Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:35:33 · Garry Tan
The default is your life is already scattered across 10 clouds owned by companies whose incentives are not yours, searchable by everyone except you. I didn't create the risk by consolidating my context. I took custody of it. Custody is the security model. And if you don't trust yourself to hold the keys, I promise you the answer isn't trusting someone else's terms of service more. So why did I open source all of it? The harness, the brain architecture, the skills, the whole personal operating system. People ask me this because they seem like... They they they think there must be a catch. Well, the answer is because I can. Because being at YC for me means I don't have to monetize my own infrastructure. But because I can is also the answer to the wrong question. The real question is why anyone should. And the answer is that I believe tools of the powerful should be given away. Every era has a private technology of leverage, a thing the powerful have and everyone else doesn't. For a long time, it was literacy. Then, it was capital. Right now, today, it's this, the harness, the library, the workforce made of markdown. The people who have it are quietly operating at a different scale than the people who don't. And the gap is widening every month. And that's what this whole conference is about, to give you the power to be able to do it for yourself. When something like that, that powerful stays private, you get a priesthood. When it gets given away, you get a renaissance. I know which one I want to live in, which means I get to do the thing that I actually believe in. And I'll give it to you as a creed because it's the closest thing I have to one. Say the things other people won't. Fund the people other people won't. Build the buildings other people won't. Write and give away the code that other people won't. Leave behind the institutions that other people won't. And when you build in the open, you should know what's coming because Spinoza's story has one more chapter. November 1676, Gottfried Leibniz, the most glittering genius in Europe, silk stockings, a calculating machine in his luggage, travels to The Hague to spend three days in an attic with the most hated man on the continent. And then he spends the next forty years lying about it. Publicly, the visit was a few hours in passing. Privately, his notes are crammed with obsessive commentary on Spinoza.
00:38:20 · Garry Tan
I love a small version of this weekly. I say agents write most of my code now and the dunks arrive by lunch. Then I look at what the loudest dunkers are actually shipping, and it's agents all the way down. So learn the pattern now because building in public guarantees you'll need it. First, they quote tweet you, then they get clone you. The dunks are just the adoption curve announcing itself. And I want to show you what this architecture looks like when it's pointed at the only thing that really matters. I have a friend whose son has a rare form of epilepsy. No lab, no grant, no permission. He just went and you can just do things. He built a repo of 80,000 markdown files, a brain for one small boy, And pushed himself to the absolute edge of what humanity knows about his son's exact condition. Every specialist visit, every paper, every seizure log, every drug interaction indexed and cross linked and ready. So that when a new doctor has an idea, he knows in minutes whether it's already been tried. A father, a laptop, and a library. That is personal AGI. Not a benchmark, not a demo. The entire architecture I've described tonight, the library, the librarian, the right three books open at the right moment, aimed at the one thing, one man loves the most in the world. Nobody was coming to build that for him. So he built it. And nobody is coming to build yours for you. That's the good news. Everything you were told you needed, the team, the funding, the permission, the credential was a workaround for the fact that one person could hold seven things in their head and work sixteen hours a day. That fact just expired. You can fly now. Not metaphorically, mechanically. Every problem where you thought, I wish I had this person. I wish I could hire this person, but I can't get them. You can. Every archive too big to read, every dataset too gnarly to clean, every ocean you were told not to boil. We can boil the ocean now. I have a sentence I live by and I wanna leave it with you. It's all made up, but you get to make it up. Every institution in the world, the one that read a curse over a 23 year old in 1656, was made up by people no smarter than you. The difference between you and every generation of founders before you is that they had to recruit dozens of believers before they could build anything at all.
00:41:02 · Garry Tan
You need a laptop and a few years of your own history you're already sitting on. There are about 7,000 people at this whole event. 7,000 canadises. 7,000 strivings. For most of history, almost all of that striving never got an audience. It died waiting for funding, waiting for head count, waiting for permission, waiting for someone else to believe first. The machinery I showed you tonight is the first technology I've ever seen that lets the striving go straight to work. One person, no intermediaries, no permission. I genuinely do not think the world understands yet what 7,000 people with that kind of leverage walk out of a building and do. Spinoza closed The Ethics, the book that had to be smuggled out in a desk with nine words. All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare. The difficulty just collapsed. The rarity is now up to you. Go and build. Thank you.