Gary Tan

“We want all consumers to be able to have from the bottom up, ah, the same access to that same technology. And that's, ah, yeah, the best insurance against tyranny.”

“I mean, this is why I think the chat interface is wrong. Like I actually think there is value accrued to really great UX, like good copy, good you know, interaction design, information hierarchy you know, being able to approach a product and say like, this is …”

“Airbnb launched three times before anyone started to pay attention, but each time they launched, they learned something new, improved the product, and kept going.”

“If someone is willing to pay for the jankiest version of your product, you'll know You're solving a real problem.”

“Those 100 people who love your product become your viral sales force.”

“If you use O-one in ChatGPT, it looks like it will tell you what's really going on, but apparently they have a fake model that just spits out things to give you the impression that it's breaking it up into steps. And they've actually You know, hidden it, becau…”

“Since then, Sam has told me that he actually wants to go to four orders of magnitude to get to a trillion dollars in you know, sort of spend.”

“So last time I did office hours with them, they said that they automated 30,000 tickets per day.”

“You can almost Argue that anything that is consumer and publicly available on the internet, that's going to be in the base model. So then your moat ultimately is for all of the other things that are not already online, whether it's, you know, for case techs be…”

“I mean, I think our sense right now is this isn't a fad. This isn't going away. This is actually the dominant way to code. And if you're not doing it, like you might just be left behind. This is just here to stay. And, you know, vibe coding is not a fad.”

“Oh, and interestingly, I guess one thing the survey did indicate is that this stuff is terrible at debugging.”

“I think we were hanging out with some AI researchers recently, and they were sort of disappointed that the models are not, you know, but they don't demonstrate as much human-like agency you know, even after all these innovations with, you know, climbing the sc…”

“You shouldn't use like VC thinking to decide what to work on. Cause a lot of people Might have looked at how many designers are there in the country, and then multiplied that out by, like, whatever they thought they could spend. And it's like, oh, that, you kn…”

“There are up to 1.5 million orders a day across 50 cities throughout India, with over three billion dollars in GMV and growing 300% a year. And they're a unicorn at a five billion dollar valuation.”

“You can't get the evals unless you are sitting literally side by side with people who are doing X, Y, or Z knowledge work. You know, you need to sit next to the tractor sales regional manager and understand, well, you know, this person cares about, you know, t…”

“It also kind of feels like learning how to manage a person. Where it's like, how do I actually communicate you know, the things that they need to know in order to make a good decision? And how do I make sure that they know you know, how I'm going to evaluate a…”

“The people who are the absolute best at improving the process are the people actually doing it, and it's literally why, ah, Japanese cars got so good in the nineties, and that's meta-prompting to me.”

“You know, we can't even build precision screws and Large sheet metal without crazy cost overruns.”

“A much more powerful version of this is let's work backwards from what I want to put on X. I'm going to make a very simple Loom video showing off a feat of strength, a thing that I really want to share that I know our team can do, and then working backwards fr…”

“I worry that some of these programs are just literally trying to teach people to become more you know, SBFs and Theranos. And that's like, you know, that's a waste of time. Like, and you're going to go to jail.”

“The really big difference today is that the very best companies that we get to see day to day, they're like, I don't know, five people, 10 people I think, you know, each of us on stage and all of the YC partners are sort of collecting incredible startups that …”

“Like objectively, you should make literally a spreadsheet. You should, you know, go down and like evaluate it the way an investor would. And then the difference is the investor has a portfolio and you just have one life. And likewise, when you start a startup,…”

“The craziest stat, I think this came out of the New York fed in February of this year computer science majors You know, obviously this is not the people in this room. This is just, like, out of, like, you know, a normal distribution of all computer science maj…”

“I mean, I think you want, I don't know, at least six, maybe nine months minimum of like, just, you know, being able to live on ramen in the cheapest possible way.”

“I think of O-three as basically about a 130 IQ, maybe O-three pro can be even smarter than that. When I really think about that, it's like, oh yeah, like a lot of the people who I've ever hired in my lifetime are like, yeah, O-three is smarter than that person…”

“I think this last batch I funded enough to have an entire section, you know, it's about six startups that are all consumer based.”

“First you have to let someone know what the heck it is. And then right after that, you have to make sure that they know that what you're doing is awesome in some way, like that you're worth spending, like, you know, that was 10:15 seconds, and then it's worth …”

“Basically retention will go up, so certain paid models will be, ah, possible now that weren't possible earlier, but then you still gotta solve the distribution problem.”

