When Y Combinator CEO Gary Tan launched his first startup in the 2000s, he worked such long hours that he took anti-narcolepsy medications just to stay awake. Today, he no longer needs pills to get through his schedule thanks to the help of Ai Ai Tan, who says he sleeps only about four hours a night, waking up early to spend the first two hours checking in. A team of autonomous AI agents. “I can do my job full time, have like eight or nine hours of meetings, and get 10,000 lines of code done on three different projects right now,” Tan said while speaking at SXSW on Saturday (March 14).
AI’s advanced coding capabilities are also changing how YC evaluates its applicants Prestigious startup incubator payouts. With intelligence now “at hand,” Tan says, the accelerator is putting more weight on founders’ flair, product management skills and agencies. The next big founder “may be an English major,” he said.
YC is known for incubating highly successful startups like Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, and Instacart. Every four months, it runs 13-week batches of promising companies that receive $500,000 in funding and mentorship from YC partners.
Tan has personally moved into almost every role in this ecosystem. He first joined YC as a founder in 2008 through his blogging platform Posterous, then became a partner between 2010 and 2015. After leaving to build Initialized Capital, a venture capital firm he co-founded with Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, he returned in 2023 to lead the accelerator as CEO.
His tenure coincided with a period of rapid change, as artificial intelligence dramatically enhanced programming productivity. Tan said he’s already seeing the impact within YC: At some batches, nearly half of the startups now produce between 10,000 and 20,000 lines of code a day. However, not all tech workers are so inclined. “I have friends who are software engineers who refuse to do that,” Tan said, urging programmers to adopt AI tools to increase their productivity.
This shift in tools reshapes what YC looks for in founders. “I don’t care much what university a person went to, or even where they worked,” Tan said. Traditionally impressive badges — like Harvard or Stanford degrees, or a job at Google or Meta — no longer carry the weight they once did. Instead, he’s more interested in the candidate’s Github repository, a living record of his code, files, and documentation.
AI is also changing YC’s long-standing preference for multi-founder teams. Co-founders remain ideal, says Tan, because they can support each other through the pressures of building a company. But he added that the broad capabilities of AI make strong solo founders more viable, pointing to Peter Steinberger, the solo founder of OpenClaw, who has launched dozens of other projects, as an example. Steinberger recently joined OpenAI to lead its personal agent division.
Since YC is often a leader in Silicon Valley, these shifts extend beyond its own portfolio. The accelerator has supported more than 5,000 startups with a total value of $1 trillion, with… More than 5.5 percent will become unicorns. Its alumni network includes figures like OpenAI’s Sam Altman (who served as YC’s president from 2014 to 2019) and Airbnb’s Brian Chesky.
YC’s footprint may soon expand geographically as well. While the incubator has long been synonymous with its San Francisco headquarters, Tan suggested that new hubs could be on the horizon, with Austin, Texas and Boston named as potential locations. The organization already has a presence in the latter, having appointed Ankit Gupta last year as its first full-time partner based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which neighbors Boston.
