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 34 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
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: AI infrastructure demand will scale to the Manhattan Project's level
“I mean, NVIDIA just, you know, has an out and out. Like, for now, they're just so far ahead of everyone else. I mean, it can't last forever, but I think that, you know, the demand for building the infrastructure for intelligence in society is going to be absol…”
Garry Tan: Serial founders built 40% of recent global unicorns
“About 40% of the unicorns from the last 10 years in the world were started by multi-time serial founders.”
Tan: Mainstream global users know ChatGPT but definitely not Anthropic or Claude
“If you go any, almost anywhere in the world I, you know, people maybe have heard of ChatGPT, they definitely haven't heard of Anthropic or Claude.”
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: 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.”
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: 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…”
Garry Tan: MrBeast told me my YouTube titles and thumbnails sucked
“Look man, your titles suck, and your thumbnails are even worse.”