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Garry Tan

CEO, YCombinator

Search every verified Garry Tan interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, has been a prominent voice in discussions about the state of startups and the impact of AI on the industry. At YC Demo Day, he highlighted a significant shift toward "hard tech" companies, noting that about a quarter of the current batch focuses on areas like manufacturing, defense, and agriculture, a roughly 40-fold increase from a few years ago. He attributed this trend to AI, saying that "intelligence is on tap" and enables founders to tackle problems involving "atoms" rather than just "bits." In a CNBC interview, Tan urged separating "science fact from science fiction" in AI doomsday debates, emphasizing real cybersecurity risks over speculative scenarios. He also discussed the growing number of solo founders and experienced founders in YC batches, and the potential for AI to allow small teams to achieve significant revenue, citing a company with two 19-year-old founders reaching $15 million in revenue. Tan has also spoken about the defense industrial base, arguing that software has "left the screen" and can be applied to national security challenges. At a YC event in Washington, D.C., he discussed how startups could become dependable suppliers to the military, calling for more competition and manufacturing capacity. In conversations with Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone, Tan described YC's surge in hard tech and said startup fundamentals remain unchanged, while also noting that SaaS is not dead but has transformed. He has expressed enthusiasm for open models in AI, suggesting that open-source and open-weight models will continue to improve even as frontier labs focus on alignment issues.

Recent appearances

  • Jensen Huang: You Don’t Have To Conquer Your Whole Life In One Day—Just Get Through This Morning | Learn English With Speeches

    October 18, 2026 · 📺 Hitvideoanalyzer

    Live conversation at Y Combinator Startup School 2026 (Chase Center): Garry Tan talks with NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. When NVIDIA was founded, its chosen technical path was completely wrong, so he went to Fry’s and bought three textbooks to relearn graphics; when Sega Dreamcast contract was on the verge of collapse, he flew to Japan, admitted he couldn’t do it, yet asked them to pay under the contract anyway and saved his company. At the end of his talk his words for young people were these:“You don’t have to conquer your whole life in one day—you just have to get through this morn…

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  • Tiny Teams Doing the Work of 100 People | Garry Tan

    October 12, 2026 · 📺 Supabase Library

    Y Combinator President and CEO Garry Tan on how AI lets tiny teams do the work of far bigger ones, including what Tan is building on Supabase. In conversation with Supabase CEO Paul Copplestone, Tan covers YC's surge in hard tech, why startup fundamentals haven't changed, hiring people who know agents, and why SaaS isn't dead. Speakers: Garry Tan, President & CEO, Y Combinator Paul Copplestone, CEO, Supabase Recorded at Supabase Select 2026 in San Francisco on October 2, 2026. All Select 2026 talks: https://select.supabase.com 👇 Learn more about Supabase 👇 🕸 Website: https://supabase.com/?…

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  • Supabase Select 26 Main Stage

    October 02, 2026 · 📺 Supabase

    Supabase Select 26 is our user conference, built for everyone building with Supabase, from weekend hackers to production-scale teams. If you're shipping software, this event is for you. Select is about giving builders the tools, knowledge, and confidence to move faster. You'll learn how teams are scaling with Postgres, shipping AI features in days, not months, and taking full advantage of the Supabase stack. Whether you're just getting started or managing infrastructure EXPLAIN at scale, you'll leave with practical insights, better workflows, and a stronger connection to the global builder c…

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  • The Startup Industrial Base: Building for the Next 250 — Washington, D.C.

    September 30, 2026 · 📺 YC Root Access

    The defense industrial base of the future will be built by small, fast-moving teams working on some of the hardest problems in national security. Live from Washington, D.C., Y Combinator brings together founders, senior government officials, and military leaders for a day of conversations about rebuilding America’s defense industrial base, working with the government, and closing critical capability gaps across autonomy, munitions, space, secure communications, manufacturing, and more. Full event agenda here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1R... 0:00- Livestream begins 10:56 - Intro 13:…

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  • The State of Startups in 2026

    September 17, 2026 · 📺 Y Combinator

    YC works with thousands of founders every year, which gives us an early look at how startups are changing. Right now, the shift is striking: startups are moving from bits to atoms, nearly one in five YC companies has a solo founder, and companies are reaching meaningful revenue faster than ever. In this episode of The Lightcone, Garry, Jared, Diana, and Harj dig into what’s driving these changes and what they mean for founders. They discuss how AI is making it possible for smaller teams to take on more ambitious problems, why experienced founders are having a resurgence, and why knowing wha…

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  • Garry Tan urges separating ‘science fact from science fiction’ amid AI doomsday fears

    September 10, 2026 · 📺 CNBC Television

    CNBC's Kate Rooney sat down for an exclusive interview with Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan to discuss the boom in so-called ...

