Synopsis
Ankit Gupta spoke to ET ahead of the accelerator’s Startup School event in Bengaluru on April 18 — the first in India. In order to tap aspiring entrepreneurs across colleges and universities, Gupta said YC will be visiting IIT Delhi this week and holding a programme there.In order to tap aspiring entrepreneurs across colleges and universities, Gupta said YC will be visiting IIT Delhi this week and holding a programme there. The event in Bengaluru will be attended by Gupta along with the accelerator’s partners Jared Friedman and Jon Xu. Founders of Y Combinator’s Indian companies — like Razorpay’s Harshil Mathur, Meesho’s Vidit Aatrey, Zepto’s Aadit Palicha, Groww’s Lalit Keshre, and Emergent’s Mukund Jha — will also speak at the event.
“We used to fund people a decade out of college. Increasingly, we’re funding people right out of college, or even dropouts. You’re more likely to be exposed to the newest tools by hacking on side projects at university than at work. Wherever the great raw technical talent is, that’s where we’ll find the great startup ideas. India has that in abundance,” Gupta told ET.
The YC Startup School can accommodate 2,000 people but Gupta said they have received over 25,000 applications. “We’re really excited for what that means, and for the amount of builder energy and excitement around startups in India.” Gupta joined YC a year ago, and had earlier cofounded Reverie Labs, which developed machine learning models for drug discovery.
The San Francisco leg of the event this year will see speakers like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Meta’s chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
