Garry Tan (@garrytan) — what they write about and why it works

My best career advice: At every job you should either learn or earn. Either is fine. Both is best. But if it's neither, quit.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Apple has devolved into a late stage holding company That Siri has no LLM while they are doing this scale of buyback is a complete lack of ambition and no understanding of what is about to happen to them

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Colleges are buying SAT takers names, marketing to low scorers, all to boost rejections and juice their already low acceptance rates to get higher US News rankings Incentives drive unintended consequences: all the world’s not a stage, but a game t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Masayoshi Son invented the first electronic dictionary, sold it for $1.7M to Sharp, and used that capital to start SoftBank. Can’t watch this without being in awe of pure innovation Full interview: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Growing up the child of immigrants, sometimes food insecure, the child of an alcoholic, this was me I paid $8 for the 10 real SATs and did 5 tests back to back. Standardized tests. Advanced math. I learned to code. A massive equalizer. Now the path is murky, and getting darker

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Steve Jobs in 1990: Interpersonal networked computing (through great software and UX) will give rise to decentralized orgs that allow people at every level work together remotely Crazy how Jobs could see clearly 30 yrs into the future! t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Anthropic shutting down OpenClaw may turn out to be a strategic blunder, or strategic genius. The OpenClaw community will be the determiner of whether it is A or B. It's an interesting moment in history. Personally I never bet against open source.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Good design is not picking colors and making it pretty Good design is removing steps, understanding motivations, making it clearer, more navigable, faster, easier... it is how it works not how it looks. Too many products (even at the largest firms in tech) forget this.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Why is every startup a 10 year overnight success? 80% of new businesses fail in the first 5 years. Another 80% fail in the next 5 years. If you can last 10 years your business is in the top 4% of cos that are still kicking. If you start, be ready to commit for 10 years.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Nah this is an exponential event for vertical SaaS More startups than ever are going from zero to $10M per year in recurring revenue with less than 10 people The next years will be IPO class companies getting to $100M to $1B/yr. A thousand flowers will bloom

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Long Term Stock Exchange is now approved by the SEC! 🦄 Let startups go public earlier 🙅🏻‍♂️ Prevent short-term corporate raiders from strip-mining small-to-mid-cap IPOs 👼🏻 Let the public participate in tech gains 🤲🏻 Add transparency/liquidity to startups t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When choosing a startup idea, you must be able to check either of these boxes [ ] Truly novel (nobody else has tried) [ ] 10X better product The absolute best check both. 99% of startups check neither. A good pitch is sometimes a strong story explaining how to get the 1st ☑️

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Garry Tan@garrytan

50 of 91 unicorns in the USA have immigrant founders who have created more than $248B in market value America has more immigrants than any other country. It’s no wonder so much innovation happens here. Immigrants, we get the job done 💪 Full video: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

This is dark but amazing: a very self aware interview with @ConanOBrien FWIW he has always been funnier than every other late night show host in my book so I am glad he is free to experiment and make more awesome funny things. Straitjacket off. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Founders— when things are great, really celebrate that. Share that with your team and savor it. When things are falling apart, the key is to take action, don’t be paralyzed, and really focus on self care: sleep, food, exercise, then back to work. This too shall pass.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I'm very proud to announce our @Initialized Fund V, a $230M fund focused on seed, before the hockey-stick happens. The honeybadgers are reloaded. There are lots of options for after product market fit. We want to be the team that helps you *before*. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

On my graduation day from Stanford, my parents told me to never let your new credential be the best thing about you. Good reminder as people secure funding, get into YC, or whatever may be the next brass ring... celebrate the wins along the way, but this is no destination.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Here's Steve Jobs explaining object oriented programming in layman's terms in 1996 😳 State the problem 💎 Explain a concept 📈 Strong claim: 10X better 🤯 Big historical analogy: industrial revolution Perfect case study for every technical founder pitching their idea🎙

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Every fast growing effective team needs two opposing archetypes: 🦄 the dreamer who can evangelize and attract talent and capital 🏋🏻‍♀️ the rational executor who makes sure the big promise is realized You should know who these people are. If one is missing—find them stat!

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You know I invite both my real friends and my newer startup friends to my house parties Sometimes especially new startup-life friends execute this advice in real time to my real friends (oh you’re a teacher? Cool *Walks away*) It’s fucking gross. Don’t do this.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Customer support is an R&D exercise. Every support ticket is an opportunity to think through: 🎫 How can we avoid having this support ticket on the future? 👓 How could we make the product clearer? 🤷🏻‍♀️ How could we avoid the confusion? 🐛 Fix the bug. —@parkerconrad

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Future founders who don’t have the skills to build yet (eng, PM, design, mgmt, marketing) think raising capital is the 1st step Actually: Unskilled founders, even with capital, still fail when in competition against the skilled Get the skills first, then get the capital after

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Garry Tan@garrytan

30% of YC companies exposed through SVB can’t make payroll in the next 30 days. If you or your company are affected, I recommend that you reach out to your local congressman to get this on their radar TODAY. Now. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Less than 60 percent of web traffic is human. In 2013, half of YouTube traffic was “bots masquerading as people,” a % so high YouTube’s fraud systems would begin to regard bot traffic as real and human traffic as fake. They called this event the Inversion. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you survey enough people, all the advice will cancel to zero. You do have to have your own point of view: ✅ Is that true? 🌐 Is that true outside of the context of what that person applied it in? 👤 Is it true in my context? 🏋🏻‍♀️ And do I want to apply it? —@naval

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Berkshire Hathaway bought See’s Candies for $25M when annual sales were $30M and earnings were $5M. Today that’s $410M and >$80M in annual earnings Berkshire has taken over $2B in free cash from See’s since 1972 🤯

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Scrappy startups: You may have raised less money and you might be under the gun. But by being lean, your quickness and fast iteration time will outrun and out-gun the incumbent and the overfunded competitor 10 times out of 10.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Talkers vs makers Talkers basically need to attract makers to succeed, and its unpredictable whether they do during the course of even a full career Makers can just keep making and they will be discovered sooner or later as long as they are good and make things people want

