Y Combinator President Garry Tan took to the social platform X Tuesday to once more categorical his displeasure at elected officers representing San Francisco, the place the storied accelerator is predicated.
This time, he was lambasting California state meeting member Matt Haney, over a proposed late-night e-mail invoice he authored. Haney represents San Francisco within the state’s house-of-representatives equal.
The tweet learn, “Legalize arduous work. Haney is spreading nonsense once more, from the man who killed algebra and spun up the fentanyl disaster within the Tenderloin.” He then posted a thread saying, “Is that this a international op or what?”
Haney is what you may name Tan’s “favourite punching bag.” Again in 2016, Haney led the San Francisco Public Faculties board when the district was discussing shifting algebra out of center faculty. The course was later reinstated in 2024. To say Tan was not a fan of that earlier transfer is clear in a number of tweets, together with in April 2023, October 2022 and June 2021.
In the meantime, in 2022, Haney was appointed to guide California’s opioid committee, to which Tan tweeted, “Politics as ordinary is placing the incompetent supe who presided over 1000s of fentanyl deaths in his SF district in command of the CA opioid fee. Matt Haney has finished nothing to help restoration and therapy…”
Haney defended his work combating the opioid disaster in a February LinkedIn publish. In it, he referenced AB 1976, a invoice that he described “would construct on current necessities for California employers to have ‘sufficient first-aid supplies’ for employees.” His purpose is to make kits that embody the life-saving treatment naloxone as accessible “as a fireplace extinguisher.”
What’s caught Tan’s ire this time is Haney’s proposed invoice, AB 2751, that will allow workers “the suitable to disconnect” after agree-upon working hours. That means they’d have the authorized proper to disregard calls, emails, texts or messages despatched after that point, until an emergency, and employers in violation may very well be topic to fines, The San Francisco Commonplace reported.
Haney advised the publication, “For those who’re working a 9-to-5 job, you shouldn’t be anticipated to be working 24/7. That must be accessible to everybody, whatever the existence of smartphones.”
It’s value mentioning that the purpose of the invoice isn’t as a lot to forbid folks from working lengthy hours in the event that they select to, as Tan implies, as to forbid corporations from imposing an always-available expectation on employees. Nonetheless, this concept does run opposite to startup hustle tradition, a part of YC’s world, which reveres dedication to work, notably within the early years.
Tan’s newest tweet discovering fault with a California lawmaker will not be distinctive. He went on a rant in January on X about seven San Francisco supervisors that took a violent tone. He later apologized, defined that the tweet was meant to be an apparent reference to a preferred rap track and later deleted the tweet.
It didn’t finish there, although. In February, three San Francisco supervisors obtained threatening letters to their houses that included a photograph of Tan and the phrase, “I want a sluggish, painful dying for you and your family members.”
TechCrunch spoke with supervisor Aaron Peskin concerning the letter at the moment, and Peskin mentioned he didn’t assume Tan was instantly liable for somebody sending the letter. Nonetheless, with its threatening tone geared toward an individual, not simply discourse on a coverage, Tan’s tweet nonetheless, did “hurt to democratic discourse,” Peskin mentioned.
Makes an attempt to achieve each Tan and Haney for remark weren’t answered on the time of publication. Y Combinator declined to remark.