference between public and private is pretty subtle. If anything, I think that normal people should be able to buy private shares. That would probably open things up quite a bit.

[Interviewer]

Is that possible?

[Gary Tan]

It's kind of hard. You have to go to things like Forge Global or Angellist or all these different, like, ways to buy private stock. It's kind of hairy.

[Interviewer]

Sounds like a good idea, though.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, a lot of people are doing it and then more people probably should get access. I mean, our family recently bought a Little bit of anthropic on secondary. And then the joke among very smart people is great, if you bought a little bit of secondary and anthropic, it means you get to get upgraded to the level two breadline with the other anthropic directors. You know, going from level three to level two is a big deal in the future.

[Interviewer]

AGI world, does big tech do everything they can to prevent little tech from existing?

[Gary Tan]

I don't think it's personal. I think capitalism means that you're supposed to go out and fight really hard. But at the same time, I'm not free market maximalist in that. Like I'm not a libertarian. Like I think that there are roles and responsibilities for government to play when there aren't open markets and open access and just to give people choice. Right. Like, you know, it's totally great that anthropic, for instance, has the best model right now. And I love it. And I'm a big fan and a couple of the YC alums are actually co founders of Anthropic. But at the same time it's like I kind of wish that they would be less than anti competitive. For instance, like if open code, which is an open source code harness, like I love Claude code, but also I want open code to be successful and to be able to be used. I think those are big questions. Right. When you talk to a lot of the anthropic folks, like a lot of them are ex Google. You know, Google famously stopped being sort of don't be evil. You know, at some point they started saying like, hey, we're kind of a business and we kind of need to make money, which is fine. Like I don't begrudge that either. But that's where like I do think that there's a role for government to play, a guard dog or watchdog. I mean if you just let companies do whatever they're gonna do, like they're not immoral, but they're also not moral, they're amoral. And then the will of the people comes through the government. And that's why I'm like, people should vote and we need a healthy media, we need healthy journalism.

[Interviewer]

Just not monopolistic.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, yeah. I mean we should be anti monopoly. Like I think monopolies are bad. What is zero based accounting in the context of yc? Yc? I guess my first day coming back as CEO, the board met and it was Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston and Brian Chesky and Carolyn Levy. That's sort of the board of YC and me. And the number one directive I got was like, what does YC 3.0 look like? YC 1.0 was under PG. YC 2.0 was in SAM era. And then YC 3.0. Let's do zero based accounting. Let's figure out if we were everything that we do, would we choose to do it again today from zero? And so that's what we did. And I think every organization probably needs, especially at sort of a leadership change like that. It's worth doing if we're going to change. We need to change as much as we can right now, not just rest

[Interviewer]

on the laurels of what happened in the past. Yeah, like a restart.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, yeah. How do you refound the company?

[Interviewer]

That sounds great.

[Gary Tan]

It was fun. I mean, it's been fun.

[Interviewer]

It sounds like a fun mission for you.

[Gary Tan]

It was insane to see because, I mean, this thing changed my life. And then now we're rocking and rolling like we're ready to meet this AI thing head on.

[Interviewer]

How important is it to know the history of the category that you're going into when you're starting a new company?

[Gary Tan]

If I go by the Airbnb example, maybe not so important, but as you're in it, you have to learn everything about it. In fact, there's an essay about it called Schlep Blindness. If the founders of Stripe knew how much work and how terrible it would be, they wouldn't have started. So. And that's probably true for a lot of creative endeavor, like almost anyone. If they knew that they had to go through the shit and you spent too much time thinking about the shit, you probably just choose to do something else. And honestly, like, starting a company isn't for everyone. Maybe that's probably the biggest myth to dispel that. Should everyone start a company honestly? Like, that's like asking, like, should everyone become a musician? Should everyone become X, Y or Z? And the answer is no. There's no one size fits all profession for someone. Yeah. And then some of them are so hard, like founder, that you better know that that's the only thing you could do. Otherwise you'll go crazy because on every other day you're going to say, you know what, this is too hard, and I'm out.

