Garry Tan on YC in the AI Era

Author: Garry Tan (YC CEO) URL: https://mixergy.com/interviews/garry-tan-y-combinator-startups-growing-5x-faster-heres-what-changed/

Summary

The current YC CEO shares concrete data on how AI has transformed startup building: 25% of YC startups have 95% AI-written code, companies of 10-20 people are reaching $10-20M ARR in 10-20 months (unprecedented), and the current batch is the fastest-growing and most profitable in YC history. Tan emphasizes that YC selects for first principles thinking and earnestness over credentials.

Key Claims

1. 25% of current YC startups have 95% AI-written code
2. 10-20 person teams reaching $10-20M ARR in 10-20 months — “never happened before”
3. Current YC batch is fastest-growing and most profitable in fund history
4. YC selects for first principles thinking + earnestness, not résumés
5. Founders don’t need 50-100 engineers anymore
6. AI transformed software from “nice to have” to urgent necessity

Concepts Referenced

• ai-era-entrepreneurship
• execution
• scaling
• product-market-fit

Backlinks

• ai-agents
• ai-era-entrepreneurship
• ai-evals
• case-study-cursor
• case-study-levels
• case-study-lovable
• case-study-midjourney
• recommended-reading