Lower Manhattan skyline at dusk, seen across the Hudson

One week · $10,000 guaranteed investment · $1B valuation

Build a next $10B+ AI‑native company.

In one week, in New York. A mix of top founders coaching you from Silicon Alley, and real enterprise buyers vetting your idea in the same city. Built for people early in the journey — before any fundraising — who want to validate the idea and learn how to scale. In one week you accomplish more than most companies do in a year.

Apply to the next cohort → Why New York

One week, on the ground · rolling applications · no fee to apply · keep your job

Fortune 500 headquarters in New York —
more than any other US metro

$17.7B

Raised by NYC startups in the
first half of 2026, across 504 deals

24.4%

Of every US venture dollar in June 2026 —
the city’s highest share on record

The whole thesis

Two things meet here, and nowhere else.

The letter is not decoration. A Y is what happens when two lines that were running separately arrive at the same point — which is the entire argument for doing this in New York rather than California.

Every other program in this category sits on the left arm only — founders, investors and other founders, all talking to each other. The right arm is the one that decides whether a company exists in two years, and in New York it is walking distance away. Sources: RealPage Analytics, Fortune 500 headquarters by metro, 2026; AlleyWatch NYC venture funding reports, 2026.

Three categories, on purpose

We are deliberately narrow.

A program that takes everyone helps no one in particular. These three are where the buyer network is real, where the operating experience is first-hand, and where New York money is actually going — AI and enterprise took the majority of the city’s venture capital last quarter.

01 — Applied AI

AI

Not another foundation model. The companies that will matter here are the ones putting AI to work inside regulated, complex enterprises — and every one of those enterprises has a New York office, a procurement process, and a risk committee that will decide your fate.

Who you will meet

Heads of AI · Chief Data Officers
Model risk & governance leads

02 — Home turf

Security

This is where our edge is sharpest and least replicable. SecurityScorecard was built by selling to exactly these buyers, one CISO at a time, for a decade. We know which problems they actually lose sleep over and which ones only sound urgent at a conference.

Who you will meet

CISOs · security architects
Heads of third-party risk

03 — The long game

Enterprise SaaS

Forty-nine Fortune 500 headquarters means forty-nine procurement processes, forty-nine CIOs, and forty-nine chances to learn what actually blocks a deal. The shortest enterprise sales cycle you will ever run is the one where you can take the subway to the meeting.

Who you will meet

CIOs · VPs of Engineering
Procurement & vendor management

The early SecurityScorecard team working on laptops in a shared lounge — Fig. 01

A crowded room of engineers at an early SecurityScorecard session — Fig. 02

Five people around a single folding table in the first SecurityScorecard office — Fig. 03

Manhattan · The first office Other programs decorate their homepage with someone else’s garage. This is ours — five people, one folding table, borrowed chairs, a few blocks from buyers who had never heard of us. What came out of it now rates the security of more enterprises than any other platform on earth. The route from that table to here is the thing we teach.

What the week actually looks like

Mentoring in the morning. Building all afternoon.

Not a stage and a slide deck. A conference table, a whiteboard, and the person who has actually done it working the room — then the cohort breaking into teams to do the work while it is still fresh.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy mentoring a cohort of founders around a conference table in Manhattan — Aleksandr, live with a cohort · midtown Manhattan

Aleksandr Yampolskiy in discussion with a founder during a mentoring session — Working a founder’s pitch, one on one

A small team of founders ideating around a table with laptops open — A team stress-testing an idea before lunch

Founders working together on laptops during a breakout session — Breakout work, same room, same day

Why this and not the other one

Three things nobody else in this category can offer you.

01 / Location

Silicon Alley, not Silicon Valley.

The Valley is where enterprise software gets funded. New York is where it gets bought. Both matter, but only one of them can tell you by Thursday that you built the wrong thing — while it is still cheap to change.

02 / Teacher

Taught by someone who carried the load.

Not a curated panel of famous names who drop in for an hour. One operator who did the whole climb — first customer, first hire, first near-death quarter, the raise, the scale from zero to $200M+ ARR and a multi-billion-dollar valuation — and who remembers what each of those actually felt like.

03 / Validation

Real buyers, not a demo day.

Applause from investors tells you nothing. A sitting CISO explaining why she would not switch is worth more than a term sheet at this stage. We book those conversations. Some of them will hurt. That is the point.

Who runs it

One climb, documented, then handed to you.

Dr. Aleksandr Yampolskiy

CEO & Co-Founder, SecurityScorecard

NOWSecurityScorecard — built the leading cybersecurity ratings platform from zero to $200M+ ARR and a multi-billion-dollar valuation. 3,200+ enterprise customers across 46 countries, including Pepsi, McDonald’s and Cigna. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Google Ventures.

