How to Get Into Silicon Valley’s $600 Billion Startup School | The Circuit with Emily Chang

Speaker 0:00 [upbeat music] [people chatter]

Garry Tan 0:07 Hi.

Emily Chang 0:08 Hello. How are you?

Garry Tan 0:09 Great to see you.

Emily Chang 0:11 Good to see you.

Garry Tan 0:12 Mm.

Emily Chang 0:12 I hear this is a special coffee shop.

Garry Tan 0:14 Yeah, this is just where so much stuff happened, especially for YC over really 10 years.

Emily Chang 0:22 YC, short for Y Combinator, is one of the most storied startup accelerators in Silicon Valley, where Airbnb, Coinbase, and Reddit all got their start. It's like an elite club for chosen founders to get access to top-shelf mentors, and if they're lucky, raise top dollars. Garry Tan is the new leader of Y Combinator, succeeding a short line of big names, including Sam Altman and Paul Graham, which makes Tan now perhaps the ultimate startup kingmaker. Ever done a deal here or anything like that?

Garry Tan 0:54 Uh, you know, like, YC is interesting because the deal is pretty straightforward.

Emily Chang 0:59 Right.

Garry Tan 0:59 You just, we just meet them for 10 minutes and then decide yes or no.

Emily Chang 1:03 That's it?

Garry Tan 1:03 Yeah, that's right. So that's-

Emily Chang 1:05 10 minutes and then yes or no?

Garry Tan 1:06 Yeah, that's right.

Emily Chang 1:07 Wow. How do you know in 10 minutes?

Garry Tan 1:10 Well, I think you can look at, you know, what the founders are capable of, their skills. I think we're up to 40,000 applications.

Emily Chang 1:18 Ever?

Garry Tan 1:19 Every year.

Emily Chang 1:20 Every year?

Garry Tan 1:21 Yeah.

Emily Chang 1:22 And you pick, like, a few hundred.

Garry Tan 1:23 That's right. It's a very, it's the lowest-

Emily Chang 1:25 [laughs] Pretty selective

Garry Tan 1:25 ... acceptance rate-

Emily Chang 1:27 Right

Garry Tan 1:27 ... of, you know, more, more selective than, you know, pretty much any selective school in the world. I feel like a lot of this stuff all started here.

Emily Chang 1:34 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 1:35 You know, back in really 2005, this idea that you could give s- very small amounts of money to just a few teams and have those teams go on to become sort of the, the Reddits and the Airbnbs of the world.

Emily Chang 1:47 All right. Awesome. Thank you. Here we go. We got a chai and a latte.

Garry Tan 1:50 Oh, thank you.

Emily Chang 1:51 Thank you very much. It's warm ex-

Garry Tan 1:53 Yeah.

Emily Chang 1:53 Let's go. [gentle music]

Garry Tan 1:55 This is where people meet their first investors. This is where they meet their co-founder for the first time-

Emily Chang 2:01 Oh

Garry Tan 2:01 ... sometimes. This is-

Emily Chang 2:03 I love that

Garry Tan 2:03 ... a really important part of Silicon Valley.

Emily Chang 2:05 And you actually were in YC yourself.

Garry Tan 2:08 Oh, yeah. I lived five blocks down that way, and YC is about five blocks down this way.

Emily Chang 2:13 And when were you accepted to YC?

Garry Tan 2:15 2008.

Emily Chang 2:16 2008. So just at the start of the financial crisis.

Garry Tan 2:20 Yeah, for sure. Uh, we raised our Angel round for Posterous the day Lehman died, and nobody else in our batch managed to raise any money.

Emily Chang 2:26 And you're a Bay Area guy, right?

Garry Tan 2:28 That's right.

Emily Chang 2:28 You, you were born and raised here.

