No Priors Ep 66 | With Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan

(instrumental music plays) So today on Underpriors, we're very lucky to have Garry Tan. Garry is currently the CEO... Is that- is that the right title?

Yeah. President and CEO-

The- the president and CEO of Y Combinator. Prior to that, he ran Initialized, a early stage venture fund. He started Posterous, which was acquired by Twitter, and has had a storied career working at a variety of Silicon Valley companies, including Palantir and others. Thank you so much for joining us today, Garry.

Thanks for having me. Well, this is gonna be our, uh, our first collabo e- episode. So part one on this podcast, part two, uh, over at the Garry Tan YouTube channel. So, thanks for having me. Thanks for doing the collab.

Super excited about it. Love to work with, like, a real creator. Um, okay, let's start with, like, you obviously need no introduction but people wanna know the story, like, how'd you go from being a founder to an investor at Y Combinator?

I think, uh, Paul Graham basically took a chance on me as a founder, and then later I got burnt out and, uh... Well, YC itself I like to think of as... You know, today people sort of look at it as this sort of institution, it's sort of the defining place where people wanna start their billion dollar companies. But I feel like in 2008 when I first found out- found out about it, it was a little bit more like, uh, you know, a punk club in the '90s in Seattle and, you know, sort of grunge was just getting started or something (laughs) . Like- like, these things are basically subcultures, and, uh, they sort of start off of the internet. And so one of the reasons why Y Combinator was so dominant and, you know, start- e- even had its chance to start was that, uh, Paul Graham's essays for, you know, sort of time immemorial, you know, from his experience creating Yahoo Stores, um, that he would write these essays that basically spoke to the experience of trying to start a company at that moment. So when you go around sort- sort of the legends of, uh, you know, YC, whether it's, you know, Patrick Collison at Stripe or, uh, my buddy Harj who I work with who co-founded a company with Patrick, um, you know, lots of people. Even me. I mean, I basically found out about starting a startup, uh, you know, from the news. Like, that suddenly, hey, there's this person who could sit in front of a computer, create software that could then touch a billion people, and was like, "Oh, it's, like, perfect mimesis." You're like, "Oh, I- I want that. How do I do it?" And then you go into Google and you type in, "Start a startup," and, uh, you find Paul Graham's essays (laughs) . And then increasingly they're finding this pod, and they're finding my YouTube channel, and they're finding the Y Combinator YouTube channel, and, uh, you know, I think all of that is sort of the direction we're going in. But that's how it started. It was like literally starting a company was a very strange thing. Like, when all of us came into tech that was, I- I think, more true. Today, I think it's something that a lot more people aspire to, and that's a really, really good thing, and that's sort of what we want.