Garry TanVerified account

@garrytan

Cofounder —Designer/engineer turned VC investor in startups now worth over $36B — New YouTube videos every week — Instagram DMs open for advice

San Francisco, CA
youtube.com/garrytan
Joined January 2008
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  1. Pinned Tweet
    May 20

    How to fight instant pushback to your ideas: 5 ways to combat the Semmelweis Reflex A doctor in 1847 reduces the hospital death rate from 18% of patients to zero by handwashing. Nobody listens to him. All people who create something new will face this

    13 replies 30 retweets 163 likes
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  2. 2 hours ago

    I always really enjoy chatting with the Associate PM classes. I've chatted with Uber, Lyft, Twitter and now Google. Contact me if there are other APM teams that would like to hear about the hard lessons I've learned the hard way starting out as a PM, then founder, and now VC.

    Thank you to for hopping on a fireside chat call with the incoming class of google apms today and to for planning it; grateful, learned so much in an hour, and very enlightened!!💡
    Show this thread
    7 replies 2 retweets 55 likes
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  3. 8 hours ago

    Google is a yes culture and Apple is a no culture. It's shocking. —Kim Scott (author of )

    10 replies 7 retweets 108 likes
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  4. Retweeted
    9 hours ago

    Just super casual talking to and next week nbd

    3 retweets 13 likes
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  5. May 26

    If any great software engineers are looking for an amazing boostrapped opportunity, pretty sure this is one of the best given COVID-19— make a OS X and PC software utility that makes USB-to-any-camera painless.

    Another good walkthrough to use your Sony Mirrorless or GoPro as a webcam with Zoom... for software engineers on OS X who don’t want to pay for an Elgato Camlink 4K and don’t mind Terminal commands
    4 replies 4 retweets 44 likes
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  6. May 26

    A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying. —John Burroughs

    7 replies 124 retweets 659 likes
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  7. Retweeted
    May 25

    Notable: Everyone has forgotten Facebook did a down round in 2009. A number of down rounds are coming this year and that is OK. The key is bridging the next 18-24 months through COVID and out the other side. Valuation is temporary, company building ongoing 🙂

    2 years earlier we famously raised from Microsoft at $15B valuation. That turned out to be a mistake because it set us up for a painful down round. By 2009 growth had slowed and the financial crisis crushed advertising. “Smart money” bids for our Series D were coming in at $3-6B.
    Show this thread
    7 replies 77 retweets 617 likes
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  8. Retweeted
    May 25

    every so often I'm reminded that good problem selection > hard work

    4 replies 37 retweets 234 likes
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  9. May 25

    Longer duration is one of the main ways smarter, more determined, higher EQ people make money. Short term: dumb money, easy to scare, weak hands, doesn’t do their own research, follows the crowd and the trend Long term: Steady progress, believes in oneself, creates the trend

    9 replies 17 retweets 239 likes
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  10. Retweeted
    May 25

    So many of my favorite people are independent thinkers: they seek their own data and derive their own (tentative) conclusions. Recently, however, I realized that such people — we? — are a handicap to factions we’re a part of. Let me try to explain.

    14 replies 26 retweets 183 likes
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  11. Retweeted
    May 25

    “Payer-provider relationships”

    1 reply 14 retweets 167 likes
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  12. Retweeted
    May 25

    Youth is wasted on the young. But wealth is wasted on the old.

    27 replies 153 retweets 1,544 likes
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  13. May 25

    The head of every software organization needs someone to pay attention to user needs from the bottom up. This executive function is the only one within an org that can cut through politics/laziness As companies scale, this becomes more important, but usually the reverse happens

    3 replies 3 retweets 28 likes
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  14. May 25

    I wonder if Bill Gates will ever bump into this and write a scathing rant like this: Minecraft & Windows 10 subscriptions is a UX disaster that makes all the easy choices for internal teams which are all the wrong ones for the users, just like Moviemaker

    2 replies 1 retweet 21 likes
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  15. May 25

    Case study in "good software is hard" - Minecraft doesn't allow you to renew an expired Realm. Microsoft basically have infinite resources to fix this but don't. Can you imagine how many millions of kids have to bounce off this support thread?

    3 replies 4 retweets 43 likes
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  16. May 24

    Silver lining: combination of shakeup of schedule and the clarity of what you want to do brought about by the pandemic crisis = lots more people do the creative work they were meant to do

    observed: quarantine is minting it’s fair share of cooks and comedians. I suspect some creative careers will be conceived out of all this, and that’s awesome.
    2 replies 1 retweet 30 likes
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  17. May 24

    If you read enough about Jung and the shadow, it will help you see that the flaws you notice in others are opportunities. Often they are mirrors to see what you dislike about yourself. Excerpt from Don’t take your life personally by Buddhist monk Ajahn Sumedho—

    4 replies 9 retweets 61 likes
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  18. May 24

    Another good walkthrough to use your Sony Mirrorless or GoPro as a webcam with Zoom... for software engineers on OS X who don’t want to pay for an Elgato Camlink 4K and don’t mind Terminal commands

    1 reply 4 retweets 49 likes
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  19. May 24

    The basic focus and text section problems of Google Docs on iOS is a an absolute joke. Trying to edit or leave comments on a doc on that platform is near impossible. Good software is so hard to achieve, even a co with unlimited resources like Google struggles.

    9 replies 2 retweets 76 likes
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  20. May 24

    Do things that don’t scale Then scale them

    7 replies 17 retweets 153 likes
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  21. May 24

    When there is a lot of competition you have basically one tool: specialization Pick off a smaller set of customers and solve their problems completely and in a deeper way. Focus on one city or locality and drive network effects. Then expand. Do what the competition won’t.

    26 replies 195 retweets 1,027 likes
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