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 72 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
Tan: Delegating without founder agency turns tech companies into political fiefdoms
“If
The founder and the CEO does not exercise agency, you know, then it's actually a political game, and then you have sort of fiefdoms that are fighting it out with one another, and the leader is not there, then you enter the situation where, ah, neither the l…”
Tan: Big tech talent hoarding decelerated overall technological progress
“I guess it felt like a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, because I think the result is that you know, tech progress itself decelerated. You have, like, the smartest people of a generation basically retired in place, working at places that, you know, the worl…”
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.”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: Current AI systems have zero agency and resemble smart toasters
“As of today, you know, these systems are, it's just matrix math, and there is no agency yet.
[3400] Garry Tan: Like, there's basically, they're equivalent to incredibly smart toasters”
Garry Tan: Modern school systems are designed to strip children of agency
“We send them to a school system that is not designed for agency. It is literally designed to take agency away from our children.”
Tan: Social unrest will occur if AI benefits bypass majority of people
“In reaction to, you know, the nature of work changing that would be the outcome that, you know, the majority of people, if not all people, like, see the benefit in some sort of direct way, and if we don't do that, then there will be unrest.”
Tan: Humans will talk directly to superintelligent AI entities
“Like, we're going to have these, you know, basically super intelligent entities that we talk to.”
Garry Tan: My AI existential risk 'p(doom)' score is 1%
“My PDOOM score is one percent. Like, I'm not totally, you know, unworried, right?”
Garry Tan: Premature AI laws will stall clean energy and medicine
“It would also potentially be worse to prematurely optimize And basically make a bunch of worthless laws that slow down the rate of progress and prevent things like better cancer vaccines, or better airfoils, or, you know, frankly, like, you know, nuclear fusio…”
Garry Tan: Sriram Krishnan as government AI czar is a positive development
“I think we're going into a very interesting moment right now with you know, the AI czar is Sri Ram Krishnan, who, you know, used to be a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, and I think that that's a very, very good thing. Like, we want people who have the …”
Garry Tan: Elon Musk proved Twitter didn't need 80% of its staff
“Elon came in and quickly asked, like, 80 or 90% of the people, and it turns out you didn't need 80 or 90% of the people, so.”
Garry Tan: The US should issue every citizen an Artificial Superintelligence
“My argument would be, like, the most American version of it is that, like, you know, you and I have our own ASI. And, like, each, you know, each citizen should be, you know, issued an ASI and be taught how to get the most out of it.”
Garry Tan: Nvidia maintains a monopoly on the best price-performance AI compute
“I'm still pretty bull on NVIDIA, and that they more or less have the monopoly on, you know, sort of the best price performance.”
Garry Tan: Indistinguishable voice AI is currently actively replacing call center labor
“The speech to text and text to speech, those things are indistinguishable from human beings now, and you can train these things, the evals are good, the prompting is good you know, I, you know, going back to what we were saying earlier, like, what we're seeing…”
Garry Tan: Proprietary evaluations, not foundation models, are the true AI moat
“I mean, I think you know, ultimately the model itself is not the moat. Like I think that the evals themselves are the moat.”
Garry Tan: ChatGPT is the second-best software; custom UIs are first
“One of the funnier quips is that, ah, you know, the second best software in the world for everything is, ah, using ChatGPT, because you can basically copy and paste, you know, almost any workflow or any data, and it's like the general purpose thing that, you k…”
Garry Tan: Software moats remain unchanged, but startups only need six employees
“The moats are not different, actually, at the end of the day. It's still, you still have to build good software, you still have to be able to sell, you have to retain customers, you have to But you just don't need like a thousand people for it anymore. You mig…”
Garry Tan: Microsoft's market cap heavily depends on OpenAI's success
“I mean, I think Microsoft has you know, just really, really deep access to OpenAI, and I think OpenAI is probably, you said public companies, right? ... So, you know, I think There's a non-zero, pretty large percentage of, like, the market cap of Microsoft tha…”
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…”
Garry Tan: Sam Altman pulled the future forward by at least a decade
“Sam Altman probably brought forward the future by, you know, five years, 10 years, at least 10 years.”
Garry Tan: Paul Graham created the first web browser-based application
“He actually basically created the first web browser based program. So he was one of the first people to hook up a web request to an actual program in Unix.”
Garry Tan: AI companies increasingly sell intelligence rather than traditional software
“Today, because people are not selling software, they're increasingly actually selling, ah, intelligence. They're like, you know, like it or not, like, these are things that you could not buy before.”
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: Startup founders often kill their companies by angel investing
“If you're a startup founder, and suddenly some, you know, people have heard of you, and people try to add you as a scout. Like, people kill their startups all the time by that, just by taking their eye off the ball.”
Garry Tan: San Francisco had zero housing starts last year
“Literally, there were no new housing starts in all of, you know, San Francisco proper for the last year.”
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: 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…”
Garry Tan: Five or six competing AI labs prevent monopoly pricing power
“Sitting here a year after a lot of those attempts I feel pretty good, because it feels like there are five, maybe six labs, all of whom are competing in a fair market, trying to deliver models that, you know, honestly, any startup, anyone, you know, any of us …”
Garry Tan: Screen time, Minecraft, and Roblox foster agency in children
“I'm actually personally pretty pro screens, and pro Minecraft and Roblox, and, you know, giving children, like, this sort of playground where they can exercise their own agency.”
Garry Tan: AI reasoning models will drive biotech breakthroughs within a year
“Like, if only by applying, you know, dollars to energy that then goes into these models, will there be, ah, real breakthroughs in, you know, biological sciences, like being able to do new processes or come to a deeper understanding of you know, whether it's, a…”
Garry Tan: Training AI on published data ultimately feels like fair use
“The funniest thing, my main response to all of that around, like, provenance of the data itself is, at some point, like, it feels like it actually is fair use, though.”
Garry Tan: Meta open-sourcing foundational AI models is 'God's work'
“What Zuck and Ahmad and the team over there are doing is frankly God's work. I think it's great that they're doing what they're doing and I hope they continue.”
Garry Tan: Every major AI lab will release computer-use agent capabilities
“What Anthropic is doing with computer use is, you know, I think that you know, what I've heard is basically every major lab is probably going to need to release something like that, whether it's an API the way Anthropic has, or literally built into this you kn…”
Garry Tan: $4 billion currently funds AI safety organizations and think tanks
“There's something like four billion dollars of money sloshing around think tanks and AI safety organizations”
Garry Tan: AI code generation makes engineers 5 to 10 times faster
“Today, with CodeGen, you know, today, engineers are basically, you know, writing code about five or 10 X faster than they would before.”
Garry Tan: Apple opened RCS messaging in reaction to DOJ pressure
“Apple even today still, you know, they're opening it up a little bit more with RCS, but, you know, it's those are actually in reaction to the work of Jonathan Cantor and the DOJ.”
Garry Tan: I didn't vote for Trump but I support the administration
“Even though I didn't vote for Trump, I am a 110%, you know, down for making America truly awesome.”
Tan: Automated systems will always require a human in the loop
“Like even if 90% of the time you're using the autopilot, like you always need a human in the loop.”
Tan: China will likely rely on a single, centrally controlled ASI
“That society probably, you know, unless there's other changes there, like that's, you can sort of count on a single, ah, artificial super intelligence, like sort of setting the, how everything works over there.”
Garry Tan: AI passing the Turing test will jump to 30% this year
“I think in a lot of domains, and this is sort of the year where, like, Maybe there's, like, five or 10% of things that, like, it's, you know, sort of hitting the Turing test and, you know, really satisfying that, but, you know, I think maybe this is a year whe…”
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…”