Harj Taggar

Managing Partner, Y Combinator · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderhostexecutive@harjtaggar ↗harjtaggar.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Harj Taggar is a Managing Partner at Y Combinator and a co-host of The Light Cone podcast. He previously co-founded Auctomatic, Triplebyte, and Initialized Capital.

12statements → 2claims → 0claims resolved → 3.92/5average certainty → 2.5/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 12said about them ↓

2 not checkable as stated how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 1 assertion · 10 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertion are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Harj argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. We have 4,058 words of Harj Taggar, and that is not enough to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host 1/10

setup questions received 70%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 7:53“When you say about kind of looking around and everyone seems to be doing so well, do you agree with that thesis and kind of sole focus on yourself, or do you think it does take a s…” ▶ 19:30“Um, even after raising, when you've got VCs kind of breathing down the neck to increase the burn.” ▶ 12:12“Uh, and, and I do have to ask, is the weekly 10% myth true?”

What they said12 What others said12 Episodes1

Everything Harj Taggar said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Taggar Predicts In-House Developer Recruitment Will Be Obsolete by 2022

“And so five years from now, the grand vision would be To think about like running your own hiring process versus just using triple byte as being as outdated as hiring engineers to build a database from scratch versus just using MySQL or Postgres.”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 25:55 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Paul Graham: Optimal Corporate Structure Resembles a Holding Company of Autonomous Units

“He genuinely believed that the optimal structure for a giant corporation is one that's more like a holding company that's, like, composed up of lots of more autonomous units are each doing well, and each of those units has operational control and is, you know,…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 13:21 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Startups Should Not Scale Their Team While Finding Product-Market Fit

“You either want to be focused with the smallest possible team on finding product market fit, or you want to be Realize you have product market fit and just be in full on growing, scaling the team and making a functioning organization. You don't want to do both…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 21:14 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Venture Investors Need Operational Experience to Develop True Founder Empathy

“I'm a pretty strong believer that operational experience is pretty important to have in investors, and the reason is, and I think this is another thing that made sort of Paul and sort of Jessica great founders of YC or great investors of Y Cominature is that t…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 15:56 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Founders Must Experience Functional Pain Before Hiring for a Role

“If you raise around prematurely, if you raise like ten million dollars before you've kind of gone through that pain, now you're under pressure to hire people, and you might not have a clear sense of exactly who you need, because every, you know, you keep using…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 20:29 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Every Startup Faces Existential Threats Despite Positive External Optics

“And what I realized is that actually what happens is no matter how problematic or screwed your startup is, Everyone always presents externally that things are going fantastically. And so as a founder, you don't often realize this, that everyone starts up at pr…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 7:10 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Internal Execution Mistakes Kill Startups Far More Often Than Competitors

“You are just far more likely to not succeed because you make a mistake internally, right? Like either you know, you build the wrong product, you don't pay enough attention to your users, you hire the wrong people, or all of these things are far more likely to …”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 8:11 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Track Competitors Only to Demonstrate Domain Expertise to Investors

“Operationally, you need to be focused on your company above all else and not be worried about Competitors, but you need to know enough about what your competitors are doing to seem like, or, you know, to generally actually have domain expertise and talk credib…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 8:59 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Raising Venture Capital Does Not Make a Startup Real

“Funding is not a, like, a prerequisite of your startup feeling real. You can raise funding but still not really feel like I have a company. The only moment you feel like you have a real company is when you have a clear set of users, and that number of users is…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 10:55 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Investor Feedback Loops Take Several Years Compared to Founders

“One of the big differences between being a founder operator versus being an investor is as an investor, you do lots of things, but ultimately, your feedback loop is several years long”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 12:18 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Taggar: Y Combinator Scaled Batch Sizes to Fund All Promising Startups

“The growth of YC was Defined as of the, you know, of the applicants every cycle, we want to make sure that we're funding all the good ones. Like we never want to turn away a great company, a really promising company because we didn't have capacity to do it.”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 14:52 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

Insight

Taggar: Seed Investing Success Relies on Top-of-Funnel Optimization and Word-of-Mouth

“Like a seed stage investor is really about optimizing the top of your funnel in the sense of there are only of the hundreds of deals that might be available, a hundred of potential investments that year. Only a few of them are going to go on and be meaningful,…”

Harj Taggar Jan 20, 2017 ▶ 17:29 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte

The other half of the tape: Harj Taggar's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 6 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 10 Alexis Ohanian 2