“I was operating for, like, the first two or three days of my nine days in the wilderness. Like no tests or very few tests, and then one day I was like, all right, today's refactor day. I'm gonna do, get to a hundred percent test coverage, and then I just sped …”

“When it's ready to land, it lands, and I can do 10, 15, 20, sometimes 50 PRs in any given day, depending on the number of meetings I have in that day.”

“Along the way, I've essentially built all of Posturus, which took two years to build with a co-founder and a team of 10 engineers. I've essentially built all of my startup Posturus, which took two years, ten million dollars, and 10 engineers to build.”

“I run 10 to 15 parallel Claude code sessions all at the same time.”

“I built GStack to encode this three weeks ago, and now it has more GitHub stars than Ruby on Rails.”

“It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly, boom, I'm doing about 400 X the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of like two thirds of the time writing code.”

“Basically, for the equivalent of, like, Five or 10 dollars of opus calls. I mean, I would estimate that it does the work of like, you know, a real human being that would have to like go painstaking through dozens of articles, read entire books about certain su…”

“One is what is the 10 X check? What is more ambitious and delivers 10 X more value for only two X the effort. Right. And so for whatever reason, coming out of latent space, this helps the model, like really visualize”

“One of the things I discovered is sometimes Claude would just get confused and like write bugs or not be complete. But once I started saying, actually, before you start your work, make an ASCII diagram of all the data flows, all the inputs and outputs. What ar…”

“Unless you have your own prompts and you can write it for yourself, like you are You know, below the API line for some PM or developer that is not you who like will not understand you will not understand your needs will not understand what you uniquely care ab…”

“It's very significant for people who are technical because it actually raises the bar on like what you are capable of doing. Like all the people who are attacking me about lines of code, they particularly are, The people who are most likely to get wings if you…”

“So I dropped like 13 PRs in the last 48 hours.”

“And then if you can token max, it's like, I mean, you can buy millions of years of consciousness of machine consciousness. Now I can be a time billionaire. It's not, you know, my own time. It's the time of a machine, like doing work for me and like the human e…”

“And then I guarantee you like this time next year, like everyone's going to be saying what you heard here first, which is like every single person on the planet will have their own personal AI.”

“I've since learned that a hundred percent is probably too much. Like hitting 80 to 90% is usually the best practice at this point.”

“One of the key maxims for YC is You know, how do you find good startup ideas, live in the future and build what's missing? Right. And so this is a profound version of that where all you have to do is commit your brain to look at, you know, spending 500 dollars…”

“The first time it took about, you know, four million dollars and, you know, six or seven people and about a year and a half. And then the second time it, you know, took about, I don't know, a hundred grand and two people, me and my co-founder Brett Gibson, who…”

“This is something that, you know, anyone can do actually, it's like this is why I think we're entering the golden age of open source.”

“My answer from, like, the OpenClaw Hermes experience with G-Brain is, like, yeah, you basically have to take that you're gonna denormalize it, and you're gonna put it in a format that, Is optimized for agent retrieval and understanding.”

“These things are really good at working with MCP and CLI. Like they're a little even better with CLI.”

“We basically have a choice to be made over the next, I don't think it's even that long. I think it's like 18 to 24 months. It might take five years, but there are sort of two scenarios”

“And then now it's like, actually what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typi…”

“I mean, by my measure with gBrain and gStack and just like the code I'm releasing open source, I'm actually on, on track to do like four or five million lines of logical logical lines of code.”

“Interestingly, like we're sort of entering this other moment where, because ploy exists, you know, you might have someone who's like, 200 IQ you know, nearly nonverbal, like, codexes. They're able to make some sort of hardware, software that literally no one e…”

“And a new way to do it is actually have the LLMs just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more customizable. It does, you know, more and is more awesome. Between token maxing and even like, you know, don…”

“In the Opus 4.5 and later moment, like I would, you know, I would trace it to like that model was the thing that changed everything for me. The things before that were usable, but like toys that release, there was something magical that happened. And now I can…”

“It means that the ideal consumer moment is still like Three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029.”

“I'm spending a million dollars a year on tokens.”

“That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future and it's not even a couple of years away.”

“I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good, like, you know, I think that in two years, like, That'll be a 100,000 and, you know, down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen.”