Garry Tan
President & CEO at Y Combinator
President and CEO of Y Combinator, former Palantir early engineer and Posterous co-founder. Builds and open-sources agentic tooling such as gstack and gbrain.
About Garry Tan
Garry Tan is President and CEO of Y Combinator. Before YC he was an early engineer at Palantir and co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital. Since 2026 he has built and open-sourced agent tooling in public, including gstack (a set of engineering skills for Claude Code) and gbrain (agentic retrieval and memory), and started the civic project Garry's List.
Perspective on AI-Native Companies
Tan treats a skill file as the unit of work: perform a process once with an agent, encode it as markdown plus code and tests, and schedule it. He advises founders to spend heavily on tokens, use agents to read across the organization and resolve conflicts, and be wary of pure per-seat SaaS. He also argues that incumbents and governments will adapt more slowly than founders expect.