Garry Tan: New Rules for Founders

Garry Tan: The cool parts of the idea maze are like the weird fringe parts, actually. It's always like, uh, what is a toy? Like that's the pattern in Silicon Valley over and over again that bears repeating, right? The idea that you could have a computer on every desk in every home. Today is like, of course, that's what's come to pass. But the people who created that thing, they were fringe weirdo punks, actually. They were outsiders. Homebrew Computer Club was not where you were getting laid. You You just were like following this weird obsession that, you know, actually I want my own computer.

Garry Tan: From Palantir I definitely learned that everything that's awesome in my life is kind of a cult. That starts with some sort of truth or belief that flies in the face of an orthodoxy, which is very punk actually.

Garry Tan: for the longest time we really really believed that you needed co-founders and I think that everything else being equal, having co-founders is net really really good. Um I think some of this is like the beginning of a cult. Like you know, a cult where there's only one person and that person can't convince anyone else to join them is like you know, worse than a cult. It's just like a crazy person actually. Um I think this is like an old Derek Sivers TED Talk, right? Where it's like uh yeah, one person dancing in a field is a crazy person. But um you know, it's really the second person who like gets up and joins that person like then you just what you find is you know, suddenly 10 people are all dancing. Then it's a party. Yeah, that's literally the TED Talk. Love it. And um I think there's something to that, but you know, I think what's happening right now with vibe coding and agentic coding um literally any given person could be 400 of that person like from two years like even like nine months ago um you can be a multiple of yourself.

Garry Tan: You do some feat of strength and then you turn it into a markdown file plus code plus tests that can be reused and like put into a cron job... we're just seeing like across the board a markdown file is an employee. And it's an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time and it will do it like as many times as you want... you just do it once perfectly. The first time you try to do it, it's going to be bad. Expensive. Many iterations. But then at the end you can tell very, very quickly and in very simple ways, like, 'Hey agent, fix this, fix that. Like this was wrong.' The actual trace and the history out of that agent working with you — it'll turn that into a skill file that's perfect. And anytime it screws up in a future case, it's just a bug fix, and then it's there forever.

Garry Tan: a markdown file is an employee. And it's an employee that, uh, will do the job perfectly every single time and it will do it like as many times as you want. And then, you know, at that point all you're doing is like take any business process that you need in your company and you just do it once perfectly. And the first time you try to do it, it's going to be bad. Expensive. Yeah, yes, many iterations. Yeah. But then at the end you can you as long as you can tell very, very quickly and in in very simple ways, like, 'Hey agent, fix this, fix that. Like this was wrong.' Um, you know, the actual trace and the actual, uh, history out of, um, that agent, uh, working with you, it'll actually turn that into a skill file that's perfect, actually. And anytime it screws up in like a future case, it's just a bug fix, and then it's there forever.

Garry Tan: I think we're just seeing like across the board, a markdown file is an employee. And it's an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time and it will do it like as many times as you want. And then, you know, at that point all you're doing is like take any business process that you need in your company and you just do it once perfectly. And the first time you try to do it, it's going to be bad. But then at the end you can... turn that into a skill file that's perfect, actually. And anytime it screws up in like a future case, it's just a bug fix, and then it's there forever.

Garry Tan: Building these agentic systems today, I think that's all you're doing is you're seeing where the bottlenecks are, and then, you know, almost every single time it's like, 'How do I just instruct the agent to create a piece of software or a markdown file that blows away that roadblock.' And then, when you take a step back and you've done that for the whole task, it's like, I mean, we we there are companies now today that, you know, we were we were talking about earlier that's like literally you can go from zero to 15 mil ARR in about 4 months with like two or three people and like hundreds of agent like, you know, a few hundred skill files.

Garry Tan: He has his agent look at the meeting transcripts from like all of his direct reports. And he like can see that like two levels down. And then the thing that really jumped out at me is like he can use meetings that he's not in now to figure out like what's broken, what's in conflict, like who's in conflict with who. And then sometimes he can show up at a meeting. He has perfect context from the last three weeks of that one compliance team. And then he can walk in and he's like, 'Actually, you're right. We're doing it your way.' And then he can leave... that is actually one of the defining reasons why startups or businesses fail. It's actually a management challenge. The business becomes too big to fit in one person's head. And then this is the most profound form — you have agents, you have memory, you have retrieval. It can actually look at the ground truth from the data. That's clairvoyance.

Garry Tan: it's all human humans are the ones who are going to like slow this down. And then actually I'm realizing this might be a white pill. So if you look at like the tenor of what's going on just broadly in the discourse about AI, it's all like this sort of doom and gloom like all white-collar jobs are going to go away. There's going to be a permanent underclass. And then funny enough what I think is all of the bureaucracy and the slowness and the seven plus or minus two of like every company, every institution, every organization, all the middle managers in the world. That is actually the white pill.

Garry Tan: The white pill to me is it's going to be 20 years and that's not a bad thing. That's actually a good thing. Society is way slower than you think. Government is way slower than you think. Every company in the world is way slower than you think. And there are real moats to these things. There are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere... I think that like the product unit manager or whatever the heck their title was — I don't think that they wanted us to waste our time like that. I think it's just that your day, you just don't have enough hours in the day and we're incredibly limited human beings.

Garry Tan: The white pill is just believing that America still has rule of law and that people in government are trying to help and like somewhat earnest... if we fix local, state and national will fix itself because on a five or 10 year basis the people who win up there they will come up through a system that's functional and about saying no to things that don't make sense, about saying yes to the things that are awesome for the people... I care about San Francisco, I care about housing, I care about crime, I care about treatment and recovery. And if we do that we can have the society we want to live in.

Garry Tan: I think San Francisco should be the beacon for pushing this back in every blue city in America... act local like take care of the people right next to you... if we fix local like state and national will fix itself cuz like on a five or 10 year basis like the people who win up there like they they will come up through a system that's functional.

Garry Tan: I care about San Francisco, I care about housing, I care about crime, I care about uh you know, treatment and recovery and if we do that like we can have the society we want to live in and then you know, if we fix local like state and national will fix itself cuz like on a five or 10 year basis like the people who win up there like they they will come up through a system that's functional and about saying no to things that don't make sense, about saying yes to the things that are awesome for the people.