Garry Tan Profile picture
President & CEO @ycombinator —Founder @Initialized—designer/engineer who helps founders—San Francisco Dem accelerating the boom loop—e/acc—technology brother
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Jan 31 4 tweets 2 min read
What metrics did it take to raise Series A in 2023? On average:

6X annual rev growth
80% gross margin
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It’s not a fast money time. The bar is high and will remain high.

news.crunchbase.com/venture/seed-t…
Jun 28, 2023 9 tweets 4 min read
Maximum Karen energy

The wife of the creator of Farmville pictured below doxxed my home address and forced me to move because I got politically active

Let’s work hard to vote out their favored elected officials and root out their corrupt cronies In 2019 The Richmond Democratic Club honored her with some kind of award alongside Peter Lauterborn, a manager in the SF Ethics Dept

Having friends in the Ethics dept is awfully handy if your political machine might need the dept to look the other way

Apr 12, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
The difference between an overhyped startup failure and a valuable real business that makes it the long haul is sometimes as simple as:

Do the founders themselves believe in what they are doing to the point where they will not quit? This is where definite optimism matters: If startup ideas were people…

an indefinite optimist looks for more optionality, searching around the room at the party for the more interesting person to talk to. Image
Apr 3, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
People know me to be nice, but one of the biggest things I had to learn is to properly tune my response to things when knives came out

The key: be authoritative, not authoritarian, and not a pushover Authoritarian responses come from a place of insecurity, as do pushover responses.

What will they think of me? Let me overcorrect.

Or, what choice do I have? The consequences may be too much.
Apr 1, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
It’s too bad this is April Fool’s Day because it would be great if Myrna Melgar didn’t run again.

San Francisco needs consistent common sense leaders instead of virtue signaling NIMBYs who don’t care about public safety This supervisor is a lot like the other corrupt supervisors Preston, Peskin, Chan, Ronen & Walton

But she is the only one who openly discussed how she is in the pocket of NIMBY corrupt nonprofit TODCO in the Chronicle

Open graft in SF deserves investigation and public scrutiny
Mar 30, 2023 5 tweets 1 min read
Beware focusing on competition over customers.

It’s surprisingly common to spend all your time fighting the other players in your market and then realizing years later the market didn’t really exist.

The only way to avoid this is radical focus on customers, not competition. Early on, my startup Posterous was framed to be a Tumblr competitor. We spent a lot of time fighting that battle.

That market didn’t end up being a real durable one.

We were so focused on web publishing we underinvested in mobile and the ultimate winner was Instagram.
Mar 30, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
New Alameda County DA Pamela Price is considering letting the killers of Jasper Wu go with no jail time. This is an outrage.

How did this child die? Two rival gangs were having a rolling gun battle on Highway 880 across the freeway at 2 in the afternoon. Image PS Nonprofits like Asian Law Caucus actively work against the safety of Asian Americans.

As a former donor, I am truly appalled. This is absolutely abhorrent and unacceptable.
Mar 27, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
America is predicated on socioeconomic mobility and the San Francisco Bay Area is among the most likely in the country for children to raise their station in life.

Children of 25th percentile-earning parents averaged north of 45th percentile!

San Francisco must be saved. People come to the SF Bay from around the world to build technology for others, and to build a life for themselves.

We need abundant housing, safe streets, and strong public schools. We need a government that works.

We have to vote better.

We demand common sense leaders!
Mar 25, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
In 1971, Intel released the first commercially available microprocessor, the Intel 4004, under Gordon Moore's leadership. This microprocessor was designed for a Japanese calculator company, Busicom. The astonishing part is that Intel wasn't originally a microprocessor company. They focused on memory chips, and the Intel 4004 was a custom project for Busicom. However, after realizing the potential of the 4004, Moore decided to buy back the rights from Busicom and market it as a general-purpose microprocessor.
Mar 24, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
The least beneficial desires are purely external—mimetic of other people’s beliefs. The Keynesian beauty contest.

The most beneficial desires are driven from scientific observation or deep introspection. You’ll be alone and right for a while, and you’ve got to be OK with that. The trick is of course being able to be alone/right but for a moment, then transmit those ideas to others and get mimesis on your side.

Most people think of marketing/comms as a side-skill, but you need new innovation AND the ability to transmit belief to truly win.
Mar 17, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
Techno-optimism is not the root cause of SBF’s grift.

It is credentialism. If person X backs it, surely it must be real. Mistaking the map for the territory.

See the land for your own eyes before you buy it. Don’t peruse the map and sign on the dotted line, sight unseen. Optimism is necessary for people to try things. Why did explorers roam the earth? The curiosity to see what is there. That’s techno-optimism.

