Y Combinator turned a sports arena into AI’s biggest pep rally

The CEOs walked out of the light-up tunnel like they were preparing to wrestle. A cameraman walked ahead of them, broadcasting their entrances to a San Francisco arena.

Rather than trading jabs, executives like Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, and others traded advice. They were at the Chase Center this weekend for Y Combinator’s Startup School, a two-day conference for “technical builders” looking to make it big in entrepreneurship.

Startup School had everything: light-up headphones, AI versions of the YC partners, and freebies upon freebies. Here’s a quick look at the spectacle.

Back to (startup) school

The Chase Center is usually decked out in the Golden State Warriors’ blue and gold. For one July weekend, it was all Y Combinator orange.

A large orange Y was propped up outside the arena, inviting in the wannabe-founders from far and wide. The event was 3x larger than last year, with over 6,000 attendees, YC leaders said. The accelerator also helped people outside the Bay Area with travel support.

Inside the arena, speakers Altman and Huang received rapturous applause. Other speakers included Meta’s Alexandr Wang, Anthropic’s Boris Cherny, and Google’s Jeff Dean. The “ClawFather” himself, OpenClaw founder Peter Steinberger, was in the room. The only major AI lab not formally represented was SpaceXAI.

Some of these speakers offered product freebies. Cherny told the crowd they’d all get six months of Anthropic’s $200 Claude Max plan. Wang offered $1,000 in free Meta credits. Altman had his own deal for YC founders two months ago: tokens for equity.

Attendees described breakout sessions in the stadium, where they wore headphones to separate the noise. They also attended one of about 100 parallel small group sessions, according to general partner Ankit Gupta, including an ML research symposium.

And then there was the “Office Hours Simulator.” One attendee spoke to an artificial Brad Flora — only for the real one to shake his hand.

Memes about the ‘megachurch’

Y Combinator also gifted attendees a portable battery. The only potential concern flagged by one attendee: it might look a bit too much like an explosive device to fly home with.

Young tech bros post anything and everything on X. Thus, Startup School had its fair share of memes — the battery being one of them.

Other memes included the line for the men’s room which, in true “Man Francisco” fashion, was longer than the line for the women’s room.

The event’s biggest meme, though, was religious. “YC Startup school giving megachurch vibes these days,” OpenAI’s Bill Chen wrote.

While some joked about the Startup School’s so-called holiness, others fashioned it into a criticism. Jay Kapoor, a general partner at VSC Ventures, wrote that Startup School looked like “a megachurch for people who only worship money.”

YC Partner Tyler Bosmeny clapped back: “New York City finance bro says what?”

For others, the grandness of Startup School was an abandonment of YC’s principles.

“The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers,” Spellbook cofounder Scott Stevenson wrote. “You can feel the herd rushing into an overflowing barn. A stadium sized barn.”

YC has always been hyper-selective, with its 1% acceptance rate. Still, YC general partner Christopher Golda defended the event’s scale, writing that the accelerator’s goal was never “scarcity.”

“There are far more people who can, should, and will be in the arena,” Golda wrote. “So yeah, we rented out an arena.”