Garry Tan is the president and CEO of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator behind companies like Airbnb, Reddit, Coinbase, and DoorDash. He previously co-founded the financial technology company Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter in 2012, and later founded the venture capital firm Initialized Capital alongside Alexis Ohanian. Before entering venture capital, Tan worked as an engineer at Palantir Technologies, where he helped develop early infrastructure and design systems. Now, he continues to make investment and product decisions as a General Partner, having read more than 6,000 YC applications, while overseeing programs for sourcing, advising, and scaling early-stage startups.
0:00 Garry Tan
0:15 Chaos, Survival, and Discovering Computers
6:42 School, Mathematics, and the Beauty of Order
13:18 Video Games, Storytelling, and Alternate Worlds
21:04 Engineering, Design, and Learning to Build
32:15 Startups, Silicon Valley, and Taking Big Risks
43:28 Y Combinator and Identifying Exceptional Founders
58:47 AI, Programming, and the Next Creative Revolution
1:13:10 Taste, Reps, and How Great Builders Develop Intuition
1:28:54 Why Certain People Become Founders
1:39:36 Power, Responsibility, and the Future of Technology
1:50:22 Reinventing Institutions and Refounding the Future
1:59:38 AI, Manufacturing, and a More Abundant World
