8 Weeks to Build an AI Startup? Inside the Hard-Driving Hustle of an Upstart Accelerator

Accelerators churn out AI startups faster than ever. But what does it really take? Inc. followed two founders’ twisty path to a viable business model.

BY BRIAN CONTRERAS, STAFF WRITER @_B_CONTRERAS_

San Francisco’s Chase Center is home to the Golden State Warriors, but for the last weekend of July, it filled with a different sort of hard-driving Californian: thousands of entrepreneurs who descended on the arena for “Startup School,” a two-day business-building summit hosted by the startup accelerator and tech investment giant Y Combinator.

The conference, which featured speakers like Jensen Huang, Patrick Collison, and Alexandr Wang, embraced the same spectacle and scale you might expect from a pro sports tournament. Sam Altman walked out to hype-up music like he was rallying for a title fight; onlookers compared the vibe to a megachurch.

Yet amid all the excess, some tech insiders saw worrying signs that Y Combinator’s meteoric growth has dulled the program’s edge. “The YC brand felt like it was designed to filter out status chasers…but you can feel the gravity of a status vortex slowly tearing down what made YC special,” wrote Scott Stevenson, co-founder of the legal tech platform Spellbook, in a post on X about the event.

Arguing about whether YC has lost its mojo has become a long-standing tradition among tech types. In 2022, debate broke out on the popular tech forum Hacker News about whether the accelerator had become too risk-averse after it announced that most members of an incoming cohort had already secured outside funding. More recently, observers have bemoaned the program’s expansion from two to four batches a year as well as its zeitgeisty preoccupation with AI ventures.

Data from Brookings indicates that accelerators grew dramatically in the years following Y Combinator’s 2005 launch. Traditional VC firms now run their own accelerator-style programs. A 2024 paper out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton business school tracked 8,580 companies as they moved through 408 different accelerators across 176 countries, and estimated that 160 accelerators are operating in the United States alone, with 2,000 worldwide. 

Although accelerators have become big brands, you can still find scrappy, homebrewed ones in quieter corners of the tech ecosystem, run by smaller-scale investors with little more than pocket-change funding, their own business instincts and a lot of elbow grease.

Consider HomeRuns, a New York-based micro-accelerator run by Karthik Senthil, a serial entrepreneur and founder of 806 Capital, that’s evocative of Y Combinator’s scrappier salad days. Inc. followed its inaugural class—two ambitious young entrepreneurs who’d joined the program with only the roughest sketches of a business pitch—as they scrambled to stake out their own little corner of the AI gold rush in just eight weeks. 

In the process, we caught a glimpse of what startup incubation looks like when stripped of all its pageantry and prestige: a series of false starts, dead ends, logistical headaches and pragmatic pivots, all endured in hopes that at some point, hunched over a laptop in a coffee shop or hotel lobby somewhere, there would come a hard-won victory that made all the hustling worth it.

An accelerator with the heart of early YC

Back in February, Senthil posted a simple request on X: He was looking for AI-savvy, New York-based founders who wanted help turning their “crazy idea” into a bona fide company. Better yet, he would give them some money to make it happen.

“We’ll whiteboard, refine the thesis, ship a real v1, strategize on product risks, and get in front of early believers,” wrote Senthil. He would offer $15,000 for a 2 percent stake, plus the option to later take 3 percent more for another $30,000 if he chose to double down.

“The way I’m setting up this program harkens back to the days of super early YC,” Senthil said at the outset of the HomeRuns program. “YC started like this, and now they’re the credential that they hated. They espoused that it was sucky that to be cool you had to have a Harvard degree—but now most startups apply to YC to get the YC stamp.”

Senthil, 43, was nearly a YC alum himself. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon with a computer engineering master’s degree in 2004, he took a job at Goldman Sachs. But after eight years, he was ready for something else, so he and a friend developed a music app and pitched it to Y Combinator. They got an interview, he says, but ultimately weren’t accepted.

So Senthil took a job at a startup, then tried to launch his own venture, though it never took off. He wound up with a management job at Amazon, then launched another startup, this time in the crypto space. In the meantime, he’d begun making a series of small investments,........

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