Garry Tan: YC Prefers Founders with Unique, Authentic Insights
Garry Tan, president of YC, stated that his favorite founders to work with are those who possess specific, unusual insights gained through personal experience, rather than vague concepts like "AI for X."
Failed founders often have strong technical skills but build products that no one truly needs, chase irrelevant metrics, and avoid conversations with users who can tell the truth.
He believes that the second type of founders can transform into the first type as long as they are willing to go out, communicate with people, continuously try, and pursue a high learning rate.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Garry Tan, as president of YC, has long guided thousands of founders during office hours. His views continue to emphasize the core concepts of "founder-market fit" and "talk to users," which align with YC's consistent opposition to the culture of "build in isolation."
In terms of capital pathways, YC's office hours filtering mechanism directs scarce mentoring resources and subsequent funding opportunities toward founders with earned insights, aiming to significantly increase batch success rates. Strategically, it helps technical founders shift from chasing metrics to solving real problems, creating a high-density user feedback-driven iterative loop.
Similar to the survival of vertical deep-dive projects amidst the demise of many "AI wrapper" projects in past YC batches, current AI entrepreneurship is at a control stage transitioning from technology-driven generalized applications to a deep-dive model addressing real problems.
This essentially represents a capital concentration-driven restructuring of the industry chain. Unique earned insights alter the resource allocation weight of early-stage entrepreneurial projects, with the mechanism being high-frequency real conversations accelerating validation and iteration, prompting capital to concentrate from technically competent but demand-disconnected teams to founders with rare insights and high learning rates, achieving a structural upgrade in the entrepreneurial ecosystem from "smart people reinventing the wheel" to "solving real pain points."
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Technology is the entry ticket; user insights are the real barrier.
Avoiding truthful user conversations is akin to chronic self-sabotage.
The best founders are never the best coders, but those who can best listen to user complaints.