Y Combinator AI Startup School 2026
30,000 applied. 6,000 got in. Here’s everything they heard.
Last weekend, Y Combinator packed the Chase Center and handed the floor to the people actually building the future of AI.
Over 30,000 founders applied, from 120+ countries. Acceptance rate: under 1%. And the ones who got in? Jensen Huang told them flat out: “If you’re here, you’re gonna make it.”
Two days. Ten stages. Jensen Huang, Sam Altman, Boris Cherny, Jeff Dean, Waymo’s Dmitri Dolgov, and more. each one dropping the kind of insight most people pay years of tuition (or failed startups) to learn.
I sat through all of it, read the notes, the transcripts, and every founder’s live thread, so you don’t have to. Inside you’ll find the key takeaways from these speakers:
Garry Tan (President, YC)
Jensen Huang (Founder and CEO, NVIDIA)
Sam Altman (Co-founder and CEO, OpenAI)
Boris Cherny (Head of Claude Code, Anthropic)
Jeff Dean (Chief Scientist, Google DeepMind)
Dmitri Dolgov (Co-founder and CEO, Waymo)
Alexandr Wang (Chief AI Officer at Meta)
Patrick Collison (Co-founder and CEO, Stripe)
Chelsea Finn (Co-founder, Physical Intelligence)
Peter Steipete (OpenClaw)
Let’s get into it!
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