[Interviewer]

How much has vibe coding changed things?

[Gary Tan]

I think we're just starting to see it. The wildest thing right now, though, is to what degree people have not changed their view. Like, I'm taking a lot of attacks from really smart people, like really smart systems engineers who are really well respected. And then what's funny about it is some of them attack me by name and then I go and look at their open source projects and I don't see any movement. They're progressing at the same pace that they were progressing a year ago, two years ago, five years ago.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And after I get some launches done, I think I'm going to go into those open source projects and I'm just going to drop some PRs on them in programmer term. It's like I'm just gonna give them a free gift of like tens of thousands of lines of fixes to their software. And I think I should actually just give them a gift and then see if they understand and accept it. And if they don't, that's okay. The engineers who hate vibe coding and AI the most are the people who would benefit the most from embracing it.

[Interviewer]

Has anything come through YC that is hardware based as opposed to software based?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, a ton, yeah. I mean Stokespace for instance, is, is probably going to be alongside SpaceX with one of the reusable rocket technologies soon. Astranas is actually a competitor to SpaceX, which is fun. They're providing Internet access. I think many Southwest flights now have Internet from Astronis. They're a competitor to starlink. Starlink, yeah. So yeah, what's funny about it is I both respect the heck out of Elon Musk. He came to speak at startup school last year and that was awesome. I also think that we need a hundred of those guys or gals. I mean, I think that we need hundreds of people who get back in the saddle and then try to solve the biggest, hairiest problems for humanity. And we need a lot more of it. And so if I look back on this age of yc, that's probably the big hairy, audacious goal for us. How do we not just create new software businesses that solve the money problem for people? How do we actually literally create new global companies that make cool stuff that make the coolest things in the world? Right. Some of it is like actually about giving really great engineers a lane to do their best work. I think a lot of people don't want to work on bank software. A lot of people don't want to help people click on ads. A lot of people don't want to be lawyers. A lot of people want to do something that's really, really meaningful. And then I think our organization needs to figure out how do we help them do that.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, there is something different about a physical object that you can circle and that you can touch with your Hands. That's just different than a great app.

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah, and we're coming into that. The interesting thing is a lot of the reason why it's hard to do that is actually not enough AI and not enough software. So it's sort of fractal. I mean, Palmer Luckey from Anduril talks

[Interviewer]

about this and I imagine 3D printing is going to help as well.

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah, definitely. So I think we want to accelerate all of the things. Yeah, I mean the next thing is pretty clear. It's going to be robotics and then we need to build stuff again. You know, we have a company called Knox Metals that is helping American companies get access to metal instead of like having to pick up the phone, for instance.

[Interviewer]

What does get access to metal mean? I don't know what that means.

[Gary Tan]

Oh, literally, like get. If you needed a giant roll of aluminum, how are you going to get it today? You still have to pick up the phone and then you get gouged and things like that. We need a whole American supply chain

[Interviewer]

ecosystem for supply chain.

[Gary Tan]

Oh yeah, that's cool. Yeah, it's interesting because we're playing a role in that. This is where government and regulation actually has a big role to play. Knox Metals is a marketplace for giant rolls of aluminum or whatever kind of metal you want to buy. But there's a cabal, there is like a small set, an oligopoly of brokers for that type of stuff. And they started freezing Nox metals out. And then this is where like social media is interesting. This isn't a bad thing. This is speaking truth to power. That founder went to Twitter, started posting about it and then through our connections, Luther Lowe is our head of policy. We have a full time person in D.C. and he knows Gail Slater who's sort of the part of the antitrust watchdogs of dc and all she had to do was take that post and post an emoji and then you know what, all of the anti competitive monopoly stuff went away for Knox Metals literally overnight. So it's funny, people in tech are afraid of government, people are worried about its impact. But it's like government is something that can be used for good fundamentally, as

