Day in the Life of Y Combinator President & CEO Garry Tan during the first week of the batch

So we just did a yoga session. We did a little bit of light stretching about about twenty minutes. We did breath work. I've been studying with Soma breath work training and we did a sound healing as well in order to do a meditation to.

think about the future identity for the different founders. So I'm really honored that Gary brought me over here. I've been training him for a while as well. It's been an awesome way to start every Tuesday and Thursday morning.

One of the things we're trying to teach people at YC is that if you can change yourself and change the way you approach things and change and like have some sort of awareness. Mhmm. If you change your awareness, you know, and it starts with your body, sort of like Yeah. If you're if you get your hardware right Yeah. You get your software right For sure.

And then you can sort of like radiate your influence out into the world. So Yeah. On the one hand it's kinda woo. On the other hand like Silicon Valley is actually sort of built on all of that. Yeah. You know, just being on the West Coast like Definitely. That's why San Francisco is a big piece of that's where people are gonna make the future and Yeah.

So, you know, getting people oriented around like, it's not just sitting in front of your computer like Yeah. You you know, often can't just like brute force logic your way to it. Yeah. It's also having your intentions set and Yeah. You know, sort of being bringing your whole self which unusual.

I like to call myself an emotional support human. I'm just trying to be a baby Yoda for the rest of the people out there. Thank you, brother.

Find Joseph on IG, link in the description below. Hey, PB. How's it going? How's going? Wanna show up on my YouTube channel? Sure. This is Paul Buchheit. He literally created Gmail and the like button.

I didn't make like button. Brett Brett made the like button. Brett made the like button, but your startup your startup created the like button, which is awesome. These are the kind of people you get to bump into Y Combinator. There are a bunch of reasons why we do this retreat. The first one in my mind is actually that you need a respite from killing it culture.

If you go to a pitch meeting with investors or sometimes you do an all hands with all of your staff, you gotta be on as a founder because you're creating a cult. We believe x and nobody else believes it yet. But you need some place in there where you can be real. I have a video that I created earlier that you can find on my channel called the Stockdale Paradox.

You have to at once know, without a doubt, you're going to make it. You're gonna create a startup of incredibly great value, and you should never lose sight of that. But at the same time, you've got to have total information awareness and an understanding of where you are in that process. And it might be far off. Things are broken.

In fact, you're getting punched in the face as a startup founder absolutely absolutely all the time. And the tricky thing is, for a great many founders out there, they don't have any room where they can turn off. And we are trying to do exactly that here for three days, getting away to Fairmont Sonoma with people in the batch.

So the retreat actually starts right here in the dining area where we have dinner and preview night. So the number one thing that you actually have to start with is getting everyone in a room so that they can know each other. And so every single company gets about thirty seconds to sixty seconds standing on stage, and we go through all 60 or 70 companies in a given group.

And the number one thing that we want people to understand is that this is the beginning of you telling your story. And the great thing is, they're in front of one of the friendliest crowds in the world. You're sitting next to a ton of really, really smart people who are some of the best builders in the world.

And so if you're selling an AI tool or a b to b SaaS lead gen tool, those are actually your customers. Those are the best customers in the world that you could get right then. So it all sort of starts the first night, and people are sort of feeling it out, but it turns out, it's kinda like the first day of school.

And believe it or not, a lot of the people that people will have met for the first time in this very room, they'll be best friends for life. And that was true for me. Two whole tables of my wedding, years after I did YC, were people in my batch or other alumni who I got to know in our community.

That's actually one of the coolest things that every single person gets, and it's actually one of the most important, differentiators. It's something that gives YC startups a leg up over all the other startups in the Silicon Valley.

1 of the things that I've talked with Michael Seibel a bunch about, you know, we came up in the game about the same time, and there were lots of people who are billionaires now, who are who we've known for years, but they could never turn it off.

But because we had YC, we always had a few dozen people who we trusted so completely that we'd literally even give them the source code if they asked, like the Heroku founders did when they came to us when I was working on Posterous.

These are literally things that you trust people so much, you would trust them with the crown jewels of your business, but you could also, more importantly, trust them to keep your secrets. And if you go to TechCrunch disrupt or you're at some fancy event, guess what?

You cannot do that because anything you tell anyone else, you have no idea what's going to happen except for this community, and that's what YC really is about. The retreat is the beginning of a batch and the beginning of relationships that last for not weeks, not months, but years, decades, sometimes your entire life.

So one of the really cool things that you get to do when you bring together really, really smart people is you get to have an unconference, which is sort of the opposite of how a lot of tech conferences work, where someone goes and like, it's very stilted and sort of planned out.

This is a totally unplanned sort of thing where as people came in yesterday, they signed up on the board and then we tried to pick out some of the most interesting topics like stories from being a firefighter or, you know, going to Russia and being a missionary, like just a lot people lived a lot of different lives and this is just one of those moments to sort of bring people together and share just interesting weird things about themselves.

The next thing I really love and is it's very important, that we get right here at YC is actually helping you find the people next to you who are gonna help you navigate the idea maze. And the idea maze is such an important mental image for what a startup founder is trying to do.

You quit your job, you raise some money, you're trying to build a product or solution that actually solves a real problem out there. But the vast majority of people out there and the vast majority of startups out there never find a market and never build a product that solves a real problem such that you can get to product market fit.

And the funniest thing is YC's knowledge, like all of the mechanics of how to get the product market fit, we give away. I give it away on this channel. You can find it on the y combinator channel. You can go to ycombinator. com and click start up library, and there are literally an unending amount of resources for the mechanics of how to do it, but you still need a village.

And that's what we've really learned here. In order to get into the idea maze and see how does the product work, how could the market actually be something that could support a startup, it really helps to have basically the hundreds of other people who are the best at what they do alongside you for the ride, and for you to be able to have open communication. Hey, we tried this.

Oh, you're selling to that market? We discovered that. Actually, you should talk to our friend over here. And that's something that ultimately is priceless. We give away all the knowledge for free, but it's the networks that are being set up every single day at YC that you cannot buy. What we just did was actually partner on conference.

The first one was Brad and I talking about investor and VC secrets. The second one was about San Francisco and how we're gonna fix SF and why we should fix it. And then third, we talked about Book Face, which is the social network that runs all of YC. About one in three of the 12,000 alumni who are part of YC use it every single day. Finally, you probably saw it in this very video.

Walking around, you have some of the people who have literally built products that a billion people use every single day. Being able to get the advice of Paul Buchheit, who created Gmail and who worked on FriendFeed, which ended up creating the like button, how crazy is that? This community is full of people who want you to be able to do that. And so it's kinda like that old Jay Z lyric.

Everybody wanna tell you how to do it, but they never did it. And I actually think that that's what really drew me to YC right at the beginning, whether it was Paul Graham creating Yahoo stores, Paul Buchheit creating Gmail, or we have new visiting group partners working alongside us right here at YC like David Lieb, who created Google Photos, something that a billion people use every single day.

There are very, very few places in the world where you can go directly to the person who made the thing that you use every day, and you can get direct advice on, well, you made something people want, how do I do that? That's YC in a nutshell.

When you add a network full of people who deservedly trust each other and who are the most capable people in the world, there is nothing like this in the entire world that I've ever seen. Hope you enjoyed this behind the scenes look at how we start the y combinator batch. And remember, this is basically week one. I kinda wish that I had this kind of experience back in 02/2008.

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