San Francisco, California, United States
President & CEO of Y Combinator. Y Combinator funds hundreds of companies per year via web-based application and has an acceptance rate of less than 1%, lower than any other selective process of its kind. YC has funded 90 companies worth a billion dollars or more, each at the earliest possible stage (usually a few people even before launch), and about 10 to 20 companies per year that go through the program will go on to product market fit and become a Unicorn. Over $800B in market value has been created so far, and counting. Before becoming CEO, I was a partner at YC 2011-2015 and built major software including Bookface and Demo Day realtime video. I'm a designer, PM & engineer turned investor and helper to startups. Subscribe to my YouTube channel at youtube.com/garrytan Founder, board partner and advisor at Initialized Capital, an early stage venture capital fund that was earliest in Coinbase and Instacart. Previously managing partner where we grew it to $3.2B in assets under management and startups worth more than $200 billion in market value in 10 years. Forbes Midas List Top 100 Global VC 2019-2023, last at #6 in the world before returning to YC. Before that, I cofounded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions. (Acquired by Twitter) I also cofounded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant finance analysis platform, and designed the current Palantir logo and wordmark. I love building things. Specialties: user-centered design, project management, software engineering, interaction design, visual design, entrepreneurship, bootstrapping, branding, design, technical architecture, scaling
501c4 news, commentary and online community for common sense politics
Lead investor in early stage startups. Was early (pre-seed, seed, Series A) investor in founders who have created more than $200B in market value in 9 years. We are a team of partners with deep expertise in product, engineering, marketing and design, with a fully institutional LP base and over $3.2B in assets under management. Investments include Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Instacart, OpenDoor (NASDAQ: OPEN), Flexport, Cruise Automation (acq by GM), Plangrid (acq by Autodesk), Rippling, Patreon, Bison Trails (acq by Coinbase), HelloSign (acq by Dropbox), EasyPost, Flock Safety, Envoy, Blend Labs (NYSE: BLND), Color Genomics, Ridecell, Lever (acq by Employ), Sift, Lob, Heap, Torch.io, Athelas, Drip Capital, Paperspace (acq by Digital Ocean), Empower Financial, Clipboard Health and many more. Hands-on help with product design, strategy, interaction design, visual design, and hiring.
Easy, simple blogs for $5/mo forever. This is a replacement for Posterous.com, but now one that we intend to charge money for, and keep online for as long as possible. We needed a replacement, and other people do too.
Helped over 700 YC startups over the past 5 years (10 batches) build tomorrow's world-changing companies. Previously designer-in-residence. Wrote key software at YC, including the internal alumni social network and forum Bookface (used by 1 in 3 YC alums every day) and the Demo Day website with realtime video updates.