The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 30 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Garry Tan: YC teams staying in SF double their unicorn odds
“One thing we spotted is that the teams that come to San Francisco and then stay in San Francisco or the Bay Area, they actually double their chance of becoming a unicorn.”
Garry Tan: Founders unable to explain their startup in 10 minutes lack clarity
“One of the things I feel like I learned from Paul was that if in 10 minutes you cannot actually understand what's going on it means the person on the other end doesn't actually understand what's going on, and there isn't anything to understand.”
Garry Tan: 60% of serial founders who built recent unicorns are YC alumni
“Did you know that 40, you know, of those 40%, 60% of those people, the people who created unicorns the last 10 years are YC alumni.”
Garry Tan: Y Combinator must be an explicitly American institution like MIT
“MIT is a an institution, and that institution is an American institution. And so being very clear about that, I thought was totally the right move for MIT. And you know, I think that YC needs to be a similar, you know, an institution of similar character.”
Garry Tan: Competitors offering double cash cannot match Y Combinator's success
“There are clones of YC right now that give like twice as much money, for instance, but I don't think that they're going to see this level of success because they're not going to have As earnest people who become as formidable around you.”
Garry Tan: Sub-15-person startups reaching $100M revenue will be common by 2027
“I think we are seeing companies that in the next year or two will get to 50, a hundred million dollars a year in revenue.
really with under, you know, maybe 10 people, maybe 15 people tops.
and so that was relatively rare, and my prediction would be this bec…”
Tan: 50% of YC companies raise Series A, 25% after year 5
“About half of companies that go through YC will end up raising a series A. That's, you know, much higher than any other pre-seed or seed sort of situation that I know of. But about, A quarter of those who raise the Series A, they do it in year five or later.”
Garry Tan: Sam Bankman-Fried's quirky public persona was a pure artificial affectation
“Like you might think of an SPF that's like, that's all artifice. Like, think about that guy. Like, that guy was, like, full of shakes and, like, the guy was, like, on meth, right? Like, the guy was, you know, everything about it was an affectation. Like, he wa…”
Paul Graham directly told YC investors to back Flexport
“PG himself really liked, liked and likes Flexport and was telling investors, you should invest in this company, which kind of controversial. YC partners, I think they're a little better about it now than they used to be, but they would kind of pick, choose fav…”
Founders must treat Y Combinator as a zero-sum competition
“I try to tell every founder, like you're going to go into YC. It's not, you're not there to have fun. You're trying to be the best and it is a competition. You versus you sure make friends with them, but I'm sure Michael Phelps is friends with the other swimme…”
Garry Tan: About 2.5% of Y Combinator startups become $10B decacorns
“Yeah, about two and a half percent end up becoming Decacorns sooner or later, so.”
Garry Tan: Y Combinator's unicorn hit rate increased from 3.5% to 5.5%
“If anything, I think that the unicorn rate has gone up over time. You know 1015 years ago, I think it was closer to maybe three and a half to four percent, and now we're around five and a half percent. Some batches from You know, maybe 2017, 20 18, or, you kno…”
Tan: YC passed on ADHD medication telehealth startup over ethical concerns
“There are lots of examples of, you know, maybe five or six years ago, there was a rash of telehealth companies that are focused on, for instance ADHD meds, and I distinctly remember one of our partners Gustav Alströmer, I, he met that team, and he said, you kn…”
Garry Tan: Breaking knowledge work into micro-steps prevents LLM hallucination and failure
“Garry Tan: It's like, what is a specific thing that a human does? Break it down into the very specific steps that a real human would do, and then actually, basically, if it breaks, you're just asking in that step to do too many things, so like, break it down i…”
Garry Tan: 5-person YC startups are hitting $12M revenue in 12 months
“We have companies basically
You know, going from zero to six million dollars in revenue in six months.
We have companies going from zero to twelve million dollars a year in revenue in 12 months, right?
And with under a dozen people.
Like, usually five or six p…”
Petersen crashed Y Combinator sessions with his brother before founding Flexport
“Y Combinator at that time did not have great security, so I would just go with him to all the Y Combinator Sessions and just said, like, acted like I was part of his company, even though I kind of was.”
Gil: Y Combinator Succeeded by Integrating Out-of-Network Founders into Silicon Valley
“And so YC early on was very good at taking very talented people who weren't part of the core networks in Silicon Valley and basically inserting them into those networks and helping them succeed.”
Garry Tan: Founders should aggressively seek early rejections in sales
“You should aggressively try to get to a no, and you know, you'd rather get a no so you can spend less time on that lead, and you can get on to the next one.”
Tan: Earnestness is the defining trait of durable, successful startup founders
“Like incredibly sincere, I think. Basically what you see is what you get. Like you're not trying to be something else. It's like authentic, but like, you know, even humble in that respect, right? Like I'm trying to do this thing. The opposite, I mean, and it's…”
Tan: Casetext founder Jake Heller first commercialized GPT-4 in legal
“Garry Tan: He was one of the first people to get access to GPT-IV, and we think of him at YC as the first man on the moon, and that he was the first to successfully commercialize GPT-IV in the legal space.”
Garry Tan: In full transparency, the median Y Combinator startup still fails
“In full transparency, I mean, probably, you know, the median YC startup still fails, right?”
Tan: YC general partners can pretty much fund whatever startups they want
“If you're a general partner at YC, you know, you pretty much can fund what you want”
Tan: The majority of Y Combinator CEOs are now technical
“The CEO of the majority of YC companies, they are technical.”
Tan: YC startup Camfer used OpenAI o1 to improve airfoil design
“There's a YC company called Camfer that is trying to apply they actually were one of the winners of the recent YC O-one hackathon we hosted with OpenAI, and their winning entry was literally Hooking up a one to airfoil design. So being able to increase the sor…”
Tan: YC companies raise ~$1B yearly with a 1% acceptance rate
“I think we have about a billion dollars a year in, ah, your funding that comes into YC companies, and that's because, ah, the acceptance rate to get into YC is only one percent.”
Tan: Y Combinator receives 70,000 to 80,000 applications per year
“Yeah, I think it's close to 70, 80,000 at this point.”
Tan: YC group partners read 1,000 to 1,500 applications per cycle
“Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the best thing that we can do is actually brute force read and on average, I think the group partner will read something like a thousand to 1500 applications for that cycle that they're working.”
Tan: YC-backed Leaping AI automates 80% of German wine merchant orders
“I funded a company in this very current batch that you know it's called Leaping AI. They are they are working with Some of the biggest wine merchants in Germany, which is fascinating. So, I mean, that's another fascinating thing. Like these things speak all hu…”
Tan: Median YC startup raises $1M to $1.5M post-program
“At the end of it culminates in people raising, you know, sort of the median Raises about a million to a million and a half bucks for, you know, sometimes teams that are two or three people, just an idea starting at, ah, you know, at the beginning of that.”