Y Combinator’s Garry Tan Goes to the Mat
Since taking over Y Combinator earlier this year, Garry Tan has laid off staff, shrunk its batches of startups and eliminated its late-stage fund. Now, as rival startup accelerators enter the fray, he’s raising eyebrows with his attacks on the firm’s critics.
Garry Tan was in his happy place. Surrounded by food trucks and techies basking in San Francisco’s September sun, the CEO of Y Combinator snapped selfies with entrepreneurs as he meandered through a crowd of 2,700 attendees at the startup accelerator’s annual alumni event.
A week earlier, though, Tan had been blowing a fuse. In a series of barbed tweets, Tan had blasted Ali Partovi—the leader of a rival accelerator, Neo—accusing him of slandering Y Combinator, while another Y Combinator partner, Michael Seibel, described Partovi as a dishonest bully and said he’d heard “so, so much dirt” about him. The impetus for the mudslinging: Earlier in the day, at a hackathon on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s campus, Partovi told college students that Neo offers a better ratio of mentors to startups than Y Combinator does.
As trash-talking goes, Partovi’s comments were relatively bland, which prompted confusion among some startup founders about why Y Combinator’s leaders went after him with such vehemence. After all, in the world of accelerators, Neo is a mere minnow and Y Combinator is the whale that helped launch Stripe, Airbnb and a pantheon of other blockbuster startups. Could it be that Y Combinator was beginning to feel a bit less secure about the unshakability of its position in the startup ecosystem?