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Hard work should pay off for Asian Americans, not block their education opportunities At Stuyvesant High School, where nearly 75% of students are Asian. 50% qualify for reduced-price/free lunch, a measure of poverty. 90% of those students are Asian. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Ways to get funded (least fair to most fair) 🤑 Hot round/who else is investing 💼 Right school or resume 👣 Prior successful startup 👩🏻‍🔬 Actually novel breakthrough 🚀 Traction The less you have of the first few, the more you have to get of the last two. It is what it is.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Basic building blocks of a pitch: 1/ What is it? What problem does it solve? Can you explain it simply? Is it something people want? 2/ Is it working? Traction, stats, stories about users wanting it. 3/ How big could it actually be? Can this be the winner? Moats/network effects.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Working for Microsoft cost me $200M I was 23 and I had a zero-risk opportunity to join a startup as employee #1. That startup is now worth $20 billion. Anyone who makes great software will run into situations like this— it's a measure of how valuable software is in the world

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When starting your startup it is better to do it out of an apartment or garage than a corporate-looking incubator space or WeWork. Why? For similar reason to why beehives must be moved miles, not yards. You must reorient yourself completely.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Today is YC W24 Demo Day A new cohort of the world's best startups is ready to meet the world's best investors today So excited to see great minds meeting in the days and weeks ahead

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When I failed, I felt shame, and when I succeeded, I used to think I only felt nothingness. My main aim was to prevent the pain and shame of failure. But then I realized the nothingness was actually peace. A placid lake of stillness. Peace is not nothing. It is everything.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Tobi exemplifies what great founder engineers can do. In the last 10 years: 👩🏻‍💻 15 employees to more than 4,000 📈 Revenues up from $2M to $1.6B 💵 Valuation exploded from less than $20M to $45B 🏬 Stores built with Shopify from <10,000 to over 1,000,000 Truly amazing.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The most brutal thing about the PM job is that doing the *easy* thing (path of least resistance within an org to get something shipped) is usually the *wrong* thing. The *right* thing is rabid and constant advocacy for the customer. This is why remarkable PMing is quite rare.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Lots of college students reach out to me asking me about how to be a VC. I tell them: be a founder first. The best VCs are chosen by founders based on how much they can help bake the 10 year overnight success. Power laws plus adverse selection equal bad returns. Be a founder.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Product needs distribution Distribution needs capital A VC (capital) who can identify good products (former builders) and can also drive distribution (media/paid acq/brand) is the ideal partner for founders in the new age

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you're a startup and you're not even growing 2X per year, and you're wondering if you're failing... yeah, you probably are. The interesting thing is the vast majority of those who are in that situation don't ask that question, and instead write VERY LONG investor updates.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You need openness and creativity pre-product-market-fit. But after that you have to trade that openness in for repeatability, scalability, and management. Failing to do this kills startups after product market fit.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When there is a lot of competition you have basically one tool: specialization Pick off a smaller set of customers and solve their problems completely and in a deeper way. Focus on one city or locality and drive network effects. Then expand. Do what the competition won’t.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You know the key thing people forget in startups is how non-obvious things are for a decade before they become obvious There is a real skill in pushing constantly and never letting up. Founders and early team/investors are prime movers to drive the message into manifestation.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You can solve a problem vertically but end up with TAM problems. Or you can solve a problem horizontally but end up with CAC problems. Pick your poison.

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1/ On outsiders vs insiders: If you’re an outsider to tech (no exits, nobody has heard of you, early in your career) then get used to being shocked at things insiders can pull off. Huge ridiculous fundraises with no traction. Big staff. Splashy press.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Unforced errors for early startup teams 😴 Unresponsive to communication from customers/partners 🗣 Says yes to customers they need to say no to, and then doing a bad job 🤑 Not charging enough 🏖 Leaving huge problems unsolved indefinitely while focusing on the inconsequential

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Founders: What did you wish you knew or prepared for in the years leading up to starting your startup? My list so far: building key skills, cultivating cofounders and first employees, learning about unsolved problems, inner work (therapy) What else?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you made something and you can’t get people to use it, you basically have two options: make it better or do something else. Ask trusted friends who have shipped good things for advice. Don’t listen to people who haven’t made anything: it’s the blind leading the blind.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Coinbase founder @brian_armstrong on joining Airbnb and finding out just how broken our global financial system truly remains: high fees, long delays, controlled by centralized oligopolies. Once you see that problem, Bitcoin seems inevitable. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Get an executive coach - if you’re a CEO or exec, you make decisions regularly that are worth 10x the cost of one. Multiplied by your team, that could be 1000x. No elite athlete can get to that level without coaching. Why would that be different for operating in business?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I did an analysis of the dead startups I invested in the past 5 years and the two most common causes are: 1/ People didn’t want X (not a problem or not good enough solution) 2/ People wanted it but weren’t willing to pay Y (low gross margin) Both totally solvable before 💀

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Beware of TAM when picking ideas! Figma founder Dylan Field (@zoink) looked at US labor stats and it suggested there were only 100K designers. This number turned out to be wrong. Dylan also noticed the top startups always had great design, so they picked the right growing market.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I am super proud to be working with @alexisohanian and our whole team at @initialized. We just reloaded with a new $225M Fund IV aimed at new early stage engineers, designers, and product folks building the future. Now back to work! 🚀

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Garry Tan@garrytan

In 30 years time, I want to look back say we invested in 100 startup decacorns that solved real problems and that help billions of people Coinbase is the golden ticket for me as an investor. But it’s just a ticket and there’s still a dance to go to. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

First time founders love throwing themselves at consumer social. I think that is great, but there’s 1 metric they musr use as a true North Star: Weekly cohort retention at 30 and 90 days. If it can’t ever be > 20% the product can never work. Save yourself years of your life!

