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We (almost) met Sam Altman
Our experience with YC AI Startup School
Good morning!
Notice things looking a bit different this week in our weekly email? Will share more on that soon. But let us know what you think of the redesign at the end of today’s article. 👀
More pertinent, we had a pretty wild week! Monday and Tuesday were spent at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, a two-day student conference featuring insights from everyone you probably know in AI.
So, naturally, we’re pushing our planned programming to bring you everything we learned from our two days alongside 3,000 of the brightest college students and recent grads from around the world.
Expect deep dives into the below, and more:
Sam Altman’s belief that this is the best time, ever, to build a startup.
Andrej Karpathy on entering the decade of agents.
Elon Musk’s thoughts on superintelligence (hint: it might be coming way sooner than you think).
P.S. We’re in SF this week! if you want to meet up and say hi, reply and let us know.
Students line up bright and early for Day 1.
Arek here. I’ll be your proverbial newsletter narrator for this week. Ethan applied a bit late to Startup School, so he had to FOMO watch the conference from the videos I sent him.
Let’s start by setting the scene: 3,000 students flocked into Mission Bay, San Francisco, at 8 am, forming a line wrapping over a half mile long from the entrance of YC’s venue at Pier 48 past the nearby Visa headquarters.
ICYMI, Ethan and I were just in New York hosting a slew of Tech Week events. So when I share that I woke up at 5:30 am to make it to the front of the line, I attribute it not just to an innate tech bro instinct to be 50 feet away from Sam Altman in the flesh, but rather a standard case of jet lag.
And so I stood there, in this ever-growing, endless line, waiting to be admitted to one of the most anticipated tech events of the year.
And finally, I made it in!
YC CEO Garry Tan kicks off a day of talks.
Not exactly front row seats, but close enough to get a view without using the max zoom on my phone.
YC’s CEO, Garry Tan, welcomed us to the conference, beginning with our formal introduction to YC AI Startup School. He was followed by Daniel Lurie, mayor of SF. The stage was now ready for the first distinguished speaker:
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
