President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @garryslist—Creator of GStack & GBrain—designer/engineer who helps founders—SF Dem accelerating the boom loop
San Francisco, CA
Joined January 2008
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Tech gave me everything I have
Its capacity to lift people into abundance is incredible and there is nothing like it
We must make that into prosperity for everyone
"I realized tech is this thing that can bring people out of whatever situation they're in and often into prosperity. And that's what I want for everyone."
@ycombinator’s @garrytan tells @emilychangtv how tech changed his family's life.
Watch here: trib.al/sxg1VGR
Garry Tan retweeted
LUMI IS THE FIRST AND ONLY HUMANOID ROBOT APPROVED BY THE U.S. GOVERNMENT 🇺🇸
lightberry.com/press/dow-app…
GBrain Cloud is the fastest way to get GBrain going across all your agents. Every harness has its strengths - Grok/Muse/Dots for personal, OpenClaw/Hermes for raw power, Claude Code/Codex/Capy for codegen
GBrain lets you run your context on all of them
gbrain.io/notes/set-up-gbrai…
Garry Tan retweeted
David Lieb, socio de Y Combinator y cofundador de Google Photos, dice que es la demo más loca que ha visto. Lo entiendo.
Subvocal es una startup de San Francisco de tres personas, de la tanda de otoño de 2026 de Y Combinator. Acaba de levantar 1,3 millones de dólares con YC y Afore Capital. Hacen unas gafas que leen los movimientos casi invisibles de los músculos con los que hablas por dentro. Mueves la boca sin emitir sonido y el texto aparece a más de 200 palabras por minuto. Sin cámaras y sin leer los labios.
La idea tiene historia. En 2018 Arnav Kapur, investigador del MIT Media Lab, presentó AlterEgo, unos electrodos pegados a la mandíbula que reconocían palabras dichas en silencio con un 92% de acierto. Funcionaba con vocabularios limitados, como números y comandos. Lo que ha cambiado es la IA, que ya sabe convertir señales del cuerpo en frases abiertas. Según Lieb, Subvocal lo ha construido en cuatro meses.
Primero fue el teclado, luego la pantalla táctil, luego la voz. La voz tiene un problema que todos conocemos: nadie quiere dictarle un correo al móvil en un tren lleno o en una oficina. Si hablar en silencio funciona, la conversación con la IA puede ser continua y privada.
Me quedan dos preguntas. ¿Funcionará en cualquier persona? La propia empresa dice que hará falta una calibración corta. ¿Y quién guarda esas señales? Son palabras que decidiste no decir en voz alta.
La reserva cuesta 199 dólares y los primeros envíos están previstos para el primer trimestre de 2027.
Pronto lo raro será teclear.
Garry Tan retweeted
The intellectual architects behind the "billionaire tax"
Were @gabriel_zucman and Emmanuel Saez
It turns out, their work was riddled with major errors (potentially academic fraud as the errors almost always go one way)
The political architect was Dave Regan, a Union leader
He is now facing a slew of allegations that undermine his credibility (from his own side)
In other words the merits and motivations behind the billionaire tax are extremely suspect
But it fits so neatly into a narrative that was deceitfully crafted over the last decade that none of this will matter in the minds of many voters
Garry Tan retweeted
California public schools lost 382,000 students in eight years and added 41,000 staff who don’t even teach.
Lower enrollment, lower scores, more overhead. Not exactly a winning formula. Sick of administrative bloat? Join us: garryslist.org/join
Garry Tan retweeted
Excited to be partnering with Cloudflare and on their AI gateway - try our new token efficient model. 🚀
Particle-1 from @particle_api is available on AI Gateway — a model designed to be token-efficient, fast, and accurate. The hottest models from the hottest new labs, all on @Cloudflare AI Gateway.
developers.cloudflare.com/ai…
Garry Tan retweeted
Your first enterprise customer is the hardest one to get.
At YC, they come to you.
Last week we launched Early Access Network: 30 companies, 100+ enterprise leaders, one room, months before Demo Day.
Now part of every YC batch. Apply for W27 by Nov 2: ycombinator.com/apply
Creators of PStack and GStack
Can’t wait to share our lightcone ep with @poteto and @romanugarte_
Garry Tan retweeted
This is the most insane demo I’ve seen. Subvocal YC F26 lets you speak completely silently and reads the minute movements of your face. So you can talk to your AI anytime.
AI + sensors is magic.
What’s crazier is they built this in 4 months. This demo was live yesterday evening at the YC office.
We’ve raised $1.3M from YC & Afore Capital so you never have to type or speak again.
