GT

Garry Tan

President & CEO, Y Combinator

San Francisco, California

Education

Work Experience

  • President, CEO, and Group Partner

    2023

  • Board Partner & Advisor

    2023

  • Founder & Managing Partner

    2012 - 2022

    Lead investor in early stage startups. Was early (pre-seed, seed, Series A) investor in founders who have created more than $200B in market value in 9 years. We are a team of partners with deep expertise in product, engineering, marketing and design, with a fully institutional LP base and over $3.2B in assets under management. Investments include Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN), Instacart, OpenDoor (NASDAQ: OPEN), Flexport, Cruise Automation (acq by GM), Plangrid (acq by Autodesk), Rippling, Patreon, Bison Trails (acq by Coinbase), HelloSign (acq by Dropbox), EasyPost, Flock Safety, Envoy, Blend Labs (NYSE: BLND), Color Genomics, Ridecell, Lever (acq by Employ), Sift, Lob, Heap, Torch.io, Athelas, Drip Capital, Paperspace (acq by Digital Ocean), Empower Financial, Clipboard Health and many more. Hands-on help with product design, strategy, interaction design, visual design, and hiring.

2013

  • Cofounder

    2013

    Easy, simple blogs for $5/mo forever. This is a replacement for Posterous.com, but now one that we intend to charge money for, and keep online for as long as possible. We needed a replacement, and other people do too.

2010 - 2015

  • Partner

    2010 - 2015

    Helped over 700 YC startups over the past 5 years (10 batches) build tomorrow's world-changing companies. Previously designer-in-residence. Wrote key software at YC, including the internal alumni social network and forum Bookface (used by 1 in 3 YC alums every day) and the Demo Day website with realtime video updates.

2008 - 2011

  • Cofounder

    2008 - 2011

    Dead simple posting of everything online using email. Attach documents, photos, music, video, and files of any kind and we'll transcode it to the most web friendly format and host it for you too. Autopost to facebook, twitter, flickr, and all your blogs. I ran full stack design and development: from product definition, interaction design, visual design to software engineering, scaling, database management, systems administration. I designed and shipped major parts of the app including text processing, post editor, customizable blog theme engine, embed expansion, realtime and digest email notifications and subscriptions, and bookmarklet. Varyingly over the years I had to wear all the other hats too -- tech architecture, scaling and optimization, customer support, spam and abuse eradication, branding, PR. It was a blast. Launched in July of 2008 and at peak was a Quantcast Top 200 site. We grew 10x in 2009 and 2.5x in 2010. Acquired by Twitter. Posterous has been hailed in the design community for its focus on no-setup no-signup first time experience, and has been featured in Designing Social Interfaces published by O'Reilly and The Smashing Book by Smashing Magazine. "What might be the simplest blogging platform to date." --Michael Arrington, Techcrunch "In terms of making things really dead simple Posterous beats every other service or app I have ever used. We can learn from them." -- Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon "The quickest and easiest setup I've ever seen." --Huffington Post

2005 - 2007

  • Lead Engineer, Designer

    2005 - 2007

    Cofounded v1 product/team for Palantir's financial analysis product. Joined as employee #10. Defined product vision and design features for 14 engineers working on a next-generation financial analysis platform, now actively deployed to top hedge funds and banks around the world in partnership with Thomson Reuters. Hacked the first few early iterations of the software from scratch. Designed the current Palantir mark and logo.

2003 - 2005

  • Program Manager

    2003 - 2005

    Program management of ActiveSync 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and Windows Vista releases of Windows Mobile synchronization and device management software.

2002 - 2003

  • Software Engineer Intern

    2002 - 2003

2000 - 2000

  • Software Engineer Intern

    2000 - 2000

1998 - 2000

  • Software Engineer Intern

    1998 - 2000

    Worked during high school and college, part time during school, full time during breaks. Web application development for clients such premiere brands as Caterpillar, PowerBar, Specialized Mountain Bikes, Esprit, and Virgin Megastore. Perl web application development, linux administration, and build system integration.