How YC's Garry Tan Evaluates Startups | Episode 3 of the Investor + Operator Podcast

00:00:02 - Sterling Snow

When we think about the podcast, we're talking to folks who are investors and folks who are operators and folks who are both. And Gary is on the Mount Rushmore of both. He was a founder that went went through the highs and the lows and an exit. He raised a $3 billion AUM across multiple funds. He is the CEO of Y Combinator, where basically you are a factory and an institution to go from zero to one. So Gary has maybe more firsthand knowledge of the early stage journey that go through and early stage investors go through than maybe anybody.

00:00:46 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, we think about what makes a good guest. There's a couple of factors. One is are they like approachable and easy to talk to conversational? Gary's a ten out of ten there. And then two is do they have some strong opinions? And then three is do they actually have advice and practical learnings that our listeners can take away. And so the hope is that Gary checks all those boxes and we think you'll love the conversation. Funny enough, we're lucky to be in Gary's house in San Francisco. He's a very kind guy to invite us into his home and it was a great conversation and hope you guys all enjoy it.

00:01:18 - Sterling Snow

We're just going to jump into it. We did want to start by going back for folks who don't know your career and how you got here. So we want to go all the way back to Palantir, employee number ten at Palantir. Tell us a little bit about what that experience was like.

00:01:32 - Garry Tan

Absolutely. I guess I almost have to start a little bit earlier in that I grew up in the Bay, so just being in the sort of shadow of tech meant that I was just really excited that technology could go out know, computer technology. And then suddenly the Internet was something that I knew that literally the engineers and the people who were building it, they were our neighbors and it was just all happening in Cupertino or I grew up in Know, it was happening in our backyard. That technology that could touch a billion people and would remake society was being made in our backyard. And so being able to go to Stanford, study computer engineering, that was a real blessing to me. I actually didn't expect to even be able to get in at the time. Weirdly, because, you know, a Chinese American kid growing up in the Bay Area wanting to study computer science, that's not really that diverse. Honestly, I thought I had no shot, but I felt pretty lucky to get into Stanford. And then friends of mine were in my fraternity at Stanford and it was Joe Lansdale and Stefan Cohen, two of the co founders of Palantir. So I had gone up to Microsoft for a couple years to work as an engineer and they said, Gary, we're starting a company. Could you come and join us? And the person who was bankrolling it and sort of starting it with them was Peter Thiel, who today he's sort of this to me even he is like this incredible person who's brought together capital and puts companies together. But what's funny that's sort of lost to the sands of time in some ways is that he himself was an entrepreneur and is an entrepreneur. He had just sold PayPal today. He's sort of billionaire loved and hated. But back then he was a very successful Stanford alum founder and he was putting his own money to start this company. And my friends told me, hey, you should come join us. And I said, Guys, I have health insurance and I have a job. I might get promoted.

00:03:53 - Tyler Hogge

Soft, right? You're at Microsoft?

00:03:54 - Garry Tan

Yeah, this is Microsoft in 2003. I'd been building Web technology for years and I guess as an example of one of the things that I stopped believing in and I shouldn't have, I actually thought that the Web was dead in 2003. Web 1.0 had boomed and busted. I actually really wanted to work at a startup coming out of college in 2003, but there were none really. It was a very different time. That whole generation of really good engineers ended up going to work at Microsoft and some of the bigger companies back then. And yeah, Peter Thiel and Joe and Stefan took me out to dinner and they flew me back from Seattle to have dinner with Peter at I think he had a new French restaurant called Friezon. It was a bad restaurant, actually. It was not that good. I think the funny thing though is Peter was so certain that the power of engineers and product people was just so intense that he said, gary, I'm so sure this is the right thing. Why don't I write a personal check for you? Like, how much a year do you make at Microsoft? And I told him it was, I think, $72,000. And he wrote the check and said, you can cash this right now. Quit your job. And I should have waited until after the end of the dinner to say no because we were kind of staring into our soup after that. And I went back to Microsoft and I did get promoted from level 59 to level 60 as a program manager. But my friends just started working on code and working on demos, trying to sell the V one of Palantir. And about a year later they got one of our mutual really close friends, Bob McGrew, to quit his PhD in computer science. And I said, oh, I made a horrible mistake. And they had already started hiring some of the smartest people we all mutually knew. And I came down for, I think, a wedding for one of our friends. And I toured the office and they said, you should quit now. Like, we're going to start the financial analysis side of Palantir. And you could run it. And I said, you know what? I guess sometimes opportunity does knock twice. And I quit my job the next day and moved back to the Bay Area.

00:06:19 - Sterling Snow

Gary, was that first meeting with Peter in the check, was that a co founder opportunity?

00:06:25 - Garry Tan

Yeah. And I said no to that. And in retrospect, I think they offered me like, 1% of the company. And in retrospect, I probably could have gotten maybe five times as much. And I have a video on YouTube that was my first viral video. My 200 million dollar mistake. I think if we update it to current public valuation, maybe it's 400 million. And then if we include the idea that I could have co founded it, that probably would have been easily multi billion dollar mistake. Absolutely. Yeah.

00:07:01 - Tyler Hogge

So you're at Palantir. How long did you spend there? How many years?

00:07:05 - Garry Tan

Oh, two years only. So I have this thing in me which I've learned over time where that's from, but I'm prone to rage quitting. So you rage quit when I was younger. Joe Lonsdale is a friend of, you know, sometimes hard to work.

00:07:24 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, founders are like that.

00:07:26 - Garry Tan

Yeah.

00:07:26 - Tyler Hogge

And did you know you wanted to become a founder and decided, what's the story of how you leave to go start your own thing? Because after that was postress, right?

00:07:34 - Garry Tan

Yeah, that's right. Actually, in between. So I rage quit Palantir, which was very interesting because Palantir is itself a very strong religion of a sort. We believe X, nobody else believes that. And that's the Peter Till quote of.

00:07:52 - Tyler Hogge

Cults make the best startups. Right.

00:07:54 - Garry Tan

I totally see it. And if anything, what we try to do now at Y Combinator is try to teach that next generation that these are sort of the ways to take capital and turn it into great value. It actually passes through, giving people an incredible amount of meaning. So the most interesting thing about leaving something that has such a strong culture is becoming an apostate.

00:08:17 - Tyler Hogge

Now you're an enemy.

