Garry Tan: personal AI agents are 2 to 3 years from mainstream, and the 'five kings' must not win

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan spoke with Walter Isaacson on The Builders (published 3 November 2026, interview taped 19 June 2026).

How YC picks founders Tan said YC receives "80 maybe 90,000 applications a year now for about 800 spots", with a final interview of just 10 minutes. He said the test of whether YC is working is whether it could say yes in 10 minutes to an Elon Musk, Bill Gates or Steve Jobs walking in. He added that 10 to 15% of self-made billionaires aged 50 and under are YC alumni, and that YC now invests $500,000 per company versus $18,000 when he went through.

AI agents as an operating system Tan described YC's internal agent, Straylight, which holds context on every founder YC has backed and every application. He said he spends "about maybe a hundred to $200,000 a year on tokens" on his own agent and that "in about 2 to 3 years... everyone's going to do it". He promoted his open-source project GStack for getting far more output from coding agents, and argued CEOs should not use AI simply to cut costs.

Antitrust and open models Tan said big tech is "absolutely" too powerful and "the antidote is little tech", praising Europe's DMA and calling for open app markets. He warned of AI value collapsing into "five kings", argued for a "Linux for personal AI", and said the US is "handing Chinese model companies a massive advantage" in open-source AI. He also recalled lessons from Alex Karp as an early Palantir employee, and noted OpenAI began as YC Research.

Source The Builders with Walter Isaacson: Garry Tan (YouTube)