Following Garry Tan’s seemingly alcohol-fueled rant over the weekend, in which he wrote on social media that seven progressive San Francisco supervisors should “die slow,” tech workers in San Francisco had a few choice words for the Y Combinator CEO: “shameful,” “really dumb,” “very stupid.”
Tan “should not have done any of that. He should go for a while. He should not represent tech anymore,” said Kevin Baragona, co-founder and CEO of DeepAI, a text and image generator.
“It’s shameful,” added a Y Combinator alumnus who, like others, declined to be named for fear of professional retaliation. He has been checking the Y Combinator internal message board Bookface and monitoring their daily email updates, but there has been “no communication” from the company, he said.
“If the CEO of Boeing or Coca-Cola said, ‘I hope Joe Biden dies a slow death,’ someone would be like, ‘Oh, whoops, that wasn’t supposed to happen,’” he said. “It would be a PR nightmare, and yet there has been no acknowledgment.”
On Y Combinator’s message board, Hacker News, which is owned by the company but open to the public, the topic generated hundreds of comments debating the wisdom of the purportedly drunken tirade, and whether Tan should now step down.
“This kind of behavior shouldn’t be acceptable for the head of a respectable corporation … He should resign or be dismissed, and YC should replace him with a responsible adult,” read one comment. “This isn’t a minor offense, it is grotesque. If he remains, it reflects very badly on YC.”
“I’m a YC alum,” began another, “I don’t have a problem with tech leaders holding political positions, nor do I have a problem with them making personal donations based on those opinions. Quietly.”
Some in tech, however, said the incident was a “manufactured crisis,” and that city supervisors were running with the incident to score political points.
“Do I think that it’s really dumb for the supervisors to be filing restraining orders or police reports against Garry Tan? I mean, come on, dude. Do they really expect that Garry Tan will hire some dudes to drive by and shoot them?” asked another tech founder. “No, of course not.”
Even those less who were less critical of the rant wondered about Tan’s judgment.
“I look at this as a drunken error, so I wouldn’t cancel him, personally,” added Stephen Gibson, founder of an early-stage AI startup, while acknowledging that it was “poor judgment.”
Y Combinator has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the incident — even after Tan’s online tirade begat very real-world consequences: On Tuesday, three of the supervisors named in his posts received identical threatening postcards at their homes, wishing harm to them and their families.
“Garry Tan is right!” read the postcards addressed to Supervisors Aaron Peskin, Dean Preston and Myrna Melgar. “I wish a slow and painful death for you and your loved ones.”
The postcards, bearing Tan’s face, were addressed to each supervisor individually. The postcards concluded with a note: “This mail was sent to communicate a political opinion. No threats were intended.”
The San Francisco Police Department said Wednesday it is investigating the mailers. District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, whom Tan has hosted at his Mission District home, said she would recuse herself from any potential case involving Tan and refer it to the California attorney general, to avoid a conflict of interest.
Tan, for his part, apologized over the weekend, noting that his post was a reference to a Tupac Shakur lyric. He initially brushed off the comments as a joke, before taking the incident more seriously: “There is no place, no excuse and no reason for this type of speech,” he wrote hours after the initial post. He has yet to acknowledge the letters sent to the supervisors’ homes.
The supervisors named by Tan have responded quickly to the tirade: They have filed police reports and consulted with the City Attorney’s Office.
At least two supervisorial candidates whom Tan has supported, Marjan Philhour and Trevor Chandler, said they do not condone Tan’s language.
Deva Hazarika, another San Francisco tech founder, said that Tan’s statements were “a dumb thing to tweet, especially for a prominent figure, but lots of people have made ill-advised tweets after a couple too many drinks.”
And, Hazarika said later, the subsequent threats were the fault of whomever sent the anonymous mailer — not Tan. “If idiots grab onto that as some sort of rationale for threats or harassment, I think that’s on them, not him.”
Tan and Y Combinator may not be household names, but they hold an outsized prominence in San Francisco and Silicon Valley: From his perch atop Y Combinator — the most sought-after incubator for startups, a virtual golden ticket for founders — Tan oversees hundreds of companies annually poised to become multi-billion dollar successes.
DoorDash, Cruise, Reddit, Coinbase and thousands of others have gone through the program, companies now collectively worth a combined $600 billion, according to Y Combinator.
Tan has also used his position to entreat tech workers and executives in San Francisco to involve themselves in local politics. He is a firebrand among anti-progressive political forces in the city, underwriting campaigns and groups aimed at dislodging progressive supervisors from their seats.
He frequently lambasts the progressive “political machine” and calls for retaking San Francisco from what he labels leftist excess. He employs partisan and apocalyptic language, calling opponents “cronies,” “corrupt” or “doom loop accelerationists,” and claiming they want to “destroy public safety” and “ruin” or “destroy” the city.
He is also a fount of misinformation, misunderstanding how the city’s police commission functions, for instance, or claiming that “the mayor can’t fire people.”
So even though Tan claimed the tirade was a joke, it fell well within his characteristic hostility.
“We weren’t born yesterday, we know this is all-consuming to you, this wasn’t just a joke,” said the Y Combinator alumnus. “He is just sort of trying to laugh it away and claim that he is a Twitter troll, and it’s like, no, you’re not, don’t dismiss years of your consistent attacks, don’t try to wash it all away.”
Despite the anger, many agree with Tan’s politics
If Tan were not the face of the San Francisco tech community, then whom? Baragona mentioned Emmett Shear, the co-founder of streaming platform Twitch, whom he finds “very reasonable.”
But, he added that he generally agrees with Tan’s views, which he described. “Garry Tan was basically in favor of making San Francisco safer, building more housing and moderate politics. I think these are good things.”
“I think that tech leaders and business leaders have a responsibility to cities and or to their communities to serve them both, either through politics or any other way … but making a statement like that, I think Tan probably has more to learn about the politics side of things. You can’t just be spouting off like that,” said Gibson.
Several others agreed that Tan “genuinely cares deeply” about the city, but is approaching politics in a naive fashion.
Anthony Jancso, founder of the group Accelerate SF, said he was “surprised” to read Tan’s post but that Tan “deserves more credit for the work that he’s doing … to set San Francisco up as the best city in the world.”
Added Evan Conrad, co-founder of San Francisco Compute: “Garry Tan is broadly a good person who genuinely cares deeply about San Francisco.”
The tech worker who asked to remain nameless talked about the fix Tan has created. “They’re making a bigger deal out of this. They’re trying to create some kind of political enemy for everybody to hate. I think it’s stoking a little bit more hate and resentment towards tech people … I’m a little annoyed that Garry Tan’s giving them the ammunition to do that.”