00:08:18 - Garry Tan

Yeah, that's right. Which was painful. But on the other hand, even then, I really had a clear idea that, you know what, I probably shouldn't be going back and hanging out with my friends at Palantir that much. It's important for them to close rank and then be able to march forward with the mission. And I'm glad they did it. Right. I'm also very glad for the concept of equity.

00:08:44 - Tyler Hogge

Absolutely. So how did you know you wanted to be a founder? You started a Microsoft level 60. Then you take an early stage bet at Palantir, but then you take the ultimate bet of I'm going to be a founder, and got into YC. Was it YC that got you over the edge? Or how did you make that leap?

00:09:00 - Garry Tan

Yeah, a friend of mine named Chinawal We're, another fraternity brother of mine from Stanford, actually. We actually just were hanging out and he was already working on this little piece of code that he used with his personal blog. So you could take any photo and just email it, and it would parse the email and turn it into a beautiful photo gallery. And it worked, I think, with WordPress. It was like this Java app that ran on a server, and I built the Rails piece of that.

00:09:31 - Garry Tan

So instead of posting to a WordPress, it would post our own blog platform and we called it Posterous. It was like preposterous without the pre. And it was really a sort of weekend project, actually. We didn't know if it could be a business. It even sort of seemed like a potentially bad idea to try to start social software in 2008. But in retrospect, it was actually a really good time because the iPhone was brand new.

00:10:02 - Garry Tan

The App Store had not had any really great apps for posting photos from iPhones yet, and that was actually really the reason why we could grow very quickly. And when I think about that time, I just think it's very fascinating how much it was just we were builders building things for ourselves and it was a toy, and we didn't even know if this could be a business or not. And yet now, with hindsight, we can look back on it and say, if you were going to create social software that could set the world on fire, that was actually an incredible time.

00:10:35 - Garry Tan

And that was why we grew ten X year on year. We did apply to Y Combinator and get in, and that allowed us to launch on TechCrunch. And I remember Michael Arrington left our launch post on TechCrunch all weekend. So we got something like 10,000, 20,000 users from that, and then 20,000 became 40,000, became hundreds of thousands, and we ended up building it into a top 200 website on the internet and sold it.

00:11:07 - Garry Tan

Right, yeah, and Twitter bought it later. And then the funniest thing is, there was a moment when it went sideways for us, and the maximum in Silicon Valley is that you shouldn't worry about competition. And I think one of the reasons why Postrus didn't become as big as what we wanted was because we maybe took that maxim a little bit too close to heart in two ways, especially having to do with competitors.

00:11:38 - Garry Tan

One, when we launched, Michael Arrington actually posted saying, posturus beats Tumblr in simplicity. And that frame was very interesting because it was Arrington's frame, it was very useful for us. But there are points at know what got you here won't get you there. And then the other time that sort of had to do with competitors, that was a real inflection point moment, was when Instagram launched and so lost to the sands of time. Posturis was actually one of the check marks next to Facebook, Foursquare, Twitter, and it was us, posturus. I think Tumblr was in there too, and basically Instagram would be able to post to posturis. And we were one of the networks that instagram knew it needed to sort of steal users from. And I remember when we launched, chris saka, one of our investors emailed us saying, hey, what do you guys think of instagram? And before I could answer, my co founder replied, it sucks.

00:12:41 - Garry Tan

And I was like, oh no. And then Chris replies one line answer like, I'm very disappointed in you guys, and of course you're in the fog of war, you never think about it again. But now I think about it often because that was the moment when posturus stopped growing. And I think that now as an investor and we're spending a lot of time with a lot of founders all of the time, one of the things that we're supposed to do is actually help people understand where they fit in the landscape.

00:13:13 - Garry Tan

Like Paul graham always talks about, there's a periodic table of startups and we're basically discovering new elements all the time. The best people to discover those next elements are actually the engineers and the builders. And all along we were thinking that we were trying to win the periodic table of startups with this blogging idea. But the real thing that was more present to hand, that we didn't even know about at the time, that we should have, was that a very dominant photo based social network that was built on top of the iPhone. That was a one time thing and that was like the thing that is the durable monopoly that now meta had to buy.

00:14:00 - Tyler Hogge

And are you saying, if I'm hearing you right, tell me if I'm wrong, that if you would have cared slightly more about the competitive landscape, you might have come up with this insight and potentially have built a better business than you did? And is that one of the lessons I'm hearing? I think taking that too far.

00:14:16 - Garry Tan

I think you have a fog of war. You don't know what's going to happen, but by default you're making, like it or not, you're making bets on what the future is and will be and what you want. We focus a lot on what we want the future to be, but at the same time being able to predict what that is is also very important. We certainly have control over what we believe the future will be, but we don't have control over necessarily what the future actually is. And the more predictive we can be, the better our decisions are along the way.

00:14:56 - Sterling Snow

So what are the actions you would have taken with the benefit of hindsight? What are the actual things you would have done differently?

00:15:04 - Garry Tan

What's interesting going back to, I think the role of investors today, I remember pitching benchmark and meeting Peter fenton for the series know, we had our hockey stick graph and we had really good retention, but not that great in retrospect. And he asked us one pointed was, you know, are you a platform or are you a network? So Instagram was a network, Squarespace was a platform. And so we had to choose. And instead of saying one or the other, me and my co founder looked at each other and we said both. And that was the wrong answer. Either of those paths, we could have tried to own the social network for photos and visual storytelling, or we could have charged money and been like WordPress or Squarespace and become really a great business. And we didn't choose either. And that was a mistake.

00:16:06 - Tyler Hogge

So the lesson might be, be deliberate about what path you're taking, would you say?

00:16:11 - Sterling Snow

And saying no? Saying something is saying yes to something else. And a lot of those learnings and.

00:16:17 - Garry Tan

What'S funny is embedded in that story is actually one of the biggest and most difficult questions that every startup faces now, especially in a time of high interest rates, which is do we try to be profitable or do we try to raise the next round?

00:16:34 - Tyler Hogge

What do you think about that, by the way? Let's ask that question right now and then we'll get into some more here. But profitability versus building to raise the next round, especially in this environment. What's your thoughts there?

