My Musings from YCombinator Startup School 2026

I was at Y Combinator's Startup School 2026 in Bangalore last weekend. It was insane being in the same room (shaadi hall?) with 2000 of India’s finest builders and entrepreneurs.

Being a designer, it was both humbling and surprising to be one of the 25000 applicants to be selected for this event. Here are my takeaways from the event:-

1. On Design:

Design is viewed as a late stage process. AI has already commoditised early stage design, and that means designers must start thinking how design applies to operations and internal uses over interfaces. Aadit Palicha, founder of Zepto (YC W21) brought up how designers are needed to bring about automation and value to improve organisational efficiency.

2. On Startups:

Lalit Keshre, founder of Groww (YC W18) urges founders to be power users of their products. Thats great advice for anyone who wants to curate value for users. He brought up the need for designers in high-stake scenarios and with heavy competition, where great UX can be a standout feature that is essential for capturing market share.

3. On Indian Builders:

More than 75% of the room is using Claude Max 20X plans. These are not people who need convincing that intelligence is worth paying for, and it shows how bullish Indians are about AI as a whole. However, Indian users heavily disregard open weight LLMs but will happily use OSS software. A lot to take away from this, but we should be concerned how Indians are overly reliant on closed models from the USA, while China pushes boundaries since they don’t have access to Claude and GPT.

4. On the Market:

There's a massive vacuum when it comes to building for the underserved and unserved in India. Most builders don't care about that market, and those who do are looking at the government to fund them, which means that we need policy that supports that kind of work. It’s going to be very interesting to see what the future of Indian Public Technology is going to be like.

5. On the old Guard:

The old guard is evolving, with CXOs and the Upper Management surprisingly the first to bet on AI. It became evident the moment Harshil Mathur of Razorpay (YC W15) asked for a Claude de-addiction himself. These organisations may be slow externally, but they have enough resources to experiment internally before they change their respective sectors.

6. On the new Generation:

The new generation of Indian companies are building for the world from India. Emergent and Giga are great examples of this. Its going to be software for now, but hardware is the next frontier. YC's core thesis hasn't changed - know your customer, and it seems Indians are best positioned in the world of AI to do that.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Harveen Singh Chadha, (LLM Research at Sarvam) and it was great talking to him about building for Indians using Sarvam's stack at Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH).

Overall, I'm excited to see what the future of Indian Startups holds.