Typing is slow. Talking into your computer is awkward. Subvocal fixes both
Our glasses give you the speed of speech without you making a sound or touching a keyboard.
It tracks your internal speech muscles with non-contact sensing and decodes silent, almost invisible mouthing into text at more than 200 words/min.
Pre-orders are now live at:
subvocal.co/preorder?utm_sou…
Garry Tan retweeted
we will need to rebuild and rewrite much of software to adapt to a new, faster pace.
code used to arrive one drop at a time. soon, if not already, code will be written as if it were a continuous stream, like a violent river twisting and turning as it pleases.
this is not a new thing: big tech cos have had to deal with this with the enormous scale of their engineering teams. but now ai has brought an incredibly elastic and capable workforce wielded by every engineer. this is your problem now, and the only way to adapt is to evolve your systems so agents - even and especially the ones with little context about the right way of doing things - can thrive. make the easy thing the right thing.
your codebase is becoming organic architecture. agent contributions grow around the constraints and guardrails you’ve designed. good software engineering matters even more now! and no, the continuous stream of code is not something you have to watch helplessly. be more ambitious and design systems, frameworks, and languages to control the chaos.
the time for mourning coding is long over
Garry Tan retweeted
interpretability might be the most important scientific problem in the world right now, as I don't think we can solve alignment if we don't know what we're building. I think I have good news about it. I co-authored early work in mechanistic interpretability at OpenAI and came away pessimistic, because neural networks appeared to fold into arbitrary tangled knots. years later, I started openai's first large-scale automated interpretability project, finding about 2% of neurons legible with the primitive tools we had
with modern agentic tools and a much closer look, the picture looks totally different. the vast majority in models up to trillions of parameters are legible, and their circuits beautiful. many famous examples of tangled neurons turned out to be misunderstood. The roadblocks I expected mostly aren't there. I now think ambitious interpretability will be solved by the time we need it most, and possibly quite soon, as automated scientists keep improving. it may be a bitter lesson for interpretability: the simple thing, at absurd scale, works
already-clean.goodfire.com/
Garry Tan retweeted
Consider @wquist’s description of VC as a process of funding cheap experiments with huge potential upside.
It requires the humility to admit that, initially, nobody knows what’s going to work. Failure rates are always high.
So, a bunch of companies get a small Seed investment, and each faces a similar set of challenges, constraints and hardships.
This is Darwinian capitalism. The weak fall away without inflicting much cost, while the best founders keep raising.
It is therefore beneficial to everyone that the base of seed investments, and seed investors, is broad and diverse.
The belief that a particular firm can “kingmake” a startup with capital or resources will only mask weakness and distort this process — raising the cost of failure, restricting entry.
Venture capital is a process of discovery. The lion’s share of capital should go to founders who earn it, not to those anointed by the hubris of investors.
Garry Tan retweeted
People who have been in research fields develop a felt sense that most "research" (in almost any field that isn't exactingly technical) is research theater, and many superstar careers enjoy star status not because of a unique connection to the truth but because of a unique connection with an audience. No one really has the time or stature to, from a position of objectivity and trust, bring popular researchers to heel. But it will get increasingly hard to hide from serious critique. The machines can do critique now, at the level of depth and rigor previously only possible for the academically deranged. We're going to have to revise a lot of what we "know" about the world that isn't really knowledge but is actually just received popular consensus - like floating voltages without grounding wires. The grounding wires are coming.
Tyler Cowen:
'I am not even sure what to say at this point. We need a radical revaluation of this work, and of the associated policy arguments. More generally, this is only a single step in the story of how AI is going to revise economic science, and indeed past research more generally. As I stress in many of my recent talks, there will be significant gains and losses in status, with the losses often outweighing the gains. I see this as one of those cases.'
Garry Tan retweeted
If this is what Proton employees are revolting against they’re not gonna make it.
CEO is 100% accurate here.
Garry Tan retweeted
In collaboration with @olam_labs, we ran a series of experiments letting agent swarms compete in Minecraft and Mindustry.
We wanted to see what kinds of agent dynamics would emerge when they shared a world over long periods of time.
We found civil bureaucracy, thousands of telegraphic A2A messages, and OpenAI models retrieving the game's source code to beat Claude.
More on our findings below:
Garry Tan retweeted
It's almost hard to believe, but the US has only a single factory left that makes HMX and RDX, the explosives in nearly every modern missile and bomb - an aging wwii plant in Tennessee that's massively backordered.
A few years ago, a startup called Solugen was making chemicals for the petroleum industry, when by happenstance they heard about this problem. It turns out that the same infrastructure they'd built for other chemicals was a perfect fit to make energetics.