[Interviewer]

opposed to it would be credible if it was the case.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, it's about access, right? Like if you can access them and help them and be in the conversation. That's what we're learning. Growing up, my dad was always like, man, you gotta stay away from politics. But that's what that was. The vibe from like Asia, you know, from the 20th century. Like, that was what my parents were. My grandfather, for instance, he ran silk factories in Yunnan in southern part of China. And then they were seized by. And the family had to flee. Eight brothers and sisters had to flee to Burma. And my grandfather rebuilt that business in Burma, and then it was seized again by the military hunter, and my grandfather died in Burma. But all eight brothers and sisters made it to Canada and the US as immigrants. And so there's a long history of, like, America is the place where people who want to create and build come here. Like, immigration is a part of this story and it's a beautiful one. And we got to preserve that. And we also have to preserve the ability for people to create new businesses in America. And for that, we actually also have to preserve the idea that starting a business is not bad or evil, but noble.

[Interviewer]

If you were 16 years old today, would you still go to Stanford for computer science or would you vibe code your first company?

[Gary Tan]

Oh, man, I'd probably try to go to Stanford at least for a couple years. And honestly, I don't know, I think I might want to just do Stanford, man. I think that's actually the hard question.

[Interviewer]

It was a great experience.

[Gary Tan]

It was a great experience. And When I was 18, my childhood was so difficult that I felt like I was 14 in college. My whole 20s were sort of this delayed adolescence and I had to figure out who I was. Yeah, it's funny, at YC, there's this vibe that YC only wants to fund the like 18 year old or 20 year old sort of Patrick Collison types. I just don't think that's true. That's not true for me anyway. Like, I started my company at 27. I just wasn't ready. I was a late bloomer. I. And I just wasn't fully developed. My YC startup was called Posturous and it actually became a top 200 website. You send an email to our email address and we would make a blog for you. And it was the fastest, easiest way to get a photo off of your iPhone, which sounds crazy now, but basically.

[Interviewer]

But you couldn't do it back then.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, you couldn't do it back. Yeah. And what that space became was Instagram. So everyone uses Instagram now. So in a way, like in technology, there's a tournament happening all the time and the winner, it's sort of like Glengarry Glen Ross. First place is you win. Second place is a box of steak knives, and third is you're fired. It's like that's basically how the competition of technology sort of works. We got the box of steak knives and sold that company to Twitter for $20 million, which is very powerful and meaningful for me.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

But when I look at what happened there, it's like I needed to be who I am now in order to properly win that tournament. And when I really look at it, I hadn't done 10 years of therapy yet, and that's what I actually needed to be able to work through all of the things that caused my startup to fail. I ended up falling out with my co founder. The startup started failing the day Instagram launched, actually, which we should have paid attention to.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

And then I just wasn't developed as a full human being to be able to go to my co founder and say what was going on for me. I just ate it. He had a really strong idea for what he wanted to do. I was like, I had read some advice on the Internet about if you want your startup to succeed, you better be a really good co founder. You're a co founder. And I read that and I thought like, oh, that means that I should. Should self abandon. That should just do whatever he says. Right? I was like, no, are you serious? Like, I was 30 at the time and I wish that I could go back and like shake the me of that time, but I just wasn't ready. Like, there are all these unexamined demons from my childhood. You know, I sometimes wonder if I'm making the same mistake too. I might be just by coding all the time right now. Back then I was like the hero engineer. I just wrote all the code, I did all the design. I even kept the servers up, which was very inadvisable. And then now, after a lot of therapy, I realize, oh, that's my hero complex. I had to carry my family. My parents were my parents, but I had to parent them as well. And that's what caused me to be the way I am. But also it caused me to fail, caused me to not be able to manage people, not be able to transition, not be able to make the decisions to help my startup. My YC startup in 2008 had a shot. We could have been a contender. And I think a lot about that. If you don't know who you are or you haven't worked through the things that are really going on inside of you or how you make decisions, if you're not an integrated person, this stuff all comes out again.