00:16:45 - Garry Tan

I guess what's funny is it doesn't matter. It's actually what the founders need to look at it and say, well, I have a choice. And I think the dominant narrative, the dominant thing that people make a mistake around is that they say both, which is what we did. We said, well, we're kind of like a platform, but we're afraid to charge because if we charge money, that'll mess with our growth rate. And then on the flip side, if we become this network, we should probably be spending all of our time instead on network features instead of like customization and custom domains and things like that. So because we chose something in between, we sort of did both poorly and then we allowed our competitors to basically win in their respective spaces. And that's sort of recurring here. A lot of founders I meet, if you have a burn rate and you're not profitable, then you're trying to work backwards from your next round. But right now that next round is really, really like unless you're literally in AI and LLMs and computer vision or in a super hot space, you don't know if that next round is actually coming. And I think across the board from the past sort of few years, what we're seeing is founders have to make a to. Can you get to profitability or cash flow breakeven and then positive, and then can you grow out of cash flow? And then that increasingly depending on what happens with certainly relationships with China and inflationary versus deflationary effects at the macro level, we actually don't know. And the safest thing is try to get profitable makes sense.

00:18:42 - Sterling Snow

So if we're continuing along the journey, you are a founder and next is you start getting into investing, right? Your partner at YC at that point. What was the transition like from being in that fog of war startup founder mode to being a partner at YC?

00:19:01 - Garry Tan

Honestly, I was super burnt out and I think some of it, I had to realize over time, was my own doing. My co founder and I were friends now, but we actually stopped talking to each other for something like 810 years, which is pretty crazy. But that's like part for the course. For co founding relationships, it's like definitely like a marriage. You're just like lashed to the hip. And I think that was really, really painful. Basically, it was 2010. We were coming off of two and a half, two years straight of nonstop growth and then growth completely flatlined for lots of reasons. Some of it was instagram, some of it was I didn't hire enough engineers, so we had incredible technical debt by then. And then the tricky thing was how good the startup was going actually covered up a lot of flaws in my relationship with my co founder. I guess one of the recurring themes that I'm realizing is if you take the startup maxims and just apply them blindly, they will come and bite you in the butt later. One of them was, hey, you should have a really good relationship with your co founder. And I think my interpretation of it in 2009, 2010 was that, oh, I should be collaborative. If they say we should do X and I think we should do Y, maybe I'll water down Y a little bit, like by 50%, and then we'll compromise, which sounds very reasonable. And in a marriage that's like what you need to do. But in a co founding relationship, you're far better off actually just having the fight.

00:20:55 - Sterling Snow

Tyler and I talk about this a lot, and we say the best partnerships are the people that you enjoy disagreeing with the most. You enjoy arguing with the most because.

00:21:04 - Tyler Hogge

You know the relationship won't be harmed.

00:21:06 - Sterling Snow

And it gets heated and there are emotions and certainly but you have to enjoy that, going through that process with that person, because you're going to do it again and again and again.

00:21:14 - Garry Tan

That's totally right. So, yeah, I had a totally wrong misconception of how a co founding relationship should be and now I recognize how toxic that is. I ended up having a bit of a psychosomatic response at some point where I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat. I randomly break out in Fever and now when I look at it, I have a very overdeveloped prefrontal cortex. I can tell myself a narrative and force it to happen until my body revolted, actually. And so, luckily, Harch Tagger, who I work with at YC now, was one of the first outside partners at YC. He and Jessica Livingston and Paul Graham at YC were looking for a designer in residence and I was burning out.

00:22:05 - Tyler Hogge

So you weren't even investing to start. You were a designer in residence.

00:22:08 - Garry Tan

Exactly.

00:22:09 - Tyler Hogge

Okay.

00:22:09 - Garry Tan

Yeah. So for the first six months, honestly, I was licking my chops because I was like, oh, my startup is not going well. I had to resign, just even partially for health issues. I just couldn't go to work anymore. And then I thought, actually, that was a very interesting time because the other things I could have done I think Brian Chesky and Joe Gebia asked me to come and run special Projects for Airbnb early 2011. So that would have been fascinating. I think they just hit a billion dollars valuation then. Hard to believe, but 100 X from there, unbelievable. Hats off to that team Ben Silberman of Pinterest, I think they were about ten people at the time, and they said, hey, you should come head our design team. And so it was that or YC just felt like home to me. And I loved working with founders that early, so I think I got paid 20,000, $30,000 a year to just come. And it was supposed to be like a 1520 hours a week contract just for me to recuperate from my startup. And instead, it just sort of consumed me in a different way, just because being that close to the metal with so many founders, it just really lit me up in a way that even those other jobs might not have. Honestly, I learned a lot. And then that was also a very special time in YC's history, because today people look back and say, oh, YC was inevitable. It's an institution. It is early stage startups personified. It's the most concentrated form of Silicon Valley. But at the time, it was still sort of this fringe thing. Like, engineers knew about it, but it wasn't something that the world knew about.

00:24:04 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah. All right, so I want to get into some practical advice you have for founders, but let's round out the story real quick. So we got to cover initialized, and then we have to cover coming back to YC in the next five or ten minutes.

00:24:17 - Garry Tan

No worries. Yeah.

00:24:19 - Tyler Hogge

So you go and start a fund, a firm, not just a fund with your co founder, and it's a big firm, a big fund, and then you leave to come to YC. We want to know about initialize, and then we want to know about the decision to leave and how hard it was, how easy it was, as many details as you want to share. And we'll have some follow ups there, but talk about that. So you start a firm with your friend and then you leave it. What's the story there?

00:24:45 - Garry Tan

Yeah, let's see. So fast forward a little bit. I basically learned how to invest by just being in the loop on Y Combinator. So we would read thousands. I think the most number of applications I ever read in an application cycle was about 1000, which is wild because I don't think that there's another place in the world where you end up seeing that many different types of people and that many different types of ideas.

00:25:15 - Sterling Snow

Getting those reps in is incredible.

00:25:17 - Garry Tan

Yeah, and I really look in that and say that really helped me so much. I mean, if I worked at a VC firm, I think in 2010 or 2011, I got an offer to be an eir at one of our VC firms and I went saying no to that one. Well, I mean, it sounded like pretty cool. And then actually, I think I was working at YC at the time and Jessica was like, what? You want to be an eir? That's so lame. And I was like, oh yeah. I mean, I didn't really understand it at the time, but obviously with many years since then, I think there's something incredibly special about being able to see just an open web form to see how VC broadly is done outside of YC. It's kind of hard to do it. Who gets to raise money? It's certain people who went to certain schools, who worked at certain places. I sort of get why that is. I mean, we have a finite number of people who we could trust. We're like a speck of dust in this world. We're just like here and then we're gone. And for any individual, or even set of individuals to see the breadth of what is possible, you just never do it as a VC. Even leaving YC and then becoming a VC, it was sort of amazing how different it was. Like, how many deals could you really investigate and prosecute in a given year? Like dozens. And you can't see the full breadth. And the really cool thing about YC was that it was always totally generalist. And it really taught me that really looking at the best possible founders, there's a way that they look at problems, there's a way that they have certain values around how they approach people, how they approach ideas, how they overcome struggle or solve problems. That's the part that is actually extremely high leverage. And I think YC has been able to create a process for that that I have never seen it replicated. And I'm not sure if it will be.

