Thank you to everyone who made this year’s San Francisco event what it was—and to the 10,000 of you who filled the halls, made connections, and left with more than you brought. Couldn’t make it? The images below give a glimpse of what you missed.
Until next year.
Vinod Khosla tells attendees that he doesn’t buy the argument that driving AI will doom climate action. Geothermal energy is almost here, he said, while fusion remains further out. He also touched on his alignment with President Donald Trump (deregulation) and his disagreements (immigration): “The only thing I will say is this administration is not going to last forever,” he said with a laugh.
It’s Roelof Botha on stage, and it’s the crowd that came to hang on every word. The Sequoia partner talked through how his firm picks winners, what government ownership in startups could mean, and warned founders not to get cute with timing, telling them to raise now if they need money six months from now. Bubbles pop.
Kevin Damoa of Glīd Technologies, winner of this year’s Battlefield competition, with Battlefield boss Isabelle Johannessen. She and TC’s Michael Schick work with dozens of startups for months to prepare them for this stage. The hug is deserved.
Roy Lee, the founder of Cluely, the app best known for its “cheat everything” mantra, entertains audiences with his bombshell take on how to win at marketing. “Every day people are doing more and more crazy things, so you have to do something even more crazy to stand out.” (Pictured left, Maxwell Zeff, holding on.)
If former Cleveland Cavalier Tristan Thompson misses the NBA, he’s not showing it. He is building a business empire and raising sharp questions about the league he left behind. When asked if players could manipulate Basketball Fun — a web3 platform that turns NBA players into tradable tokens — he offered a counterplay: “It’s the same question we ask about judges. They are not playing the system?” When moderator Rebecca Bellan pressed him on whether he thought NBA referees accepted bribes, Thompson shrugged. “It’s just a question that needs to be asked,” he said.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
27.-29. October 2025
Our very own Sean O’Kane shares a moment with Wayve’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Kendall. Kendall may also be smiling because his UK-based self-driving startup — whose software acts as the “brains of cars” — is in talks to raise a new $2 billion from SoftBank and Microsoft at an $8 billion valuation.
Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, founders of AI-powered shopping assistant Phia, dazzled the crowd at TechCrunch with their enthusiasm for making high-quality used clothing much easier to find. Gates, the daughter of Bill and Melinda, was also sporting when moderator Amanda Silberling asked what her famous parents have taught her. Said Gates with a laugh: “Hopefully style! I don’t even consider myself that stylish; I just like building in the consumer space, but now I get random emails from my family asking, ‘Should I wear this?'”
Waymo co-CEO Tekedra Mawakana with TechCrunch’s Kirsten Korosec, asking questions about autonomous vehicles, including whether society will accept deaths caused by self-driving cars. “I think the community will,” Mawakana said. “The challenge is to ensure that society has a high enough security barrier that companies are held to.”
Kevin Rose talks about Digg’s reboot and the future of venture capital (Rose is also a general partner at early-stage venture firm True Ventures). I’m smiling because that’s what you do when someone won’t answer your questions about a busy, portable startup that’s still in hiding. (We’ll have more on Sandbar soon.)
Co-founder of Hugging Face, Thomas Wolf, hydrates between questions about building the future of artificial intelligence, including LeRobot, the Hugging Face project that tries to democratize robotics with affordable hardware, open source tools, and shared datasets.
Final judges Marlon Nichols of MaC VC and Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures during the final stages of our highly competitive Startup Battlefield. Somewhere off-camera, a founder is sweating through their pitch deck.
Box’s Aaron Levie in conversation with TC’s Russell Brandom. Levie has graced the Disrupt stage numerous times during TC’s 20 years at the center of the startup ecosystem, and he always brings it.
Netflix CTO Elizabeth Stone on the streamer’s expanded mandate from simple binge-watching to interactive programming (think voting on live shows and games via your phone): “It hasn’t changed the way we tell stories,” she told a rapt audience.
TC’s Dominic-Madori Davis talks community building with Tage Oyerinde of Campus, who is reimagining the community college, and Teddy Solomon of Fizz, the anonymous social app that spreads across college campuses and is occasionally banned, which some might see as a badge of honor.
A board of wants: developers needed, contacts offered, offers suggested. We love it when founders lean into old-fashioned tactics. (Some still work!)
David George, who leads the growth investment team at Andreessen Horowitz, joined the show to talk to Julie Bort about what startups should weigh when looking at the public market. It was his birthday, as it turns out; the audience takes a moment here to celebrate with him.
Here is San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie discussed his call with President Trump about why he shouldn’t send the National Guard to the city — a proposal made by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. “What I said to him was what I say to everybody: this is a city on the rise,” Lurie said. “Three days of Disrupt here should prove that.” As for whether he was making concessions with the deal-making Trump, he was final. “No, absolutely not. No, ask.”
Many people come from all over the world to program on how to put their startups together. We covered all the bases on our Builders Stage which was packed every day, all day.
Post-show excitement from TC’s Jessica Barrera, who handled ticket sales for 10,000 attendees. She saves our bacon routinely.
For many more photos from the event, visit our Flickr stream.
You can also find our full video coverage: here’s Day 1, Day 2 and Day 3.