[Interviewer]

I'll just argue the other side of that. Sometimes the people who are fully integrated can't go to the inhuman Unrealistic extremes necessary to break through. Yeah. Like sometimes it's because of that damage that you can just keep hammering.

[Gary Tan]

Yes.

[Interviewer]

I'm not suggesting that as a choice, but it's just the reality that sometimes it takes that.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, I haven't reconciled that yet. I mean, that's definitely true. Like when we meet people and they're all the way turned on, it's like that's coming from someplace.

[Interviewer]

It's not always a positive place, but that might be the energy to get over the gap. And then once it works, then they can work on themselves and have time. During the race, you can't focus on anything but the race.

[Gary Tan]

You're hitting on something very deep. And I'm just going to be super vulnerable here. Like, that's actually one of the defining things I'm struggling with right now. Now, like I have a rage and a fire inside me and I see it in my therapy sessions. Actually I go visit that room.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

Like I can visit my 7 year old version of myself in that apartment with. Filled with beer cans and technical books and it's tiny and it's a hoarder space and like I slept on the floor, you know, like we didn't have beds, like we had foam pads on the floor. And I can go there anytime and I can feel the dread of my alcoholic father is going to come home and I don't know who's going to come home. Is he going to be drunk already? Is he going to beat me? Like, what's going to happen? But that's also when people look at me on the Internet and they're like, what is wrong with that guy? It's like, what's going on for that guy? You know? Or like they see me with like the very extreme intensity of what I want and what I'm trying to make happen. It's because I can go into that room and I go to my 7 year old version of myself and he's in there all the time. And then I bring in a cup and it's like this radioactive cup and he just pours out like liquid plutonium. And then I go into my day and I got it.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. Would you say you have a relationship with him where he's not running the show all the time?

[Gary Tan]

I mean, if anything, like I'm running the show and I'm using him.

[Interviewer]

That sounds like a healthy relationship.

[Gary Tan]

I hope so.

[Interviewer]

That could be a superpower.

[Gary Tan]

What do you think? Do you think so? I mean, my therapist is like, man, you gotta, you need to integrate that Kid and like hug him and then I'm afraid. Well, if I do that, will I be able to still do what I do? I don't know yet. I don't know what the answer is.

[Interviewer]

Do you feel like he's in any way getting in your way now?

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, all the time.

[Interviewer]

Would you say there's a part of you that's self destructive?

[Gary Tan]

Well, I stopped drinking, so that's good.

[Interviewer]

That sounds great.

[Gary Tan]

Funny enough, I do have a self destructive streak that I am now very, very aware of. But when I was younger, I was like, oh, no, I'm fine, I'm normal, everything's fine. I have this like very extreme control thing. It's either self abandonment or it's domination. Right. And the integration thing right now is how do I, you know, stay in the middle? My wife always says, like, gary, you're so extreme. Like, it doesn't have to be a pound of broccoli or a pound of steak. Sometimes we just want to eat chicken. And I'm trying, I'm trying.

[Interviewer]

You know, I wonder just hearing you say it. As long as it's not self destructive, like you use the word normal, it's like normal is nothing to aspire to.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. That's the median.

[Interviewer]

Normal is average.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah. Yep. We want to be extraordinary.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. And sometimes part of that is a fire that comes from somewhere. As long as it's not burning you.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

Or burning the people around you and doing good in the world. Having the fire to use for good is really good.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, totally. I guess where it's coming up for me right now, I mean, we're going to get super personal. But I think that it's something that a lot of people who I hang out with actually struggle with and they'd never talk about it. So maybe we need to normalize talking about it. This cup of plutonium has a deleterious effect and that is not being able to show up or turn off at home. And so, you know, I've got boys at home.

[Narrator]

I have.