Garry Tan 2:29 Yeah, I grew up right here in, uh, Fremont, right across the bay. And, uh, tech gave me everything I have, honestly. You know, child of Chinese immigrants, you know, we were sometimes food insecure. But I just remember tech was here, and we grew up in the shadow of all this greatness, all this technology being built from nothing. I knew that I wanted to learn to code.

Emily Chang 2:49 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 2:50 And you know, I cold-called the internet section until I, like, got a job. And we were living in one or two-bedroom apartments.

Emily Chang 2:56 Right.

Garry Tan 2:56 And for my parents to, you know, sometimes struggle with English-

Emily Chang 3:00 [laughs]

Garry Tan 3:00 ... the cultural barrier, you know, my dad was a foreman in a machine shop. My mom was a nurse assistant at a convalescent home. For dinner, we would sort of have the expired bread that someone would drop off to sort of help out my mom, who was, you know, working sometimes two shifts just to keep the family going.

Emily Chang 3:17 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 3:18 Um, and so I think that's one of the really important things to me that I realized, like, tech is this thing that can bring people out of whatever situation they're in and often into prosperity, and that's what I want for everyone.

Emily Chang 3:31 You were sort of like an engineer/designer by background. How does that inform your perspective?

Garry Tan 3:36 This is why YC really attracted me in 2008, was that here was the one place that wasn't about the flash.

Emily Chang 3:45 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 3:45 It wasn't about, you know, whether you had an MBA or, you know, you went to some school or whatever. It was just purely, "Hey, can you build something great?"

Emily Chang 3:54 You have this picture. It's 2008, I believe.

Garry Tan 3:57 Oh, yeah.

Emily Chang 3:57 You're sitting on the ground, and you can see Paul Graham in the background and Mark Zuckerberg. What's going on in that moment?

Garry Tan 4:04 At that point, I knew I wanted to start a company. And YC, through this event that was a free event called Startup School-

Emily Chang 4:11 Mm-hmm

Garry Tan 4:11 ... and it was all sort of like the luminaries. You know, I believe that year Jeff Bezos came.

Emily Chang 4:17 Mm.

Garry Tan 4:17 And he actually launched AWS at that Startup School in 2008, um, at the auditorium-

Emily Chang 4:23 Wow

Garry Tan 4:23 ... at Stanford. I was sitting on the ground. Photography was one of my loves.

Emily Chang 4:28 Mm.

Garry Tan 4:28 And I was actually thinking about, you know, either starting a company or becoming a hip hop editorial photographer. [laughs]

Emily Chang 4:34 [laughs] Very different proposition.

Garry Tan 4:35 Yeah.

Emily Chang 4:36 You went on to become a partner at YC yourself. How did you make the transition from entrepreneur to investor?

Garry Tan 4:41 You know, we were doing dead simple blogs by email, Posterous.

Emily Chang 4:44 And then didn't you sell that to Twitter?

Garry Tan 4:46 Much later, actually. I mean, Instagram came out, and that flat-lined our growth.

Emily Chang 4:50 Oh.

Garry Tan 4:50 And this is one of the interesting things about being an investor. You know, I think we were very much in the running to be sort of one of the major social networks.

Emily Chang 4:58 Hmm.

Garry Tan 4:59 But that was because there were no really great iPhone apps yet for uploading photos, until Instagram. [laughs] And now I realize it's actually the role of the investor. We need to be helping them understand the historical context, like what, you know, what is actually happening in the market and what are, what are the brass rings that are going to be enduring, meaningful businesses-

Emily Chang 5:20 Mm-hmm

Garry Tan 5:20 ... that could be worth billions of dollars.

Emily Chang 5:22 So obviously, you worked at YC for a bit. You went on to start your own fund.

Garry Tan 5:25 Yep.

Emily Chang 5:25 Initialize.

Garry Tan 5:26 Absolutely.

Emily Chang 5:26 You made some pretty smart bets early on.

Garry Tan 5:29 Oh, thanks.

Emily Chang 5:29 You invested in Coinbase, for example. What did you learn from that experience-

Garry Tan 5:33 I-

Emily Chang 5:33 ... that gave you sort of the bona fides to be an investor?

