Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is so deep into AI agents that he’s spending $100,000 to $200,000 a year just on tokens. The revelation came on a new episode of Walter Isaacson’s podcast “The Builders,” set to publish on Tuesday.
Garry Tan (Credits: Hutton Supancic / SXSW Conference and Festivals / Getty Images)
Garry Tan Spends Up to $200K a Year on AI Agent Tokens
“I spend about maybe $100[,000] to $200,000 a year on tokens,” Tan told Isaacson. He has previously joking about suffering from “cyber psychosis” and barely sleeping from excitement about working with his agents — and he meant it. His agents handle countless work projects and coding tasks, and he has freely shared his set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on GitHub to teach others what agents can do.
Tan uses his agents the way many people use AI — researching guests and prepping questions for Isaacson’s podcast — but also to run his life. “It’s read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It’s read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years,” he said.
He describes the experience as having help with “almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life” — “a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder at all times” that runs ahead, anticipates needs, and helps you “see around corners.”
How Y Combinator Itself Runs on AI Agents
The YC organization is also going all-in. Tan said the company is using an internal AI agent named Stray Light that is “rebuilding the way we operate at YC.” The agent has a personality and what he calls “a company brain” — the total context of every founder YC has ever backed, everyone who has ever emailed them, and every application.
As an early OpenClaw adopter and now power user, Tan’s biggest lesson is not to treat agents like traditional software. People who obsess over “repeatability and safety,” he argued, “trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human.”
Two hundred grand a year is a staggering AI bill for one person — but for the man running Silicon Valley’s most famous accelerator, it may be the cheapest hire he ever made.
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Source: TechCrunch — read the full story there.