{"id":3294,"date":"2026-08-13T07:05:24","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T07:05:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3294"},"modified":"2026-08-13T07:05:24","modified_gmt":"2026-08-13T07:05:24","slug":"garry-tan-says-founders-who-tokenmaxx-on-ai-agents-will-be-2-years-ahead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3294","title":{"rendered":"Garry Tan says founders who tokenmaxx on AI agents will be 2 years ahead"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Y Combinator’s CEO has a message for founders worried about burning too many AI tokens: Burn, baby, burn.<\/p>\n

Read more Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says there\u2019s one thing Silicon Valley needs to do to change Americans\u2019 minds on AI<\/a><\/p>\n

On an episode of the A16z podcast released on Wednesday, Garry Tan said that founders should give themselves permission to spend heavily on AI tokens \u2014 even if it comes with a hefty price tag.<\/p>\n

“You have to tune it all the way up. You’re just, like, let me load a million tokens or 800,000 tokens in,” he said about using AI agents. “When you do that, I think that you basically get to live in 2028.”<\/p>\n

Tan’s pitch is that spending heavily on AI agents lets founders access a level of AI capability most others will only have access to in the future. <\/p>\n

He added that this advantage won’t come cheap.<\/p>\n

“It costs, I don’t know, 50 or $100,000 a year to use the agents at full strength,” he said. “It just costs like a crazy amount. But for a CEO or for a founder, it actually makes a lot of sense to do that.”<\/p>\n

Tan said that founders can make that expensive experimentation pay off over time. Once an agent successfully completes a task, he said, founders should “skillify it” by turning the process into reusable instructions that the AI can follow automatically again and again.<\/p>\n

“A markdown file is an employee,” he said, referring to awritten set of instructions that tells an AI agent how to perform a particular job. “It’s an employee that will do the job perfectly every single time, and it’ll do it as many times as you want.”<\/p>\n

Read more A \u2018made with AI\u2019 label on Karoline Leavitt\u2019s departure message on X intensifies the AI watermark debate<\/a><\/p>\n

Tan is a rare tech leader championing tokenmaxxing, even as other voices in Silicon Valley have dismissed it as wasteful. Tokenmaxxing is the practice of deliberately letting AI agents consume large numbers of tokens rather than minimizing their use and cost.<\/p>\n

Last week, Uber’s tech chief,\u00a0Praveen Neppalli Naga,<\/u>\u00a0said the ride-hailing company is seeing interesting data on AI costs and that this was “another signal that we’re coming to the end of the so-called ‘tokenmaxxing’ era<\/u>.”<\/p>\n

“The next phase, whatever we call it, will not be characterized by who spends the most tokens, but about how people use them as efficiently as possible,” he said in a post on X.<\/p>\n

In a June podcast, AI coding giant Cognition’s CEO Scott Wu<\/u> said companies lost the plot by encouraging tokenmaxxing.<\/p>\n

“It is directionally correct, but I think there are definitely some places where people have gotten carried away,” Wu said. “People are like, ‘We rank our engineers by how many tokens they’re spending.’ Well, let’s try and rank people by how much output they’re actually producing.”<\/p>\n

Read more Departing Google chief scientist Jeff Dean has been in talks for a $10 billion valuation for his new AI startup<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Y Combinator’s CEO has a message for founders worried about burning too many AI tokens: Max them out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3293,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-startups"],"yoast_head":"\nGarry Tan says founders who tokenmaxx on AI agents will be 2 years ahead - American home journals<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3294\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Garry Tan says founders who tokenmaxx on AI agents will be 2 years ahead - American home journals\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Y Combinator's CEO has a message for founders worried about burning too many AI tokens: Max them out.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/americanhomejournals.com\/?p=3294\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"American home journals\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-13T07:05:24+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"2 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/a3bb30439d8074c26cddd2e4af7af957\"},\"headline\":\"Garry Tan says founders who tokenmaxx on AI agents will be 2 years ahead\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-13T07:05:24+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294\"},\"wordCount\":524,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/8e6165371317253a87a92eb23092cf13.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Startups\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/americanhomejournals.com\\\/?p=3294\",\"name\":\"Garry Tan says founders who tokenmaxx on AI agents will be 2 years ahead - 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