Garry Tan Named Next President, CEO Of Y Combinator

Startup accelerator Y Combinator named Garry Tan, a co-founder at seed investment firm Initialized Capital, its next CEO and president.

Tan will replace Geoff Ralston, who said in a blog he is leaving the role at the end of the year.

“I am leaving YC, but I’m not actually the retiring type and am looking forward to some to-be-discovered adventures,” wrote Ralston, who has been with Y Combinator since 2011.

Tan is not new to Y Combinator. He co-founded Posterous, a blogging startup which was accepted into Y Combinator’s Summer 2008 program. In 2010, Tan joined the accelerator as a designer-in-residence and became an investor.

Just two years later Tan co-founded Initialized, which has an impressive list of early investments including Coinbase, Instacart and Cruise.

Busy year

The announcement continues what has been a busy year for Y Combinator, whose portfolio is a who’s who of startup success stories such as Airbnb and Stripe.

In May, the accelerator sent a letter to its portfolio companies warning them of the current venture pullback the industry is witnessing and the fact it may get worse.

“No one can predict how bad the economy will get, but things don’t look good, ” YC wrote in the letter titled “Economic Downturn.”

“The safe move is to plan for the worst,” the accelerator wrote.

Y Combinator will shrink the number of startups within its accelerator for its Summer 2022 batch, according to a report earlier this month. As first reported by The Information, the summer class has nearly 250 companies, down 40% from the previous class which had 414 companies.

Related reading:

• Y Combinator Warns Startup Founders Of Economic Downturn: ‘Plan For The Worst’
• Under The Hood: How Early-Stage Investor Initialized Spots Future Unicorns

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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