Y Combinator turned Startup School into an arena-scale AI founder event at San Francisco's Chase Center over the weekend of July 25 and 26, bringing more than 6,000 technical builders to the Golden State Warriors' home court. YC leaders said the 2026 event was three times larger than last year's in-person Startup School, with over 6,000 attendees and travel support for people coming from outside the Bay Area. Speakers included Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Meta's Alexandr Wang, Anthropic's Boris Cherny and Google's Jeff Dean. Jensen Huang told the crowd, "This is absolutely the single greatest time to start a company, I'm jealous of all of you." The event featured hands-on robotics and hardware demos, research poster sessions, small-group sessions with YC partners, and more than $25,000 in compute credits from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, xAI, AWS and Azure.