Garry Tan: $10M yearly profit reinvested beats a dilutive Series A in the AI era
garrytan · x · 2026-10-13
YC president Garry Tan quotes investor Rohit Mittal on the Series A/B crunch: vertical AI SaaS startups hitting $1M-$3M ARR in 2 years (or $5M-$10M in 3-4) are finding almost no investor interest at 1x-3x growth, leaving founders stuck with heavy pref stacks.
Tan's answer: run your company with maximal agentic AI loops and stay profitable instead of selling equity. $10M per year in reinvested profit, he argues, is like an annual Series A with zero dilution — and the best startups are already doing it. "You don't need saving."
More from AGI Musings
- "You have a magic coding robot and your big idea is cloning mediocre apps?" — rms80 · 2026-10-13
- Economist Josh Gans: Writing PowerPoint slides is thinking — joshgans · 2026-10-13
- SSI's Aschenbrenner: frontier AI pacing is game-theoretically unstable, acceleration is inevitable — beffjezos · 2026-10-13
- Math debate follow-up: burden of proof lies with whoever makes the claim — _onionesque · 2026-10-13
- X debate: does human math still matter when AI can prove theorems? — _onionesque · 2026-10-13
- minilek urges policymakers to take AI risks seriously; Ilya Sutskever replies 'Yet!' — minilek · 2026-10-13