AI Study Camp — Where best founders learn & adopt AI

Table of Contents

What It Is

A 5-week online course aimed at:

understanding LLMs deeply
figuring out what you can build with them for your startup (e.g., internal tools, AI features, new AI products)
learning the basics of building so you could prototype a v1 yourself and then hand off to engineers/CTO

This course is designed for non-technical founders. That being said, ~20% of our students so far have been technical and they all enjoyed it too. If you’re technical and not sure whether you should take this class or not, email us and we’ll help you decide.

Course stats

as of Mar 2026

4 years
12 cohorts
170 students (mostly YC founders, including founders of top YC companies like Daily, Mux, and Codecademy)
several founders started new companies after taking this course, one got into YC; explore outcomes here
tons of positive reviews, see for yourself here
100% completion rates for c9 & c10

Course Vibes

Inside the Course:What Your Week Looks Like

Kickoff Call

9th cohort kickoff! featuring Jenna Blaicher-Brown (exited Shipamax W17 to $40B+ WiseTech), Matthew Busel (co-founder of Whalesync S21, now building agents at Basis), and others

10th cohort kickoff! featuring Zach Sims (Codecademy Founder/CEO, exited for $525m to Skillsoft), Andrey Artemenko (Carrefour VP of ecommerce), and others

Expert Speakers

Gordon Wintrob (co-founder and CTO of Newfront, $2.2bn insurance tech co) stopping by to talk about how they use LLMs internally and to improve their product

Elena Samuylova of Evidently AI S21 giving a lecture on evals; Charlie Guo (course instructor) digging in and asking re vibe evals

Group Sessions

Vasili Shynkarenka (course instructor) explaining how LLMs learn by having Chinese-naive students try and make sense of Chinese writing; read more here

1:1s with Instructor

Vasili & Charlie as course instructors answering a (very long!) list of Mike Mahkow's open questions about LLMs

Final Project Presentations

Jon Dahl of Mux W16 pitching his course project - n8n pipeline for story generation; Nazli Danis of Paloma S25 giving feedback!

How It Works

Small groups of 7-12 founders
structured, well-researched curriculum, updated as of Mar 2026
hands-on, experienced instructor (YC founder)
Weekly speakers like:
- Gordon Wintrob (Co-Founder & CTO at Newfront (acquired for $1.2bn), 2x YC alum). See Gordon’s previous lecture here
- Vaibhav Gupta (CEO @ Boundary YC W23, ex-Google, ex-Microsoft; worked on HoloLens & Face ID). See Vaibhav's previous lecture here
- Kwindla Hultman Kramer (Co-founder & CEO of Daily YC W16, creators of Pipecat, top YC company). See Kwindla's previous lecture here
SOTA learning practices like active recall, spaced repetition, socratic questioning, etc.
assignments and group calls to keep you accountable
course project!

Reviews

“

I can’t speak highly enough about this course. As a technical cofounder who has attempted to keep my skills sharp, I have generally kept up with the progress of LLMs but have also had trouble parsing the good information from the hype. Before the course, I had a basic understanding but did not quite see where the true value of the technology beyond a “better google” or “content generator”. I’m now excited about the tangible benefits I see from it not only in assisting my day-to-day workload, but also in how I can integrate it into future projects. As a bonus, Vasili, provided a wonderful framework for improving my learning skills. This wasn’t just a benefit to getting more out of the course, but to improve recall and retention in general. The last thing I would highly recommend is truly devoting time to the course. With the learning methodology, lectures and materials, you want to give yourself the time to truly absorb and explore to get the most out of the course.

Andy Norborg

Founder, RealCrowd (YC S13)

“

Just wrapping up the cohort. Loving it! Recommended to our 7,000 person company. I had been playing around with vibe coding before the course & hitting a wall at certain points. The course has enabled me to take a step back & understand what is going on under the hood to help me work with the tools better. I also now have a much better understanding of the end to end stack - which helps me figure out which pieces to put together when building. Highly recommend 🙂

Jenna Brown

WiseTech Global, Exited Founder (YC17)

“

Full recommend here for Vasili Shynkarenka’s course! As a non-technical person, I was looking for a way to unlock my brain to learn how to use these tools and also at a higher level how to even think about what they really are. Vasili used the analogy of installing some new software in my noggin to figure out how to work with this hardware. I’ve learned a ton already, am working on a pretty exciting side project as part of the program and will continue to implement some of the learning techniques in my life even outside of this subject. Really great course and I think well worth the price of admission if you're looking to level up your understanding and learn some practical skills in the space! Also great to see a few fellow S13 founders on the zooms!

Adam Hooper

Co-founder & CEO of RealCrowd (YC S13), ex-VP at a $7B private equity firm

See more reviews here.

Outcomes

As of Oct 2025: 3 years running, 11 cohorts completed, 170 students including YC founders and PMs from Deel & Google, 100% completion rates for cohorts 9 & 10.

See more outcomes here.

Syllabus

Basically we go over the last 6 years of LLM evolution and build up your understanding gradually, from base models like gpt3 to assistant models (+tools +multimodality) to reasoning models & agents that really started working in late 2025, all the way reinforcement learning as 2026 SOTA (esp. in domains with verifiable rewards, like coding).

See the full syllabus here.

In the last two weeks of the class, you will build a project, which usually is some piece of software that leverages LLMs (e.g., internal tool, AI feature, new product prototype). See some examples of what students build in the outcomes section above.

Logistics

fully remote
5 weeks, ~1-2h a day to make sure it really sinks in and make progress on projects
3 weeks of theory, ~2 weeks of project work
60% async (reading, watching, tinkering, assignments, etc.) and 40% live (speaker lectures, group discussions)
live lectures and group calls are on Thursdays and Fridays at 9 am PT

Note: you really need to allocate at least 1h per day to the course, otherwise it won’t work. As I like saying, “1h a day or stuff fades away.” Karpathy explains why in this twitter thread.

Instructors

In SF with Cathy Pearl, ex Design Manager of Google Assistant at Google

Vasili Shynkarenka

mostly worked on chatbots and voice assistants, since 2015
built a software agency BotCube in ~2016-2018, creating chatbots for large enterprises
YC founder with Storyline W18 (no-code Alexa skills builder)
teaching LLMs since late 2020
founded AI Study Camp in 2025, with the goal of helping people really understand AI
linkedin, twitter, website

Pricing

The course costs $4,000, with a 20% discount if you buy multiple seats.