Geoff Ralston is stepping down as president and CEO of Y Combinator, a position he's held since 2019, he announced Monday. Garry Tan, founder and managing partner at Initialized Capital, will take over for him after Ralston’s year-end departure.
“My goal has been to cement YC as an institution that will endure for decades — not only through organizational changes but by leading a team that has scaled the community we bring together, the products and capital we provide to startups, and the software we build,” Ralston wrote in a blog post. “Garry, the visionary hacker, designer and builder who has described how YC is ‘engraved on his heart’ believes in this future and is precisely the right person to take over as YC’s chief executive.”
Tan, the 10th employee at Palantir, was a YC founder in 2008 and co-founded the blogging platform Posterous before selling it to Twitter. He joined YC as a partner in 2010, writing some of the core software the accelerator still uses internally, Ralston said. Tan left YC in 2015 to focus on Initialized.
Initialized president Jen Wolf and general partner Brett Gibson are taking over as managing partners of Initialized effective immediately, according to a blog post on the firm’s website. Tan will remain at Initialized as founder and partner until leaving for YC early next year.
Correction: This story was updated Aug. 29, 2022, to correct how many years Geoff Ralston had been the president of YC.
Climate TRACE's data show emissions at the facility-level.Image: Climate TRACE