The Dork Knight: How Garry Tan became Batman to SF’s tech geeks

When he woke up in the hospital, Vishnu Hari didn’t know what had happened. The doctors said he’d suffered a traumatic brain injury from being struck in the back of the head. The incident, which took place around 2 a.m. on Jan. 18 near 24th and Bryant streets, landed the AI startup founder in the hospital for 10 days.

After being released, Hari took to X to update friends and colleagues on his condition. He said he’d been randomly attacked by a man with a metal pipe.

“This man is known to the police since he’s done this before to other people,” he wrote. “[As far as I know] they will not be pressing charges or prosecuting this individual due to the state of SF politics.”

Hari’s followers were outraged. They blamed the San Francisco Police Department and elected officials for the incident, saying they are too lenient with violent criminals. They might have directed demands for redress at Mayor Daniel Lurie, District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, or their supervisors. Instead, they appealed to a higher authority: Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan.

“What are you doing SF. who benefits from leaving violent criminals on the streets? the police KNOW WHO HE IS and are doing nothing. @garrytan how can we bring justice here?” one commenter posted on X.

“Insane this city protects criminals for political points instead of rational policies. Hopefully @garrytan can help bring safety back to SF,” wrote another.

It might seem odd to expect the head of a startup accelerator program — even the one that minted Airbnb and Stripe — to get involved in a local law enforcement matter. But Hari’s followers are among many San Franciscans seeking Tan’s intervention in civic affairs, criminal or otherwise. 

In March, a tech founder asked Tan for help after claiming that a person had fired a gun at him. (The noise the founder heard turned out to be fireworks, an investigation by The Standard confirmed.)

Another founder tagged Tan on a post lamenting the presence of feces and needles on the street ahead of his company’s planned employee gathering. 

Still another made sure to apprise Tan of what he saw as a ticky-tacky fire-code violation slapped on his office phone booth. 

Although he has funneled more than $400,000 to moderate politicians and causes in the city over the last few years, Tan is an entrepreneur and investor, not an elected official or civil servant. Still, plenty within his tribe of VCs, founders, and coders seem to believe he might take up their pet causes as his own and leverage his contacts and social media bullhorn to find solutions. 

And even if he doesn’t, just getting on Tan’s radar as a sympathetic fellow traveler can be worthwhile in its own right for a young entrepreneur on the make. 

“I am honored to have people reach out to me on social media,” Tan said in a statement via his rep, Sam Singer. “I am pleased to provide insights or connect people when I can.”

Tan got involved in local politics in 2021, when he boosted the stories of two Asian residents who were killed in separate incidents downtown. The stories proved critical in the recall of District Attorney Chesa Boudin and in Tan’s emergence as a champion of public safety. In the years since, Tan’s “Stop Asian Hate” stance has expanded into a more comprehensive view of what’s wrong with San Francisco (excessive lenience with violent criminals and the drug trade, overregulation) and how to fix it (elect moderates, put more cops on the streets). 

“People tag Garry instead of elected officials because SF’s elected officials are famously incompetent or corrupt or both,” said the programmer behind the anonymous X account @powerbottomdad1, whose edgy tech-culture jokes have earned him more than 40,000 followers. “They’re also not active on Twitter.”

Sending up the Tan Bat Signal on X has increasingly become a self-aware meme, one that Tan himself encourages by fielding questions on California divorce law and cast-iron pan maintenance. 

To fans of good government, the idea of a wealthy donor being able to expect concierge service from the police or Public Works Department might not seem funny. Although Tan endorsed Mark Farrell and London Breed over Lurie in the mayoral election, he supports the new mayor. Having gathered a slew of tech leaders in his inner circle, Lurie has had to contend with allegations of favoritism and conflicts of interest. 

That doesn’t bother Tan fans, who are happy to see tech executives swinging their weight around in the public realm.

“I actually view this as a return to the past and a huge positive,” said startup founder and Y Combinator graduate Evan Zimmerman, who tweeted at Tan about Hari’s assault. 

