The Dork Knight (opens in new tab) rises — once again.
While many of Garry Tan’s tech friends are fleeing California for red states with no billionaire taxes on the horizon, the longtime tech investor and executive is staying put and fighting back.
On Wednesday, the Y Combinator CEO will launch Garry’s List, a statewide nonprofit aimed at voter education and support for what he calls commonsense, pro-growth policies and candidates. Tan described the organization as a “Rotary Club for radical centrism.”
Garry’s List — a riff on Emily’s List, the national organization that supports Democratic women candidates — will publish voter guides and policy research and a blog authored by Tan and contributors. It will host Commonwealth Club-style events across the state, including at Tan’s church-turned-townhouse (opens in new tab) in the Mission.
The organization may also offer training and preparation for moderate candidates, though those efforts are still in the early stages. “We’re trying to build political infrastructure for the next 20 years,” Tan said.
Tan is funding the organization and has raised money from friends and supporters. He declined to say how much the group is starting with.
By day, Tan runs the startup incubator that has minted companies like Airbnb, DoorDash, and Stripe. But for years he has been actively involved in local civic issues. Last year, Tan even served as an ersatz batman to San Francisco’s tech community, fielding complaints and lamentations about public safety from founders.
In 2022, he contributed more than $50,000 to the campaign that recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin and helped bankroll the successful effort to remove three school board members.
Source: Noah Berger for The Standard
Tan hopes Garry’s List can build upon those local efforts to address statewide issues. “What we’ve done in San Francisco, a lot of people said couldn’t be done,” Tan said. “I want to get back to the energy that I felt when we were first working on the recall of Chesa Boudin and the school board, and deliver that same success to all of California.”
In another sign that Tan is looking beyond local politics, the centimillionaire last month donated nearly $40,000 to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan’s campaign for governor, according to campaign finance filings.
Tan denied that the proposed billionaire tax was the impetus for launching Garry’s List. He said it’s something he’s wanted to start for a while but was sidelined by the demands of running Y Combinator and raising two children in San Francisco.
Instead, Tan said, the spark came from Anthropic’s AI-powered coding tool Claude Code. Tan began vibe-coding the Garry’s List website a few weeks ago and has published blog posts on topics including San Francisco Unified School District’s enrollment lottery (opens in new tab) and ongoing teachers strike (opens in new tab). Think of the blog posts as extended versions of Tan’s tweets, which he blasts to more than 600,000 followers daily.
Tan did, however, reiterate his opposition to the billionaire tax, suggesting that YC will have to open offices outside California if the measure makes it to the ballot and passes in November. Garry’s List will seek to educate voters on the perils of the proposed tax, he said, as well as other local and statewide proposals.
“California should be focused on keeping entrepreneurs and investors here,” Tan said. “Driving entrepreneurs, capital, and investors out of the state will hurt innovation and ultimately make it harder to support healthcare, police, public works, public safety, education, and essential services.”
Tan has no plans to leave California himself. “I’m ride or die,” he said.