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Venture Capital: 2% of the time it works every time $9M of a $400M fund is 2% of the fund 2% * 753X return = 15X fund returner on one investment This is the power law at work. Every VC fund that was an outlier did it this way.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You can learn a lot from books and podcasts but here’s why you need to still seek out advice from people who have worked with a lot of startups 1:1— Books/podcasts don’t tell you what happens when things go bad. They will just give you the survivorship bias of what goes right.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Bad pitch, common: Form random sentences using hot buzzwords and rely on social proof for the rest Good pitch, surprisingly rare: Use plain English to concisely describe what you are doing in the simplest and shortest possible way

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Weird possible future: the majority of the company is remote but founders, CEO and executive leadership team is located in SF Bay—being asked to move to HQ is stepping stone to upper management. Executive dining halls and similar corporate hierarchy perks, 2020 edition.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

This is a classic investor fallacy Startups don’t ever die because they raised a full round at $20M valuation They die because the product sucks or the market doesn’t care Obviously

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One reason to be a designer who codes is that you can make better things. How? I remember one time working as an interaction designer, my assigned software engineer lied to me saying a given database index couldnt be created. I called him on it. It happens all the damn time.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

An uncharitable but very useful view of your potential users are ultimately that they are lazy, not very smart, and totally selfish. So if that's the case, the only way our product can see success is if it's easy, clear/understandable, and totally satisfies a fundamental need.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Never let your credentials be the only noteworthy thing about your pitch. Instead focus on: Product, users, market, usage, and why now? Namedropping will fool investors who have never built anything in their lives, but those aren’t the investors you want on your cap table.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

About 50 reviews through 300 YC applications submitted for comment. Surprising how unaware people are of competition. Yes, you don't die by competition, but when you make something new, you should be hyper-aware of what Google might tell people to use instead of you.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I know a lot of people with kids are going to have a tough week One stoic practice I think is helpful is to meditate on the fact our days are numbered with our kids I’m holding my 9 month old to sleep tonight but I only get to do that at most another 100 to 200 nights 👶🏻 💤

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The key to a good online business: 1/ make a great product that solves the problem 2/ figure out how to get users cheaply and repeatably 3/ keep them around forever (high retention) Seems to be the answer to half the startup q’s I get on IG DM Simple to say, hard to do obvi

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Rippling raised $45M with no Pitch Deck. Instead there was an Investor Memo, coupled with a diligence deck of 46 slides of metrics, projections, and detailed methodology footnotes. I would welcome all who pitch @Initialized to do this 👍 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

A lot of people worry when they try and fail, that failure will hang around their neck forever The lucky reality is that nobody cares! You will be remembered if you help a lot of people or make something great, but as long as you don’t hurt anyone else the downside is nil.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Pre product market fit you have to get lucky. You have to catch lightning in a bottle. After product market fit you have to be good. You have to ride the lightning by building systems and scaling. It’s hard to keep it. Few do. For those that do, the promised land awaits.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Sat next to a YC applicant flying to SF for an interview. Overheard them close an enterprise client for an LOI. You always remember your first customers! What a fun moment to overhear... feeling nostalgic. Gave them interview prep before we boarded. Hope they get in! 🤞

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Garry Tan@garrytan

People often ask me about how to get rid of their fear of working on a startup idea. I say don’t get rid of that fear. You need that fear to keep you away from bad startup ideas. You might be able to notice a good idea if you don’t feel that fear for that particular idea.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Why second time founders have a much easier time raising: “The trouble with the first time entrepreneur is that he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. After a failure he does know what he doesn’t know and can beat the hell out of people who still have to learn.” —Don Valentine

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Why YouTube? I want to try to lift all the boats and the be the magnet that creates a lot more wealth. That's what @paulg's essays did for me. I was a software engineer and knew nothing. His work opened my mind and opened doors I didn't even knew existed.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Quality assurance is the most underrated function for early stage startups. Yes your product works on the golden path. But what if you deviate by 1%? 5%? Your users will. And if you don't fix the "edge case" bugs then they'll never come back.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Startups must nail storytelling because a great storytelling pitch that actually achieves its happy ending is actually self-fulfilled prophecy. That’s why the hagiography of successful founders is written that way: true prophets are rare.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The ideal stance for a good startup advisor is actually short term pessimist, long term optimist Short term optimism that is false leads founders astray: It's like unintentional palliative care. If you say it's OK and it's not, your startup will fucking go in the ground.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Founders who are technologists tend to think in terms of features or software to write Customers and users don’t think that way. They think in terms of outcomes and results. Or sometimes even feelings they want to feel. Link the tech and features to the outcome and feelings 🔗

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Explaining Capital to a 4 year old Money is food for companies. Good companies grow with that food and then poop out a lot more money. Bad companies eat all the money and explode. 😂

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Doubled my YouTube channel subscribers to more than 5000 while also adding 3600 new Twitter followers in the last month Building a new audience with content is slow and takes forever but I am happy with 2X monthly growth 👌 Creators have to celebrate small wins 🙏

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Everyone wants to own their successes but owning your own failure is the only path to self improvement. You can’t grow and you can’t ever get better if it is never your fault.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Just as you should never make the most interesting thing about you the college you went to Founders should never make the most interesting thing about your startup who your investors are This includes the startups I invested in Greatness comes from your product and customers

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Early in your career it is important to find encouragement. A lot of failure early on is the result of being discouraged. Later, if you become mega successful, it is important to find people who will keep you moored to reality. A lot of failure later is the result of sycophancy.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

So the agents basically hacked a core service to turn it into Moltbook and also hacked around multiple security mitigations This video is a glimpse into the wild cybersecurity future we are all about to step into

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Initialized is hiring partner and principal roles. You’re brilliant. Come help us find the next generation of billion dollar startups. Watch my video on how we do what we do, and what we are looking for—t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

People often ask if a startup idea is viable based on a description alone. Hard to answer without knowing all of these— 🧲 Can you get customers (CAC)? 🤩 Will they be delighted (NPS)? 🗓 Will they stick with it (long term cohort retention)? Only then can you answer viability.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

A true gem of an HN comment replying to a post by a software engineer getting overpaid at Pivotal It’s true there are few jobs that could really let you do your best work. Most people don’t care. If you do care about your craft then you should maximize skin in the game.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Of the big 5 tech firms I think startupdom (and the Fortune 500) should fear Amazon the most Spartan values, fearless in the face of competition, fine with lower margin, and not afraid to touch atoms and the real world

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I wanted to help my parents buy our first house. I was 14 and I grew up in apartments. I cold called the Internet section of the Yellow Pages to get my first job making websites. I rode my bike to work after school and on breaks. My earnings helped pay for the down payment.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Capital is a commodity—there’s an oversupply of money seeking yield It’s an incredible time to be a founder or VC—capital is plentiful and the marketplace for talented people starting companies is unlimited (as long as you look outside central casting) Growth mindset 📈