00:27:31 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, it seems like there's no one else that can really have the breadth of startups in a generalist way. And like you said, a thousand applications that you're seeing in every cycle. So why did you leave that to go start your own firm?

00:27:42 - Garry Tan

Well, Sam Altman took over and at some point I said, you know what, YC is the institution. And then I guess for parallelism's sake, I could say it was a rage quit, but it was more like rage quitting.

00:27:59 - Sterling Snow

We're waiting for it.

00:28:00 - Garry Tan

It could have been a rage quit. But what's lucky is by then I had really good therapy and I had really good exec coaching. And then honestly, there were just so many things I didn't know as a founder or as an early engineer, product manager that I wish I knew. And it wasn't out there. It was actually inside me. Like all these things about my cultural heritage as a Chinese American child of immigrants, all these things about I'm the adult child of alcoholics, which if your parents were alcoholic, that's something that a lot of people sort of hide and don't want to talk about. It's unpleasant. But one of the things I encourage everyone watching right now to do is go online and look up adverse childhood experiences. The ace score. And if you have a really high Ace score, get therapy. Seriously. That's something that helped me incredibly deeply and it allowed me to be a much better leader. And a lot of the mistakes I made earlier, they were sort of knee jerk. That was why in end of 2010, I had to quit my job. I mean, the startup that I started, right, I could not deal. And it was because I wasn't integrating all of these other things that were happening. And if I fast forward to today, I now really understand why when we're working with founders all the time, when you have sort of an uncontrollable reaction or you shout at someone or you react in a certain way in a certain setting that you're like, where did that come from? You can sort of pull on that thread and instead of sort of fighting it, the path is actually to sort of integrate that.

00:29:56 - Sterling Snow

So Gary, let's start with Product Market Fit. How do people most effectively go about trying to find it? What are the things that they're doing that you notice are sort of predeterminant of success?

00:30:11 - Garry Tan

Yeah.

00:30:11 - Tyler Hogge

You're meeting with people before they find it often and what have you noticed that the ones who find it, what do they do?

00:30:17 - Garry Tan

Feels like there's sort of two different types. Sometimes people come in with incredibly special talents or some sort of special insight and they're just right. I mean, I think of Brian Armstrong with Coinbase or Apurvameta with Parker with Rippling.

00:30:35 - Tyler Hogge

He just knew it.

00:30:35 - Garry Tan

Yeah. And often those are like the biggest outcomes. And then there's this other type that I think sometimes, and this is maybe more common people approach starting a startup because of the lore, because of the community, because of sort know, mimesis, just like memetic, desire realizing like, oh, growing up, I really looked up to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs social network.

00:31:04 - Sterling Snow

So they don't have the insight, they just have the desire to build startup.

00:31:08 - Garry Tan

And then that's quite common. And then the only way those people sort of transform from the bad version of this sort of looks like you're mailing in a book report, right? Sometimes like really bad pitches look like that you're taking a pitch and they're walking you through their deck, but. It sort of sounds like a book report in college or high school or something like that. It sounds like they're saying the right things.

00:31:40 - Tyler Hogge

Boring. Recite it all.

00:31:42 - Garry Tan

They're reciting it right. And they're sort of hoping for the B.

00:31:45 - Sterling Snow

We call that you're trying to MBA your way into a startup.

00:31:49 - Garry Tan

Yeah, into an insight. And I think the hard thing for people to remember is that a B is an F in startups.

00:31:58 - Tyler Hogge

Pretty binary.

00:32:00 - Garry Tan

Basically it's either an A plus or an F. And I think that's hard because everything else in society, everything about our upbringing, our school, by college, by the professional world, whether you're coming up through law or business or engineering, there's these rungs society is sort of built as a tournament. And then the thing to realize is for startups and finding product market fit, there's no tournament. It's just literally either you found it or not.

00:32:34 - Tyler Hogge

So I'm hearing you right. Tell me if I'm wrong here. So ideally they've got an insight and that insight was right, but the majority may think they have an insight, but they're doing this memetic thing and trying to be a startup. Talk to those folks. Do they ever find an insight? How do they do it?

00:32:51 - Sterling Snow

What actions are they taking?

00:32:53 - Garry Tan

I guess the best example I can think of is actually Wee Deng at Clipboard Health. So she did YC, she came out and actually lost her technical co founder immediately. They were doing basically indeed resume posting marketplace app for nurses. And there are many marketplaces, there are many things for nurses. It was pretty undifferentiated for a good number of years. And then the way that she went from sort of that to actually product market fit was that she started spending a lot more time with a certain segment of people. So she discovered skilled nursing facilities and convalescent homes. Funny enough, my mom growing up, she was a CNA at a convalescent home and kind of as a latchkey kid, I remember picking up the phone growing up and it would always be the director of nursing at her work, being like, hey, can your mom work tonight? Because we had a cancellation. And so it was like, interestingly. One of those things that I had heard about and it was YC, company that we had already funded initialized at the seed. And then when she came in and said, well, I started spending time with this particular type of skilled nursing facility and discovered they were spending a lot of money on one off consulting sorry, one off agencies. So there would be these staffing agencies that would like just there would be these staffing agencies that literally opened up the book and started calling people to try to fill these shifts and basically software hadn't touched that yet. And it was because you can think of all the world of people who are good builders, engineers, product people, designers, and then way over here, large parts of the economy that have never seen software, period. And then basically where they touch is like the billion or ten or 100 billion dollar idea. And those are actually out there all the time. And so I think that's what happened. We started spending time in these particular types of skilled nursing facilities, realized that there was no software there, built a version of it, and it was very sticky. And now they've built something that's making nine figures in revenue on this incredible trajectory. And it started as something that was not that different than a oh, well, indeed. Already does this. I want to do this 10% better. And then she was able to find a place, we call it a thin edge of the wedge, where literally like ten x or 100 x better.

