Y Combinator's Garry Tan Spends Up to $200,000 a Year on AI Tokens

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan spends between $100,000 and $200,000 a year on tokens to run his personal AI agents. He said so himself, on camera-ready record, in an episode of Walter Isaacson's podcast The Builders, set to publish Tuesday.

"I spend about maybe $100[,000]-$200,000 a year on tokens," Tan told Isaacson. That figure isn't corporate spend — it's one person paying for compute to run agents across his work projects and coding tasks.

Tan has shared part of his setup publicly. He's published a set of 23 Claude Code skills, called gstack, on Github — an effort, he said, to teach others what agents can do.

How much of his life does the agent touch?

Practically all of it. Tan uses agents the way many people do — researching Isaacson's podcast, prepping for likely questions. But his agent also runs his personal world.

"It's read all of my email and all of my Dropbox. It's read, like, all of my Apple Notes, even my therapy notes going back 20 years," he said.

He frames the experience as constant companionship. Working with agents, he said, is like getting help with "almost anything that you do in your day-to-day life, and for it to do it somewhat more autonomously. Think of it as a Jiminy Cricket on your shoulder at all times. Like, almost anything you want to do, it knows you, and it's there to help. And it will actually sort of run ahead and say, 'What about this?' Or, it'll help you see around corners."

Tan has joked before about suffering from "cyber psychosis" and barely sleeping because he's so excited working with his agents. The $200,000 token bill puts a number on that enthusiasm.

What has he learned as a power user?

Don't treat agents like traditional software. Tan, an early OpenClaw adopter, said some people focus so hard on "repeatability and safety that they actually trade off all of the beautiful parts of working with an AI agent, which basically can be so similar to a human."

Y Combinator itself has bought in. The firm runs an internal agent that Tan says is "rebuilding the way we operate at YC."

"We now have an internal AI agent, for instance, named Stray Light that kind of has a personality, and then it has a company brain. Like it actually has the total context of every founder we've ever backed, anyone who's ever emailed us, like all the applications," he said.

That's an accelerator with a memory — every founder, every application, every inbound email, indexed into one system.

What has to change before agents go mainstream?

Price. Tan believes personal AI agents will eventually become mainstream, but only if costs come down.

"It's too expensive right now," he said. He knows his own spending level is "a crazy privilege that not everyone can do."

He's also skeptical that free agents from big tech are the answer. Discussing Meta's influence as a social media company, he said: "This is a huge company that controls the algorithm, and we all wish that they didn't at some level. So you could imagine a personal AI that you control, that you program."

Tan's bet, in short: agents for everyone, but owned by the user rather than the platform — and only once the token bill stops requiring a venture capitalist's income.