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Garry Tan@garrytan

There’s a direct relationship between how deep your minimum viable product must be and how crowded your market is— Novel? Release what is new first. Iterate. Crowded? Focus on what is novel—you must be clearly better than some of the alternatives for some customers even if few.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Consensus and right = small low risk return Contrarian but right = 1000X possible VC is collecting as many contrarian but right calls in a portfolio to smooth out the risk (secret: if you do no harm, believe early and help, you collect better ownership from better founders)

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When founders ask about positioning vs competitors, I think of Glengarry Glen Ross— 1st prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. 2nd prize is a set of steak knives. 3rd prize is you’re fired. Better to find a niche where you win first prize than to be one of an undifferentiated many.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

China inserted hacked microchips onto motherboards shipped to 30 US cos incl Apple. They were also in DoD data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and Navy warships. This is what information warfare looks like - and the stakes are high. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

All startups are either virtuous or vicious cycles that at the moment are inflecting upwards or downwards. At all times they are either collecting or losing: 💰 Capital 🏬 Customers 👩🏻‍💻 Craftspeople Adding each helps you a bit on others. Losing each likewise hurts.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I was thinking about this recently: how many people got into tech via PC video games? Defeating copy protection when you’re in 5th grade requires command line and hex editor Kids today just tap an iPad. I guess now they get into computers in college since it’s a hot major

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Garry Tan@garrytan

It’s a weird thing take a moment with founders to reflect on competition and rivals you were worried about early on, and then look them up now and realize they had quit 6 months ago. You do you, don’t quit, delight your customer.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Today there are more than 75 public SaaS companies worth nearly $1T 10 years ago, there were less than 20 worth less than $100B.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Any area that is untouched yet by software and technology (which is still relatively large parts of GDP) will see amazing growth in startup activity over the next 10 years 2020’s will be about late adopter industries

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Garry Tan@garrytan

More than a year later my one year old no longer sleeps in my arms (sleep training for the win, yes!) but as predicted... Those 200 days holding my baby came and went like the blink of an eye, never to return again.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Being plain spoken is a virtue, and a guiding light for how @alexisohanian and I invest. FOMO, namedropping, brandwhoring— we don’t like that at all. Instant no. Tell me about your problem, your product, and how you’ll sell. Show me your team and how you can manage them. 💎

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When you make something new and beautiful, sometimes the mechanism is strange and uncomfortable. Perhaps even ugly and you don’t think it should work. People fight. It’s not easy or elegant. The outcome makes it worth it. 💎 🤯 allegory by Steve Jobs in the Lost Interview 👇

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Don't look for a mentor. Find people and teams who you believe in, who can help you, and help them first. That's how I got into Y Combinator, and this is my story. Taking photos at Startup School 2008 would change my life. Full video: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Subtle real advantage nobody talks about: if founders can access deeper pools of capital early/quickly, they can get bigger faster without spawning lots of competitors. If your startup is real, pitching Sand Hill is sometimes like giving away copies of your treasure map

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The map isn’t the territory. Likewise the resume is not the person and the pitch deck is not the startup. Always remember: the signifier is not the signified. The wider the divergence, the more investors or hiring managers are misled. Being able to spot the difference is 🔑

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you’re on the journey and some clones come with their copy machines, know that people like that generally don’t have the determination to stick it out 10 years to win. Every winning startup is the 10 year overnight success. Few people want to sign up for that lift.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you are a startup founder and have caught lightning in a bottle, you should know holding on to that is so hard that you must do everything day to day to keep it. Doing other things like investing will be fun but you will truly feel bad if the light goes out in that bottle

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Garry Tan@garrytan

In 2013 I wrote to potential Coinbase Series A investors: "All the Bitcoins in the world today are worth about $300M—up 400% in the last year. With Coinbase at the forefront, I think this is one of the most disruptive opportunities I’ve ever seen." 🚀 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One of the most interesting charts I have ever seen about how memory works Look at that long term chance of remembering go up with each successive “reminder” This is also the main driver for how you should think about marketing

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Garry Tan@garrytan

CAC just went to close to zero for a ton of services that are suddenly essential (delivery, Ecommerce, logistics, food, telepresence) Low CAC + High LTV = long term future cash flows driven by a macro shift in human behavior Markets only starting to understand this

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Some of you disagree. That's fine. But this article is about me. I grew up food insecure at times, the children of immigrants— standardized testing and admissions got me to where I am today. You can't take my own direct experience away from me.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

VC would be more functional if instead of some magic, it was merely described as 3 sided marketplace driven by high touch enterprise sales The sides? Founders, LPs, and upstream/downstream VC partners If you ever wonder why a hard working VC schedule is so insane, this is why.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

We all deserve to be safe on our own streets Did you know that YC-backed Flock Safety’s license plate readers are solving 10% of reported crime across the USA Their goal is 25% by end of next year At YC, we would love more tech that brings public safety to everyone

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Founders starting out usually have products, business models and go to markets that don’t work or barely work. In frustration some just pursue any startup-like activity as a short salve. Find long term fixes: Talk to users. Try to fix the product or go to market. Ship & Repeat

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Execs and new founders frequently make a big mistake: overvaluing the big idea and undervaluing the execution Here are 3 questions that let you skip that noise: 🧥What should we build? 🧵How should we build it? 🌨Why should we build it? t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Truepill is in Forbes in print this month: one of the next billion dollar startups— Having only raised $11M, they reached $48M ARR and are set to grow beyond 9 digits revenue in the next year Capital efficiency in a $400B telemedicine boom t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you're trying to figure out your minimum viable product and deciding between a/ feature parity with alternatives and b/ new features nobody else does, always prioritize B, but also realize you have to do the minimum set of A that would allow someone to stick with you.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

GPT-3 is great but remember meaning isn’t created in machines or any amount of matrix manipulation. It is created in your human brain.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Adobe is a $149B company that has a crippling bug that afflicts tons of users— a looping bug in the Creative Cloud app. It's an easy fix they should do: add a log out button. Current workaround: Uninstall hundreds of gigabytes of software and reinstall t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Founderhood is truly a game with escalating levels of difficulty Before you start: you must learn to do things well, then learn to be a part of a team Then eventually you must build your own team, and when that team is good, you’ve got to scale that team It always gets harder