00:35:37 - Tyler Hogge

Do you think the insight there is? If you're not sure whether the actual insight is groundbreaking, go find the most desperate customer, which is what you're calling thin edge of the wedge, narrowing that.

00:35:49 - Sterling Snow

Focus instead of being a broad.

00:35:53 - Tyler Hogge

This is very close to the first episode we had with Andy Ratcliffe talked about find desperation, because only when you find that will it spread.

00:36:00 - Garry Tan

That's right. Yeah. It's not a, oh, that'd be nice. Or the hardest thing about everyone says, go talk to your users. And then by and large, users are very nice. And they're humans. You're sitting across from a human. Humans, like, by default nature, want to help someone and make them succeed. And the trickiest thing is, without feeling something, without an actual action, everyone's going to say, that sounds like something that.

00:36:31 - Sterling Snow

They'Re lying to you. Until they're paying for something or changing a behavior that they would only do out of self interest. They're lying to you.

00:36:38 - Garry Tan

Exactly.

00:36:39 - Sterling Snow

That feedback is worthless, which is hard.

00:36:41 - Garry Tan

And we want to be lied to.

00:36:43 - Tyler Hogge

As founders, we love it. Happy years.

00:36:45 - Garry Tan

Yeah.

00:36:46 - Tyler Hogge

All right, so lesson one is, all right, find the thin edge of the wedge. If you haven't found the insight yet, if you're not there, what else do you notice about founders who go on to find product market fit? How about them individually? Are they of a certain demeanor?

00:37:00 - Sterling Snow

How do their brains work? How do they approach?

00:37:02 - Tyler Hogge

Are they more intense than other founders? I don't know. What do you notice about the founder themselves?

00:37:09 - Garry Tan

I guess what's funny is it's incredible how plain spoken they are. Let's see, being a truly great communicator helps so much by being and the reason why. Let's see. I think one thing that's kind of funny do you guys know the meme, the Midwit meme, there's like 75 IQ, and then there's like the Midwit at 100 to 110 and then 150 IQ. The genius. And like it or not, things that look 75 IQ often are 150 IQ. Actually, I think there's a reason for it. The through line is actually that really great founders are able to communicate in very, very few words. These incredibly complex ideas. And at the core of a complex idea that's a breakthrough is actually something that is so obvious, actually. And that's the 75 IQ part. So I think what ends up happening is that when you're pitching and the reality is a founder is sort of the prime mover. So they have to go and have that conversation with absolutely everyone all of the time. Closing a customer, closing a candidate to work for them, closing money, those are the three sort of fundamental things that a founder has to do. Nobody else really can do that. Everyone sort of thinks that you can hire someone to do those things. And well, after Product Market Fit, that's possible when it's sort of unstoppable. But at the beginning, you're the one who has to explain to people like, no, you should trust me. I know you only have your 40 hours work week, please spend 3 hours of that with me on this speculative thing that will get you a ten X result. And you have to be able to say that in a minute or less, when people emphasize the elevator pitch, it's that, that pitch, that core idea, the thing that we believe, that nobody else believes, you actually have to breathe that into other people to actually even manifest the product, the service, like the company. And so really clear communication. Sometimes people are saying incredibly, 75 IQ things, but at the core of it, when it really works, it's actually the 150 IQ thing.

00:39:31 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, that's brilliant. So you got the thin edge of the wedge and you've got the clear communication that touches everything. Everything from customers, to investors, to people you're trying to recruit. I love that when you think about once they find it, once they find Product Market Fit, you called it unstoppable. What are mistakes that you've seen people make that actually stop the growth, stop the product Market Fit? How do people screw it up?

00:40:03 - Garry Tan

I mean, I can speak from my own experience. I think the hardest thing for people who view themselves as nice is that actually you have, you do have to hold people to account. And I feel like I always really relied on design or engineering or like brute forcing it myself. And then I have now come to the realization that past the zero to one point, the CEO or the leader actually has to hold people to account. And it's almost binary. Like either they, you know, you read about it before, you know, when you're trying to figure out how to be a leader, you read that who gets fired and who gets hired, who gets promoted. That's your real culture. But you don't really understand it until here are two very well meaning people. One person does it like X and one person does it like Y. And who you choose? And you have to choose. You can't just be like it's both the easy way out is. And frankly, if you look at big tech, that's what big tech is doing. Let's do both, right? We're overflowing on net revenue. It's unlimited amount of cash. We don't have to make hard choices anymore. Let's do both. We'll do it all. And then, unfortunately, that's death to culture, because sometimes there are, like, win win scenarios, and you want to find that as much as possible, but more often than not, everyone's watching. Which camp do you choose? It's like, that meme inside everyone. There are two wolves, and which one do you actually feed? That's how it works in the organization.

00:41:57 - Sterling Snow

Is there a right culture for these startups to succeed, or is it just important that you have one that is very unique and authentic to the mission that you're on? Or do you see no, like, 80% of the time, the culture tends to look fairly similarly, and this is what it is.

00:42:14 - Garry Tan

I think the culture, like it or not, especially for founders, it just radiates out from the founders themselves, and you'll find that in organizations all the time, basically, these days. I'm starting to realize, basically being CEO is a lot like having power armor. You got to be careful. With great power comes great responsibility around that.

00:42:37 - Tyler Hogge

So it's just a natural result of the CEO. But are there common things that you've.

00:42:41 - Sterling Snow

Seen with CEOs who have great cultures, like their traits? I'm sure there's some interesting ones.

00:42:48 - Garry Tan

I guess my favorite one these days is if you watch Brian Chesky's speeches, which I highly recommend. I think you did a great one about design and product management at the last conference. You're sort of seeing apex leader at the apex of if anything, I hope it's not the apex. I think they're still just getting started. Of all the companies in the world, I think airbnb is probably one of the ones that could still ten x, which is kind of wild. I mean, mainly because you look at the amount of supply in the world, I think a small percentage of space is available on Airbnb right now, and there could be still a hundred x in that, actually wildly. And if you really examine what Brian's been talking about lately, it's actually that the leader and this is very hard, has to be relatively unapologetic about who they are, what they stand for, and then in order to have a strong know, they have to actually not pull their punch.