BEFORECISO, Gilt Groupe — through rapid growth past $600M in revenue.

BEFORECTO, BlogTalkRadio — scaled to 36M monthly visitors, exited via M&A.

BEFORESecurity leadership at Goldman Sachs and Oracle.

ACADEMICPhD, Cryptography — Yale.

ALSOEY Entrepreneur of the Year 2021 · World Economic Forum Global Innovator · author of The Perfect Scorecard · angel investor in 20+ cyber startups.

The reason this program exists is that the material already existed. For a decade Aleksandr kept a working manual — how to size a market, which questions destroy a bad idea fastest, how to tell a Lead feature from a Compete feature, what actually gets a deck funded. It was written to run a company, not to sell a course. Y Fellows is that manual, taught in person, in the city it was written in.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy presenting a framework on the Gartner mainstage — Gartner mainstage · the S.C.O.R.E. framework

Aleksandr Yampolskiy being interviewed on Fox Business — Fox Business · Special Report

A full lecture hall during a SecurityScorecard talk — Standing-room teaching · New York

The SecurityScorecard team at an awards evening — The team that made it real

The Sherpa Method · six camps, one week

From an idea at base camp to a funded company at the summit.

Six stages, compressed into one week on the ground in New York — a short async intake before you arrive, then one camp a day until Saturday’s summit. Each stage ends in something you can hold, not a feeling of progress. You do not move up until the deliverable exists, and the first camp is the letter on the door: why.

The Sherpa Method — one ascent, six camps, one week

5,364 m

Base Camp · Day 1

Exploration

Ideaflow Method

Why you, why this, why now. You have to know why you do what you do before anyone else will care — a mission defines your purpose, a vision extends it into a future state worth reaching. Most founders skip this and spend two years paying for it. Who do you want your customers to become? We run every idea through the Jobs-to-be-Done lens: nobody hires a cup of coffee for the coffee — find the job your product is actually hired to do.

Deliverable

Your company defined in one declarative sentence, and a thirty-second problem statement that names a real person’s pain.

6,065 m

Camp I · Day 2

Validation

Sunrise Method

Deep conversations with hundreds of customers who hold the budget. You are not looking for the market majority — you are looking for innovators and early adopters, and they are a different species. We run the interview protocol: how they solve it today, what they pay, what happens if they fail to solve it. Never “would you buy this?”

Deliverable

A lean canvas, a bottom-up market size you can defend, and at least one question asked that could have destroyed the business.

6,400 m

Camp II · Day 3

Differentiation / Prototyping AI / Mentoring

Pair Ideation Method

Sit down and pair-ideate directly with founders who took a company from zero to a billion dollars. Every capability you have is a Lead, a Compete, or a Survive. Lead features are immediately obvious and people buy on them. Compete features are table stakes. Survive features are the ones on your roadmap that you talk about too much. Companies die when nobody identified the Lead early.

Deliverable

A value curve against your five nearest competitors, and exactly two things you describe in a sales call. Everything else, they discover.

7,200 m

Camp III · Day 4

Prototype: AI and vibe coding

Where the product physically fits and sits in your customer’s day — built with AI and vibe coding, so the gap between idea and working software collapses to hours, not months. Use cases written as people, not features. Built against the feedback from Camp I, in front of the same people who gave it. It always takes longer and costs more than you think.

Deliverable

A working prototype, a roadmap with dates you believe, and the single consumption number you are driving over the next ninety days.

7,950 m

Camp IV · Day 5

Go to market

The sales velocity equation. Outbound and inbound systems that compound rather than decay. A real BDR engine, not spam. Pricing tested properly — the point at which it is too expensive, and the point at which it is so cheap they assume it is bad.

Deliverable

A repeatable motion, and a P&L that survives contact with a T2D3 growth curve instead of a spreadsheet fantasy.

8,849 m

Summit · Day 6

Fundraise

Story first, metrics second — then the metrics had better be there. How investors actually read a deck, what kills a deal in the first four minutes, and when the honest answer is that you should not be raising yet.

Deliverable

A deck, a tracked pipeline of the right investors, warm introductions where we have them — or a clear-eyed decision to wait.

The unfair advantage

Your idea, in a room with the person who signs the cheque.

This is the part that cannot be copied by a program run out of California, and it is the reason to choose us over anyone else.

