Harj Taggar
26 statements across 15 episodes · 11 bullish · 7 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Feb 15, 2017 by Kat Manalac · said 12 times in 7 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Harj Taggar's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Vivek Ravisankar (1), Pete Koomen (1), Kat Manalac (1), Jared Friedman (1), Craig Cannon (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 7 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2018 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Harj Taggar, oldest first
Feb 15, 2017 positive
Manalac: Y Combinator frequently re-funds alumni after startup failures
“We funded so many alumni at this point multiple times. You know, we just recently had Dennis Mars from Proxy who is coming through a second time. You know, YC, former YC partner Harge went through with, you know, Triple Byte for a second time. So it, you know,…”
Apr 8, 2022 bearish
Taggar: FAANG Product Launches Rarely Kill Fast-Growing Startups
“Cause like, if you think about like, we're like scratching our heads, trying to find examples of times that like a fan company launched a product that killed a fast growing, successful startup. So like clearly more often than not, like structural advantage isn…”
Sep 15, 2022 negative
Taggar: Second-Time Founders Risk Becoming Lazy at Product and Sales
“Whereas a first time founder, the only way you're getting your first few users is having a really great product and being really great at selling it. And I think you can just get a little bit lazy on that front as a second time founder.”
Sep 15, 2022
Taggar: Investors soften feedback for repeat founders to protect referral networks
“And it's like when you're a second time founder, the investors know that you know more people. They don't want to give you bad feedback, right? Like they're incentivized to tell you nice things so that you'll continue being nice to them. Whereas when you're a …”
Nov 1, 2022 positive
Taggar: Finding startup ideas and co-founders should not be separate tasks
“I'd start by encouraging you to not think of finding ideas and co-founders as two separate tasks. It's hard to think up good ideas yourself. Also, your ideas will start out being vague and fuzzy, more like a hunch or an impulse than a clearly formed idea, and …”
Nov 1, 2022 negative
Taggar: Academic and workplace success poorly predict startup performance
“You might think you could just look at how well someone has done in school or at work and assume success there would lead to success at startups. That's definitely what I thought when I first started working at YC in 2010 and began reading YC funding applicati…”
Nov 1, 2022
Feb 8, 2024 positive
Taggar: 'ChatGPT wrapper' meme benefited YC by filtering out trend-chasing founders
“Going back to like the chat GBT rapper meme again, I actually think that was great for YC. Because it meant we only got the people who are like tune, who could tune that out. And we're just like, hey, like either I'm just so interested in this technology, I do…”
Feb 8, 2024 negative
Taggar: Malicious AI agents will require consumers to deploy defensive AI agents
“He's worried about there's going to be a world of just sort of like all these AI agents that are out trying to do malicious things, and that we're going to need like our own like good defensive AI agents out there making sure we don't get scammed out of all of…”
Feb 8, 2024 positive
May 30, 2024 positive
Taggar: The best founders believe no startup task is beneath them
“One thing I've just noticed again is the best founders, no matter how smart they are, like they just like dive into that. I think you just got to have that mindset of like, nothing is beneath me. The only thing I care about is like getting to product market fi…”
Jul 12, 2024
Taggar: Zero traction signals a flawed assumption, not necessarily a bad idea
“It doesn't mean that this is a bad idea. It doesn't mean that you need to pivot to something else necessarily, but it does mean that you've made a bad assumption and you need to figure out what that is and develop a new hypothesis about the world.”
Sep 27, 2024
Taggar: Early hires cannot replace a co-founder's emotional support
“Your co-founder ideally should be someone who's all in on the startup in the same way that you are. And when you're having bad moments, they can bring you up and you can do the same for them. And that's an important reason why you can't just sort of hire peopl…”
Sep 27, 2024 positive
Taggar: Solo founders cannot achieve the work quality and output needed to succeed
“And you really can't do that alone. Like you need someone else there who at a basic level can just get more work done with you, right? Two people is more working hours per day than one, but also having a good co-founder improves the quality of your work. So if…”
Nov 1, 2024 bullish
Nov 14, 2024 bearish
Taggar: AI coding startups risk obsolescence from OpenAI o1's native reasoning
“I wouldn't go all the way and suggest they should pivot, but I do think companies that are building AI coding agents or AI program engineers are potentially have stuff to think about here, because it seems like O-One in particular is like outperforming on just…”
May 30, 2025 positive
Taggar: Gemini Pro Excels at Integrating Feedback Notes into Prompts
“One thing I found useful is as you're using it, if you just note down in a Google doc things that you're seeing, just the outputs not being how you want or ways that you can think to improve it, you can just write those in note form and then give Gemini Pro li…”
May 30, 2025 positive
Taggar: Prompting LLMs as Expert Engineers Creates an Effective Optimization Loop
“A very simple way to get started with meta-prompting is to follow the same structure of the prompt as to give it a role and make the role be like, you know, you're an expert prompt engineer who gives really, like, detailed great critiques and advice on how to …”
Jul 8, 2025 bearish
Harj Taggar: Incumbent software companies underwhelm businesses seeking AI solutions
“Because, like, AI has captured the, like, the imagination of everybody, everyone, like, wants to know what's possible and are consistently underwhelmed by what, like, the established software companies can offer them, but they're open to, like, college student…”
Jul 8, 2025 positive
Taggar: College students often extract better AI model performance than PhDs
“The technical expertise is now actually really like the missing piece for a lot of these things. And we consistently see, at least in YC, that college students are actually at the forefront of this stuff, like actually understanding how to use the models and h…”
Jul 8, 2025
Taggar: The 'Last Window to Get Rich' Logic Is Flawed Under AGI
“If this is actually the last window to make money and get rich, then you're basically implying that, you know, that we're going to get some definition of AGI or ASI, or whatever you want to call it. That's like a necessary condition for that to be true. Like, …”
Jul 8, 2025 neutral
Harj Taggar: Humans cannot outcompete AI on instructions; agency will matter
“It's pretty clear now in the AI world that, like, the AI is very good at following instructions, and it's probably going to be hard for humans to compete with the AI on just, like, Following instructions reliably, in which case people here need to think about …”
Nov 7, 2025
Taggar: Elite Founders Nurture Relationships for Years to Hire Individual Engineers
“I think some of the elite founders that I've worked with throughout the YC career, they are essentially, in a sense, always recruiting, but they're always looking to meet people who they think are really smart and interesting, whether they're available or not.…”
Dec 22, 2025 neutral
Taggar: Incremental model gains make finding AI startup ideas difficult again
“The models themselves have incrementally improved this year, but there haven't been like major steps forward that have shaken everything up, which is, has a knock on effect. Many episodes ago, we talked about how it was It felt easier than ever to pivot and fi…”
Dec 22, 2025 negative
Feb 21, 2026 positive
Taggar: Devtool founders should design products from the agent's perspective
“Developing an intuitive fuel, like a hands-on fuel for
The agents, their limitations, their capabilities, and very specifically around what we're talking about here is like, what type of tools the agents work well with?
where do they get stuck?
And once you s…”