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Trends are the ultimate red herring. Make things people want. There are lots of things nobody is talking about that are huge problems, totally solvable, just with the right smart people, the right product, with the right go-to-market. Follow first principles, not the crowd.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Now as an investor I try to remind myself we are⛽️ and it’s the founder and their startup team that is the 🚀 This isn’t a platitude: if you forget, then investors (especially ex founders) fund things as if they were driving, and that always ends in 😭

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Consumer startups that catch lightning in a bottle often suffer from too much success too fast. SaaS/Enterprise founders usually have to scrap and dodge death for years. Fire-forged steadfastness sustains. Consumer founders take note: Seek wisdom on your board/execs or perish

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Garry Tan@garrytan

SB1047 is not the right path. This bill, as it stands, could gravely harm California’s ability to retain its AI talent and remain the location of choice for AI companies. We hope Sen. Wiener chooses a path that protects startups and open source AI. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Zoom is amazing but doesn't have product market fit. There's a lot of space around it that will be filled. 21% of people say they wouldn't be disappointed at all if they couldn't use Zoom anymore. How to beat them? Specialize, segment, and go deep. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

At the earliest possible stage of startups, basing your success on the approval of anyone except your customer is basically instant death 💀 Don’t leave it in the hands of others to say no. Make something better/faster/cheaper that helps your customer and solves a problem.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I grew up at times food insecure in Fremont, CA. I am the outcome of public school: honors classes, AP, algebra in 8th grade, calculus in high school. I would not have been able to get ahead without advanced math. And now that path will be dismantled for politics and ideology

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Ugh, I did it again. I tweeted a really mean thing because I was frustrated about bad product quality. There are real people on the other end of this stuff. This is the real double edged sword of an immigrant upbringing: Internally I associate doing a bad job with deep shame.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

My next YouTube vlog is up! 🎞 Why am I doing these vids? 💰 Why did I start a VC firm? 🎥 Why am I doing it on my own, one camera, one mic, all myself? Watch the full video and please like and subscribe for more: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Reading this 2008 tweet in 2021 makes me think I should have invested in Dropbox back then. But I couldn’t because my net worth was negative. I had credit card debt and I hadn’t even started my startup yet.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I am not your Harold. “Asian Americans are the least likely racial group to be promoted into Silicon Valley’s management and executive levels, even though they are the most likely to be hired into high-tech jobs.” t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The first step is often awareness. Take the adverse childhood experience (ACE) test for instance. If you reflect on where you’ve been you can often see around corners and address them. I was surprised at how affected I was over my career by this. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Great career advice from @stevesi Think in 5 year timescales What will define those 5 years? e.g. This person is really good at X. (For Steven it was writing long emails) Create something, get it to market, and then fix it. Repeat. Then you become truly great at your craft

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Sometimes the best strategy when you and another startup have exactly the same name is: Keep working on your startup. Most other startups die, so as long as you succeed and they die, that'll be a clean resolution to a name collision, often in the course of just a year or two. 🎀

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Eclipse Foods has created plant-based milk that is so similar it can be made into ice cream Micelles = molecular structures of milk proteins. Oat fiber, cane sugar, cassava starch, potato protein Indistinguishable from its animal counterpart 🏆 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

“Replacing an employee costs about 15X that employee’s base salary—so by holding onto their best employees, startups can avoid the cost of high turnover and funnel that capital elsewhere.” This is why I funded @torchlabs and recommend it to all startup founders. Coaching works.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Spaced repetition is magic! Memory matters a lot in programming, so I was impressed to read about this engineer using spaced repitition to become a 10X engineer t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The initial idea is just a first direction. The best path is found through listening to users and observing them through their usage of your product. You will reach places nobody else can if you have a tight loop around listening to users. Maybe even product market fit.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

YC is now in its 20th year of operation, having created over $800B in new startup market value. Thanks @Kr00ney for coming to YC Demo Day and for having me on CNBC! t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

What's the best community platform right now for influencers/creators who want to go direct? t.co t.co Discourse? Discord group? Open to earlier stage seed/pre-seed teams looking to do this who would want to build it with my audience.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Early stage startups should probably keep track of two types of runway: * Optimal plan (includes revenue) * Worst case (no new revenue) Be able to execute to take advantage of good opportunity (optimal) but know what happens if it fails— and have a plan B.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

This ad for a new medium format digital back for the Hasseblad system 👌 The Hasselblad 500 was a film camera they used to shoot photos on the moon. It was the gold standard for commercial photography for half a century. Want 📷

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The cofounder trap: When you want so much to be good cofounders to one another you skip the most important step— arguing in good faith to resolve conflicts and make the right decisions together. Get this right and you skip the #1 startup killer: the cofounder breakup.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

How Gobble CEO Ooshma Garg flipped the meal kit industry on its head Growing 2X in a quarter with cash flow is a big deal when your space falls out of favor. That is true startup grit. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

For a while I was expecting there to be a Hacker News or subreddit for every industry. Instead it might spring up as an influencer with a substack, podcast, YouTube channel with a paid community (Patreon, Facebook group, Discord, Slack, or forum) B2B trade press 2.0

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I did YC in the Summer of 2008. Lehman died the day we closed our Posterous seed round. Nobody else raised money. As a result, we were the least valuable YC batch on record. 73% of those companies died immediately. Airbnb was funded the next batch, Winter 2009!

