Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, describes the unprecedented speed at which vertical AI software startups are scaling revenue with minimal headcount.
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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.”
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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…”
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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…”