Running Y Combinator Like a Founder | Garry Tan | Ep. 7

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

April 17, 2025

Duration

46m

Channel

Uncapped with Jack Altman

Watch on YouTube

▶ Open ↗

📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

(If you enjoyed this, please like and subscribe!) This week I sat down with Garry Tan, President & CEO of Y Combinator. YC has funded 5,000+ startups including Airbnb, Stripe, DoorDash, Rippling, and Reddit, among others that have totaled $600B in combined valuation. Garry is a designer, engineer, and investor in early stage startups. Previously Founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that was earliest in Coinbase and Instacart. Before that, Garry was a partner at Y Combinator where he invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies at the earliest stage. He previously co-founded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions (acquired by Twitter). Garry is a builder at heart. We covered:

• Running YC like a founder
• Advice for founders
• Picking winners
• What changes because of AI
• YC being the “YC of hard tech”
• Public service

Timestamps: (0:00) Intro (0:25) Running YC like a founder (6:25) Focusing on growth and prosperity (12:40) Incredible pick rate (14:34) Role of the Group Partner (19:21) Lean vs fat startups (20:53) Archetypes of special founders (25:18) Rule changes because of AI (33:00) YC being the “YC of hard tech” (37:40) Community and political involvement Linktree: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod Twitter: https://x.com/jaltma Email: friends@uncappedpod.com

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Garry Tan

  guest

• Jack Altman

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Uncapped with Jack Altman, featuring Garry Tan and Jack Altman, Running Y Combinator Like a Founder | Garry Tan | Ep. 7 explores garry Tan on founder-mode leadership, YC strategy, AI, politics insights Tan describes taking a “zero-based accounting” approach to YC—pruning programs and decisions back to what would be built from scratch—while treating culture (who you hire/fire/promote) as the core lever.

🔗 RELATED EPISODES

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on The Case for Prediction Markets | Ep. 48

Concentrating in Winners | Vince Hankes, Partner at Thrive Capital | Ep. 27

Y Combinator in the Age of AI | Ep. 43

Inside the Mind of the Investor Who Backed Josh Kushner, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen | Ep. 34

Pixar’s Golden Age, Twitter through IPO, and Building YC’s Growth Fund | Ali Rowghani | Ep. 26

Anduril & Founders Fund’s Trae Stephens on Choosing Good Quests in the Age of AI | Ep. 35