Anyone who does construction in India or around the world knows how influential Silicon Valley accelerators are. Many of the more than 2,000 developers and builders from across the country who gathered at YC’s India’s first Startup School on Saturday afternoon took something home with them. Some companies found employment opportunities, others were promised summer internships, and others secured new customers.
YC managing partner Jared Friedman, who had flown in from the United States, could barely take a few uninterrupted steps before his co-founders buttonholed him and pitched the startup in between handshakes and hurried introductions.
Friedman told ET on the sidelines of the event that the scale and intensity of the turnout was unlike anything he had seen before. “We decided to host a startup school in India for the first time because we believe that we are at the beginning of the second wave of Indian startups, with AI-native companies like Emergent and Giga ML targeting not just India but the global market,” he said.
Sharing advice for the builder community, he added, “I want more founders in India to build on the cutting edge of AI. You can’t build one of the best companies in the world if you’re working on an idea that’s 3-6 months old.”
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Opportunities abound
“Building for India and building from India to the world are both equally difficult, so why not build for the world? But very few startups are doing this,” Mukund Jha, founder of vibe coding startup Emergent, told ET.
Students from BITS Pilani, IIT, and IIIT joined the internship on the spot and quickly exchanged LinkedIn profiles for follow-up. At least one in three founders had previously applied to Y Combinator but were unsuccessful. They viewed this event as a second shot, hoping to have a direct conversation with the right person.
Divyansh Bhargava, co-founder of Stac.dev, a developer tool for faster mobile app updates, said, “I applied to YC last year but couldn’t make it, so I came here. The best part of the event is the networking. I never expected to find clients here.”
Another attraction for participants was the shortened feedback loop. Many companies were working on similar or adjacent problems, so the founders didn’t have to rely on email or regular phone calls. They were able to get immediate and direct feedback from their colleagues.
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Ankit Gupta, Partner at YC, who has backed companies like Meesho, Groww, and Zepto, spoke about the potential of YC and India, saying, “We see that there is no ceiling to the ambitions of young founders. They are fighting to beat the best companies in the world.”
“I think there were some Harshita Aroras in the audience today,” Mr. Gupta added. Arora, a native of Uttar Pradesh, became YC’s youngest general partner earlier this month. She began her journey after moving to the United States at the age of 16 to launch her own startup.
Social media is all the rage
Where there are Gen Z, there are also memes. Some budding entrepreneurs got tired of making the same pitch over and over again and turned to humor instead. They showed up wearing quirky T-shirts with a line of startup-related memes printed on their backs or designed to encourage conversation. Strangers stopped, laughed, asked questions, and chatted, which was often much the same as a formal pitch.
Satyam M, the 18-year-old founder, said this happened to him. “I actually walked up to someone because I was wearing a T-shirt. It started as a joke, but it ended up being a conversation about voice AI and technology implementation,” he said, adding that these types of events are about more than gathering feedback. People are willing to tell you what you should build before you even ask.
Many people criticized the event planning on social media, criticizing sloppy crowd management, low seating and poor ventilation.
A participant said, “This is YC’s first time in India, so we should have chosen a better venue. We came to hear from the founders and get their advice. In this hall, built for community events like weddings, you can barely hear them in the back, so we just stuck to networking.”
Another attendee added that food arrangements were poor. For lunch, only sandwiches, motichoor laddoo and small juice packs were served. Many ended up ordering online from nearby restaurants.
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