Now: TYPE III AUDIO.
Previously: 80,000 Hours (2014-15; 2017-2021) Worked on web development, product management, strategy, internal systems, IT security, etc.
Before that: My CV.
Side-projects: Inbox When Ready; Radio Bostrom; The Valmy; Comment Helper for Google Docs.
I’m defaulting to co-egg...
Congratulations!
The name has six syllables—is there an official line on what the conversational abbreviation should be?
I’ve no experience writing questions for prediction markets. With that caveat: something like that question sounds good.
Ideally I’d like to see the 1-year analysis run in 2026Q1.
Notably, in that video, Garry is quite careful and deliberate with his phrasing. It doesn’t come across as a case of him doing excited offhand hype. Paul Buchheit nods as he makes the claim.
Cool, thanks. With that source, I agree it’s correct to say that Garry Tan has claimed that “YC batches are the fastest growing in their history because of generative AI” for the summer 2024, autumn 2024 and winter 2025 batches.
Have you noticed him making a similar claim for earlier batches?
Thanks for the post. Of your caveats, I’d guess 4(d) is the most important:
Generative AI is very rapidly progressing. It seems plausible that technologies good enough to move the needle on company valuations were only developed, say, six months ago, in which case it would be too early to see any results.
Personally, things have felt very different since o3 (April) and, for coding, the Claude 4 series (May).
Anthropic’s run-rate revenue went from $1B in January to $5B in August.
This post misquotes Garry Tan. You wrote (my emphasis):
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan has publicly stated that recent YC batches are the fastest growing in their history because of generative AI.
But Garry’s claim was only about the winter 2025 batch. From the passage you cited:
The winter 2025 batch of YC companies in aggregate grew 10% per week, he said.
“It’s not just the number one or two companies—the whole batch is growing 10% week on week”
Thanks for reporting this.
I’ve just fixed the narration.
On “Standards”: I often link people to Jason Crawford’s blog post “Organisational metabolism: Why anything that can be a for profit should he a for profit.”
A long overdue thank you for this comment.
I looked into this, and there is in fact some evidence that less expressive voices are easier to understand at high speed. This factor influenced our decision to stick with Ryan for now.
The results of the listener survey were equivocal. Listener preferences varied widely, with Ryan (our existing voice) and Echo coming out tied and slightly on top, but not with statistical significance. [1]
Given that, we plan to stick with Ryan for now. Two considerations that influence this call, independently of the survey result:
There’s an habituation effect, such that switching costs for existing hardcore listeners are significant.
There’s some evidence that more expressive voices are less comprehensible at high listening speeds. Ryan is less expressive than the other voices we tested.
We’ll survey again—or perhaps just switch based on our judgement—when better models are released.
[1] Above a basic quality threshhold, people’s preferences for human narrators also seem to vary wildly. We’ve found that the same human narrators elicit feedback that can be characterised as “love letters” and “hate mail”—in surprisingly similar proportions.
Similar reasons that I want both of Twitter’s “home” and “following” views.
I want “People you follow” to include everything and it should be chronological.
If quick takes are includedl, I guess the “People you follow” content could dominate the items that currently make the “New and upvoted” section.
Quick thought is that I’d want a separate section on the homepage called “People you follow”.
Mixing it into the current “New & Upvoted” section seems bad to me but that’s really just a hot take.
I wish it was easier to find the best social media discussions of forum posts and quick takes.
E.g. Ozzie flagged some good Facebook discussion of a recent quick take [1], but people rarely do that.
Brainstorm on minimal things you could do:
a. Link to Twitter search results (example). (Ideally you might show the best Twitter discussions in the Forum UI, but I’m not sure if their API terms would permit that.)
b. Encourage authors to link to discussion on other platforms, and have a special place in the UI that makes such links easy to find.
I actually can’t read the comments because I barely use Facebook and am not in the right group or something, but I guess many people can.
Hmm I think Twitter-ish feed containing posts, quick takes and comments from just the users I follow would be very useful. Not sure what it’d do to the forum dynamic overall though, but could be good, actually?
Another way to make me engage more with “Quick takes” is if I could get a feed of takes from users I follow. I can kinda get that in the “Notifications” list but again it’s super hard to skim the list to find the ones of interest.
I ~never check the “Quick takes” section even though I bet it has some great stuff.
The reason is that its too hard to find takes that are on a topic I care about, and/or have an angle that seems interesting.
I think I’d be much more likely to read quick takes if the takes had titles, and/or if I could filter them by topic tags.
Maybe you can LLM-generate default title and tag suggestions for the author when they’re about to post?
I wish the notifications icon at the top right would have have separate icon to indicate replies to my posts and my comments.
At the moment those get drowned out by notifications about posts and comments from people I follow (which are so numerous that I’ve been trained to rarely check the notification inbox, because it’s such a rabbit hole...), so I often see comments weeks or months too late.
I’d also like to be able to get email notifications for just replies to my posts and replies to my comments.
Fixed—thank you.
I can imagine “co-eff” being sticky.
I agree that “co-give” is nice but it’s sufficiently harder to say that I predict it won’t catch on.