Garry Tan

Garry Tan is president and CEO of Y Combinator and a General Partner. His AI work combines a public argument for organizing companies around AI with a concrete software-development workflow: gstack, which he presents as his open-source software factory and says he uses every day.[2][3]

At the AI Engineer World’s Fair, Tan argued that the fastest-growing founders YC sees are “not treating AI as autocomplete, they’re treating it as a workforce,” according to Richard MacManus’s July 3, 2026 report. His closing prescription was: “Build an AI-native company, not a company that just uses AI.”[1]

Tan’s gstack turns Claude Code into what its documentation calls a virtual engineering team. Markdown slash commands assign distinct roles to product judgment, architecture, design, code review, browser testing, security review, and release work. Tan explains his decision to share it by saying, “these tools should be available to everyone.” The software is released under the MIT license.[3][4]

The documented workflow follows Think → Plan → Build → Review → Test → Ship → Reflect. Its distinguishing mechanism is the handoff of artifacts between stages: /office-hours writes a design document for /plan-ceo-review; /plan-eng-review writes a test plan for /qa; and /ship verifies fixes for bugs identified by /review.[3]

Tan’s software-building experience predates this AI workflow. His earlier career includes engineering and design, founding a blogging platform, and building software for YC founders.[2]

Tan was an early designer and engineering manager at Palantir, where he designed the company logo. He later co-founded Posterous, a blogging platform in YC’s Summer 2008 batch that was acquired by Twitter. He also co-founded Initialized Capital and holds a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford.[2]

During his earlier YC partnership, from 2011 to 2015, Tan built key parts of the founder experience, including Bookface and the Demo Day website. His first-person gstack account describes Bookface as YC’s internal social network—an example of his software work within the organization he now leads.[2][3]