Y Combinator names venture capitalist Garry Tan as next president

Y Combinator has named an outsider as its next president — sort of.

The legendary Bay Area accelerator has selected venture capitalist and Y Combinator alum Garry Tan as the fourth leader in its 17-year history. In January, Tan will replace President Geoff Ralston, who took over in 2019.

“It’s a people’s dream more or less Community in many ways,” Tan told Forbes in an exclusive interview. “The chance of coming back and helping make it happen is a one in a hundred billion thing.”

When he takes over the top job at Y Combinator, Tan will set foot on Tan in 2012 Co-founded a full-time position at Initialized Capital in 2009 with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. An early investor in cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase, grocery delivery service Instacart and supply chain software unicorn Flexport, Tan has appeared on the Forbes Midas list for the past four years, most recently at No. 28. He debuted at No. 4 on the inaugural Forbes Midas Seed List in 2022.

By selecting Tan to lead YC, the accelerator’s board of directors has brought back one of its most distinguished alumni to the company. Tan and Ohanian started investing as Initialized in 2011, when they were still partners at YC, before leaving to focus on the company full-time. (Ohanian later left to start a new VC firm, Seven Seven Six, last year.) But Tan’s ties to the accelerator remain deep: The internal catalog he built, cheekily called Bookface, is still a YC-provided network. Important section. entrepreneur.

“I always thought of Garry as a YC guy,” outgoing president Ralston told Forbes . “It feels like he’s coming home.”

Tan will begin leading Y Combinator in a transitional moment at the accelerator, one of the largest and most influential alumni in the world One, including home rental service Airbnb, payments leader Stripe and online collaboration company Dropbox. Founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2005 by married couple Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston and two others, Y Combinator moved to the Bay Area and became synonymous with the Silicon Valley startup scene in the decade that followed. Under its semi-annual “batch” program, where the company works closely with YC partners, advisors and alumni over a three-month program, and then presents it to investors and journalists as part of a demo day, the acceptance rate is typically 1.5% to 2%. its website. To date, YC has funded more than 3,500 companies and 80 unicorns valued at $1 billion or more.

Under Graham’s successors, Sam Altman and Ralston, Y, Combinator went through a period of rapid expansion, expanding both its reach and its notoriety in the tech ecosystem. YC now expects to invest $500,000 in participating companies in exchange for at least a 7% stake, and possibly more, depending on the company’s subsequent funding rounds. In 2021, even as YC grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic, it has funded 750 companies, a Y Combinator record. Ralston made headlines in December 2021 when he told the Newcomer blog he envisioned a route to funding each batch of 1,000 startups.

Last summer, however, Y Combinator shrunk its summer batch by 40%. Other YC plans, such as a plan to move the accelerator’s headquarters from Mountain View, Calif., to San Francisco, have been quietly abandoned.

In a separate interview, Tan and Ralston’s welcome quote from current and former YC employees: Doubt about YC getting too big or “jumping the shark” almost as much as the accelerator itself as old. They both said they believed the group’s engineer-led ethos would forever drive it to experiment unabashedly on behalf of entrepreneurs. “I don’t know if there will be 1,000 batches in the short term, but I believe there is potential,” Ralston said. “We’re a big world.”

Ralston plans to leave Y Combinator once Tan has taken over leadership responsibilities in full, he said; he has no plans to remain on the board as Altman initially expected long. Ralston hopes his legacy of more than three years at the accelerator will be remembered as stable, when the program’s long-term future solidifies into something more akin to academic institutions like Stanford. “I changed Sam’s direction, and I doubt Gary will [that],” he said.

In his absence, Tan’s VC firm, initialized, will be led by managing partners Jen Wolf and Brett Gibson. Both are longtime Tan collaborators: Wolf was Tan’s boss before he applied to Y Combinator early in his career; Gibson was Tan’s co-founder at Posterous, the company he applied to. In an interview, Wolfe said she had been managing day-to-day operations during the past year as Initialized’s president. She added that the company will continue to maintain the same brand and maintain the partnership. No one has to lose to someone else to win,” Wolff said. “If he didn’t think we were ready, he wouldn’t do it. ”

Still, it was an unexpected move for Tan, he told Forbes said in a profile that his early investing success had given him “a golden ticket” to build Initialized into a lasting institution in the venture capital space. (In last week’s report In an interview, Tan cited the same 2021 article back Forbes
, and Point out that he “d said at the time that he wanted to build a company that outlived its founders.)

Funding is plentiful, Tan argues; opportunities for entrepreneurs, few and far between. Citing his own personal story, he said he grew up in food-insecure East Bay areas and learned to code web pages to help his parents put down a down payment on a house.