YC Startup School 2009 - Thanks to YC and the speakers for another great year.

It was a pleasure and privilege to once again photograph Y Combinator's Startup School 2009 yesterday at UC Berkeley. An assemblage of several hundred awesome engineer/hackers and future founders got together to hear the most successful entrepreneurs of the computing and Internet revolution speak about what it takes and how to get there.

Funny story: I sat in the front row of SS08 last year. YC applications were due the following Monday (just as the latest application cycle is due this coming Monday). Was not a founder then, just a designer/engineer with a sparkle in my eye. I grabbed a seat in the front row and took photos of all the speakers from last year, (posted on my Posterous here). I posted my photos on Hacker News. YC partners Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston saw the photos... later they told me it played a part in helping us get selected for interviews out of the likely thousand or more apps for that batch! We accepted YC funding for Summer of 2008, launched 3 weeks into the program, raised an angel round in Oct 08, and so you're reading this now on a startup of our own.

I guess you have to give a little to get a little. We feel greatly appreciative of being a part of YC, so I couldn't think of a better thing to do than to take photos once again. If you were there at Berkeley yesterday, I was that guy with the white Canon L lens running around the stage. ;-)

The amazing speakers included...

Chris Anderson
Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine

Paul Buchheit
Founder, FriendFeed; Creator of GMail

Jason Fried
Founder, 37signals

Paul Graham
Partner, Y Combinator; Founder, Viaweb

Tony Hsieh
CEO, Zappos; Founder, LinkExchange

Mitchell Kapor
Partner, Kapor Capital; Founder Lotus

Greg McAdoo
Partner, Sequoia Capital

Biz Stone
Founder, Twitter

Mark Pincus
Founder, Zynga; Founder, Tribe; Founder, SupportSoft; Founder Freeloader

Evan Williams
Founder, Blogger; Founder Twitter

Mark Zuckerberg
Founder, Facebook

Want more photos? Check out the full 85 picture full gallery at my smugmug. That gallery includes full 12 megapixel images suitable for print. You may use these images with attribution link back to my blog. Thanks friends!

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