Garry Tan

Accelerator

President & CEO, Y Combinator

YC CEO and Initialized Capital co-founder

San Francisco, CA$100K–$2M checks8 notable investments

Pre-SeedSeed

Website LinkedIn 𝕏@garrytan Y Combinator Crunchbase

AIEnterprise SaaSDeveloper ToolsFintechInfrastructure

Background

Garry Tan is a Canadian-American venture capitalist born in Winnipeg who grew up in Fremont, California, and graduated from Stanford University with a degree in Computer Systems Engineering. He was an early employee at Palantir Technologies, then co-founded Posterous, a blogging platform acquired by Twitter in 2012. He joined Y Combinator as a partner in 2011, then co-founded Initialized Capital in 2012 alongside Alexis Ohanian and Harj Taggar, growing it to a $700 million fund before returning to YC. He became President and CEO of Y Combinator in January 2023, relocating YC's headquarters to San Francisco. He is known for early seed checks in Coinbase, Instacart, and Flexport through Initialized Capital.