When The Y combinator CEO, Harry Tan launched his first startup in the 2000s, he worked such long hours that he took anti-narcoleptic drugs just to stay awake. Today, he no longer needs pills to power his program thanks to the help of AI Tan, who says he only sleeps about four hours a night, waking up early to spend the first two hours checking one. team of autonomous AI agents. “I can do my full-time job, doing like eight, nine hour meetings and doing 10,000 lines of code on three different projects now,” Tan said while speaking at SXSW on Saturday (March 14).
AI’s advanced coding capabilities are also changing the way YC evaluates applicants for it prestigious flock of startup incubators. With intelligence now “on tap,” as Tan puts it, the accelerator is putting more weight on founders’ tastes, agency and product management skills. The next big founder “could be an English degree,” he said.
YC is known for incubating extremely successful startups such as Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase AND Instacart. Every four months, she leads 13-week cohorts of promising companies that receive $500,000 in funding and mentorship from YC partners.
Tan himself has moved into just about every role in that ecosystem. He first joined YC as a founder in 2008 with his blogging platform Posterous, then became a partner between 2010 and 2015. After leaving to build Initialized Capital, the venture capital firm he co-founded with the co-founder of Reddit Alexis Ohanianhe returned in 2023 to lead the accelerator as CEO.
His tenure has coincided with a period of rapid change as AI dramatically increases coding productivity. Tan said he’s already seeing the impact within YC: in some groups, roughly half of the startups are now producing 10,000 to 20,000 lines of code a day. However, not everyone in tech is keen. “I have software engineer friends who are in denial,” Tan said, urging coders to adopt AI tools to increase their output.
This shift in tools is reframing what YC looks for in founders. “I care less and less what university someone went to, or even where they worked,” Tan said. The traditionally impressive signs – a degree at Harvard or Stanford, stands at Google OR Meta– they no longer carry the weight they used to carry. Instead, he is more interested in a candidate Github repository, a living record of their code, files, and documentation.
AI is also changing YC’s long-standing preference for multi-founder teams. Co-founders remain ideal, Tan said, because they can support each other through the stress of building a company. But he added that AI’s extensive capabilities are making strong solo founders more sustainable, showing that Peter Steinbergerthe sole founder of OpenClaw, who has launched dozens of other projects, for example. Steinberger recently joined OpenAI to lead its personal agent division.
Because YC is often a hub for Silicon Valley, these shifts are beyond its portfolio. The accelerator has backed more than 5,000 startups with a combined valuation of $1 trillion, with more than 5.5 percent will become unicorns. Its alumni network includes figures such as OpenAIS ‘ Sam Altman (who served as president of YC 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 centers could be on the horizon, citing Austin, Texas and Boston as possible locations. The organization already has a presence in the latter, having hired Ankit Gupta last year as its first full-time partner based in Cambridge, Mass., adjacent to Boston.
