Three years ago Claude was a punchline: Garry Tan amplifies lesson on iterating to PMF
garrytan · x · 2026-09-24
- In YC W23, Claude was accessed via a Slack bot and widely seen as a joke next to ChatGPT; Copilot was SotA for real engineering, Cursor didn't exist, and Claude Code was two years away.
- Founders who built tightly coupled harnesses and guardrails around weak models suffered once agents actually worked in late 2025.
- The quoted thread argues big companies (Anthropic, Meta with Muse) find PMF by stacking launch over launch — and that not giving up is the most important compounding advantage; on a long enough horizon, anyone can become someone's competition.
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