Garry Tan

Welcome to The Builders, my series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future.

Today, I'm speaking with Garry Tan.

Y Combinator has become one of the most powerful and important brands in Silicon Valley.

The companies that emerged from YC include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Dropbox.

Together, they have transformed how we travel, spend money, work, and communicate.

Now Garry Tan is deciding which builders come next.

Gary first entered Y Combinator as a founder.

He became an early investor in Coinbase and Instacart.

Welcome to The Builders, my series of conversations with the most consequential minds shaping our future.

Today I'm speaking with Garry Tan.

Y Combinator has become one of the most powerful and important brands in Silicon Valley.

The companies that emerged from YC include Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, and Dropbox.

Together, they have transformed how we travel, spend money, work, and communicate.

Now Garry Tan is deciding which builders come next.

Gary first entered Y Combinator as a founder.

He became an early investor in Coinbase and Instacart.

Now far less religious now like there are a lot of times when I'm like just okay this just needs a simple machine learning model chat GPT build me an XGBoost to solve this problem kind of a thing I've come to that now I've become much more pragmatic now I was religious for a while but now I'm much more pragmatic on this one.

I'm fascinated by the notion of, you know, what you call, you know, the business perspective of using data, because what is happening there like this, I forget who said this, was it Gary Tan, action produces information.

And I guess in your case, if you are working with actual businesses and actual practitioners of public policy, then it's not just that action produces information, but then that information leads to action.

And therefore, the incentives are different, the stakes are different, you're much closer to the ground in that sense.

But if I maybe like built on your question a bit, something that the machine learning will not be able to do as well as we do.

And I learned this by listening to a Wall Street Journal podcast with the CEO of Y Combinator, Gary Tan.

And he is very bullish about AI technology.

I mean, they're investing in those sorts of companies.

You needed to think, do I really need to light this candle because it's an expensive candle? Now you don't have to think about it, and it would be a waste of your time and energy to think about, should I be turning this light on within limits, right? And so it's a little bit the same now, because one of the things that the cost has gone down on with AI is refactoring as well.

Gary Tan, who is the CEO of Y Combinator, he introduced this concept of boiling the lake.

We still don't want to boil the ocean, but You don't have to be so focused now.

You can build the fuller version of what you're trying to build straight away rather than building like a real minimum viable slice of it.

Idiot startup founders stay in Cali.

Gary Tan, the chief executive of Y Combinator, which funds and advises tech startups, was equally caustic when I spoke with him recently.

These are speculative startups, he told me.

Markets can shift very quickly.

Their aggrieved response to the proposed tax and the vast sums of money they were spending to defeat the ballot initiative was likely, he argued, to make people even more inclined to vote for it.

Keep talking, Sergey Regan said.

Keep talking, Gary Tan.

Keep talking, Peter Thiel, because you guys are not the best messengers.