YC AI Startup School
Startup Village
Networking that starts before the badge queue.
Every year founders fly into San Francisco for YC's AI Startup School from Lagos, Bangalore, São Paulo, Berlin, everywhere, and every year the same problem repeats itself in a hundred separate group chats.
Someone has a spare room and no one to fill it. Someone is landing at SFO on the same Tuesday morning as four other attendees and none of them know it. Someone is flying out of the same city as a founder they would genuinely want to meet. There was no single place to solve any of it.
Startup Village was built to be that place: verified housing listings you can filter by the exact nights you need, flight coordination that surfaces attendees leaving from your city, and date-based groups that show you who is in town when you are. Networking that starts weeks before the event instead of in the badge queue.
Networking that starts weeks before the event instead of in the badge queue.
The gate
Nobody shares a room or an arrival time with a stranger from the internet. Access sits behind a verification gate that asks questions only real attendees can answer.
The rooms
Verified housing listings you can filter by the exact nights you need. Spare rooms find the people who need them.
The inbound
Flight coordination that surfaces attendees leaving from your city. Someone landing at SFO on the same Tuesday morning as four other attendees — and now they know it.
The overlap
Date-based groups that show you who is in town when you are. Contact details are revealed only when both sides approve.
Dissolve Labs built and shipped it as a community project, and the hard part was never the listings, it was trust. Nobody shares a room or an arrival time with a stranger from the internet. So access sits behind a verification gate that asks questions only real attendees can answer, contact details are revealed only when both sides approve, and the whole thing was published open source so the community could audit exactly what it did with their information.
A short push seeded the first members, and after that it moved the way founder tools actually move, passed between attendees in Slack threads and WhatsApp groups until it was the default place to sort out your trip. By the end of the launch window: 250+ verified members from 30+ origin cities and 80+ listings posted, with a roadmap shaped entirely by what people asked for once they were inside.
Lead stack
Postgres Row Level Security
GeminiStructured output
Postgres tstzrange + GiST
PostHog
pgvector
Also used
Next.js
TypeScript
Tailwind
shadcn/ui
Zod
Supabase
Upstash Redis