Zimmerman pointed to the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, in which insurance executives — not politicians — led the push to update building codes. In Zimmerman’s view, San Francisco can learn from this history.

The idea that success in tech is a prima-facie qualification for rewiring government is, of course, getting a thorough airing in Washington, D.C. On X, Tan has expressed enthusiasm for Elon Musk’s efforts at the Department of Government Efficiency, although he’s recently gone quiet on the subject. 

While DOGE has fallen far short of its stated goals, and a majority of Americans have soured on its performance, the idea retains its resonance among the kind of people who view Tan as the answer to whatever ails his home city. 

Founder Paul Klein tagged Tan this month in an X post directed at Lurie about how annoying it is to install new call booths in San Francisco offices. So far, that post has not borne fruit, but Klein remains hopeful.

“Maybe he’s the Elon Musk to Daniel Lurie’s Donald Trump,” he said, laughing. He quickly added that he was joking. 

Quite often, a post tagging Tan gets a response from the man himself. Much less often does it secure tangible results.

The SFPD said the investigation into Hari’s assault remains open, and no suspect has been identified. Police said a witness reported seeing Hari and his attacker in an argument that turned physical, contrary to Hari’s account. 

Hari told The Standard he had no memory of the event, but a pipe-wielding man hangs out at that intersection, and friends told him the man was known to police. He added that he walked back his account on X later in the same thread. Even so, he thinks it was a random attack.

“I’m not the type of person that gets into random arguments with people,” Hari said. “I’m a tech founder — I just want to vibe and play video games.”

He emphasized that the blow was to the back of his head, indicating that he was facing away from his assailant. 

If anything, recruiting Tan and his half a million X followers to his cause has brought unwelcome blowback. Hari said he found several notes slipped under his front gate after he was released from the hospital that said “more tech founders need to get Luigi’d,” referring to Luigi Mangione, who allegedly assassinated a healthcare executive in December.

“I would not like to get Luigi’d, ideally,” Hari said.

The mayor’s office did not respond to a request for comment about whether Lurie meets with Tan or whether the tech boss has influenced the mayor’s policy or decision-making. 

If asking Tan for help doesn’t work, why do people keep doing it? Possibly because getting a response from him is an end unto itself.

“If you have a startup, the way to get Y Combinator’s attention is to tag Garry Tan in a human feces post,” said Dimitry Yakoushkin, Tan’s longtime Twitter adversary. “It’s low-hanging fruit. It doesn’t necessarily work in funding their company, but it opens a door that would not otherwise be open.”

Hari, Klein, and Zimmerman all said it was conceivable that people were doing that.

Zimmerman was quick to point out that Tan already followed him on X, but not every founder tweeting at Tan is part of a Y Combinator cohort; some are just random people with 400 followers. For them, aligning themselves with Tan on local politics might seem like a path to camaraderie, mutual respect, and, eventually, funding. 

“Founding a company that’s worthwhile takes weeks and months and years of hard work, but photographing a poor person at 2 a.m. and uploading it to Twitter takes five minutes,” Yakoushkin said. “I think it’s brilliant — I kind of respect them for getting his attention this way.”

On Twitter, the fantasy goes, any one of these founders could obtain what Zimmerman has: a YC credential, $500,000 in funding, and an AI startup valued at $10 million. (Pitchbook data show Zimmerman’s startup, Edge, was valued at $9.57 million in 2021.)

The strategy doesn’t seem to have paid off for anybody yet, and Tan resisted the idea that the posts are networking attempts.

“These are not necessarily professional relationships,” Tan said in the statement provided by his rep. “These are people who kind of know each other from the other person’s ideas, even if we’ve never met. It’s an online community, a distributed network of people who value San Francisco, civic engagement, and the vast opportunities for progress and advancement here.”

Tan said that while he has met “virtually all of” his political connections through X, none of his social media connections have led to funding. 

Venture capitalist and radical centrist Lee Edwards, a friend of Tan who took his own turn with the meme, said he’s sure people are trying.

“That’s definitely a thing that happens on Twitter, right?” Edwards said. “You shoot your shot.”