Garry Tan 5:36 This is actually a business that requires you to see enough, and YC was just such a concentrated form of all of tech happening, and it remains that, that I think you just end up learning way more about what's doable, what's possible.

Emily Chang 5:51 So coming back to YC as CEO, is that, like, a dream job?

Garry Tan 5:56 Yeah. I mean, the ability to help people basically achieve their dreams, you know, that's what YC did for me. And I'm, you know, a steward here. I'm trying to figure out what can we do to help more innovation happen in the world.

Emily Chang 6:13 Ooh. [gasps] I love the wall of photos.

Garry Tan 6:18 Oh, yeah. So this is very, very early days.

Emily Chang 6:24 Alexis Ohanian.

Garry Tan 6:25 Yeah

Emily Chang 6:26 Steve.

Garry Tan 6:27 There's Sam Altman on the left.

Emily Chang 6:28 Oh, there's Sam.

Garry Tan 6:29 Yep, that's Emmett Shear of Twitch.

Emily Chang 6:31 Oh my gosh.

Garry Tan 6:32 Justin Kan, Steve Huffman, and Alexis of Reddit.

Emily Chang 6:35 There's a lot of lore in this one photo.

Garry Tan 6:36 That's right.

Emily Chang 6:37 My gosh, everyone looks like babies.

Garry Tan 6:39 Yeah.

Emily Chang 6:40 I mean, they really are though too, like, just out of college, like...

Garry Tan 6:44 And that's the thing to emphasize here is there's sort of the next Brian Chesky-

Emily Chang 6:48 Oh

Garry Tan 6:48 ... out there maybe watching this right now.

Emily Chang 6:51 I walked right by this.

Garry Tan 6:52 Oh, yeah.

Emily Chang 6:53 What do we have here?

Garry Tan 6:54 Well, this is sort of, uh, the experience of every startup, right? You know, you launch and then things sort of fall out, and then you have a crash, and then-

Emily Chang 7:02 Trough of sorrow.

Garry Tan 7:03 Yep.

Emily Chang 7:04 Everything's horrible.

Garry Tan 7:05 Yep. Obviously, you always hear about this story, but-

Emily Chang 7:08 Yeah

Garry Tan 7:08 ... we're here to sort of try to lift people up right at that moment.

Emily Chang 7:12 Right at the crash of ineptitude.

Garry Tan 7:13 Yeah, that's right. [laughs] Ups and downs are always a part of it. This is, uh, actually the photo from-

Emily Chang 7:19 That's you

Garry Tan 7:19 ... my YC interview actually. [laughs] This is the Stripe office right in Palo Alto. I think that's Greg Brockman of OpenAI right there. Yeah, so this is from 2009. That's me over here, and, uh, Sam's right there. Yeah.

Emily Chang 7:37 Oh my goodness.

Garry Tan 7:38 James Lindenbaum from Heroku.

Emily Chang 7:40 So this is-

Garry Tan 7:41 Scribd, Justin

Emily Chang 7:41 ... this looks like the Last Supper.

Garry Tan 7:42 Yeah.

Emily Chang 7:43 Airbnb, Stripe, Instacart, Dropbox, Coinbase, Cruise.

Garry Tan 7:49 So many.

Emily Chang 7:49 Who am I forgetting? [laughs]

Garry Tan 7:50 Oh, gosh. There- I mean, there are so many, right? The most crazy thing to me is that the next ones are still coming.

Emily Chang 7:56 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 7:56 This is a community that is refreshing itself with the next billion-dollar startups literally right now.

Emily Chang 8:02 So I have to call you out about something here.

Garry Tan 8:03 Sure, of course.

Emily Chang 8:04 There are a lot of dudes in these pictures.

Garry Tan 8:06 Absolutely.