[Gary Tan]

My wife is incredible. And she supported me all the way through this. And I was just working with my personal AI, doing a bunch of research about Warren Buffett, who at 47, got divorced, famously, I guess his first wife, Susie, moved to San Francisco. And at the time Warren talked about, Susie's amazing, but she doesn't understand the value of compounding. And then years later, I mean, I think recently, maybe like, you know, 30 years after they didn't get divorced, like it just was a separation. Yeah. But you know, in his 70s, or 80s. He started talking about, like, that was the greatest mistake of my life. So I'm 45. I just turned 45. And I guess that's where my head goes. It's like, I'm not that unique. I am.

[Interviewer]

But is it 247 always, or is it 247 always?

[Gary Tan]

So you trying to stop? Okay, I'm trying to make that space, but I find it incredibly hard.

[Interviewer]

I understand.

[Gary Tan]

I'm Christian, so I don't really believe this, but, like, if there was reincarnation, I would have lived 10 billion lifetimes to inhabit this body and this mind on this Earth at this moment. There's like, a sense of mission. I see, like, everything sort of arrayed out, and there are things that I need to get done that, like, if I don't do them, I'm not sure if they're going to get done.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

How do you sit with that? And how do you go home and basically take the fire suit off at the doorway and then go home and have dinner with your wife and kids? I think that's what people actually need and want now more than ever, which is just actually connection with other people. And that's sort of what I think society sort of needs. Like, in San Francisco, we've been working on this thing called Acts 17, where we're trying to bring more tech people into church, which sounds sort of almost antithetical to tech. There is actually a really strong atheist sort of culture around tech, which I think I get. And I was an atheist when I was growing up. I was an atheist, yeah, Because I looked at what I experienced as a child, and I just didn't believe that. Basically, God is supposed to be all seeing, all knowing, and all powerful. And I looked at how I was growing up and was like, one of these things is wrong.

[Interviewer]

Tell me something you believe now that you didn't believe when you were young.

[Gary Tan]

The biggest one, I think, is that when I was 22 or so, friends of mine were starting a company, and they said, gary, you're at Microsoft. You're the smartest engineer we know. We're starting this company. You got to come and quit your job. And I was like, man, I don't know, man, whatever you guys are doing, like, I got a job, okay? It was so hard to get this job. Like, what are you guys doing? They finally convinced me to fly down to San Francisco from Seattle, and I had dinner with their benefactor. Turned out to be Peter Thiel. It was probably within a few months of him writing the $500,000 check to Facebook. And so it's me, my two buddies, Joe Lonsdale and Stefan Cohen and Peter Thiel. And Peter is like, what are you doing at Microsoft, man? You gotta quit your job. I didn't realize this was like a whole shtick that you have to do as an investor or as a co founder is like, you're always convincing people to quit their stupid jobs to come work for you.

[Interviewer]

Right.

[Gary Tan]

And so this was just like one of, like, a thousand conversations that he had. But my buddies really wanted me, I guess. So they put him up to saying, I know you never had money having a job. And I was like, hey, I have health insurance. He's like, I know all that's really important. How about this? Let's make this a zero risk opportunity for you. Here's a check for $70,000 from my personal bank account. You cash it, and this is zero risk. Just quit your job. And I should have waited until after the soup course because we were. I said, no, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel. I might make it to level 60 next year. I thought I was going to get promoted, and I did get promoted. But that company turned out to be Palantir. And I turned down something like, I don't know, two and a half to $4 billion.

[Interviewer]

Crazy.

[Gary Tan]

Don't feel bad for me. I mean, it was fine. And I also ended up joining as employee number 10. But I think a lot about, like, that particular moment where I was like, I didn't believe in myself. I didn't believe that my skills were valuable. I thought that, like, having a job at Microsoft was like a gift.

[Interviewer]

Yeah.

