Where best founders
learn & adopt AI

We make AI courses for startup founders and deliver them in a way that works well for humans: in small groups, led by experienced instructors, with lots of 1-1s & guidance.

Explore our courses →See how we teach →

Our Courses

Each course runs for 5 weeks and requires ~1-2 hours of work per day. It may seem like a lot, but that’s the only way to really learn!

Knowledge

LLM Fundamentals

Deeply understand the most important technology of the decade. Figure out what it means for your now (or future) startup, as well as for the software industry more broadly.

What you’ll learn

AI history, LLM theory & use cases, current AI stack

What you’ll build

LLM-powered feature, new product prototype

100+ alumni

Explore this course →NewSkills

Vibe Coding Foundations

Master Claude Code and other vibe coding tools. Start building & shipping your ideas as a nontechnical founder — no engineers or designers required.

What you’ll learn

LLM basics, Claude Code, vibe coding best practices

What you’ll build

4 vibe-coded websites/apps/workflows/etc.

50+ alumni

Explore this course →

Not sure which one to pick? Email us and we’ll book a 20-min free call to help you decide!

Our Sprints

A sprint is a series of live, expert-led workshops aimed towards a particular outcome. Sprints provide accountability, peer pressure, and guidance to help you “get there.“

Nontechnical Founders

Set Up and Start Using OpenClaw

A 1-week sprint to set up openclaw & integrate it into your workflow as your “AI chief of staff.”

Artem Vysotksy (Founder, Software Engineer, ex-Meta)

Vasili Shynkarenka (Founder AISC, YC founder)

Run by: Artem Vysotsky (ex-Meta engineer, founder) & Vasili Shynkarenka (YC W18 alum, AI Study Camp founder)

Explore this sprint →Technical Founders

Train an LLM From Scratch

A 3-week sprint to deeply understand LLMs by replicating Karpathy’s Nanochat.

Fabian Blaicher (AI & ML Researcher, YC Founder)

Run by: Fabian Blaicher (technical founder with AI & ML background, co-founded Shipamax W17 and exited to WiseTech Global)

Explore this sprint →

How We Teach

Humans tend to learn best when they’re learning from other humans (experts), with other humans (the group), and while guided & supported by other humans (instructors). This is exactly how we teach.

Small groups of 7-12 founders

Instructors who both know their subject deeply & love teaching (rare find!)

Inspiring, world-class experts as speakers

Structured, curated, up-to-date curriculum

Evidence-based learning techniques like active recall, socratic questioning, etc.

Lots of live work & support — 1:1s, office hours, group calls

See what this looks like in practice →Read more on fake vs real learning →

What Our Students Achieve

After our courses, founders start new companies, build AI features & internal tools, and create AI systems to help run their busy lives. Some even get into YC!

Felipe Echandi

Co-founder & CEO at Cuanto (YC W19)

Went from not being able to code to contributing to production codebase & solving user tickets. Built a personal passion project app: Panama City Sidewalk Analyzer!

Before: Couldn’t ship product improvements on his own

Vibe Coding Foundations

Cassie Choi

Founder Coach | fmr Co-Founder at Pair Team | Nurse Innovator | Top 50 in Digital Health

Built AI tools for her coaching practice to streamline ops. For fun, built an RV co-pilot app for her parents!

Before: Didn’t know how to think about LLMs, evaluate AI solutions, and build her own LLM-powered tools

LLM Fundamentals

Vital

Co-founder of Numo.ai — AI for neurodivergent people

Built a Claude-powered “Personal Operating System” that runs his personal & professional lives through only 2 apps (20+ MCP servers, 60+ custom skills, 500+ automations).

Before: Was drowning in “founder work nobody sees” — contracts, tax filings, invoices, accountant emails, etc.

Vibe Coding Foundations

Adam Hooper

Co-founder & CEO of RealCrowd (YC S13)

Built and launched a v1 of his new company during the course, ReportIR — an AI-native investor communications platform.

Before: “Didn’t know how to use these tools or how to even think about what they really are”

LLM Fundamentals

See more outcomes →

What Our Students Say

We’ve received >30 reviews over the years. Here’s what some of our students think about our courses. Explore the Reviews page for more!

“

I took the most recent cohort of this course and it actually helped me build the demo we showed during our YC application :) Vasili has done an amazing job distilling the signal from the noise in the curriculum for this course. I went in not knowing anything about how AI works as a non-technical person, and came out understanding exactly how things work and what’s possible today with AI, which I noticed helps a lot with my product development and roadmap brainstorming. tldr, highly recommend it, take the course!

Nazli Danis

Co-founder & CEO, Paloma (YC S25)

LLM Fundamentals

Felipe Echandi (Co-founder & CEO at Cuanto, YC W19) shares his experience with the Vibe Coding Foundations course

“

Half my team has done this now (the Vibe Coding Foundations course) and I’m going to make it mandatory for non-technical folks as it’s elevated our product and technical convos. Strong recommend.

Juan Andrade

Founder, Caribou (YC W19)

Vibe Coding Foundations

“

I just finished the most recent cohort and can’t recommend it enough. I am non-technical and wanted to figure out LLMs and how I could employ AI in my day to day existence. Mission accomplished. I wound up writing a focus assistant in Replit that seems to work pretty well to help me take large unstructured problems and create concrete actions. I also appreciated his approach to learning in general and have found it helpful in several facets of my life. I feel much more comfortable with what AI can and can’t do now and how to position myself for the future.

Patrick Deem

Co-Founder and CFO of Voodoo Manufacturing (YC W17)

LLM Fundamentals

Our Origin Story

Big things start small. In 5 years, we went from a fun side project (Vasili’s GPT-3 course) to helping hundreds of founders learn and adopt AI.

2020

After tinkering with GPT-3 for ~6 months and writing about it, Vasili made his very first course — Building Apps With GPT-3. It was mostly async, with a Slack group for support. About a hundred people took it, including the famous American author Derek Sivers!

2023

As foundation models advanced and expanded beyond text, Vasili rebuilt his GPT-3 course into a new one — Building Products With Foundation Models. Trying to improve completion rates, he also shifted into a more classic cohort-based learning model, with a cohort size of ~20-30 YC founders.

Late 2023

After running a few cohorts, Vasili realized that large groups of 20-30 students miss genuine human connection, the very thing that makes learning work. So he came up with the “mini-group” model — 7-12 students per group, led by their own instructor, with lots of 1-1s & support. As a result, completion rates tripled, from 30 to nearly 90%. This is the model we use to this day.