Emily Chang 8:06 Where are all the women? [laughs]

Garry Tan 8:08 Yeah, I mean, that's something that we're gonna continue to work on and, uh-

Emily Chang 8:12 I mean, there's not a single woman in this picture.

Garry Tan 8:14 Yep, two... I mean, 2009 was a time that it was easily a problem, and that's something that we're continuing to work on.

Emily Chang 8:24 Is there something about the orange? This room is very orange.

Garry Tan 8:26 It's very orange. I think it was the hes- hex code for the color was, uh, FS- FF6600. [laughs]

Emily Chang 8:33 Okay.

Garry Tan 8:34 So it was a very simple color that you could write in code, and it turned out to be a very bright one.

Emily Chang 8:38 We read online that orange also can s- symbolize optimism and energy, so I thought maybe that was the reason.

Garry Tan 8:45 That's-

Emily Chang 8:45 But of course, it's probably more wonky than that. [laughs]

Garry Tan 8:47 The name Y Combinator is actually an algorithm that writes other algorithms. So YC was meant to be a startup that helps start other startups and-

Emily Chang 8:55 Oh, I never knew that. So many companies have come through these doors. Talk to me a little bit about the process. For those who don't understand, what exactly does a startup accelerator do?

Garry Tan 9:06 Well, YC works kind of as a 10, 12-week program. Uh, anyone can apply online. All they have to do is, you know, ideally have an idea and have, uh, a demo sometimes. And what we do is we try to figure out who are the smartest, best people who are capable, what are the things that they're trying to do, and are those things viable. And we whittle it down to about 250 to give half a, half a million dollars to. [laughs]

Emily Chang 9:36 Right.

Garry Tan 9:37 Which is great because when I first started, I think YC only gave me $12,000.

Emily Chang 9:41 What does the newest class of founders look like? What problems are they trying to solve?

Garry Tan 9:45 A good deal of them are focused on AI, uh, bringing in large language models. That's a really exciting time for just software, period.

Emily Chang 9:54 Demo Day is sorta like a rite of passage.

Garry Tan 9:57 Oh, definitely.

Emily Chang 9:57 Right? What happens on Demo Day?

Garry Tan 9:59 It's 1,000 investors, VCs, angel investors, people who have been there, and they often raise millions of dollars. And so that's a really powerful moment because that big bump at the top, at the top of, uh, you know, that graph that we saw. [laughs]

Emily Chang 10:16 Yeah.

Garry Tan 10:16 You know, that's when... That's a moment of euphoria, and then, "Hey, guys, it's back to work." Like, we're gonna be in that trough of sorrow for a while, but we're gonna make it to the promised land.

Emily Chang 10:25 What do you say to the folks who are out there thinking, "How do I get in?"

Garry Tan 10:29 Well, uh, the big thing is I think we really like people who are earnest. What we really care about is are you solving a real problem, uh, can you show us the quality of your work, you know, can you access a market that nobody else can actually access.

Emily Chang 10:44 So in 10 minutes you decide with- whether to give someone a golden ticket.

Garry Tan 10:48 That's right.

Emily Chang 10:48 Are you making all the right decisions?

Garry Tan 10:50 Well, we hope so, and that's why Demo Day exists. You know, those thousand investors come back year after year after year because, you know, you'll never find a congregation of hundreds of startups in which, you know, a dozen of them will probably go on to be worth a billion dollars or more. The hard part is it's not really about what happens in that 10 minutes. It's about the 10,000 hours that goes in beforehand. The best CEOs in the world are sort of jack of all trades but master of one or two, and that isn't something that is in that 10 minutes or in those 12 questions. That's something in someone's life.

Emily Chang 11:28 Are you really looking for people from around the world, or do people who are here have an advantage?

Garry Tan 11:33 Lots of people come here just for the batch. They raise money, they build their community, and then they go back and become the best company in Mumbai, the, the best company in London. So, you know, I think that this is a story that is San Francisco Bay Area based but also one that radiates out into the entire world.

