President & CEO at Y Combinator · Joined 2011
View Live Interactive Profile →Garry Tan brings a genuinely rare builder-to-investor-to-CEO path to Y Combinator's top job. After early engineering and design work at Palantir - where he designed the company's logo - he co-founded Posterous, a blogging platform that sold to Twitter through YC's own Summer 2008 batch, then became a YC partner himself from 2011 to 2015, building foundational pieces of the founder experience like Bookface. In parallel he co-founded Initialized Capital, growing it into a firm managing more than $3.2 billion before returning to YC as President and CEO in January 2023. He remains one of the most publicly visible leaders in venture capital, maintaining a large YouTube following, continuing to write code and build YC's internal tools himself, and pushing the organization hard into AI-first investing during his tenure.