Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan Says AI Is Changing Who Joins YC

When Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan launched his startup in the 2000s, he worked such long hours that he took anti-narcotics just to stay awake. Today, he no longer needs pills to work on his schedule thanks to the help of AI Tan, who says he only sleeps about four hours a night, waking up early to spend the first few hours testing. a team of autonomous AI agents. “I can do my full-time job, do eight-, nine-hour meetings, and get 10,000 lines of code across three different projects right now,” Tan said during a speech at SXSW on Saturday (March 14).

Advanced AI coding skills are also changing the way YC evaluates applicants respected startup incubator groups. Wisely now “on tap,” as Tan puts it, the accelerator puts more weight on the founders’ taste, agency and product management skills. The next great inventor “may be an English major,” he said.

YC is known for incubating successful startups like Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase and Instacart. Every four months, it runs 13-week cohorts of promising companies that receive $500,000 in funding and training from YC partners.

Tan himself has gone through almost every role in that ecosystem. He first joined YC as a founder in 2008 for his blogging platform Posterous, then became a partner between 2010 and 2015. After leaving to form Initialized Capital, the venture capital firm he co-founded with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he returned in 2023 to lead the accelerator as CEO.

His tenure has coincided with a time of rapid change, as AI dramatically increases the productivity of coding. Tan said he’s already seeing an impact within YC: in some clusters, about half of the startups are now producing 10,000 to 20,000 lines of code a day. Not everyone in technology, however, depends on him. “I have software engineer friends who are in denial,” Tan said, urging coders to use AI tools to boost their productivity.

That change in tool usage is reshaping what YC looks at for founders. “I don’t really care where someone went to university, or where they worked,” said Tan. The traditionally impressive markers—degrees from Harvard or Stanford, landing on Google or Meta—no longer carry the weight they once did. Instead, you’re more interested in the candidate’s Github repository, a living record of their code, files and documentation.

AI is also revolutionizing YC’s classic favorite of many creative teams. Co-founders are always good, says Tan, because they can support each other through the pressures of building a company. But he added that the broad capabilities of AI are making independent developers more efficient, pointing to Peter Steinberger, the co-founder of OpenClaw, which has launched dozens of projects, as an example. Steinberger recently joined OpenAI to lead the personal agents division.

Because YC is often the bellwether of Silicon Valley, these changes ripple beyond its portfolio. The accelerator has supported more than 5,000 startups with a combined value of $1 trillion, more than 5.5 percent went on to become unicorns. Its alumni network includes figures such as OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who served as YC’s president from 2014 to 2019) and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.

YC’s footprint may soon grow with space. Although the incubator has long been synonymous with its San Francisco headquarters, Tan suggested that new locations may be on the horizon, naming Austin, Texas and Boston as possible locations. The firm is already on board with this, having hired Ankit Gupta last year as its first full-time partner based in Cambridge, Mass, near Boston.