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Garry Tan@garrytan

YouTube is mainly an editor’s game. Stories enforce constraints but long form vids don’t. If attention lags for even 5 sec, the back button is right there. Bore a viewer and you broke the social contract of “show me something good” and they’re gone Ruthless editing 👌

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Meal kit startup Gobble was burning $1M/mo, and Blue Apron's IPO poisoned the capital markets. What do you do? Die? Sell? Recap? Not for @ooshma. She got profitable and grew 2x in a quarter off of CASH FLOW. Here's how. FULL VID— t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

So you just raised the capital of your dreams (it could be $1M or $10M) to build your startup—What do you do next? The money isn't yours. Every dollar you spend needs to be treated as an investment: what's your expected return and when? Full video: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One hard part about getting career advice from books is that biographical time frames are too long: By the time the book is written, the tactical lessons stopped working 20 years ago Books are good for strategy but you end up seeking 1st hand sources for today’s tactics

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Garry Tan@garrytan

What are some of the best ways to come up with startup ideas? My list so far— 👣Problems you had in the past (@typesfast was a top importer of medical hot tubs) 🗿Fringe ideas (@brian_armstrong read Nakomoto whitepaper) 🧸Toy features (post by email for Posterous) What else?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

20M software developers in the world— if you can convince this set of people in the world to use your software, you've got a very very valuable startup. Watch @sylvainutard of @algolia give a masterclass on the best dev onboarding experience Full vid—t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I get more out of a text chat with the average founder than reading their deck. Bad decks and email resemble high school book reports. The form precedes the function: communication. People spend more time checking the checkboxes of looking like a startup than actually being one

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Garry Tan@garrytan

At the vanguard of every macro shift will be a multi-billion dollar startup. The Mom Project just raised $25M for a very important one: Family-friendly and remote-friendly workplaces for talented parents returning to work. 🚀 @mrsrobinson_a & team t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One of the more remarkable things about product market fit is once you find it, there is no magic moment. You’ve still got to keep telling everyone you know about it. And after many years and thousands of conversations, only then will it become obvious to people.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you don’t have a team or idea you absolutely must work on now, a better move is to find a post-product market fit startup and jump in any open seat on the rocket ship. Many people who want to be founders would be better served by this than starting without a team/idea.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Better questions for seed investors to ask: How many people will you hire and for what roles? How much rev can you drive by 6 months before the end of your runway? Then you see if they have a viable plan for Series A or profitability. Tells a lot more than a made up spreadsheet

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Garry Tan@garrytan

What are the most clever examples of interaction design you can think of in the last 15 years? Example: Pull to refresh for mobile lists comes to mind: invented by one of the first Twitter clients made by @lorenb

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Garry Tan@garrytan

NPR’s piece on In Defense of Looting is purely irresponsible. I am a big fan of NPR and don’t believe mainstream coverage of something so heinous has a place in civil society. If you agree and want to do something about it, leave feedback here: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

There were two suicides in my YC batch in 2008. They were brilliant people who I miss. We demand unreasonable things from ourselves and our teams. Sometimes too much. It doesn’t have to be that way.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I think this is the cheapest good setup for Zoom that I have been recommending lately: Sony A6000 ($500), Sigma 30mm f1.4 ($299), Elgato Camlink ($160 on eBay), plus dummy battery and cables. Just under $1000. Add a good mic and it's $1100. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Agentic LLMs are going be the biggest revenue drivers for media brands and @usecapitol is going to bring it to every one, starting with powering Politico Pro It’s a research assistant and persuasive writer at your fingertips t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

When Ben Horowitz asks you who is CEO, you should have probably picked one before you stepped foot on a Monday morning partner meeting at A16z. Don't make my 2010-era founder mistake. More importantly, know thyself: Are you the one who needs to to fix it if everything breaks?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Paul Buchheit on the virtuous cycle of hiring great people at Google: It became a cycle. These smart people would bring more smart people with them and so on. It was like pulling on a string of talent and getting all the talent attached to it. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

How I got into @ycombinator in 2008 ⚖️ Deciding between being an editorial photographer for a hip hop mag OR founder 📸 Went to Startup School and took event photos 🚀 Got the interview, became a founder, and built the startup Bonus: Embarrassing vid of me from 2009👇

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Garry Tan@garrytan

My first job paid $7/hr making web pages. If you sell your time, you'll always be stuck because we have a finite amount of it on this Earth. Couple that with a consumerist life and you're trapped. Escape the rat race: Make products, solve problems. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Decades of schooling train people to excel on arbitrary tests that are disconnected from the true aim of knowledge. Likewise founders aim to raise money (arbitrary test) instead of making a good startup that grows. Seek the signified, not the signifier! t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Experienced product leadership will speed up your process, not slow it down. Hiring better executives after product market fit for every discipline is often the only way you can keep riding the lightning: if you don’t, your competitors will.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Why are YC companies worth YC demo day prices? Because you are more likely to find a multi-turn fund returner that makes your whole investing career in one check than any other place in the world

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I totally underestimated how important the title and thumbnail is on YouTube. The best advice I got was from @MrBeastYT — if you get a 6% clickthrough that still sucks because 94% of people said "that looks boring"

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you can’t grow and you were growing before, often it’s because something broke in the software and people can’t complete their tasks. Every code change no matter how small will introduce more bugs. Design to catch failure instead of pretending the code is perfect.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Lean startups mostly fail because the median founder is bad at building things In fact builders who can ship great software are so rare that either you have to scout/fund the best directly (YC model) OR fund non-builders (pro managers) w/ enough money to hire them (fat startup)

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Papa just raised an $18M Series B to help fight the loneliness epidemic in our nation's elderly population. 👵🏻 Social isolation increases risk of death by 29% 🩺 Papa pals is a highly effective form of "pre-care" that keeps people healthy t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

As I get older and move forward into my more venerable years, I hope to welcome failure as the first iteration in a process to self-renewal and future success. The growth mindset can only be maintained through conscious risk seeking Now reading “Self Renewal” by John Gardner 👇

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Update, I've hit 546K views for the month, which is... 530K more than I did last month. I'll be donating all revenue from my YouTube videos to causes supporting underrepresented folks in tech. 10K to 36.6K followers in less than 3 weeks? 🙏

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Garry Tan@garrytan

New YouTube series from me: Office hours, an education series on concrete skills you need to build startups that touch a billion people First up? A tutorial on interaction and visual design for non-designers t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Here’s how to build the absolute best teleconferencing webcam setup 📷 Sony Mirrorless 🔬 Wide angle prime lens ⚙️ Elgato Camlink 🙆🏻‍♂️@around_hq teleconferencing software Full tutorial and the interview with Around creator @dom_zane using Around here: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Monetizing Open Source: Business Models That Generate Billions 🎪 Maintain an open free for everyone 🎟 Offer a basic cloud hosted option 🚀 Add features and support as customers scale ⚖️ Keep commercial needs balanced with the open source foundation t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Incredible activity these days around payment infrastructure. I think there is a deeper macro sense that trillions of dollars in B2B payments will go from PO / accounts receivable process to real payment rails: ACH and Visa/Mastercard. Who will accrue most of the value capture?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

