Tokenmaxxing: How Top Builders Use AI To Do The Work Of 400 Engineers

**Gary Tan** (0:00)
I think that's like the defining question. Like, will you have control over your own tools, or will your tools have control over you? Using OpenClaw these days is like driving a Ferrari, and it's like exhilarating, it's insane. Like, you get to do things, like it figures things out. You would never think a machine could figure out, and it does it so quickly, but then it's also like a Ferrari in that you better be a mechanic.
Like, it's a Ferrari that will break down on the side of the road, you know, when you most need it, and you need to get out with your wrench and pop the hood and like fix it, you know, you're gonna have to fix it yourself. And so, this is a very exciting time in computer science and technology.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:47)
Welcome back to a special episode of The Lightcone. In this episode, we're going to talk about how Gary Tan got back to building.
If you follow us on Twitter, you'll know that after a multi-year hiatus to become an investor, Gary Tan is back to being a builder, and in the last couple months, he's shipped hundreds of thousands of lines of code and built popular open source projects that have gone from nothing to more than 100,000 stars on GitHub. And he did all of this while having a very demanding job running YC full time. A lot of people on the Internet don't even think that this is possible and are somewhat like in disbelief, but it actually happened, we know because we were here to see the whole thing. And so today, we're going to talk about how he did it.

**Gary Tan** (1:27)
Well, I'm relatively shocked myself.
I'm amazed as well as 13 years of not coding. And then suddenly, boom, I'm doing about 400x the amount of work that I was that year, the last time I was even sort of like two thirds of the time writing code.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:43)
Maybe to start things off, how will we go back to the project that started it all off, which was Gary's List? And just like talk about a few months ago, how you powered up Claude Code and like started to get back to coding.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:54)
And it was right after one of the Lightcone episodes, right?

**Gary Tan** (1:56)
Oh yeah, definitely. I realized that I wanted to bring together all the people who believed what I believed, particularly for California. And so I started a 501c4 and now it's a c3 and a pack, which is sort of what a lot of political groups do. It's a very common way to bring people together. Everyone focuses on the money, but we're trying to bring together smart people.
What I learned in the years of working in San Francisco politics is that bringing together people is so powerful.
And that's what a mass social movement is. And I said, okay, well, why don't I just make a website where we start doing that? And it would just start with, why don't I start writing about the issues that I'm worried about? It's like, I want children in school, people watching this from all around the world might find it very, very strange, like I find it strange, that it was not possible and still very, very hard for a seventh grader or eighth grader in middle school, in San Francisco public schools, to be able to take algebra. And that was a math education thing. If I didn't get to do that when I was in public schools in the East Bay of the Bay Area, there's no way I would have studied engineering at Stanford. I never would have written code. I never would have been able to do any of these things. So it was close to my heart and I realized like, hey, it's time to write code. And I ended up building Postras, my first YC startup from 2008

**SPEAKER_2** (3:27)
What was Postras for people who don't remember it?

**Gary Tan** (3:29)
Yeah, Postras was Dead Simple Blogs by email. It grew to be a top 200 website on the internet and then Twitter ended up buying it for about $20 million. So that was sort of like my first bag, really. I actually built it again as Post Haven when Twitter bought it for the amazing people that we had hired and they shut down the startup. It would have cost a couple million dollars to buy it back from Twitter. And at the time I had no money in the world. So the next best thing was why don't I write it again?
And then in January of this year, I ended up writing it a third time. Only the first time it took about four million dollars and six or seven people, and about a year and a half. And then the second time it took about, I don't know, a hundred grand and two people, me and my co-founder Brett Gibson, who now runs Initialized, and maybe like three months or so.