Y Combinator Launches A Conference For Young People To Find 'Future Elon Musks'

Y Combinator runs arguably the best-known startup accelerator program in the world. Now it's launching an event to tap into the pre-startup talent pool.

Called YC 120, the new conference will gather 100 young attendees with 20 more established business and tech leaders for a weekend in late April in Colorado.

According to president Sam Altman, Y Combinator is good at surfacing collaborators and leading thinkers for its portfolio founders who can "find their tribe" in its network of founder alumni, mentors, investors and advisers. Now YC hopes to provide a version of that community for people it identifies as possible future startup or technology creators. By doing so, YC hope to encourage people who may otherwise feel pressured to join large companies or work on more conventional ideas to pursue their own. Being a founder can be lonely, says Altman, and daunting to people without existing networks of support.

"The goal is to find people who are talented, future Elon Musks, especially people who want to do hard tech," Altman says. "To the degree you can create a network for people, you can 10x their potential at least."

Y Combinator's taking several steps to make its debut conference more inclusive. (The program has long-run a popular demo day for its startup classes and has hosted other informal meetups over the years.) YC will cover the travel and lodging costs of attendees, who apply through a one-minute video that asks them about their interests, and what their "potential for greatness" is "adjusted for whatever life circumstances you were born into," the company writes. YC also asks applicants: "In a best-case scenario, what do you want your obituary to say?"

"We are trying to talk to a wide swath of folks," says Altman, who notes that he wouldn't have gone to such a tech conference fourteen years ago, when he dropped out of Stanford University, if he'd had to pay his own way. The conference is in Colorado, not California's Bay Area, specifically to "get out of the bubble," he says.

Attendees of YC's event will find themselves matched up with others for meals, but otherwise free to roam the meetup space to sit in small groups with the visiting leaders, participate in group activities and games. The event is intended to avoid "being talked to all day," based on Altman's own experiences with events, he says. YC will then work to keep attendees in touch, though how it plans to do so remains a work in progress.

With its own free online course, larger accelerator batch sizes and its own sizable fund to invest in alumni companies, as well as other events like a conference for female founders, Y Combinator has expanded greatly from its origins as a small accelerator for startups in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2005. But Altman says YC isn't taking on too much, but too little. "I think we are under-extended," he says.

"I think there's a lot of focus right now in Silicon Valley about how we can open up access in many ways, redistribute opportunities. How venture dollars are spread," Altman says. "Network access is maybe the most important way of all."

If attendees of YC 120 and possible future events end of members of its accelerator classes and future investments, all the better, Altman says. "Hopefully some great startups will come from it. If we can find one Elon Musk per year, that would be pretty good."