Transcript
Gary Tan (0:00)
I think that's like the defining question. Like, will you have control over your own tools or will your tools have control over you? Using OpenClaw these days is like driving a Ferrari. And it's like exhilarating. It's insane. Like, you get to do things like it figures things out you would never think a machine could figure out. And it does it so quickly. But then it's also like a Ferrari in that you better be a mechanic. Like, it's a Ferrari that will break down on the side of the road when you most need it and you need to get out with your wrench and pop the hood and like, fix it. You know you're going to have to fix it yourself. And so this is a very exciting time in computer science and technology.
Light Cone Host 1 (0:47)
Welcome back to a special episode of the Light Cone. In this episode, we're going to talk about how Gary Tan got back to building. If you follow us on Twitter, you'll know that after a multi year hiatus to become an investor, Gary Tan is back to being a builder. And in the last couple months, he's shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of code and built popular open source projects that have gone from nothing to more than 100,000 stars on GitHub. And he did all of this while having a very demanding job running YC full time. A lot of people on the Internet don't even think that this is possible and are somewhat like in disbelief. But it actually happened. We know because we were here to see the whole thing. And so today we're going to talk about how he did it.
Gary Tan (1:27)
Well, I'm relatively shocked myself. I'm amazed as well. It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly, boom, I'm doing 400x the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of like 2/3 of the time writing
Light Cone Host 1 (1:42)
code maybe to start things off. How about we go back to the project that started it all off, which was Gary's list.
Gary Tan (1:48)
Oh yeah.
Light Cone Host 1 (1:48)
And just like talk about a few months ago, how you powered up Claude code and like started to get back to coding.
Light Cone Host 2 (1:54)
And it was right after one of the Lightcon episodes, right?
Gary Tan (1:56)
Oh, yeah, definitely. I realized that I wanted to bring together all the people who believed what I believed, particularly for California. And so I started a 501 and now it's a C3 and a PAC, which is sort of what a lot of political groups do. It's a very common way to bring people together. You know, everyone focuses on the money, but we're trying to bring together smart people. You know, I learned in the years of working in San Francisco, politics is that bringing together people is so powerful, and that's what a mass social movement is. And I said, okay, well, why don't I just make a website where we start doing that? And it would just start with, why don't I start writing about the issues that I'm worried about? It's like, I want children in school. You know, people watching this from all around the world might find it very, very strange. Like, I find it strange that it was not possible and still very, very hard for a seventh grader or eighth grader in middle school in San Francisco public schools to be able to take algebra. And that was, you know, a math education thing. Like, you know, if I didn't get to do that when I was in public schools in the East Bay of the Bay Area, there's no way I would have studied engineering at Stanford. I never would have written code. I never would have been able to do any of these things. So it was close to my heart, and I realized, like, hey, it's time to write code. And I ended up building Posterous, my first YC startup from 2008.
