Uncapped #43 | Garry Tan, Harj Taggar, and Jared Friedman from YC

**Jack Altman** (0:00)
I think like AI and a big change like this favors younger people for all sorts of reasons, so I get it.

**Garry Tan** (0:05)
For what it's worth, I'm a late bloomer. I did YC when I was 27

**Jack Altman** (0:08)
I was 26

**Garry Tan** (0:09)
Yeah, so, hey, late bloomers, high five.

**Jack Altman** (0:13)
The old guys. All right, guys, I'm really excited to be here with you. Thanks for all doing this with me. So I guess just to start, when did you all first go through YC as founders?

**Jared Friedman** (0:22)
I think I did it first. I was summer 2006, so the third batch ever.

**Harj Taggar** (0:25)
I did winter 2007, so six months later.

**Garry Tan** (0:29)
And then summer of 2008

**Jack Altman** (0:30)
Okay, so a long time. It's like pretty close to the beginning. So I guess where I want to start is like, you all have in many incarnations seen what YC has been like as founders, as partners, you've sort of worked outside of YC, inside of it. What has changed? And so I guess maybe the lens I want to ask this question through is what was the value proposition to founders in 2006 versus 2016, 2026? Like what has changed? What has stayed the same?

**Garry Tan** (0:59)
Yeah, what was it like in 2006?

**Jared Friedman** (1:00)
The most surprising thing to people from the outside I found is actually how little has changed. And I think that's kind of by design, which is like the thing that Paul Graham created that we all did in the early 2000s. Like it was great. It was a great product. And as you know, we have a great product. You're like, don't fuck with it. There are some things that have changed, but I would say in broad strokes, it's much more the same than it is different.

**Jack Altman** (1:24)
How would you capture the essence of that product? Like to a founder, if you had to boil it down to like two or three things, like what is that product about?

**Jared Friedman** (1:32)
So we recently worked on a redesign of the Y Combinator website. Actually, Garry had it. We actually like tried to like write it down, possibly for the first time. Do you want to explain this? This is really your words on the website.

**Garry Tan** (1:44)
Oh, gosh. I mean, it was team effort, but like honestly, we tried to return to, you know, what is the founder's experience? And then we found all of these old photos of, you know, I actually, your brother is like the first one on there. And it's like him with double-packed collar. Yeah. And then-

**Jack Altman** (2:01)
We'll pop that up on the screen.

**Garry Tan** (2:03)
That's right. And then you start flipping through, and it's, you know, Patrick and John Collison, it's Brian and Joe and Nate at Airbnb. And you see them so young, and then you see them, you know, ring the bell. And it's like, basically what we're trying to create is like Disneyland for transformation from, you know, startup founders who are just starting out to literally the people who sort of make these, the companies that really matter. It's actually a social process. Like all reality is sort of socially constructed. And then uniquely, like, I remember when I found YC and then came to my first startup school, it was kind of like being a fish out of water and then jumping into water. Like I was surrounded by people who were builders, who like were earnest. And basically when you get into YC, like we take people who are earnest and technical, and then at the end of that process, hopefully they become formidable. And so when you go to the homepage, that's what that's about. It's like YC is like a transformative process. Yeah. It's like Hoffman or something. It's like this, it's not that new agey. It's actually very chill. It's more like, I don't know how you would describe it.

**Jared Friedman** (3:16)
I'm a Harry Potter fan, so I prefer to think of it like Hogwarts.

**Garry Tan** (3:19)
That's good.

**Jack Altman** (3:20)
I mean, I kind of felt like when I did in Winter 16, and I felt like starting a company is such like a weird, odd experience. And in some ways, having this group that normalizes what it's about, where you're like surrounded by other people, where they like talk about like, here's the new language and the new set of things you should be thinking about, it almost like makes the strange dream that you're in, like you'd like get calibrated or something like that. So I thought that was a big part. And then I guess also there's always been the thing of like, there is some stamp of approval. I think that's like hard to sort of underweight. I'm curious how you guys think about that with like, outsiders in particular. One of the things that seems different to me at least, is now more than 10 years ago, and I'm sure more than 20 years ago, like the ecosystem is like an understood thing. And like a lot of founders, like they can read a lot of stuff online, people can read a lot about them online. There's more known in general, but I still feel like there's this thing that YC can do, which is take people who maybe aren't yet in that vortex, and identify talent somehow, and bring them into the vortex. I'd just be curious if you guys like spend like active cycles thinking about that.