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  • YC Demo Day, Spoon = Bent (Again), Boring Company Raises, Apple Duo 2 Predictions

    September 10, 2026 · 📺 TBPN

    00:01:47 The Future of AI 00:10:57 AI Safety Takes Over the Timeline 00:12:48 Spoon = Bent (Again) 00:17:54 iPhone Duo Reactions 00:24:17 Garry Tan discusses Y Combinator’s growing focus on hard tech and how AI enables small teams to build ambitious hardware, software, defense, and gaming companies with fewer resources. The Y Combinator CEO predicts AI-native startups will outcompete established firms through agentic workflows while emphasizing practical cybersecurity solutions over speculative AI-safety debates. 00:43:56 Om Buddhdev, co-founder and CEO of Olam Labs, discusses building realist…

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  • Open Models Change The Economics of AI

    September 04, 2026 · 📺 Y Combinator

    Ollama (YC W21) is used by 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500, giving co-founder and CEO Jeffrey Morgan a unique view into which AI models people are actually using and how that’s changing. Right now, the biggest shift he sees is toward open models, driven by coding agents, falling costs, and capabilities that are rapidly catching up to the frontier labs. On Ollama Cloud, that shift has driven a 150x increase in token usage since the start of the year. In this episode of the Lightcone, Jeff joins us to talk about the future of open models and the story behind Ollama, from two ye…

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  • The New Rules for Founders | Garry Tan on a16z

    August 12, 2026 · 📺 a16z

    Anish Acharya is joined by Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, for a conversation about how AI is rewriting the startup playbook, why founders should be more ambitious than ever, and what two decades of Silicon Valley booms, busts, and missed opportunities have taught Garry about building what's next. Garry reflects on turning down an early opportunity to join Palantir, why chasing what's "hot" is often the wrong strategy, and why the best ideas tend to begin with people pursuing strange, earnest obsessions outside the mainstream. They also explore how AI changes the economics of co…

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  • Garry Tan: "Personal AGI Is How You Stay Under Your Own Power"

    August 06, 2026 · 📺 Y Combinator

    The next generation of startups will be built by smaller teams than ever before. At Startup School 2026, YC President & CEO Garry Tan explains why we're entering the era of personal AGI: AI agents that run on your own infrastructure, compound your knowledge over time, and dramatically increase your ability to build. He shares the tools and workflows he uses every day, why every founder should own their intelligence instead of renting it, and what it means to build under your own power. Transcript: https://www.ycrootaccess.com/p/garry-... Apply to Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ap…

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  • The Case For Data Centers In Space

    August 05, 2026 · 📺 Y Combinator

    Philip Johnston is the co-founder and CEO of Starcloud, the company building data centers in space. In November 2025, Starcloud launched an Nvidia H100 GPU into orbit and trained the first large language model in space. They've since raised $200 million, hit a billion-dollar valuation just 17 months after YC demo day and filed with the FCC to deploy 88,000 more satellites. In this episode, Philip walks us through their wild origin story, the engineering challenges behind the Starcloud-1, why they booked a SpaceX launch before they even knew what they were building and how data centers in space…

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  • The New Physics of Business — Garry Tan, Y Combinator

    July 17, 2026 · 📺 AI Engineer

    Garry Tan, President of Y Combinator, discusses how the rise of AI-native companies is revolutionizing organizational productivity, allowing lean teams to operate at a scale previously requiring hundreds or thousands of employees (0:52-1:07). Key Takeaways: The 400x Leverage: Tan reports a massive increase in output (approximately 400x) by shifting from writing individual lines of code to managing AI agents (2:32-2:35). Wiring the Work: He emphasizes that founders should treat AI not as a simple autocomplete tool, but as a workforce (3:58). He explains that core organizational components—lik…

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Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think it's great. I mean uh you know at demo day routinely the hard tech companies are raising 5 to10 million which is like a little bit unpre you know that the median amount that someone raises at YC is usually someplace between uh 2 million to $3 million. Uh and so the hard techch ones are very interesting and that not only like I mean this was not true 3 years ago. 3 years ago like the hard tech things were oddi”

“The most surprising trend that we're seeing is that not only are the hard tech companies applying and the quality of the people working on them are so you know this PhD level you know all of the right you know it's not you know necessarily like the software companies are all like a wide range like 18 year olds all the way up to 50 year old I mean 60s I mean just like you know classically much younger on the software ”

“I mean, the reality is with a startup like these are not research organizations necessarily the you know we're trying to be pragmatic so you know the best version of these things um have some sort of real pragmatic uh use case in like today right I was meeting with a you know I did office hours just now with a photonics company and they told me this crazy story about how data centers today run on fiber optics but the”

“What would it take for a 20 person company to become a dependable supplier to the American military? The big defense companies play an essential role. So do the manufacturers, suppliers, and workers who've spent decades learning how to build things people trust with their lives. What we need is more ways for new companies to join them, more competition, more suppliers, more manufacturing capacity, more opportunities ”

“In 18 years since, software has left the screen. It can see, it can navigate, it can fly, it can run entire factories. We've got computer vision, autonomy, batteries, chips, advanced manufacturing, and most importantly, the engineers who know how to make it all work. Most of it was built for commercial reasons, but all of it can be pointed at defense. YC funds startups at the very beginning, often when it's just a co”

“I mean, you don't really have to necessarily even sell to each other, though that's happening. like the space ecosystems coming together like StarCloud is a great buyer of lots of other space tech um that's h that's been happening I mean we got defense tech coming together and people trading notes like we're putting together a ca so that we can actually help all YC defense companies get in theater with real uh depart”

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