This is a 100% free conference, and every attendee is hand-picked.<br><br><strong>This year’s speakers include:</strong></p><ul><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://x.com/elonmusk/">Elon Musk</a>, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://x.com/satyanadella/">Satya Nadella</a>, Chairman & CEO of Microsoft</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://x.com/sama/">Sam Altman</a>, Co-founder & CEO of OpenAI</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://karpathy.ai//">Andrej Karpathy</a>, Founder of Eureka</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.andrewng.org//">Andrew Ng</a>, Founder of DeepLearning.ai</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.linkedin.com/in/jared-kaplan-645843213//">Jared Kaplan</a>, Co-founder & Chief Science Officer of Anthropic</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://fchollet.com//">François Chollet</a>, Co-Founder & CEO, Ndea</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://x.com/AravSrinivas/">Aravind Srinivas</a>, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://sriramk.com/">Sriram Krishnan</a>, Senior Policy Advisor for AI, White House</li><li>and more!</li></ul><!--kg-card-begin: html--><center>\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus/" class=\"ycdc-btn mt-2 ml-[13px] mt-[-10px] items-center justify-center\">Apply To AI Startup School</a>\n</center><!--kg-card-end: html--><p><br><strong>Who should apply?</strong> <br>This conference is just for undergrads, grad students, and recent graduates working in computer science, AI, applied math, robotics, or another highly technical and relevant field. Even if you didn’t go to school for it, you may qualify as we’ll look at your technical achievements: # of users your products serve, papers published, core contributor to open source, etc. Apply to attend <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://events.ycombinator.com/ai-sus/">here.
Not in San Francisco?</strong> <br>We’ll cover up to $500 for airfare for your travel to SF.</p><p><strong>Space is limited,</strong> and we look forward to reading your application and hopefully seeing you in San Francisco.</p>","comment_id":"67aac161d59c27000139d0df","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2025/02/BlogTwitter-Image-Template.jpg","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2025-02-10T19:17:53.000-08:00","updated_at":"2025-05-13T07:34:27.000-07:00","published_at":"2025-02-12T12:45:26.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"We're gathering 2,000 of the top CS undergrads, masters, and PhD candidates in AI to hear from speakers including Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, Andrej Karpathy, Andrew Ng, and many more — the world’s top AI experts and founders who will teach you how to build the future.","codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71179","name":"YC Events","slug":"yc-events","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-events/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71173","name":"YC News","slug":"yc-news","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-news/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/ai-startupschool/","excerpt":"YC is hosting our first-ever AI Startup School in San Francisco on June 16 and 17th.","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"66ff5635d896210001baba89","uuid":"ae197cbd-0aea-40c8-9798-aa35106e1c40","title":"Correcting the record for Continue and PearAI","slug":"correcting-the-record","html":"<p>YC is at our best when backing founders with an ethos of building for others, including strong open source developers like the founders of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://continue.dev/">Continue and many others. </p><p>Earlier this week, a startup in the current batch, PearAI, was criticized online for an inappropriate approach to open source, particularly in how it approached forking <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://continue.dev/">Continue. Out of instinct to defend YC companies, I supported PearAI without knowing all the facts. In this case the criticism did have merit, and I worked with PearAI’s group partner and the founders to fix this situation. </p><p>Ty Dunn and Nate Sesti, co-founders of <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://continue.dev/">Continue, have had the grace to light a path forward for PearAI and all developers through their clear communication and commitment to open source. PearAI has apologized, removed the offending repositories, and is working to correct all their mistakes.</p><p>Still, I want to personally apologize to the founders of Continue, the YC community and the open source community for not responding more thoughtfully. </p><p>I also want to clear up some important facts:</p><ul><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://continue.dev/">Continue is not a fork of VS Code, which was misinformation reported in TechCrunch. Continue is a standalone project, built from scratch as an extension to VS Code and JetBrains, which can be easily installed by anyone in their respective marketplaces.<br></li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://continue.dev/">Continue itself is the center of a vibrant open source community that is rallying around <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://amplified.dev//">amplified.dev, which believes that the tools used to code with LLMs will be critical infrastructure, that an ecosystem is key to supporting all developer workflows, and that this will only work if developers work together. </li></ul><p>Open source is the life blood of tech startups, and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders. </p><p>Thank you for making what we do possible. </p><p>Garry Tan<br>President & CEO, Y Combinator</p>","comment_id":"66ff5635d896210001baba89","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2024-10-03T19:43:01.000-07:00","updated_at":"2024-10-03T19:51:51.000-07:00","published_at":"2024-10-03T19:49:44.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"}],"tags":[],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d2","name":"Garry Tan","slug":"garry","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2023/03/Instagram-Image-Template--Square---21-.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Garry is the President & CEO of Y Combinator. Previously, he was the co-founder & Managing Partner of Initialized Capital. Before that, he co-founded Posterous (YC S08) which was acquired by Twitter.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":"@garrytan","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/garry/"},"primary_tag":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/correcting-the-record/","excerpt":"YC is at our best when backing founders with an ethos of building for others, including strong open source developers like the founders of Continue and many others. ","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null}]},"url":"/blog/build-for-customers-not-vcs","version":"a2ce9abc7c2080e819915df4aacfcc5c01cd09b5","encryptHistory":false,"clearHistory":false,"rails_context":{"railsEnv":"production","inMailer":false,"i18nLocale":"en","i18nDefaultLocale":"en","href":"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/build-for-customers-not-vcs","location":"/blog/build-for-customers-not-vcs","scheme":"https","host":"www.ycombinator.com","port":null,"pathname":"/blog/build-for-customers-not-vcs","search":null,"httpAcceptLanguage":"en, *","applyBatchLong":"Summer 2025","applyBatchShort":"S2025","applyDeadlineShort":"May 13","ycdcRetroMode":true,"currentUser":null,"serverSide":true},"id":"ycdc_new/pages/BlogPage-react-component-8db4b662-6179-4071-9687-3586fb82c322","server_side":true}" data-reactroot=""> by Dalton Caldwell3/21/2024 It’s easy to analyze your way out of taking the first step. It’s something we see a lot, particularly when founders try to choose what to build based on what they think VCs will like. These founders will find a great problem that they could solve, only to convince themselves it’s not “venture scale.” Before they’ve written a line of code or even talked to a single person about it, they’re trying to predict market opportunities and exit strategies a decade down the road. That’s just not how early stage startups work. In this episode of Dalton & Michael, we’ll talk about the risks of “thinking like a VC”, how to know when you’re stuck in this mindset, and how to unlearn it (spoiler: stop reading so much about who’s raising what.) We’ll also cover a short list of things that we’ve found actually matter when starting a company — it’s simpler than a lot of people think. Other Posts Dalton is Managing Director, Architect and Group Partner at YC. He was the cofounder and CEO of imeem (acquired by MySpace in 2009), and the cofounder and CEO of App.net.Build for customers, not VCs
Author
Dalton Caldwell