Inside Y Combinator’s ‘Boom Loop’: The Startup Factory Goes Brasher, Leaner And Meaner

Former venture capitalist Garry Tan has slashed programs and turned up the mics in a bid to restore the famed accelerator behind Airbnb and Stripe to its full glory.n the summer of 2022, Garry Tan hopped on a plane from San Francisco headed for the Cotswolds, a quiet part of England about a two hour’s drive west of London, to meet with his mentor, Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.

In the year-plus since, Tan has worked to win them over by reshaping YC in a “return to roots,” as he describes it. That has meant reconfiguring its batches, from admissions to groupings and social activities, to restore its status as a mecca for earliest-stage, technical founders to learn the basics of company-building over three months.

One founder, who said they were speaking only because they still cared about YC’s mission, warned that Tan was taking YC down a more politicized and belligerent path. Others, like Brian Chesky, the Airbnb cofounder and CEO and a YC board director since 2022, said they see in Tan — and his social media tussles — the spirit of Graham, known to many as just “PG”: “Garry’s properly intellectual in a good way that’s built around curiosity,” Chesky said. “He’s a great storyteller.

“I’ve funded 1,000 companies. It’s like I’m a large language model that’s been trained on all this data.” Among the wider tech community, a perception of an adrift YC picked up in those years, punctuated by the shift of its in-person Demo Day online. “The brand was a little bit damaged. People would say the quality wasn’t as dense,” said one investor who has backed a number of YC startups. “Those times were tough for them,” said a YC founder in the current batch who went through the program twice before. Added a former employee: “PG felt we’d strayed too far off the path.

And to make still-larger batches feel more intimate, Tan formalized “The Sharding” , which partitions YC’s groups on parallel tracks. Groups already spent more time together than with others, especially in the remote years. Besides imposing more nerd speech on the program, “sharding” the founders formalized them in tracks, with dedicated individual dinners and events, meaning Pinterest cofounder Ben Silbermann could be addressing founders on one floor, GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij on another.

For his part, Tan said he understood the appeal of Metcalfe’s Law and the notion that the bigger YC’s network, the better. But reminded about Seibel’s state university comparison, Tan rejected the idea out of hand. “This isn’t McDonald’s. This is actually The French Laundry,” he said, invoking the exclusive Napa Valley restaurant opened by seven Michelin star-holding chef Thomas Keller.

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