00:43:52 - Sterling Snow

I think that's a big one. A lot of times there's rough edges on these individuals who believe they can light the world on fire. And I think for a long time, when things were a little easier in startups, it was about trimming off those rough edges and making you more palatable to a larger group of people. But really what makes them special is the rough edges. The rough edges, and then they resonate with a very small group of people. But it's the right people. So you talk about Palantir being a religion and every startup being a cult and things like. So I think that point about founders needing to be authentic that you're talking about, it's a big deal and it's showing its teeth more now because survival depends on it for these companies.

00:44:36 - Garry Tan

Yeah. And the hard part now, especially now, is that I'm starting to realize how different that is than what it takes to get up into an organization. Right. And that's probably one of the most weird paradoxes of venture capital. It's like large amounts of especially early stage venture capital is very resume based. It's like, oh, if you were employee number X at this company and your resume says that you like ten x revenue, maybe you did, maybe you didn't, but here's large amounts of very early stage capital for those people. I'm not saying often they're right, often these are the exact right people, but they have to learn to exercise a totally different way of being. And being in organizations is totally different than being the founder and CEO.

00:45:31 - Sterling Snow

Totally.

00:45:32 - Tyler Hogge

Gary one part of the YC product that founders seem to really love is these office hours. They sit down with you or with Paul or with their group lead and it feels like they're able to get answers that they couldn't get without them. So founders are listening to this. What are those office hours like? What are the type of things you're teaching founders most commonly? What are the biggest topics you cover, biggest lessons that you've had to feels like you repeat most commonly in those office hours that we could give to everyone listening today, gary's going to say.

00:46:02 - Sterling Snow

Apply to YC and find out.

00:46:03 - Garry Tan

Yeah, that's mean. It's sort of simple, I think. Let me put it a different every. There's a Jay Z line like everybody want to tell you how to do it.

00:46:16 - Tyler Hogge

They never did it.

00:46:17 - Garry Tan

Yeah. So I think that that's the trickiest thing. I kind of get it. It's fun to work with startups and thinking about ideas is super fun. And then what you sort of want is people who have had to do all the hard, terrible things and made the wrong choice. And then largely that's what I try to do in office hours. It's like, what's the 75 IQ thing? The funniest thing is, and you see this in startup land all the time, there's sort of like the ritual and then there's the gem and it's like, ideally in office hours we're mainly talking about the gems, like what is actually happening and how do we fix it? And then the ideal sort of office hours for me is I don't want to hear sort of the 20 minutes explanation for why something failed that matters in a big company. It basically doesn't matter at all inside a startup. Startups fail for all sorts of reasons. One of the things Michael Seibel says at the beginning of the batch that has really resonated for me is do not try to be the median startup at YC. If you're the median startup, you fail. If you're the average startup, it's pretty good, but it's because the average is like all in the power law. Like the the, you know, the top end of that like brings up it like creates all the value. So you have to be a superlative startup and then most office hours are actually trying to break down. What are the 10,000 landmines that kill companies? I think the first one, I mean, I actually did this analysis recently on having funded sort of hundreds and hundreds of startups and I made a spreadsheet of all the startups that I worked with since 2012. And then I think the number one thing was always just not making a thing people actually wanted. And it's like in all the lies, like we want to be lied to. We want to feel like in fact, it's extra hard for the leader because the leader raised this money, the leader hired all these people. In our social situations, we have to spend all of our time like, hey, let's keep rallying around this thing.

00:48:26 - Sterling Snow

You have to have this relentless optimism to even start on the journey and to keep people engaged and involved. But you also have to have this almost cynical view that until somebody's paying or going through pain, they're just lying and you're just searching for truth and you're super skeptical. What's that phrase that when somebody tells you something you want to hear, be skeptical. When someone tells you something you don't want to hear, you should probably pay attention. It kind of feels like the best founders have that.

00:48:57 - Garry Tan

Yeah, good to great. There's a Collins book has the stockdale paradox and I think about that all the time. And if anything, I'm always just trying to I'm basically of two modes in office hours. Either people need to believe in their idea more so they can actually get customers and hire and raise money, or they need to be much more aware of the thing that's about to kill them.

00:49:19 - Sterling Snow

How do you think about valuations today? Again, there's certainly been a shift. So what's your advice to folks as they think about raising money, if they have the opportunity to do so? How to think about pricing things?

00:49:34 - Garry Tan

Yeah, that's a great question. What's funny is if we're a YC company, I'd say go talk to your group partner. Barring that, fundraising is almost like a roll of the die these days. I think it was a lot easier in 2021 and it's really hard now. And then all you can really do is try to stack the ODS in your favor. So have trusted advisors, spend time with them, try to really hone what do we believe that nobody else believes and then come at it with evidence. Really? Like this is why we know this is great. And then you need to have a hypothesis that is truly huge. That was actually one of the more crazy things to realize. Again, so many people come over from school, from academia, from business, and in those realms, there is a B plus. Right? The B plus will get you someplace. It lets you feed your family, you get promoted. Good things happen in startups. The B plus is an F, and you're dead. It's as if you never did any of those things right. And so that's probably the trickiest thing.

00:50:52 - Tyler Hogge

So we've probably got five or ten more minutes, and I know you've got another meeting. Gary, let's wrap up with a couple of thoughts that you may have about the future. One is the future of SF. You're fighting for it, man. You're in the trenches on Twitter X every day, fighting for SF. As an outsider, if I didn't know anything about you or your background, I would say, oh, this guy's not a YC CEO. He's an SF fighter, he's a community leader. Why are you spending so much time on that? Why is that important to the future of YC or you or anything?

00:51:25 - Garry Tan

Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, the high level here is that I just want more startups to actually succeed. And my experience over and over again is when a company decides not to maximize their ability to be the A plus company, they fail. And so, on the one hand, I really want there to be super vibrant startup communities everywhere in the world. And then on the flip side, for the individual founder and founding team, I still think being next to all of the greatest companies and the greatest agglomeration of talent and capital is the way to maximize the chance to be in that top 1% to 10%.

00:52:09 - Sterling Snow

Are we talking about Miami, or are.

00:52:11 - Garry Tan

We talking about that's right? We mean you're talking about Utah. No, I mean, I'd love for every other place to be as successful as possible, but for that zero to one process, it actually makes a lot of sense to have 1ft in San Francisco at least.

