Shownotes Transcript
We're joined by Posterous co-founder, former YC partner and current Managing Partner of Initialized Capital Garry Tan to go deep on how YC changed the game for company creation and seed investing, how they thought about building the "cult" of startups, and what lies ahead as the early-stage world continues to globalize and evolve more quickly than ever.
Sponsors:
Topics Covered (among others):
How the recruiting challenge for early-stage startups led to outside-the-box thinking
Peter Thiel’s “crazy” (but not actually crazy) offer to Garry to join Palantir
Leveraging “cult” startup culture into a magnet for specific types of people
Y Combinator’s path from fringe to mainstream
Insight that those same cult recruiting techniques could be applied at a meta-level to recruiting company founders themselves
Initial strong reactions to YC, and knowing they were on to something
The beginning of “influencer investing” with Paul Graham’s essays + Hacker News
The blooming of Seed as an asset class alongside and around YC
The landmark deal with SV Angel and DST / Yuri Milner to “auto-fund” every YC company starting in 2011
YC scaling from ~10-12 companies per batch to 70-80 and now 200+ per batch
Starting Initialized Capital within YC, and then spinning it out into one of the largest independent seed funds
Influencer investing and startup evangelism going mainstream
The impact of The Social Network movie
Exporting the ~”YC message” to the entire world: you can start a startup
The power of direct, bi-directional access to people via the internet
Links:
- Paul Graham’s Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html)
- Hackers and Painters: https://www.amazon.com/Hackers-Painters-Big-Ideas-Computer/dp/1449389554/)
- Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com)
- Garry's (great) YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIBgYfDjtWlbJhg--Z4sOgQ)
