Garry Tan
President & CEO, Y Combinator
About
Garry Tan is a venture capitalist and the President and CEO of Y Combinator, the startup accelerator behind companies like Airbnb, Stripe, and OpenAI's earliest cohorts of founders. Born in Canada to immigrant parents and raised in Fremont, California, he studied Computer Systems Engineering at Stanford, worked at Microsoft, and became the tenth employee at Palantir Technologies. He co-founded the blogging platform Posterous (acquired by Twitter in 2012), joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011, and co-founded Initialized Capital, where he wrote Coinbase's first seed check. Since taking the helm of YC in January 2023, he has steered the accelerator decisively into the AI era, with a majority of recent batches building on large language models.
Key Contributions
- Leads Y Combinator as President & CEO since January 2023, steering the world's most influential startup accelerator into the AI-native era
- Co-founded Initialized Capital and made early bets on Coinbase (first seed check, 2012), Instacart, and Flexport
- Co-founded Posterous, a pioneering blogging platform acquired by Twitter in 2012
- Tenth employee at Palantir Technologies, where he worked as an early designer and engineer
- Built one of tech's most-followed founder-education channels on YouTube, translating startup strategy and design thinking for millions
