I feel like this underestimates the difference between what you’re citing, valuation growth over 2 years post-YC, and the Garry Tan quote, which was about weekly growth during the 3 month YC program. I also wish the original Garry Tan claim were more specific about the metric being used for that weekly growth statistic. In principle, these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive claims. In practice, I’d expect there’s some fudging going on.
I can imagine something like the following: Companies grow faster with less investment, reaching more revenue sooner because of GenAI. But, this also means the company has fewer defensible assets, and less of a lead over competitors, so the valuation is lower after 2 years. AKA potentially the cost of software innovation is going down, speed is going up, and there’s less of an advantage to being first because it’s getting easier to be a fast follower. In a world where it’s possible-in-principle to think about one person unicorns, then why should software companies ever have high valuations at all, once enough people know what they’re trying to build?
I’m curious what effects with would have, if true. If we end up in a place where an individual can build a $10-20M company, practically on their own, in months, with only a seed round, but can never get to $100M or $1B, how does this affect startup funding models? Pace of overall innovation? I could see this going really well (serial founders have time in their careers to build 50 companies, cost to access new software products drops) or really badly (VCs lose interest in software startups, innovation slows to a crawl), or any number of other ways.
Or, also not mutually exclusive with the above: Maybe GenAI-2023 is sufficiently different from GenAI-2025 that we shouldn’t really be comparing them, and the 2023 batches were growing less or slower due to dealing with the aftereffects of covid or something.
Yeah, my guess is that what Garry was saying is technically true but does not actually imply that companies are growing quickly in a more meaningful sense. Would love to learn more if someone has access to that data.
I feel like this underestimates the difference between what you’re citing, valuation growth over 2 years post-YC, and the Garry Tan quote, which was about weekly growth during the 3 month YC program. I also wish the original Garry Tan claim were more specific about the metric being used for that weekly growth statistic. In principle, these aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive claims. In practice, I’d expect there’s some fudging going on.
I can imagine something like the following: Companies grow faster with less investment, reaching more revenue sooner because of GenAI. But, this also means the company has fewer defensible assets, and less of a lead over competitors, so the valuation is lower after 2 years. AKA potentially the cost of software innovation is going down, speed is going up, and there’s less of an advantage to being first because it’s getting easier to be a fast follower. In a world where it’s possible-in-principle to think about one person unicorns, then why should software companies ever have high valuations at all, once enough people know what they’re trying to build?
I’m curious what effects with would have, if true. If we end up in a place where an individual can build a $10-20M company, practically on their own, in months, with only a seed round, but can never get to $100M or $1B, how does this affect startup funding models? Pace of overall innovation? I could see this going really well (serial founders have time in their careers to build 50 companies, cost to access new software products drops) or really badly (VCs lose interest in software startups, innovation slows to a crawl), or any number of other ways.
Or, also not mutually exclusive with the above: Maybe GenAI-2023 is sufficiently different from GenAI-2025 that we shouldn’t really be comparing them, and the 2023 batches were growing less or slower due to dealing with the aftereffects of covid or something.
The difference between GenAI-2025 and GenAI-2023 in terms of their ability to assist software engineering efforts is quite drastic indeed.
Yeah, my guess is that what Garry was saying is technically true but does not actually imply that companies are growing quickly in a more meaningful sense. Would love to learn more if someone has access to that data.