[Gary Tan]

It's not just safe. It was like, oh, my God, this is a gift. Like, society has given me a job. I have a vocation. All your power and agency is sapped away inside these, like, giant organizations. It's safe, but you're, like, losing something really, really big. And then the other thing, the bigger thing, I think, was realizing I also didn't know how to value what was in front of me. These were my best friends who I built products together with. I knew them. They were some of the smartest people I'd ever met. And it was backed by someone who, you know, he's not, like, he wasn't a billionaire yet. He had sold PayPal. He was sort of this. This super famous, successful founder. But everything was perfect. And I said no. And I asked, like, why? And it's because, like, my whole life and everything I believed was constructed for me by people who. Now I realize why was I paying Attention to the reporters at the Wall Street Journal at that moment, it's like they are closer to the source, but they're not connected to the source. People who are like, like you or Paul Graham or like a lot of the people we know, they are in the flow. And like the thing that you read about from media is actually the second and third hand retellings of stuff that the people connect to the source are doing from six or nine months ago. And so I thought, oh, well, they're working on enterprise software. That's not hot. I mean, this whole idea of investing or spending your life following what is hot is like, I'm sure. I mean, this must, like, drive you crazy.

[Interviewer]

I don't participate in that.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah, exactly. Right. Like, if you met someone and they're like, well, I kind of want to, you know, make something. I want to make a song that's kind of like whatever they just heard. I was like, who cares, dude? Why are you like, that's telling someone else's story.

[Interviewer]

Exactly.

[Gary Tan]

You know, what's your story? What's going on for you? And so if I could just go back to when I was 22 and value myself more and then also realize the whole world is made up and you don't have to take it on authority from media or really anyone. Even your mentors, right? Like slay your mentors. Not literally, but just like, I mean, in your mind.

[Interviewer]

No, they mean well, but they're sharing their experience from their life.

[Gary Tan]

Yeah.

[Interviewer]

And you're on a different path. You're not on the same path as them.

[Gary Tan]

Actually, I love it when I'm mentoring someone. Or like, I don't feel like I'm mentoring. I'm just literally just vibing with people in office hours. And I love it when I'm like, hey, this is like what I see. And they're like, no, no, no, you have it wrong. And I'm like, oh, shit, you're getting connected to the source. Yeah, I want to actively find people who are like, they're making their own connections and they're like building their own world models of how the world works. And that's the most unique, most important thing to encourage in the entire world. And the world does not encourage that. The world says, shut the fuck up. Yeah, the world is like, why are you doing this? In fact, I hear that all the time. They tell me that, but I have learned actually, like, this is something I have had to tell a lot of founders who are connected to the source and they're doing something. They're making waves and doing things that scare people, upset people, they give them ego wounds. And for me, if I could do like a message in a bottle, I'm like, you're over the target, bro. You're over the target. Keep going. Yeah, like, if you got someone, someone is mad and like, you look at it and it's like there's nothing underneath that. Like, they don't have a logic. There's no, like, first principles thinking about, like, why what you're doing is bad or wrong. It's just vibes and they're like, I hate it. And you can't find, like, something deeper, then it's your over the target map. Tetragrammaton is a podcast. Tetragrammaton is a website. Tetragrammaton is a whole world of knowledge.

[Narrator]

What may fall within the sphere of Tetragrammaton, Counterculture, Tetragrammation Sacred geometry. Tetragrammaton the avant Tetragrammaton Generative art, Tetragrammaton the tarot Tetragrammaton out of print music Tetragrammatin Biodynamics Tetragrammatin graphic design, Tetragrammatin mythology and magic. Tetragrammatin obscure film Tetragrammatin beach culture. Tetragrammatin esoteric lectures. Tetragrammatin off the grid living Tetragrammative alt spirituality. Tetragrammatin the canon of fine objects. Tetragrammatin muscle cars. Tetragrammatin ancient wisdom for a new age. Upon entering, experience the artwork of the day. Take a breath and see where you are drawn.

[Gary Tan]

Petra grande.com.