So, that's what they're doing now. They can already make 1/10 of what the old US army plant makes, and in the future will make much more.
This is the SpaceX/Anduril moment for the US military explosives market.
In four days of the Iran war, the US and its allies fired more Tomahawks than the US builds in four years. One bottleneck is energetics production.
So we built a 100% CONUS energetics supply chain with our own capital. Our modular solution makes HMX and other advanced energetics, the explosives in nearly every US missile and munition.
The US builds about 85 Tomahawks a year. The Army's only plant making the explosives inside them is 84 years old, and its $1B upgrade has slipped from 2025 to 2029 or later. That plant is Holston, in Tennessee. It makes about 3% of what it made in 1944, and buyers wait one to two years for its explosives.
Holston makes its chemicals and its explosives on one site, so every expansion means building both plants there. A plant like that takes billions of dollars and about a decade to build. Permitting this in the US is a nightmare, because you’re taking on the risk of a chemical plant and an explosives plant at once. What could possibly go wrong.
We separated the two. Terraforge 1, Solugen’s Houston plant, is tied into Houston's petrochemical infrastructure and makes inert precursors: white powders about as flammable as sugar. They can ship via FedEx or UPS, and sit in an ordinary warehouse. Discreet.
Odin Energetics, our joint venture with Kraken Kinetics, turns them into explosives in shipping container reactors called Nitroforges. It took us six months to build the first one, and they can be set up where the weapons are needed. On-demand energetics. That means no stockpiles or concentrated first-strike targets. Kraken builds the warheads, so every step from chemical to warhead happens in the US. Together we stood up the entire chain from raw chemical to finished warhead.
Odin can already make close to a tenth of what Holston makes in a year. To make more, we’re building several factories at the same time.
wsj.com/politics/national-se…
ALT Screenshot of a Wall Street Journal article headlined “America Needs Explosives for Its Drones. This Startup Is Making Them.” Subhead: Odin Energetics rebuilding supply chain that has withered in decades since World War II. Photo of an explosives test outside Houston.
Garry Tan retweeted
can confirm there are an impressive number of software startups taking single digit million seed rounds, getting to 3-10M+ ARR, and jumping straight to one or more back to back growth rounds
i respectfully disagree
i am actually quite bullish on underdog software startups, and feel fortunate to get to serve thousands of them at greptile.
here is what we see:
- ambitious startups have never been more leveraged. with coding agents they can punch far above their headcount. labs are competing to provide increasingly more value at lower prices.
- large software companies are being forced to step up their game in response. the best ones are painstakingly refactoring their engg orgs to adapt to a new way of building software
like many of the best tech disruptions, this one shifts power from incumbents to upstarts
Garry Tan retweeted
Last night an AI agent performed brain surgery on a mouse.
We gave it 19 gene therapy vectors in a spreadsheet, a mouse model of epilepsy, access to a motorize surgery rig with cameras and one goal: reduce seizures.
It picked the drug. It picked the brain region. It derived the coordinates from three papers. Then it drove the stereotaxic arms into the brain and injected 250 nanolitres while watching the entry site through the rig camera for bleeding.
A licensed vet gated every irreversible step and held a physical kill switch to stop the AI agent.
Thread on what it decided, what it saw, and the moment it refused to let me override it.
[Writing this on the spot out of excitement, but I've been 18hrs in front of my laptop coding and coordinating this, so keeping it brief and descriptive, more cohesive thoughts on this soon...]
Garry Tan retweeted
i respectfully disagree
i am actually quite bullish on underdog software startups, and feel fortunate to get to serve thousands of them at greptile.
here is what we see:
- ambitious startups have never been more leveraged. with coding agents they can punch far above their headcount. labs are competing to provide increasingly more value at lower prices.
- large software companies are being forced to step up their game in response. the best ones are painstakingly refactoring their engg orgs to adapt to a new way of building software
like many of the best tech disruptions, this one shifts power from incumbents to upstarts
What we are seeing at @coderabbitai and elsewhere on this parabolic trajectory is that even larger seed rounds ($8M+) are no longer enough to build a software business. Software factories need quality tokens and large-scale compute to run CI, sandboxes, and other infrastructure to ship software at scale. At this point, smaller startups exist only to funnel ideas to larger startups with more tokens.
Garry Tan retweeted
Atoms are the new bits. 25% of YC startups now build hardware, so we're setting up a YC Hardware Lab in Dogpatch.
We're hiring the person to run it. If you've built hardware and know your way around a shop, apply or send us someone great: ycombinator.com/careers?job_…