00:52:27 - Tyler Hogge

So in your mind, this isn't in conflict with YC's mission. You're actually viewing this as a prerequisite to YC continuing to succeed. Am I hearing you right?

00:52:35 - Garry Tan

Yeah, I mean, I think YC, honestly, I think know we in the community suffered greatly through COVID. It wasn't the same, and it was really, really hard to get people to change how they were doing things from remote over a zoom window, you just can't really do it. I think one to a billion, one to billions, I think move the HQ. A lot of things stop mattering when you find product market fit, but I think San Francisco is still the greatest place in the world to find product market fit.

00:53:12 - Sterling Snow

I think it's very hard to argue that point. Another futuristic kind of thing is how is the landscape of Venture going to shift? You obviously made some decisions about YC continuity when you came in as CEO and just walk us through how you think Venture is going to change in the coming years.

00:53:32 - Garry Tan

Well, I am still really a technological optimist. I think that enabling tech means that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. And then most people sort of believe there's too much money chasing too few good people and too few good ideas. And then as far as I can tell, none of that's true. Really. It's a self limiting tyler and I.

00:53:59 - Sterling Snow

Tend to think that we tend to think that fund sizes are too big. And you don't agree with that?

00:54:05 - Garry Tan

Well, that's good stuff to tell LPs. They'll give you money, that's for sure.

00:54:10 - Tyler Hogge

What you're saying is good stuff to tell founders because you need them to apply to YC.

00:54:13 - Garry Tan

Exactly.

00:54:14 - Tyler Hogge

We're all talking our book, Gary.

00:54:16 - Garry Tan

That's how it works. But at the same time, I genuinely believe, and this is what's happened over the past ten years on the one hand, yes, valuations are up. On the other hand, I remember when I was modeling my fund, one of initialize a $7 million fund, we said, best case, this sounds crazy, but if we catch a dropbox, that's like a $7 billion exit. And we were modeling like a five X return or something like that. It turns out that we returned more than 55 X DPI on that fund because of coinbase and instacart.

00:54:52 - Sterling Snow

Just a quick salute there.

00:54:54 - Garry Tan

Thank you. But I mean, basically even ten years ago, we thought like, this is the craziest, wild outcome. Like, if we really knock it out of the park, it'll be a five X and we return 55 X. So I think that that's happening across all of Venture and that's what we hope to continue to build, that the decacorns will be much more numerous, the hectocorns will become much more numerous, and then literally anyone I think it's a macro shift. Like, this is what I believe is happening. And my main data is like working with the founders very directly, seeing that with the advent of large language models 1015 years ago, the idea that two or three people in a garage could literally get $10,000 a year contract and have that expand and expand to millions of dollars. That's happening over the course of three to six months for a lot of companies in the AI world. That it's never been like that. I've never seen that happen before. And that's happening right now. And that's more a testament to literally computers have the capability to reason, and that's one of the most important things in the economy, period.

00:56:08 - Sterling Snow

But doesn't that mean that founders are going to need less money? They're going to be able to actually do more with less? Going back to smaller fund sizes and things, they just have more leverage. And in a world where prices are coming down. Like, why would I raise money?

00:56:23 - Garry Tan

Yeah, the reality also is that that macro shift is happening for founders. I mean, the average YC company I think is taking closer to ten or 12% dilution, whereas I think we did seven hundred and fifty k on three post or something like that. Right? So it used to be the norm to take 20% to 40% dilution in the seed and another 20 to 40 in the Series A. And that's all good by my book. Like, founders having more control means that the outcomes can actually be a lot bigger. And so I think it's win win across the board. And I think we're just getting started, guys. The amount of incredible human capital that is wasted, being a management consultant or an investment banker, or even in legal in all of these other knowledge work fields, it's like the same person, given a different set of circumstances, can literally create companies that drive hundreds to billions of dollars per year. And shouldn't we be doing like we should be encouraging that?

00:57:27 - Tyler Hogge

So a question I asked Mark Andreessen on Twitter was, what's the limiting factor in the startup recipe? Is it capital? Is it enough talented founders? Is it talented or big ideas? I'm hearing you say it might be capital. We actually need more money flowing into this because the people are plenty, the ideas are out there and we actually need more.

00:57:45 - Sterling Snow

Maybe it's smarter money.

00:57:46 - Tyler Hogge

Smarter money, is that right?

00:57:48 - Garry Tan

I don't even think it's capital. I mean, there's a lot of capital. There is startups, especially early stage. I actually think it's community. This is why I came back to Y combinator. Y Combinator is the one place that allowed me to develop as a human, get access to capital, and then learn from other people. And it took a village for me. It's funny, I went to a founders fund, one of their really cool events recently, and I looked around and I was like, oh, there's like a bunch of 22 year olds who have everything that I had to learn. I spent 20 years making all the mistakes and it's already in their brains. And they're like, working on neuralink or all kinds of crazy startup ideas. I'm like, what did I miss? And it's like, oh no, that's great. Community is happening. The belief is there people are changing how they approach things, and when they have a community that actually prepares them to do it, way more of them will actually do it. And that's what I'm really excited about. We just came off of a zero interest rate phenomenon. Capital is definitely not the limiting reagent, and it's not people. Right? It's actually people in community with the right values running at the right things. There's like infinite problems. The problems are everywhere. And this is actually why I'm an effective accelerationist at this point. I just deeply, deeply believe that the rate of technological change can happen, can actually increase from here, and ultimately we have to believe that we can do it in order to actually get there.

00:59:35 - Tyler Hogge

I love that. All right, we got a couple of questions we ask people before we wrap up. One is, who's the investor you admire most?

00:59:44 - Garry Tan

Oh, man. Investor.

00:59:47 - Tyler Hogge

And then I'll ask you operator too. So there's going to be two there.

00:59:56 - Garry Tan

I don't know. I feel like there are so many greats. That's a hard one. It's like, shoot, there are too many people to mention. And then, honestly, I might offend someone if I leave.

01:00:11 - Tyler Hogge

Who's one that you really like?

01:00:13 - Garry Tan

Okay. I don't know. I mean, at the end of the day, the way Mark has built sort of what he's done, he literally is sort of the best builder who sort of has turned around to build an organization.

01:00:26 - Tyler Hogge

You're talking mark Andreessen.

01:00:27 - Garry Tan

Mark andreessen yeah.

01:00:28 - Tyler Hogge

How about operator one that you like doesn't have to be the best? A founder that you just admire or an operator?