Emily Chang 11:53 We talked about the pictures on the wall, and you said, "Hey, you got me. We don't have enough women. We haven't had enough women for a couple of decades now." What are you seeing in the numbers now?

Garry Tan 12:04 I think representation matters a lot at the end of the day. You know, the types of problems that people solve kinda come out of their own stories. It is important to us. It's important to me. You know, at YC we have more than 850 women founders who have gone through the program. And you're right, that's not enough.

Emily Chang 12:20 What are you doing to, to make- To change the, the ratio.

Garry Tan 12:24 I mean, I think I look at the process, and we want the process to be something that is as open and inclusive as possible. There's a lot to be done, and, you know, we're not done.

Emily Chang 12:33 We're seeing tens of thousands of people getting laid off from tech companies. How does this play out?

Garry Tan 12:39 I think a lot of large companies started treating their employee base almost as a place to park resources and almost as a competitive moat versus the other-

Emily Chang 12:48 Mm

Garry Tan 12:48 ... giants. And, uh, when I think the, about the amount of talent that was sort of locked up in cushy jobs that, you know, could have been actually out there in the market making new technology, pushing things forward, I'm hoping a lot of them actually come over to startups and they realize, oh, this is what it's like to run fast again.

Emily Chang 13:08 What's your advice for these workers who are getting laid off? It does sound a little trite to just say, "It's time to build."

Garry Tan 13:14 Right. It sure does. [laughs] I mean, I think some of it is like take stock, right? Like, getting much more connected to the problems out there I think will lead to just a lot more direct access to, I mean, building equity, building businesses that really matter.

Emily Chang 13:30 Well, speaking of equity, for years, tech workers have been paid in stock, and that was sort of, you know, the ticket. You're taking a risk on this company. Uh, it could be worth zero or it could, you know, be worth millions, right?

Garry Tan 13:41 Absolutely.

Emily Chang 13:41 We're seeing kind of the dark side of RSUs or getting paid in stock now. Do you think that's still the way it should work in Silicon Valley?

Garry Tan 13:52 I mean, that's some of the magic of startups. I think this is about labor being able to access, you know, actual capital, and this is, like, one of the most direct and most awesome versions of it.

Emily Chang 14:03 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 14:03 Some of the bad behavior we saw from startup founders was trying to reach for that billion-dollar valuation because they wanted the headline, uh, out there saying that they're a unicorn now, but that comes at a cost, right? The focus on valuation and getting that next notch of valuation above all else, that comes at both a great personal cost to the founders themselves, but also to the employees. That's-

Emily Chang 14:28 So what do you think needs to change?

Garry Tan 14:30 I think some of it is already happening, right? You know, the revaluation of startups right now is starting, and it will continue. People are gonna be a lot more mindful about, you know, do I really need to do that 50 to $200 million raise?

Emily Chang 14:43 So you're a few months into this job as CEO of Y Combinator, and Silicon Valley Bank collapses. What is your level of panic in that moment?

Garry Tan 14:53 Well, I remember, uh, you know, I'm dropping my seven-year-old off, uh, Friday morning at 9:00 AM, and then immediately I start getting texts and phone calls from founders saying, uh, "That was my only bank account. What do I do?" Because it wasn't clear to me that people were going to give a bank called Silicon Valley Bank the benefit of any doubt at all simply because of its name. This is not big tech getting need, in, in an hour of need. This is a moment of little tech.

Emily Chang 15:24 This whole SVB thing has made clear a lot of people look at Silicon Valley and see elites. Are they wrong?

Garry Tan 15:31 Anytime you have power that is accumulated in the hands of the few, that's something we should be worried about. Little tech is competition, and competition is the way that we have actually vibrant markets that give consumers new choice, and that is actually a very important thing to protect.

Emily Chang 15:50 Mm. How long do you think the downturn lasts? Like, how hard does this get?

