Garry Tan
@garrytan • 1,141,413 subscribers
President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @garryslist—Creator of GStack & GBrain—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerating the boom loop
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The NYT is predictably tearing down Reese Witherspoon for encouraging moms to try AI before they ingest the anti-AI pablum as truth Instead of linking to the NYT op-ed, I think you should watch this video and encourage you to follow Reese Witherspoon on Instagram
Garry Tan1,253,369 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
I asked Secretary Duffy what Americans should be able to do, if we get this decade right, that they can't do today. Sean Duffy is the Secretary of Transportation, and he sat down with me at our Startup Industrial Base event in DC today. He went straight to how our country's air traffic gets managed. At the command center, people sit in front of six screens with a paper flight chart above them, trying to make the calls on weather and routing. His example: four planes reach the same runway at the same time and only one can land. See it two hours out, speed up two, slow one down, and each one lands when the runway is open. "Like, not complicated stuff, but we don't do any of this." Paper and pencil and minimal human augmentation from software looks like this: Say an airport can take 15 planes in a 15 minute window. "Well, the airlines will schedule 32." He says he's handing the airlines that data and asking them to spread out. The tool is SMART, from Air Space Intelligence, a small company he says competed with the biggest companies and won. It predicts. His stage example: a 2.5 hour ground stop might only need 45 minutes. He's taken heat for supposedly handing air traffic control to AI. Duffy's answer? "it's dumb AI, not smart AI." Controllers still make every call. None of this needs a breakthrough. It needs the will of the people to know they need to use software and be ok with AI augmentation instead of insisting on a paper chart and copper wire.
Garry Tan78,469 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
Now announcing: Garry's List We’re starting a citizen’s union for radical centrism. We proved local politics is winnable in SF. Now we’re building the community to do it everywhere — news, commentary, and accountability for policies that affect California and our society.
Garry Tan403,050 Aufrufe • vor 8 Monaten
The Pentagon's 300-page RFP "was designed for a lawyer and a lobbyist and a prime contractor to know how to fill out." That's Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research & Engineering, saying it out loud to a room full of founders at our Startup Industrial Base event in DC today. A 10-person startup reads 300 pages, gets one thing wrong, gets kicked out. Or survives and grinds through 3, 6, 9, 12 month rounds until it's two years in. Meanwhile the prime has a team whose whole job is filling out every page perfectly. Emil’s fix? Write a one pager not 300. "I need to fly a missile 500 miles in this kind of environment." If your payload won't work, you hear that fast. Target is 90 days. Drone Dominance runs the same way. Apply, top 20 go to a fly-off, objective metrics, cuts every round, and he says half a billion dollars of orders at the end. "I'd rather know if I lose and why." Miss round one and there are more rounds coming, and "it'll be 2 or 3" winners, not one. Cost per intercept is the game now. Shoot down a $50k drone with a Patriot missile and "the math doesn't math." He's funding directed energy and high power microwave that cost thousands, not millions. The tech was never what kept startups out. The 300 pages were. Two pages and a fly-off means the best product can actually win, and the prime has to compete like everyone else.
Garry Tan37,655 Aufrufe • vor 21 Tagen
Sam Altman's advice to founders worried about OpenAI competition: "Don't build our core chat assistant. There's so much more space to go after." Count on the models getting far smarter. Sam promises "Sign in with ChatGPT" which would be powerful with access to memory.
Garry Tan556,869 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Holistic college admissions? More like hostile and racist. 18-yo prodigy Stanley Zhong gets Google L4 but is rejected by 16 colleges. I sat with his YC-alum dad Nan, who sued UC to crack open the admissions black box. The American Dream demands merit not more racism 👇
Garry Tan537,943 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Sam Altman says Artificial Superintelligence is thousands of days away. There is a lot of compounding left to do. What happens then? Fix climate, space colonies, limitless intelligence, understanding physics, abundant energy. Think bigger. The age of abundance is nigh.
Garry Tan651,608 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
I am so thankful for Paul Graham Jessica Livingston Brian Chesky Carolynn Levy for believing me and selecting me to be the President & CEO of YC. To be able to lead this brilliant band of partners is beyond the best job I’ve ever had! If you love what you do, you never work a day in your life
Garry Tan210,332 Aufrufe • vor 7 Monaten
Elon Musk's formula for success: Ego ÷ Ability < 1 When your ego exceeds your ability, you break the feedback loop to reality. Smash your ego. Internalize responsibility. Do whatever it takes. The goal isn't glory—it's true work that serves the most people.
Garry Tan437,696 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Jung said: “The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.” Founders on their journey must overcome their inner situation and integrate their shadow. Only then will they have a chance at altering fate itself.
Garry Tan360,505 Aufrufe • vor 1 Jahr
Daniel Ek made >$5M at 22 and lived “that life” in the nightclubs of Stockholm to realize that all of it was just status games. So he returned to the things he loved: music and tech. So he started Spotify. The status games are a distraction from the fulfillment of building.
Garry Tan512,409 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren