Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: Small YC startups routinely hit $20M revenue in 20 months
“We're seeing routinely YC companies with 10 or 20 people get to 10 or twenty million dollars a year in revenue in 10 or 20 months. And that's like literally never happened before in software.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: YC startups average 10% weekly revenue growth over 12-week batches
“The average rate at which YC companies grow their revenue during the YC batch, which is a 12 week process, is a 10% per week on average. I mean, some of the batches have been growing 15, 20% a week, but it's been at least 10% a week for more than a year.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: Anthropic's Claude Code team uses AI to write 95% of codebase
“The Claude Code team apparently writes, 95% of their code is written by Claude, which means very directly that each engineer working on Claude Code themselves is doing the work of 20 people.”
Opinion
Tan: ZIRP-era tech workers are clinging to jobs and denying AI
“A lot of those people started their careers actually during Zerp, so they're actually sort of, you know, hanging on for dear life at both startups and Fang, and those are also, like, funny enough, some of the people who are the biggest AI deniers. Like, they j…”
Opinion
Tan: ChatGPT is the most astonishing consumer product launch in history
“ChatGPT itself is actually the best and most astonishing consumer launch of any product in the history of products actually.”
Insight
Tan: Founders Worry Prematurely About Market Size Ceilings
“I think a lot of founders are worried about that early, but my sense is maybe it's premature worry because embedded in that is also the case text pivot that, you know, they got users and an understanding and a useful corpus of data All of which turned into a t…”
Assertion Supported
Tan: Scaling laws revealed the path to AGI for OpenAI's leaders
“If you were Greg Brockman or Dario Amadei, ah, at that moment, you started, you know, internally you were talking about the scaling laws, and that the loss function was going down as log linear to the amount of, ah, data and compute you were putting in, and th…”
Opinion
Tan: Casetext founder Jake Heller pioneered early prompt engineering workflows
“I think of Jake a little bit like the first man on the moon.”
Insight
Tan: Founding a startup accelerates your career by 5 to 10 years
“It's better for people to, ah, become founders, learn how to create things for other people, and then either, you know, you manage to get product market fit, and you figure out a moat so that you can be, you know, as big a company as possible. Or even if you d…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: 18-to-22-year-old founders at YC are up over 100% year-over-year
“Well, even at YC, like, we are seeing the rate of 18 to twenty-two-year-olds at YC is up by more than a hundred percent year on year. The rate of twenty-two-year-olds to twenty-five-year-olds is up about 20%. And then the rate of 25 to thirty-year-olds is actu…”
Insight
Tan: Asking AI to iteratively update its own prompt compounds output quality
“Get the script to where I felt really good about it, and then at the last point, I would say, given what we did in this session to improve the prompt, output the next version of the prompt. And so now I've done this about 20 or 30 times, and so now I have a th…”
Disclosure
Tan: YC board abandoned conglomerate model to return to focused accelerator
“When I came back, like, we explicitly decided as a board and as, like, the sort of steering body of what YC was supposed to be, we said, you know what, like, Alphabet is great, but we're gonna go back to being Google.”
Opinion
Tan: Gemini 2.5 excels at extracting structural patterns from long video scripts
“One of the things that I did recently, I took the scripts of all of the top videos that I ever made from my YouTube channel, and I just fed it in, and the prompt to Gemini, because it had long context at the time, I think a lot of other people have long contex…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Tan: People are increasingly treating ChatGPT as a therapist or psychiatrist
“Apparently one of the biggest behavior changes in ChatGPT recently, for instance, is that people sort of treat ChatGPT as a counselor or as a psychiatrist or therapist.”
Assertion Supported
Tan: OpenAI Was Spun Out of YC Research by Sam Altman
“OpenAI itself was a spin-out from YC research by, ah, Sam Altman.”
Insight
Tan: Reliable LLM output requires decomposing tasks into small contextual steps
“At that moment if you chopped it down to a bite-sized chunk, like you gave it some amount of context, That a human being, given the same context and the same prompt, would answer in a certain way. He found that he could, ah, you know, given inputs and outputs,…”
Disclosure
Tan: Y Combinator has 15 equal investing partners selecting startups
“We have 15 equal partners on the investing side who like are in, we basically are in there trying to fish.”
Assertion Supported
Tan: Cruise co-founder Daniel Kan is in current Y Combinator batch
“Daniel Kahn, for instance, who created, co, co-founder of Cruise Automation, he's in the batch, and I'm pretty excited about it”
Garry Tan