01:00:34 - Garry Tan

I mean, honestly, Parker Conrad is on his own level.

01:00:40 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, I think he might be.

01:00:41 - Sterling Snow

My he's incredible. And then I think the fact that he came back to YC is an interesting part of the rippling.

01:00:49 - Tyler Hogge

Sterling wanted to ask that, by the way.

01:00:51 - Sterling Snow

Yeah, I mean, why does someone like Parker, who already had so much knowledge, know a Zenofitz run come back? And he knew what he was building, and he knew how he was going to build it. So why do people like that come back to YC?

01:01:08 - Garry Tan

Well, I mean, one of the memes that I'd love to get out there, which I think is actually quite true, is coming back is sort of like coming home. So that's sort of my personal answer. But at the same time, I think rippling is incredibly important for people to be able to sell to other companies. And being a YC company is often basically worth its weight and gold just.

01:01:34 - Tyler Hogge

Off of that last one for me is I call it the golden Spur. Question what drives you? Why are you the way that you are? You talked about your childhood kind of rough, but why are you this way?

01:01:49 - Garry Tan

I often ask that myself. My wife asks me of this.

01:01:53 - Sterling Snow

What does a therapist say?

01:01:56 - Garry Tan

My wife sometimes is like, why are you like this, Gary?

01:01:59 - Tyler Hogge

Mine too funny.

01:02:00 - Garry Tan

Yeah. What's a good answer for that. I guess I'm just a joiner. At the end of the know. I get excited by myself. I always believed, and maybe this is actually something that I have to thank my father for. He is a man of many faults, but one thing that he always emphasized for me was like, Gary, you're set apart. Like, I'd come home with a B plus, and he'd be like, Gary, what is this? And I'm like, what? Like, my friends got a B plus. And it's like, oh, are. You the same as your you there, or are you a cut above? And he mean through many different ways, made it clear the expectations on me were far above that of anyone else's. So I guess I really there's something about startups that really speak out to me. It's like when I meet with founders, I genuinely want them to be the cut above. It's like, that's sort of one of the conversations I feel like I have with people all the time, that I just want the outcome to be so great. And to do that, it requires a belief. And so I want to breathe that type of belief into others, and then this is basically the best job in the world to do that.

01:03:31 - Sterling Snow

We really appreciate you taking the time. This was an awesome conversation.

01:03:34 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah. Thanks, Gary. It was awesome.

01:03:35 - Garry Tan

Yeah, we'll do it again. Thank you guys for having me.

01:03:37 - Tyler Hogge

Thank you. All right, so let's recap. Sterling, we have a couple people who listen to this podcast. You got investors, operators, founders. Which one's this going to be most relevant for?

01:03:53 - Sterling Snow

Well, what's crazy about Gary is he's actually been a founder. He's gone through an accelerator as a founder. He's gone through an exit as a founder. And then he's also the CEO of Y Combinator and had, I think, a $3 billion AUM had initialized.

01:04:10 - Tyler Hogge

He's done it both. Yeah. He's both.

01:04:12 - Garry Tan

Yeah.

01:04:12 - Sterling Snow

And he told us he talked about in the podcast how you can't say both. You can't pick both, but I'm going with both.

01:04:17 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, I think he's both too. All right, what are our top takeaways for this one? What do you think?

01:04:23 - Sterling Snow

Some things that stuck out to me were his learnings around co founder dynamics.

01:04:28 - Tyler Hogge

Love that.

01:04:29 - Sterling Snow

How important it is to be able to argue with people, disagree with people, but not fracture the relationship.

01:04:36 - Tyler Hogge

Yeah, funny. He said, I took the advice of you have to have a good relationship with your co founder. And I'm like, Actually, you do, but good means fight. So I think he just misunderstood that advice rather than didn't live it, and.

01:04:47 - Sterling Snow

Maybe fight is the wrong word too. Disagree, but debate and argue and be able to do so in highly emotional ways and then not let it fracture the underlying relationship. And the thing that's interesting to me there, he talks about, okay, you got to narrow your focus. You got to search for that desperation specifically and then broaden where if you find it initially, I think you can go broad a lot faster. And so they're in competition a little bit, but he definitely thinks there's more people who want to build something. They just aren't exactly sure what that is yet versus people who have the insight and are just ready to go.

01:05:27 - Tyler Hogge

Yes, he talked about I'm a little bit of, like, the sell ahead, but how did he say it? Like, you have to derisk it somehow. I can't remember it, but he did seem to say that the way, oh, liars are buyers is what I'm thinking of. He validated that a lot. Or buyers are liars.

01:05:42 - Sterling Snow

Totally. Yeah. And that we want to be lied to. And so there's a gem in there for founders about be very skeptical when people are telling you things you want to hear, but they are not taking the actions that you want them to take or the actions that are congruent with what they're saying.

01:06:01 - Tyler Hogge

So the advice around buyers or liars around edge of the wedge, what else was there for early stage founders authenticity? Lean into your corners. Don't try and round them out.

01:06:15 - Sterling Snow

This one hits home for me because I think whenever you're trying to be a leader of people, people try to water you down. Right. You're supposed to appeal to more folks, and that's kind of been common wisdom. But you're not trying to appeal to everybody as a startup leader. You're trying to appeal to an absolute fringe within a fringe, and that's where your power comes.

01:06:38 - Tyler Hogge

Cult metaphor as well, which he leaned into. It's like, yeah, you're actually trying to build a religion, which is only possible if the founder of the religion has some weird edges.

01:06:47 - Garry Tan

Absolutely.

01:06:48 - Sterling Snow

I mean, and look at these successful companies. Palantir is absolutely a religion. What Gary does with the community of YC is absolutely a religion, and the great startups always are, and it's the religion of the religion of the founders.

01:07:03 - Tyler Hogge

What other takeaways any others we got to hit?

01:07:05 - Sterling Snow

Oh, man. I thought it was fascinating to hear him talk about rage quitting and decision making and some of those kinds of things and how to evaluate opportunities. Just very cool, because he's had basically unlimited, amazing opportunities. So I just thought that was interesting.

01:07:28 - Tyler Hogge

Agree. I think my last one here is, it seems clear to me that Gary's doing what God put him on the earth to do, like, he's doing what Gary Tan is meant to do. He talked about community, and he's got this special place for YC and feels very lucky for the world and for the organization that he's doing that. And he was know passionate about that. You could tell.