Garry Tan 15:56 I guess it's so hard to tell, and, you know, I'm not a macroeconomist. Some people like to play that on Twitter, though. [laughs]

Emily Chang 16:02 [laughs]

Garry Tan 16:03 So I underestimated to what degree, uh, interest rates rule everything around us. It affects valuations. It affected the SVB crisis. You know, if you work in crypto, you better pay attention. I mean, all of these things matter because the price of money is sort of shifting radically.

Emily Chang 16:20 YC branched out into a lot of things, like a lot of funds did, to be honest, uh, over the course of the last 10 years. You're now ending the later stage investing. Does that make it harder for a lot of the YC companies to then do follow-on rounds? Does that sort of clip their wings before they can even fly?

Garry Tan 16:39 Well, I don't think so just because the best thing we can do is take our own advice, and especially in times of sort of recentering, uh, you know, a reset in what's happening out there in VC. What are the things that make you truly unique, and really focus on those things. So you, that was a painful decision to make, uh, but it was ultimately the right one for YC.

Emily Chang 17:00 When you look at venture capital culture and the way it operates, do you see things that are broken?

Garry Tan 17:05 Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest part is often there's not alignment, right? You know, if you're a junior VC, you're coming in, you might only be able to do one or two deals, three or four deals period, and in those three or four deals, one better be a unicorn. And we see people bend over backwards, sort of put their own interests ahead of that of the founder, uh, and sometimes that's systemic.

Emily Chang 17:26 Do you think it's gonna be harder for startups to raise money for the next 10 years? It's been a fruitful time. Is this just the-

Garry Tan 17:33 Yeah

Emily Chang 17:33 ... new normal?

Garry Tan 17:34 Well, I think today we're, you know, in the midst of this large language model explosion, and I think that that might be the next platform, and those platforms will actually give rise to new platforms that we don't even know about yet. So, you know, if you ask on a 10-year timeframe, like, will there be more technology or less, I think there's gonna be more. And, you know, if it's a one or two-year timeframe, like, you know, we gotta ask Uncle Jerome.

Emily Chang 18:00 Between Microsoft and OpenAI and Google and Facebook and Apple and Amazon, is there enough room for startups to run when it comes to, to AI? Do they have room to really compete?

Garry Tan 18:11 I think so, and, you know, some of it is, like, we actually don't even know the physics of this market yet. It took many years of the search engine world and the search engine war before we figured out that Google and AdWords were gonna be the winner.

Emily Chang 18:24 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 18:24 And, uh, I think we're right there right again. I would never count out, uh, you know, the, the little startup who figures out a way to, uh, you know, fight against unbelievable amounts of capital or unbelievable amounts of market power. That's how we combat this idea that big tech is, you know, too powerful. Like, guess who's gonna fight against them? It's startups.

Emily Chang 18:46 What's gonna define the Garry Tan era of YC?

Garry Tan 18:50 What I hope is that a thousand flowers bloom at the end of the day. You know, I also experienced this crazy place that gave me prosperity, and ultimately all I care about is that that story continues.

Emily Chang 19:03 How much are you working here versus home in San Francisco?

Garry Tan 19:07 Oh, uh, well, we're San Francisco-based.

Emily Chang 19:09 [laughs]

Garry Tan 19:09 And work from home culture means that I'm in San Francisco pretty much all the time.

Emily Chang 19:17 So I hear Mr. Beast schooled you on your content creation.

Garry Tan 19:20 Yeah, that's right.

Emily Chang 19:21 [laughs]

Garry Tan 19:21 This was during the pandemic, and I got in touch with him on Clubhouse, and he gave me advice on, uh, thumbnail, title, and, you know, click-through rates, and all that good stuff. Welcome to the YouTube studio. [laughs]

Emily Chang 19:34 [laughs] I love it. What do we got going on here?

Garry Tan 19:37 Well, you know, the number one thing that I give people advice about is get a really big soft box so you get, like, the really nice cinematic look.

