Due to everybody who made this yr’s San Francisco occasion what it was — and to the ten,000 of you who crammed the halls, made the connections, and left with greater than you got here with. Couldn’t make it? The pictures under provide a glimpse into what you missed.
Till subsequent yr.
Vinod Khosla, telling attendees he doesn’t purchase the argument that powering AI will doom local weather efforts. Geothermal power is sort of right here, he stated, whereas fusion stays additional out. He additionally touched on his alignment with President Donald Trump (deregulation) and his disagreement (immigration): “The one factor I’ll say is that this administration received’t final without end,” he stated with a smile.
That’s Roelof Botha on the stage, and that’s the group that got here to hold on his each phrase. The Sequoia accomplice talked via how his agency picks winners and what authorities possession in startups may imply, and warned founders to not get cute with timing, telling them to boost now in the event that they’ll want cash six months from now. Bubbles pop.
Kevin Damoa of Glīd Applied sciences, winner of this yr’s Battlefield competitors, with Battlefield chief Isabelle Johannessen. She and TC’s Michael Schick work with many dozens of startups for months to organize them for this stage. The hug is earned.
Roy Lee, the founding father of Cluely, the app greatest identified for its mantra “cheat at every part,” entertains the group together with his f-bomb-laden tackle the best way to win at advertising. “On daily basis, individuals are doing crazier and crazier issues, which is why to face out, you need to do one thing even crazier.” (Pictured left, Maxwell Zeff, holding his personal.)
If former Cleveland Cavaliers Tristan Thompson misses the NBA, he’s not displaying it. He’s constructing a enterprise empire and elevating pointed questions concerning the league he left behind. When requested about whether or not gamers may manipulate Basketball Enjoyable — a web3 platform that turns NBA gamers into tradable tokens — he provided a counterpoint: “It’s the identical query we ask about referees. Are they not gaming the system?” When moderator Rebecca Bellan pressed whether or not he meant NBA referees take bribes, Thompson shrugged. “It’s only a query to be requested,” he stated.
Techcrunch occasion
San Francisco
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October 13-15, 2026
Our personal Sean O’Kane shares a second with Wayve co-founder and CEO, Alex Kendall. Kendall might also be smiling as a result of his U.Okay.-based self-driving startup — whose software program acts as “brains for automobiles” — is in talks to boost a contemporary $2 billion from SoftBank and Microsoft at an $8 billion valuation.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, founders of the AI-powered buying assistant Phia, dazzled the viewers at Disrupt with their enthusiasm for making high-quality, secondhand clothes rather a lot simpler to search out. Gates, daughter of Invoice and Melinda Gates, was additionally sporting when requested by moderator Amanda Silberling what her well-known mother and father have discovered from her. Stated Gates with amusing, “Hopefully fashion! I don’t even think about myself that trendy; I similar to constructing within the shopper area, however now I get random emails from my household asking, ‘Ought to I put on this to this?’”
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, fielding questions on autonomous autos, together with whether or not society will settle for deaths attributable to self-driving automobiles. “I believe that society will,” Mawakana stated. “The problem is ensuring society has a excessive sufficient bar on security that corporations are held to.”
Kevin Rose speaking Digg’s reboot and the way forward for enterprise capital (Rose can also be a normal accomplice on the early-stage enterprise agency True Ventures). I’m smiling as a result of that’s what you do when somebody received’t reply your questions on a buzzy, wearable startup that’s nonetheless in stealth. (We’ll have extra on Sandbar quickly.)
Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf hydrating between questions on constructing the way forward for AI, together with because it pertains to LeRobot, the Hugging Face mission that’s attempting to democratize robotics with reasonably priced {hardware}, open supply instruments, and shared datasets.
Finals judges Marlon Nichols of MaC VC and Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures over the past phases of our extremely aggressive Startup Battlefield. Someplace off-camera, a founder is sweating via their pitch deck.
Aaron Levie of Field in dialog with TC’s Russell Brandom. Levie has graced the Disrupt stage quite a few instances over TC’s 20 years on the middle of the startup ecosystem, and he all the time brings it.
Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone on the streamer’s expanded remit from easy binge-watching to interactive programming (suppose voting on reside reveals and gaming by way of your cellphone): “It hasn’t modified the best way we inform tales,” she advised a rapt crowd.
TC’s Dominic-Madori Davis speaking group constructing with Tade Oyerinde of Campus, who’s rethinking group faculty, and Teddy Solomon of Fizz, the nameless social app that’s spreading throughout faculty campuses and infrequently getting banned, which some would possibly view as a badge of honor.
A whiteboard of needs: builders wanted, contacts provided, offers proposed. We adore it when founders lean into old-school ways. (Some nonetheless work!)
David George, who leads the expansion investing workforce at Andreessen Horowitz, got here to the present to speak with Julie Bort about what startups have to weigh as they’re eyeing the general public market. It was his birthday, because it seems; the group takes a second right here to have a good time it with him.
Right here’s San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie discussing his name with President Trump relating to why to not ship the Nationwide Guard to town — a proposal floated by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “What I stated to him was what I say to everyone: This can be a metropolis on the rise,” Lurie stated. “Three days of Disrupt right here ought to show that.” On whether or not he made concessions with the deal-making Trump, he was definitive. “No, completely not. No ask.”
Lots of people come from all over the world for programming about the best way to put their startups collectively. We coated all of the bases on our Builders Stage, which was packed day-after-day, all day.
Submit-show elation from TC’s Jessica Barrera, who dealt with ticketing for 10,000 attendees. She saves our bacon routinely.
For a lot of extra pictures from the occasion, go to our Flickr stream.
It’s also possible to discover our full video protection: right here is Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3.
