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
Videos & Interviews
Connections
Jelani Nelson
In conversationTheoretical Computer Scientist, Anthropic; Professor, UC Berkeley (on leave)
At Berkeley's Newton Series the algorithms theorist sat down with the head of Y Combinator, and the two traced their acquaintance to Twitter, where Tan kept retweeting Nelson's posts about how high schools teach math. The conversation keeps returning there from both sides: Tan says that if his Fremont high school had scrapped its honors track freshman year, almost nothing in his life he is thankful for would have happened. An algorithms researcher and a maker of founders, agreeing that who gets to build is often decided in a ninth-grade math class. The conversation is on this site.
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Sam Altman
In conversationCEO, OpenAI
Tan and Altman worked together at Y Combinator, and in 2024 Tan rebooted YC's 'How To Build The Future' series by sitting Altman down to look back on it. Asked about his reputation for being formidable, Altman put it more plainly: he simply did not see why things had to be the way they were, and what YC gave him was a peer group who believed you could just do stuff. His advice was that no one is immune to peer pressure, so all you can do is pick good peers — a theory of how ambition spreads, told by two people who spent years in the same rooms.
youtube.com · x.com
Jensen Huang
In conversationFounder, President & CEO, NVIDIA
At YC's Startup School 2026 in Chase Center, Tan interviewed Huang on stage about how NVIDIA began: with the wrong technology, and with textbooks on 3D graphics bought after the money was raised. Huang's lesson was that so long as you can confront reality and keep learning, the technology itself doesn't matter. His advice to a room of founders is a small psychology of starting: tell yourself 'how hard can it be?', and let the suffering come to you a little at a time.
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