YC Demo Day W26: Back in the Room
A special edition of Thursday Thoughts on AI - from a 2013 YC founder, back at Demo Day for the first time
13 years ago, I was a founder in this room.
Today I got to sit on the other side of it.
YC Demo Day W26. Nearly 200 companies on stage. When I went through the program in 2013, there were about 50. That number isn’t just a statistic - it’s a signal. The cost of starting has never been lower. The barrier to building has never been thinner. And the energy in that room? Very much alive.
Here are the three things I’m walking away with.
1. Ambition is having a moment - and it’s earned.
Gary Tan shared a stat that’s still with me. In just the first three months of this year, he’s already written more lines of code than he did in all of 2013 - the last year he coded (his GitHub reflects this). His message was clear: now is the time to boil the ocean. We can build almost anything. The only real constraint left is how big you’re willing to think.
2. AI is going to work - in the real world.
Not just in chat interfaces and productivity tools. The first section of pitches was stacked with startups using AI to attack hard, physical, unglamorous problems - industrial operations, infrastructure, supply chains. The stuff that doesn’t trend on X but keeps civilization running. Watching founders pitch solutions to problems that have been stuck for decades in “the old way” was genuinely exciting. The “AI wrapper” era feels like it’s giving way to something with more substance.
3. The builder energy is alive - and it’s yours too.
Nearly 200 companies. Some had been building for years - deep tech, robotics, hardware that takes time to get right. Others started with an idea and built their entire company during the batch. One founder I talked to pivoted mid-batch and rebuilt from scratch. All of them on the same stage. All of them moving.
That’s the thing about this moment. You don’t have to be 22 and in San Francisco. You don’t have to have raised a round. The tools are here. The time is now. Gary’s right - boil the ocean.
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