Emily Chang 19:45 Everyone needs a nice cinematic look.

Garry Tan 19:47 That's right. It's important. I mean, it's sort of like, uh, wearing a suit to a nice meeting. Like, having a good Zoom setup is, I think, you know, increasingly important.

Emily Chang 19:55 What have you found really resonates? Like, what takes off?

Garry Tan 19:59 The number one thing for me is just actually talking about the things I messed up. Like, actually saying, "Hey, you know, this is why my startup failed," or, "The time I messed up my pitch to Series A investors," or my co-founder disputes. Like, those all were real things that became a problem for me, and then being real about that helps people understand, like, hey, this is, again, the long trough of sorrow, and, uh, here's how you get through it.

Emily Chang 20:27 So it's being human.

Garry Tan 20:29 Yeah.

Emily Chang 20:29 Being authentic. And actually, I feel like a l- some folks in tech, and I won't name names, have trouble admitting when they're wrong.

Garry Tan 20:36 That's fair. [laughs] That's one of the salient features of going on Twitter sometimes. [laughs]

Emily Chang 20:41 [laughs]

Garry Tan 20:45 This is my favorite part.

Emily Chang 20:46 Wow. You've got quite a view going on here. You walk down the streets of San Francisco, you have to admit, it's different post-COVID.

Garry Tan 20:57 The streets are different, but right down the street is what they call Cerebral Valley, which is sort of turning into the new Silicon Valley.

Emily Chang 21:04 What is your role in San Francisco politics? I know you're doing a lot of tweeting.

Garry Tan 21:07 Oh, yeah. Somehow Twitter gets me in trouble all the time.

Emily Chang 21:10 [laughs]

Garry Tan 21:11 But my Twitter, in addition to being about startups, has accidentally also become really about what is the future of San Francisco and how do we make this a place for immigrants and immigrant families to actually come and do their thing? Like, for them to find their American dream here.

Emily Chang 21:27 I mean, it is expensive. Like-

Garry Tan 21:28 It absolutely is

Emily Chang 21:29 ... there was this huge push to raise payroll taxes in San Francisco. That was supposed to help the homeless problem. A lot of companies left San Francisco as a result. Stripe, a Y Combinator company, for example. So now the city's taking in less taxes 'cause the companies aren't here, and the homeless problem, it doesn't seem like it's been solved. Like, what do you think about that?

Garry Tan 21:53 I'm never about, "Hey, we should lower taxes." I don't think that's the issue. When we have prosperity in tech, we should be able to share that, 'cause we want abundance, and we need policies to actually get us there.

Emily Chang 22:03 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 22:04 I just want things to work. Can we meet in the middle? Can we find, uh, common sense things to do, common sense policies that work? Can we find politicians that represent us, that are not at the extremes, but finding ways to work together? And that's what I want.

Emily Chang 22:20 People look at you like this rich tech bro who wants to turn San Francisco into a utopia. Is that not the case?

Garry Tan 22:28 I think a utopia is just another form of extremism. Um, we have to look at what's possible. We have to look at the resources. And, you know, I think that tech probably should pay its fair share.

Emily Chang 22:39 How do you keep the soul of San Francisco, but also make it more attractive to everyone else?

Garry Tan 22:46 For the longest time, the status quo was, let's prevent people from building, and let's stop people from coming here. Let's make it unpalatable for people to move to San Francisco.

Emily Chang 22:57 Mm-hmm.

Garry Tan 22:57 And maybe that will make it okay. And I think that that's just the wrong solution. That's not a solution at all. That's putting your head in the ground. We should absolutely be making space for everyone. That's really what America is for me. That's what America has been for my family, and that's what I want for everyone in the world.

Emily Chang 23:14 San Francisco for life?

Garry Tan 23:16 You know it. This is the shining jewel that I go everywhere in the world, and the number one thing they wanna hear about is, how do we bring tech to our city? Like, this is a gift, and this is just getting started. [upbeat music]