It's a real strength to choose intrinsic motivation over extrinsic. e.g. for YouTube metrics I didn't look at sub count vs other influencers. I looked at hours watched vs hours I spent making the content. If I focused too much on extrinsic metrics, I was liable to quit early.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

It also makes me excited to fund great engineers, designers and product people who are ready to throw their chains off. There is magic in running hard in a direction with smart people and no pointy headed bosses. If you are ready, the water is warm.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

“Truepill is what happens when you lock a software engineer with a pharmacist in a room for long, long periods of time.” Over $200M ARR in 2020 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Got an email from someone who got a job through one of my YouTube video interviews. It’s a perfect fit for her background 👌 Makes you think about how many connections should be made that aren’t! Imagine how much smaller the world can be with the right communities and software.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Lots of shade about Clubhouse— not the best look. When money is the topic, the crowd gets nasty. Regardless of $, it's one of the best recent great consumer social apps to be built. I believe in @pdavison @rohanseth and their product is a great addition to my life.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Fell into Blender YouTube and I am impressed. Open source, tons of tutorials, and very powerful tools to create any kind of special effect. You too could create District 9. Software cost? Zero Look at how crazy this is: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I’ve been debated not saying it but keep seeing live and long form video that underscores this for me: Please edit your videos. Live video and unedited extemporaneous speech is like releasing unedited drafts of blog posts. They’re not respectful of your audience.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You may not be interested in politics but politics is interested in you. It’s been amazing to see the impact of @lutherlowe and YC’s public policy efforts to help preserve the golden goose of tech startups being born in the USA Just getting started t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Better, faster, cheaper for startups — in a nutshell 🎯 Better — Technical excellence, outperform in an underserved niche 🚀 Faster — Beat paper and pencil, overload supply 💸 Cheaper — Take advantage of tech cost curves, look for emergent behavior, give up margin

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Longer duration is one of the main ways smarter, more determined, higher EQ people make money. Short term: dumb money, easy to scare, weak hands, doesn’t do their own research, follows the crowd and the trend Long term: Steady progress, believes in oneself, creates the trend

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I wish the significance of the model came from more people actually using it and coming to their own conclusions But yes most people in the world learn about it through signifiers and not through interacting with that which is signified

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I sat down with master growth marketer @mrsharma to learn how to build the next Coca Cola, all online. 💸 Nail product before marketing, then organic before paid 🥶 Cold reach-out with a good story works 🔮 Payback period is a myth Full interview: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

43% of professional women leave the workforce after having children. Many want to return but struggle to. @The_Mom_Project helps them return to highly paid knowledge work. If this doesn’t move the needle on US GDP, I don’t know what will! Amazing investment @AldaLeuDennis

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Garry Tan@garrytan

In 2010, I was sitting in Benchmark's office on Sand Hill Road raising our Series A and Peter Fenton asked us if Posterous was a platform or a network. We said BOTH and the pitch meeting was over. My lesson for founders in my newest vlog 👇 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

The Long-Term Stock Exchange raises $50 million in new funding Proud to back ⁦@ericries⁩ and team here. We need more startups going public earlier, with better governance for long term decisions. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

YouTube is an interesting audience— what you think is 🔥 or what you spent a lot of time on often underperforms, but sometimes your "filler" goes viral. Makes you realize how hard it is to truly understand what other people want.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

You must be open minded to accept risk You must be vulnerable to grow Taking risks combined with personal growth leads to self actualization It’s unnatural to keep open to things that challenge you, and it’s scary to be vulnerable... but it’s worth it.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Can a startup help bring thousands of new units of 1BR and 2BR housing online in California? @MyAbodu thinks so, and @kimmaicutler and I agree. You now can build a 1BR/2BR apartment in your backyard in 12 weeks or less, with auto-permit granted in Palo Alto, San Jose for ~$200K

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Garry Tan@garrytan

VC performs about the same as S&P500 in aggregate. But the top 10% massively outperform, of course. Power law. What is the main decision point that causes this low mean? LPs funding bad managers. Like... really bad VCs who are coin operated and can’t tell good from bad. 😭

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Wanted to share my favorite tool for pre-product-market-fit founders searching the idea maze: The Timebox. ⏳ Timebox each attempt at customers and their problems. This simple technique will get you more iterations, increasing the chance you reach PMF. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Get these 3 things right and you will nail your YC Interview. Also, a word of encouragement for those who didn't get interviews. 1/ What is it? 2/ Is it good? Are you the ones? 3/ How big can it be? It's just a conversation. Don't worry, just practice. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Here are three of the common 1,000 landmines founders hit on their startup journey— 🤕 Chasing the wrong problem 🛬 Overinfluence of authority 💡 Thinking the idea is all the work Thanks @Cookie for having me this time at TechCrunch Early! t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Growth mindset is the antidote to zero sum mindset that is infecting our world If only we could use mimesis to get more people to see win-win instead of only win-lose The highest calling is to try to get humanity to rise above, together

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Garry Tan@garrytan

It's remarkably important in 2020 for products and services to "win the Internet" - this means if for all keywords someone searches for that are related to intent for said product, yours comes out #1 - cheapest, fastest, or best. This is the true aim of proper growth marketing.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

We need a startup visa and a rollback on the madness that is this administration’s immigration policy. At one time the best and the brightest came here to build billion dollar businesses employing millions of people. We are killing the golden goose. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

None other than legends @alexisohanian & @justinkan catching up at YC Alumni Demo Day a few weeks ago (I shot this on my Hasselblad 500cm on Fujifilm Pro 400H) Learning the virtues of using your iPhone on monochrome All 3 of us with @KatManalac were YC group partners together!

