San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference 2026

Choose your fighter

Garry Tan

Y Combinator

San Francisco Ruby Startup Conference '26

Year Two · Nov 10-12, 2026 · SF Jazz

450 Ruby and Rails engineers and founders meet in San Francisco to build the future

Join the game Buy the ticket $450 · until Sep 30

Organized by

The lineup

Garry Tan

Y Combinator

Built Bookface, YC's internal platform, on Rails. Now runs the place.
Keynote
Ryan Sherlock

Fin (ex Intercom)

“Who Watches the Agents? Closing the Rails Loop from Code to Customers”

Ryan Sherlock is Senior Director of Engineering at Fin, leading infrastructure and core technologies.
Cole Robertson

Rebulk

YC S25. Measures bulk inventory nobody can barcode, with LiDAR and computer vision.
Carmine Paolino

Chat with Work, RubyLLM

“RubyLLM 2.0: The AI Framework Ruby Deserves”

Carmine Paolino builds the tools he wants to use: RubyLLM, how Rubyists do AI, plus archspec, kamal-backup, a cluster headache…
Rosa Gutiérrez

37signals

“Solid Queue: two years on Rails”

Rosa has worked with Ruby for over 13 years.
Jason Bosco

Typesense

“How We Bootstrapped an Open Source Search Engine to $10M+ ARR with 15 People and Ruby on Rails”

Bootstrapped an open-source search engine on Rails. It answers 10B+ searches a month.
Chris Oliver

GoRails, Hatchbox

Chris is a Rails Luminary, entrepreneur and content creator.
Vladimir Dementyev

Evil Martians

Author of AnyCable, TestProf and Layered Design for Ruby on Rails Applications.
Andrey Novikov

Evil Martians

Author of Yabeda, the Ruby instrumentation framework with over 10 million downloads.
Jason Thomas

OpenC3

“Satellite command and control with Ruby and COSMOS”

Jason graduated from Iowa State University and spent 20 years at Ball Aerospace, where he was instrumental in building COSMOS.
Celina Lopez

Primary Health

Self taught software engineer with more than 5+ years of experience.
Phillip Campbell

Gusto

“Background processing at Gusto: The Parts Where People Look Puzzled”

Phillip Campbell is an engineering leader at Gusto, where he leads the teams responsible for Rails architecture and background…
Peter Zhu

Shopify

“Open Source is the Most Fragile and Most Resilient Ecosystem”

Peter is a Ruby core committer and a Staff Software Engineer at Shopify.
Ben Sheldon

Frontdoor Benefits

“Building the same app twice: same problems, different decade”

Ben Sheldon is the author of GoodJob, an Active Job backend.
Alex Coomans

Persona

“Keeping Your Head on Straight in Concurrent & Complex Ruby Applications”

Alex is a long time Rubyist with a love for intricate and mind-boggling puzzles.
Madison Sites

Order.co

“The System Nobody Understood (Including AI)”

Madison Sites is based in Lake Tahoe and has been a professional Ruby developer for over 10 years.
CJ Avilla

Anthropic

“Assign to Claude: Making an Agent a First‑Class Teammate in Your SaaS”

CJ Avilla is a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic and former Stripe Developer Advocate.
Marco Roth

Herb

“Reactive Rails Views, No Rewrite Required”

Marco is a passionate full-stack developer and a dedicated open-source contributor.
Irina Nazarova

Evil Martians

“Startups on Rails in 2026”

CEO at Evil Martians, co-founder at AnyCable, and organizer of the SF Ruby community.
Keynote

Speaker profiles and talks

Day 1–3

More than a room of talks

Half the value of a conference is who you meet, so it is on the schedule rather than left to the coffee queue.

01
Everyone gets a mic

You are matched into at least two networking groups of 70 to 100 people. In each one you get 60 seconds on the mic to say who you are and what you are building.
02
Teams of 5+ get a longer slot

Bring five or more from your company and you get extended time, and slides, to introduce the team to the room.
03
Founders' round with Garry Tan

A dedicated group for founders and founding teams with the President and CEO of Y Combinator.

Bring your team Ask for an invoice

Season open

The conference starts now

Your ticket is a character slot. The game begins the day you register, months before the doors open.

01
Your character joins the map

Upload a photo and get your Cloud Card: an 8-bit version of you, up on the clouds on one big shared picture with everyone else who is going.
02
Tasks and games, starting now

Quests run in the conference app and the SF Ruby Slack from the day you register until November. Complete them and badges stack up on your Cloud Card.
03
Arrive knowing your crew

We match you into a group by shared interests. Find your people online first, then in person at SFJAZZ, where the last badges are earned face to face.

Claim your slot Join the Slack

Tickets

Three days at SFJAZZ

All talks, all networking sessions, and the community day.

Early bird Sold out $350
Regular Until Sep 30 $450
Company-sponsored Invoiced, expensable, no deadline $650

Get tickets

Bringing your team?

Everyone gets 60 seconds on the mic in their networking groups. Teams of 5 or more get extended time, and slides, to introduce the company. Group registration is open on Luma, and we invoice.