Tim O'Reilly literally "Watching the Alpha Geeks" (photo by Adam Kazwell)

Y Combinator and Stanford’s BASES recently announced this year’s Startup School.

When: April 19, 2008, 9:00 am
Where: Kresge Auditorium, Stanford University
Application Deadline: March 23

I’m biased of course, but I think this is the best event out there for anyone who wants to start a startup (or already has). You can’t learn everything in a day, but Startup School exposes you to advice from an amazing array of people who have either done it themselves or work daily in that world.

Startup School began as an experiment to “open source” Y Combinator. YC itself takes three months and we can only fund a limited number of startups. But we wanted to see how much we could give everyone for free in one concentrated day of talks. A lot of the experts who speak at Startup School are the same ones who speak at YC dinners.

But beyond the high quality speakers, there’s something magical about Startup School that is hard to understand if you haven’t been there: the audience is mostly programmers and there’s an atmosphere of intelligence combined with commitment that I’ve never felt anywhere else.

The event is free, because we know that the one thing most startup founders lack is money. It always seemed odd to me that so many conferences having to do with the web charged so much to attend. Many founders we knew (even ones with some funding) who were at ground zero of all the new things happening on the web, tended to be priced out of these events.

We run Startup School like a startup. We offer bagels and coffee in the morning and not much else. There’s none of the extra stuff usually associated with conferences-- no sponsors, no introductory remarks, no exhibitors, no bags full of schwag. Startup School is just about the content. And like a startup it has grown by word of mouth.

Ask someone who’s been.  They’ll tell you what I mean.

Me interviewing Flickr's Caterina Fake at SUS 2006. Fun! (photo by Patrick Tufts)