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Tundra raised $12M from our friends at Redpoint! The $1 trillion B2B wholesale market is set up with platforms/distributors charging 5% to 30% commission. Tundra brings that down to 0% which is a big deal for small businesses. Proud @initialized fam 👌 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Truepill cofounder @sidviswanathan spent over a year needfinding for his next startup before he met his cofounder who knew all about the brokeness of pharmacy. Sid just asked questions until he built enough product for it to be useful! My full interview: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Storytelling for your Series A My partner @ndrewlee leads us through 4 storytelling tips to raise your next round 🏃🏻‍♀️ Brevity is the soul of wit 🤫 Secrets create friends 🚄 Transport investors into the future 🦸🏻‍♀️ You are the right hero for this journey t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

If you own the keys to your kingdom, the best thing you can do is systematize your values into process, build your team continually, and try to innovate yourself out of a job. Everyone should think like an owner, especially actual owners.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Zeus raises $55M for property management done right (starting with corporate rentals) $100 million annual revenue run rate, up 300% in 2019, and now has 250 employees and more than 2,000 homes under management Just getting started 🔥🚀 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Hopping out of an Uber in NYC, I ran into someone applying to YC who I had just given feedback to from my prior YouTube video giveaway. I did 100 reviews and this happens in a city of 8.5M people 🤯

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Good editing in video and podcasts, just like good design in products and services, is about giving respect, love, care and attention to your viewers, listeners, and customers. Being other-centered/other-focused is the paradox of modern creators: To attract you must give first.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Jessica Livingston: In 2005, I cofounded Y Combinator, the first "accelerator." YC began the same way as most other startups: something we thought people wanted. It turned out they did want it. Now we've funded 1867 startups with a total value of over $100 billion. 🦄📈 t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

This was me in 1995 — age 14. My parents were immigrants to the country. I remember at times we didn't have enough food to eat: Dinner was bread and milk. I learned to make web pages and got my first job cold calling the Yellow Pages. The craft (design/eng/PM) gave me my life.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Great products exist but are often undiscovered CAC is the classic reason why you don’t hear about it: hitting people at the right time and making the sale is hard Lower CAC and you help more great products thrive

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Garry Tan@garrytan

What skills do you need to go from software engineering to a product role? A PM must help make clear tradeoffs between business needs, user needs, and what is technically achievable. Add business knowledge, and empathy for customers to great engineering knowhow and then... 🛫

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Proud to lead Stacker’s seed round. Their no code platform is helping over 500 companies and thousands of users and they just started last year. Turn every spreadsheet into software, with no coding or tech background needed. Customer portals and internal apps created instantly.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Atoms shoes are so good, all the team has to do to recruit people to join the team is give candidates a pair. They usually join within a month. A truly great product does magical things like that. Putting love into your product is magic.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Huge lesson for great builder founders: building gets you initial product market fit but won’t help you forever Management is necessary to secure the bag 💰

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Garry Tan@garrytan

It’s pretty clear he is not doing his job because not doing his job is the point. The sophistry is necessary to get enough data in some sort of grand experiment. Unfortunately we SF residents are the ones who are the lab rats in the cage. Some of us will die.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One thing I am starting to realize is if you can’t get either, the founder is better off cutting burn and starting over (or shutting down) One of the hardest convos in the life of any startup Sometimes you just know. But sometimes your friends have to nudge you. Never easy.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Huge get for Airbnb and amazing role for Ahmad One of my favorite things about Airbnb is how often you get to know new people in new places, often even your host. Can you imagine what AI can do to personalize and make that happen much more often?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Engineering hiring broadly is broken because if you didn’t go to Stanford Google Facebook and build a “top resume” you can’t get noticed by anyone This is why I funded @triple_byte and why @ammonbartram started it: to give great engineers a way to escape the credential trap

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Incredibly proud of being able to help Brian identify that moment of product market fit, over lunch at a French bistro in SOMA in 2013. Bitcoin's price had just exploded and they were hitting their working capital limits 4 days in a row. PMF vibes

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Seriously burn it because if you stack a pile in the corner those things mold. Also you need all the fuel you can get. The world is cold, and we must use every bit of wood and twine we find.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I've been doing a lot of Instagram DM advice lately, and this is becoming apparent: most founders expect brilliant, perfect customers to come and find them— that it's automatic. In reality, great founders go out and find these very imperfect human beings and solve their problems

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Zeus is the software eating the property management business. Coolest thing about this co? They have a large team of engineers whose main KPI is NPS on supporting the ops, sales, customer success efforts. Landlords finally have a far better option. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One of my directs once told me in a 1:1 early in my career as a founder: "I've never been so disrespected in my career." 😩 I wasn't delegating, and we weren't aligned on goals/values. I was micromanaging. The cure was delegation (6 steps) t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

One of the more important things early founders need to hear is: Zoom Out The process of starting is scary and that results in razor focus your own problems: being taken seriously, looking like a startup, etc This is a distraction from the real work: solving problems for others

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Growth Culture > Zero Sum Performance-Obsessed Culture Growth = see through blind spots, accept their own insecurities rather than acting them out, don’t defend their personal value so they create external value. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

I spent one meaningless summer interning at a doomed B2B electronic parts marketplace in 2002, my junior year of college. I got fat eating McDonalds and wasted 3 months. If you aren’t learning, aren’t learning, and aren’t having fun, you should quit. t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

2nd most common mistake: Describing what a startup does, but failing to communicate why it’s a great product/service. New things must massively outperform incumbents just to have a chance at escaping obscurity. Step 1 - What is it? Step 2 - Is it great?

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Great reminder from @stevesi on a day like this: for founders and leaders know each person on your team will process the events of today in their own way. Be present for them, acknowledge what they are experiencing, and make space. Your team will appreciate and remember it.

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Just posted my newest YouTube vlog— How to Avoid the Cofounder Trap @alexisohanian and I spent a day in NYC on our cofounders retreat. Learn how the #1 thing that can help your startup can also ruin it if you don't handle this one thing. FULL VIDEO: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

56% of dogs are obese, and dog food is part of the problem Former Casper execs are building a direct-to-consumer dog food startup called Jinx CEO Terri Rockovich is a world expert at building brands in the digital age—proud to lead this $5.6M seed round t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

For my startup Posterous, my conviction we would prevail clouded my ability to see reality when we had a problem. Don't make my mistake. FULL VIDEO: t.co

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Garry Tan@garrytan

Twitter should really treat drafts as more durable than it does in their apps. Lost a bunch of ideas recently when probably some bug or logout happened. User data loss should always be a high severity bug. Computers are so good at storing data, there is no excuse!

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Garry Tan

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