Garry Tan on Spotting Extreme Winners, Advice for Founders in AI + Lessons from Paul Graham

Episode 642: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Garry Tan ( https://x.com/garrytan ), CEO of Y Combinator, about how the sauce that makes YC outperform the rest of Silicon Valley plus lessons from Paul Graham, Peter Thiel and Garry’s first million.  — Show Notes:  (0:00) Winning the game (3:16) Being the Harvard of startups (7:31) How YC outperforms most Silicon Valley investors (9:36) Spotting extreme winners (14:14) Capital-as-a-service (16:34) How Garry hustled at 14 to get his into financial security (23:04) Turning down Peter Thiel's offer to start Palantir (32:20) Garry's first million (44:57) Early days at YC (51:31) The edge of startups with a 2-pizza team (54:36) Advice for founders in AI (1:05:57) The spoon-bending story — Links: • YC - https://www.ycombinator.com/ • Founding Sales - https://www.foundingsales.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano