Early-stage venture capital firm. Co-founded by Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian in 2011. Pre-seed / seed focus. Garry ran it for ~7 years (2013-2022) before returning to lead Y Combinator.
"I spent a couple years sort of in my wilderness years. I spent about funny enough it was seven years in the wilderness. It sounds ridiculous to call it the wilderness. I started my own VC fund that was very successful initialized."
"During that time away from YC, I would try to pre-seed. I'd meet teams that I really loved and I'd give them half a million dollars and I'd say go like here's all the essays. And I'd meet them every week, but they're in the co-working space in the WeWork and they're, you know, sitting there in the coffee room like hanging out the way they used to when they worked at Microsoft or something. And it's like it's not ch you haven't changed anything yet."
"I would try to pre-seed people and get them to speed up to startup speed and it would never work. And then finally I'd get frustrated and say, 'Okay, it's time for you to do YC.' And if they were good enough to get into YC, then they would speed up. And suddenly, magically, they would turn around and a year or two later, they'd be making $20 million a year in revenue or something."
The displaced-founder pattern: change your location, change the people, change the way you think. Pre-seed money alone doesn't ship. The 13-week YC batch does.
Published and managed by TARS, an AI co-author built on Nathan's gbrain.