Garry Tan has revealed his ‘secret sauce’ for getting into Y Combinator

Comment
If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies from someone who knows best: Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.
The Economic Club of Washington, D.C. hosted Tan Wednesday for a one-on-one interview with Teresa Carlson, a General Catalyst board member. 
It’s widely known that Y Combinator accepts less than 1% of the applications it receives — the last batch was whittled down from 27,000 applications, Tan said. Cohorts these days tend to be around 250 companies. So Carlson wanted to know, among other topics, what is the “secret sauce,” if you will, to getting accepted into Y Combinator?
First, it might be one of the few places where you don’t have to know anyone to get in, Tan said. Anyone can go to the website, apply and submit a one-minute video. YC’s 14 partners read the applications to understand a few things: Who is the applicant’s potential customer and what have the founders built in the past? Top applicants then go on to answer a handful of questions from the partners.
“So many venture capitalists are taking meetings, week-to-week, and saying ‘no, no, no, no,’ and then maybe a few times a year saying, ‘yes,’” Tan said. “YC turns that on its head.”
One of the things YC is looking for is founders who can create a market, that they see a technology no one has envisioned yet, he said.
Tan used Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong as an example of someone who created a market. When Tan first met Armstrong, he was still working as an anti-fraud engineer at Airbnb. Armstrong had read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper, and had an idea.
“He said, ‘Nobody believes this yet, but I believe it, and I want to work on software that would manifest this crazy idea that you could have a sovereign cryptocurrency,’” Tan said. “This was a very fringe idea at the moment, but that’s what we’re looking for — a fringe thing.”
He went on to explain that the “fringe thing” is a new technology “that deeply technical people are obsessed with” and one that goes on to “touch all of society.”
After the YC partners interviewed and accepted Armstrong into the program, Tan recalls working with him weekly. And during those chats, he realized that if something like Coinbase existed, “that’s gonna be really big.” Then came the discussion about how to build it out.
“The cool thing about what he was doing was that it was really hard to even get Bitcoin,” Tan said. “I personally experienced that. These fringe things can basically turn into something very big.”
He also said that Armstrong was an example of another thing that YC partners look for in candidates: “He was a first principles thinker.” By that Tan meant that Armstrong not only believed what no one believed yet, he set about figuring out what the necessary things were to build, whether that was software or distribution, to create this thing that no one else saw. It’s not enough just to recognize a new thing, you have to understand some of the steps toward building it and have a plan to validate that what you built is solving the problem you originally set out to solve, Tan said.
YC went through a round of interviews last week, and Tan said all of the founders that he chose to fund “came in with some new discovery that they had discovered interacting with the technology itself.”
“Like sitting on a workbench realizing, ‘Hey, did you know there’s a robotics manufacturer that’s making a humanoid robot now for $16,000. It’s arriving on my desk on Monday, and we’re going to try and be the first people that commercialize that,’” Tan said. “That’s an example of a first principles insight that is a very interesting area.”
Every weekday and Sunday, you can get the best of TechCrunch’s coverage.
Startups are the core of TechCrunch, so get our best coverage delivered weekly.
The latest Fintech news and analysis, delivered every Sunday.
TechCrunch Mobility is your destination for transportation news and insight.
By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice.
Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Is it…
Crowdaa is an app that allows non-developers to easily create and release apps on the mobile store. 
Back in 2019, Canva, the wildly successful design tool, introduced what the company was calling an enterprise product, but in reality it was more geared towards teams than fulfilling true…
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 isn’t just an event for innovation; it’s a platform where your voice matters. With the Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice Program, you have the power to shape the…
The United States Department of Justice and 30 state attorneys general filed a lawsuit against Live Nation Entertainment, the parent company of Ticketmaster, for alleged monopolistic practices. Live Nation and…
The UK will shortly get its own rulebook for Big Tech, after peers in the House of Lords agreed Thursday afternoon to pass the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumer bill…
Spotify’s addition of its AI DJ feature, which introduces personalized song selections to users, was the company’s first step into an AI future. Now, Spotify is developing an alternative version…
Call Arc can help answer immediate and small questions, according to the company. 
After multiple delays, Apple and the Paris area transportation authority rolled out support for Paris transit passes in Apple Wallet. It means that people can now use their iPhone or…
Redwood Materials, the battery recycling startup founded by former Tesla co-founder JB Straubel, will be recycling production scrap for batteries going into General Motors electric vehicles.  The company announced Thursday…
A new startup called Auggie is aiming to give parents a single platform where they can shop for products and connect with each other. The company’s new app, which launched…
Andrej Safundzic, Alan Flores Lopez and Leo Mehr met in a class at Stanford focusing on ethics, public policy and technological change. Safundzic — speaking to TechCrunch — says that…
Remark trains AI models on human product experts to create personas that can answer questions with the same style of their human counterparts.
ZeroPoint claims to have solved compression problems with hyper-fast, low-level memory compression that requires no real changes to the rest of the computing system.
In 2021, Roi Ravhon, Asaf Liveanu and Yizhar Gilboa came together to found Finout, an enterprise-focused toolset to help manage and optimize cloud costs. (We covered the company’s launch out…
On the heels of raising $102 million earlier this year, Bugcrowd is making good on its promise to use some of that funding to make acquisitions to strengthen its security…
Google is preparing to build what will be the first subsea fiber-optic cable connecting the continents of Africa and Australia. The news comes as the major cloud hyperscalers battle it…
The Kia EV3 — the new all-electric compact SUV revealed Thursday — illustrates a growing appetite among global automakers to bring generative AI into their vehicles.  The automaker said the…
Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it…
If you thought autonomous driving was just for cars, think again. The “autonomous navigation” market — where ships steer themselves guided by AI, resulting in fuel and time savings —…
The best known mycoprotein is probably Quorn, a meat substitute that’s fast approaching its 40th birthday. But Finnish biotech startup Enifer is cooking up something even older: Its proprietary single-cell…
Silo, a Bay Area food supply chain startup, has hit a rough patch. TechCrunch has learned that the company on Tuesday laid off roughly 30% of its staff, or north…
President Joe Biden needs a meme manager.
Featured Article
Meanwhile, women and people of color are disproportionately impacted by irresponsible AI.
If you’ve ever wanted to apply to Y Combinator, here’s some inside scoop on how the iconic accelerator goes about choosing companies.
Indian ride-hailing startup BluSmart has started operating in Dubai, TechCrunch has exclusively learned and confirmed with its executive. The move to Dubai, which has been rumored for months, could help…
Under the envisioned framework, both candidate and issue ads would be required to include an on-air and filed disclosure that AI-generated content was used.
Want to make a founder’s day, week, month, and possibly career? Refer them to Startup Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2024! Applications close June 10 at 11:59 p.m. PT. TechCrunch’s Startup…
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is officially launching DMs (direct messages), the company announced on Wednesday. Later, Bluesky plans to “fully support end-to-end encrypted messaging down the line,”…
The perception in Silicon Valley is that every investor would love to be in business with Peter Thiel. But the venture capital fundraising environment has become so difficult that even…
Powered by WordPress VIP

source
Sponsor:News technical sponsor
Sponsor:News AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor
Sponsor: AI sponsor