Y Combinator at UChicago

​Two Y Combinator partners are coming to the University of Chicago to give an off-the-record talk about startups.

​Jared Friedman and Harshita Arora both started successful YC companies and are now YC partners.

​We’ll be talking with the founders of Wafer, who graduated from UChicago and did YC in the summer of 2025. They’re working on making LLMs run faster, and they recently announced their $40M Series A at a $220M valuation. Not bad for one year out of school.

​We’ll talk with the Wafer founders about their decision to start a company right out of college rather than getting a regular job, and how they managed to grow so fast.

​Don’t worry if you’re not working on a a startup yet - we’re especially interested in talking to students studying technical subjects like CS, math and engineering who may not have thought much about doing a startup but are curious to learn more.

​We'll hold a reception with food and drinks before the talk and would love to meet everyone interested in startups.

​If you are already working on a startup and would like to do 1-1 coffee chats with us to talk about it, we'd love to talk to you and have a separate signup for that here.