There are new things to try and new things to create and we don’t know what will work.

We don’t know what is around that mountain.
Mar 10, 2023 4 tweets 1 min read
The real victims of the SVB fallout are the depositors:
startups (10 to 100 employees) who cannot make payroll, and will have to shut down or furlough *next week*

If these startups wait weeks/months for their deposits, we have destroyed a generation of US startups, *at random* twitter.com/i/web/status/1… Depositors must be made whole, and if the govt doesn't do this, there will be a contagion that will destroy our economy.

If we know depositors will be made whole, private lenders will set up and make this work.

Otherwise this contagion will not only kill startups but all banks.
Mar 10, 2023 6 tweets 2 min read
The most important thing the FDIC and the US Government can do right now is *make the receivership as short as possible*

There are thousands of US startups that banked at SVB, often as their *sole bank*. $250K per account is not going to last long.

From the FDIC website: The #1 pressing issue for these startups is *payroll* - you can't have people work if you can't pay them.

This means mass furlough.

It might mean thousands of startups die before the FDIC gets through its receivership process and releases the funds.
Mar 1, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
Don’t fall victim to this trope!

Tech is the scapegoat of the failing city politicians who are blocking housing, making streets unsafe, hurting immigrants

We are organizing to fight this and make SF great for all people including tech.

Follow @GrowSF if you want to help This person means well but doesn’t understand it is the extremist progressive policies of the political machine that enable and create the suffering in San Francisco

We are all Democrats here, but what we need is common sense and good outcomes for the oppressed and marginalized,… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…
Feb 14, 2023 6 tweets 3 min read
SF School Board’s Alida Fisher is once again up to the same tactics recalled ideologues Allison Collins/Gabriela Lopez used to remove Algebra from middle schools & destroy an excellent school (Lowell)

Destroy merit, water down our public schools, and use national issues to do it In SF we want immigrant families and children of every socioeconomic background to have access to the best schools in the world.

When they say politicize, they seem to project their own power grab: keeping ideology the center of instruction, not child outcomes.

This must stop.
Jan 31, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
If you wonder why the SF Chronicle supports the cesspool of the SF Political Machine, and it's nearly impossible to clean up the open air drug markets of SF, here's why:

The SF Chronicle's newsroom *DOES NOT TRY TO BE OBJECTIVE ANYMORE*

They're shouting the quiet part out loud The WaPo opinion piece is right: "Trustworthy journalism by a new generation of journalists and newsroom leaders can ensure that the news media continues to do its part to protect democracy."

We do not have this in San Francisco.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/…
Jan 31, 2023 4 tweets 2 min read
San Francisco is being ruined by open air drug markets, fentanyl addiction and an extreme housing crisis.

Why? Luxury beliefs held by the SF political machine.

Good news: We can vote these ideologues out in 2024.

(Follow @TSFAction to do something about this) Image Who is the SF Political Machine, supporting open drug scenes and virtue signaling, resulting in terrible outcomes for our city?

Simple: Preston, Peskin, Ronen, Walton, Chan

Remove them from power in 2024. Vote them out. That's the only way we can fix this broken city. Image
Jan 21, 2023 5 tweets 2 min read
San Francisco is experiencing a drug overdose crisis. The fentanyl crisis is caused by a city that does very little to stem the open air drug markets that proliferate in TL, SOMA and downtown.

The city must make a change, but SF hard left political machine fights for status quo The SF Police Commission is filled with ideologues who support the open air drug markets:

“We have had a long history where we tried [arresting drug dealers] and it’s not working.”

— SF Police Commissioner Cindy Elias, Dec 19, 2022

Elias has yet to provide an alternative plan.
Dec 25, 2022 4 tweets 2 min read
You can reduce achievement gaps by juking the stats or actually improving education.

Removing the availability of advanced mathematical courses to middle schoolers and beginning high schoolers is juking the stats.

SFUSD policy feels good but hurts kids sfexaminer.com/news/education… While most parents want to help kids get access to the best education, SFUSD (informed by the by feel-good but wrong research by Stanford’s Jo Boaler) reduces access and call it good/fair/righteous.

“Detracking” is de-growth

Bring back Algebra to SF public middle schools!
Dec 12, 2022 5 tweets 2 min read
I think we needed some good news and this is it
Dec 10, 2022 6 tweets 3 min read
I predict this kind of thread pointing out the basic logic flaws of hard left elected officials and the SF status quo political grift machine might end up being a whole genre of tweet storm we see regularly

I certainly would vote for ChatGPT over Peskin, Preston and cronies It’s very reasonable to shut down open air drug markets but SF police commission is against it

It’s reasonable making drugs less available will make recovery and sobriety possible but the homeless industrial complex is against it