I'm a designer, engineer, and investor in early stage startups.
Previously a partner at Y Combinator. Invested in and directly worked with over 700 companies in 5 years from the earliest possible stage, often just an idea.
Before that, I cofounded Posterous and helped build it to a world-class website used by millions. (Acquired by Twitter) I also cofounded the engineering team for Palantir Technology's quant finance analysis platform.
I love building things.
Specialties: user-centered design, project management, software engineering, interaction design, visual design, entrepreneurship, bootstrapping, branding, design, technical architecture, scaling
Cofounder @ Easy, simple blogs for $5/mo forever. This is a replacement for Posterous.com, but now one that we intend to charge money for, and keep online for as long as possible. We needed a replacement, and other people do too. From March 2013 to Present (2 years 10 months) Angel Investor @ Advisor and angel investor in early stage startups. Over 100 investments in competitive seed and Series A rounds of financing.
Hands-on help with product design, strategy, interaction design, visual design, and hiring. From January 2011 to Present (5 years) Partner @ Helped over 700 YC startups over the past 5 years (10 batches) build tomorrow's world-changing companies. Previously designer-in-residence. From January 2011 to November 2015 (4 years 11 months) Cofounder @ Dead simple posting of everything online using email. Attach documents, photos, music, video, and files of any kind and we'll transcode it to the most web friendly format and host it for you too. Autopost to facebook, twitter, flickr, and all your blogs.
I ran full stack design and development: from product definition, interaction design, visual design to software engineering, scaling, database management, systems administration. I designed and shipped major parts of the app including text processing, post editor, customizable blog theme engine, embed expansion, realtime and digest email notifications and subscriptions, and bookmarklet.
Varyingly over the years I had to wear all the other hats too -- tech architecture, scaling and optimization, customer support, spam and abuse eradication, branding, PR. It was a blast.
Launched in July of 2008 and now Quantcast 200. We grew 10x in 2009 and 2.5x in 2010. Raised over $5 MM in funding from Y Combinator, Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, and a dozen top angels in Silicon Valley. Acquired by Twitter.
Posterous has been hailed in the design community for its focus on no-setup no-signup first time experience, and has been featured in Designing Social Interfaces published by O'Reilly and The Smashing Book by Smashing Magazine.
"What might be the simplest blogging platform to date." --Michael Arrington, Techcrunch
"In terms of making things really dead simple Posterous beats every other service or app I have ever used. We can learn from them." -- Werner Vogels, CTO Amazon
"The quickest and easiest setup I've ever seen." --Huffington Post From June 2008 to January 2011 (2 years 8 months) Interaction Designer @ Design and conceptualize product designs for personalization, widgets, and mobile projects. From October 2007 to June 2008 (9 months) Lead Engineer, Designer @ Cofounded v1 product and team now known as Palantir Finance and Thomson Reuters QA Studio. Joined as employee #10.
Defined product vision and design features for 14 engineers working on a next-generation financial analysis platform, now actively deployed to top hedge funds and banks around the world in partnership with Thomson Reuters. Hacked the first few early iterations of the software from scratch.
Designed the current Palantir mark and logo. From September 2005 to October 2007 (2 years 2 months) Program Manager @ Program management of ActiveSync 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and Windows Vista releases of Windows Mobile synchronization and device management software. From July 2003 to September 2005 (2 years 3 months) Software Engineer Intern @ From June 2002 to January 2003 (8 months) Software Engineer Intern @ From June 2000 to September 2000 (4 months) Software Engineer Intern @ Worked during high school and college, part time during school, full time during breaks.
Web application development for clients such premiere brands as Caterpillar, PowerBar, Specialized Mountain Bikes, Esprit, and Virgin Megastore.
Perl web application development, linux administration, and build system integration. From June 1998 to January 2000 (1 year 8 months)
BS, Computer Systems Engineering @ Stanford University From 1999 to 2003 Garry Tan is skilled in: Entrepreneurship, Interaction Design, Scalability, Software Engineering, Graphic Design, Visual Design, User-centered Design, User Experience, Start-ups, Mobile Devices, JavaScript, Product Development, Mobile Applications, Product Marketing, User Experience Design
Websites:
http://ycombinator.com,
http://garry.posterous.com