Garry Tan to founders: Build yourself before you build your company

As a Stanford freshman emerging from a rough childhood, Garry Tan felt like he had made it to the end of the tunnel. Almost 30 years later, Tan – now the CEO and president of startup accelerator Y Combinator – told current Stanford students he still had a long way to go.

At the Jan. 29 Distinguished Lectureship hosted by the Stanford Initiative for Entrepreneurs’ Resilience & Well-Being (SIER), a collaboration between the Stanford Mussallem Center for Biodesign and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), Tan compared the process of understanding himself and developing resilience to machine learning.

“You can’t change your pre-training, but you can change your prompts and post-training, which is very good,” he told moderator Anastasia Ntracha, co-lead for entrepreneurial resilience and well-being at Stanford Biodesign.

Tan said he thought he could compartmentalize the pre-training from his childhood, which was shaped by his family’s frequent moves and the demands of his father, who struggled with alcoholism. But in his early days as a founder, he discovered that the “bugs” – unhealthy behaviors he’d learned as a child – would come out.

While founding his startup in 2008, Tan said, he fell into detrimental habits that he now regrets: working 20-hour days, using pharmaceuticals to avoid sleep, and attempting to do everything himself instead of delegating.

He encouraged future founders to figure out their own bugs before they launch a startup, while they have time.

“If you're not aware of your internal default programming, then it will rule you, right?” he said. “That’s probably the most important lesson that I hope people take away, actually. These things are not fate, but you also have to do the introspection.”

Learning to pivot and building community 

To define resilience, Tan paraphrased the TV show Adventure Time: “Sucking is the first step to not sucking.”

Through his work with founders at Y Combinator, Tan has observed that responses to failure vary. Some people give up, while others keep trying the same things. Sometimes he has to tell founders it’s time to pivot.

“You have to view it as a process. You have to be aware of your circumstance and then learn,” he said. “Madness is doing the same thing over and over again, and so being totally relentless but doing the same thing is a form of self-torture.”

Another mistake founders sometimes make is thinking that founding a startup is about solving their own problem: needing a startup.

“Entrepreneurship is very lonely and then also not helpful to anyone if it’s making something only for yourself,” Tan said.

Instead, founders should be “other-focused,” he said, referencing a slogan on a Y Combinator T-shirt: “Make something people want.”

He encouraged aspiring founders to surround themselves with people they trust and can be honest with about how business is going. At Y Combinator, he often sees a high rate of success among founder groups who are inspired by each other’s success.

“You want to be around people who raise the bar for you,” he said.

Habits and tools for well-being

Tan said he was resistant to the idea of therapy and psychology when he was younger but has since worked extensively with a somatic therapist. It’s helped him recognize when his basic programming is happening, through signals like his face getting hot and habits like self-abandonment to the point of not eating or sleeping.

Sauna and cold plunge are part of his well-being routines, as well as sound healing and meditation, which he said has helped him integrate the different parts of himself.

“My software runs so much better,” he said. “I can be better for other people. I can slow down. I can notice when my face feels hot, and then I can make a different choice. The feeling of it actually is like meta-programming of the self.”

ChatGPT has become another valuable tool for Tan. He said he and his wife have used it to communicate better, and he sees it as a complement to his prefrontal cortex and language centers.

Well-being benefits founders and startups

Prioritizing well-being isn’t just personally good for founders, Tan said: “It is not a ‘nice to have;’ it is actually deeply integrated into whether or not your startup and what you try to do in your life will be successful.”

The complex decisions founders have to make in the early days of their startup make it even more important to develop resilience before launching a company, he said.

“If you are a better communicator, if you’re more integrated, if you’re more perceptive, if you’re more in touch with yourself, if you’re more in touch with the team – you can hire better people, you make better decisions. You make 10,000 better decisions in the first year,” he said.

“If you can handle this and be a better person, then your team will be better, and you’ll make better decisions, your product and service will be better, your business will better, and you will succeed.”

The views expressed by speakers are their own and do not represent Stanford University. If you or someone you know is in crisis or needs support, visit our mental health resources page.