Chief Information Security Officers

The budget holder for anything security-adjacent

Chief Information Officers

The buyer for infrastructure and platform

Heads of AI and Data

Where applied-AI budget actually sits in 2026

A decade of selling into enterprise New York leaves you with a phone book. Fellows get scheduled customer-discovery conversations with sitting buyers across banking and capital markets, insurance, healthcare, pharma, media and the public sector — structured interviews, run to a protocol, with the questions that produce truth rather than politeness. You will hear that your pricing is wrong, that a platform you have never heard of already does half of it, and that the problem you picked is the seventh most annoying thing in their week. Better now than after the seed round.

Context

The rooms this comes from.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Jeff Bezos — Jeff Bezos

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Elon Musk — Elon Musk

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Sam Altman — Sam Altman

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Satya Nadella — Satya Nadella

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with President Bill Clinton — Bill Clinton

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Joe Biden — Joe Biden

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Boris Johnson — Boris Johnson

Aleksandr Yampolskiy with Arnold Schwarzenegger — A. Schwarzenegger

To be completely clear

These are rooms Aleksandr has worked in — not faculty, and not people you are promised a meeting with. Nobody pictured here is affiliated with Y Fellows or endorses it. They are on this page for one reason: the conversations that set the direction of enterprise technology happen at that altitude, and sitting in them for a decade changes what you know is coming. That vantage is what gets taught. The introductions you actually receive are the ones in the section above, and those we will make.

The offer

Terms.

Draft — not yet final

Duration

1 week

In person, in New York. A short async intake before you arrive — the week itself is on the ground.

Cohort

12 founders

Small enough that every company gets real time. Solo founders welcome.

Focus

AI · Security · SaaS

Enterprise only. If you are building consumer, we will tell you at the interview.

Cost

No fee

You do not pay to attend.

Investment

$10,000 guaranteed

Every fellow gets it — on a SAFE, at a $1B valuation cap. Yours to accept or decline.

Buyer calls

5 guaranteed

Scheduled in advance, so the week itself is spent in the room — not chasing calendars.

Start an application → Rolling · reviewed weekly · reapplication encouraged

Questions

FAQ

Why “Y”?

Two reasons, and both are load-bearing. A Y is the shape of two separate lines arriving at the same point — builders on one arm, buyers on the other, New York where they meet. And the first question the method asks you is why: why you, why this, why now. Everything downstream depends on getting that one right.

Do I have to be building in AI, security, or enterprise SaaS?

Yes. That narrowness is the product. Our buyer network, our operating experience and our pattern recognition are all concentrated in enterprise, and a program that takes everyone helps no one in particular. If you are building consumer, another program will serve you better and we will say so at the interview rather than take your time.

Do you take equity?

Not for attending — there is no fee and no equity charge just to be in the room. Every fellow is guaranteed a $10,000 investment on a SAFE at a $1B valuation cap; that is the one instrument where we do take future equity, and it is yours to accept or decline. If you decline it, you owe nothing.

Do I need to quit my job or drop out?

No. Sessions are structured around people who still have obligations. Several of the strongest founders we have worked with started while employed.

Do I need a co-founder, or a company?

Neither. Apply solo or as a team — one application per team, and mention your co-founder in it. You can arrive with an idea rather than an entity; Base Camp exists for exactly that.

I am not in New York.

That’s okay, but you will need to come visit us for the week. The week is entirely in person — that is where the buyer meetings happen, and they cannot be done over video without losing most of what makes them worth having. There is a short async intake beforehand so the week itself is not wasted on paperwork.

What actually happens on the buyer calls?

A structured thirty-minute conversation, run to a protocol we teach you first, booked before you arrive so the week itself is not spent chasing calendars. You are not pitching. You are asking how they solve the problem today, what they pay, where the current answer fails, and what happens to them if it stays unsolved. We debrief every one with you afterwards.

Is it okay if I am still in high school or college?

Yes — 100% okay. We welcome people who are dreamers early in their journey. Some of the strongest applicants we see have not started a company yet; what matters is the intensity of how you think, not your title or your age.

Isn’t a week too short to get anything real done?

It is, if the week is unstructured. It is not, if the buyer calls are already booked before you land and every day has one job. That is what the six camps are for — a forced sequence, one deliverable per day, so a single intensive week produces what an unstructured program would take months to get to. The intake before you arrive exists so day one starts at Base Camp, not at introductions.

A team offsite on Governors Island, with the Manhattan skyline behind

Next cohort

Start with why. Finish with a customer.

One immersive week in the only city where the person who would pay for your product is close enough to tell you, to your face, that they would not. Find that out now — while it is still cheap to be wrong.

Apply →

Y Fellows · New York, NY Applications reviewed on a rolling basis