YC's Garry Tan Spends Up to $200K a Year on AI Tokens

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan says he spends roughly $100,000 to $200,000 a year on AI tokens, funding agents he uses for work projects and coding tasks. He made the admission on Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders, set to publish Tuesday.

Tan has shared a set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on Github to show others what agents can do. He said his agent has read all his email, Dropbox and Apple Notes, including therapy notes going back 20 years.

He compared the experience to having a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder that knows you and helps you see around corners. Tan also warned against treating agents like traditional software, saying fears about repeatability and safety can cost users the best parts of working with them.

Y Combinator now has an internal agent named Stray Light with a personality and a company brain holding context on every founder backed and every application received, he said. Tan believes personal agents will go mainstream once costs come down, calling his own spending a crazy privilege, and suggested users should control their own AI rather than leave it to big tech.