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

and if you can get Keith Rabois to invest in your startup, you should do a fat startup.

Yeah, exactly.

And, you know, and a few other of our friends, obviously. Like, if Elad will do it, like, if Elad, you know, there-- we, we sort of know all the people who can and will do it.

Yeah.

And, like, if they want you to do a fat startup, you should do a fat startup with them.

[upbeat music] All right, Garry, thank you so much for doing this. It's great to be here. I appreciate you making time for it.

Jack, thanks a lot for having me.

Yeah, I know you're super busy, and, um, I'm really excited to have this conversation. Um, you're now, I think, two years into running YC. Is that, that, that's about right? And you've really been running it like a founder, uh, from my perspective, and I kinda wanna start by getting inside your own mentality, and what's the headspace that's let you do that? 'Cause you've made a lot of changes that I think have been really good, that have broadly been received as really good, but that were not easy to do. I think you've done a lot of stuff that, um, has required the confidence of a founder, and you've acted like that. So can you talk a little bit about what headspace you came into when you started running YC?

Definitely. I mean, the great thing about YC is that, um, we're, we, we need to go zero-based accounting. So literally, uh, if we were, you know, starting YC from scratch again, all the things that we would add, you know, we would add in that moment, like, we're keeping those things. Um, and that's, like, a very freeing thing to actually have the people who support you and, like, are your board. You know, for them to say that is just... You just have, you know, sort of not totally carte blanche, but you have, like, as close to it as you could, while not being, like, directly the owner of the thing.

When you had that conversation and you're thinking zero-based accounting for YC, like, what is, what is order of business number one? Like, what must be true first order of business for you, for YC to thrive and be what you want it to be?

I mean, I guess from an abstract standpoint, um, 'cause there are lots of specifics that I don't want to get into [chuckles] but, um, from the most abstract standpoint, like, I view YC as this, like, tree of prosperity. And then, um, you know, like it or not, every organization in the world, uh, no matter how dominant, could use, uh, a little bit of pruning. Like, this is a garden, and, uh, in order for... You know, if you have fruit trees in your backyard-

Right

... you know that, uh, in order to actually have a good bloom, you know, sort of a good crop coming out of your fruit trees, you've got to do all this pruning, you know, months or sometimes, you know, in the years in advance of that.