Mark Zuckerberg To Speak Tomorrow At Y Combinator Startup School

Mark Zuckerberg has been understandably very busy in the months since he took Facebook public — closing and integrating the billion dollar Instagram acquisition, overhauling Facebook’s mobile strategy, jetting to far-flung places to build the company’s international presence, and such — that he has spent remarkably little time giving interviews and speeches. In fact, his talk with Michael Arrington last month at Disrupt was his first official on-stage interview since Facebook’s initial public offering way back in May.

So attendees at Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator’s annual Startup School event tomorrow are in for a real treat: Zuckerberg is slated to appear as a speaker, kicking off the day-long program being held at Stanford University in Palo Alto.

Co-sponsored by YC and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), Startup School is aimed at giving programmers who are thinking about starting their own companies the motivation and know-how to make the leap into the startup life. We can expect Zuckerberg and the other speakers (including Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, and more) to talk about their own personal entrepreneurial experiences. It’s an event by hackers for hackers, so the speakers tend to be especially relaxed and candid about what it takes to build a business.

Applications for this year’s YC Startup School are closed and the event is completely sold out, but if you’re not already on deck to see Zuck in person don’t despair: TechCrunch will be there issuing reports from the event. You can also watch the livestream of it all from www.startupschool.org.

This will be the fourth year in a row that Zuckerberg is speaking at Startup School, so his attendance is a tradition of sorts at this point. In his appearance there last year, he famously said that if he were starting Facebook today, he would have kept it headquartered in Boston, saying, “If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me.” Now that he’s put Facebook on what is meant to be the ultimate long-term track — the public stock market — it will be very interesting to hear what his perspective is like these days.

Embedded below is the video from Zuckerberg’s appearance at YC’s 2011 Startup School, courtesy of YouTube user John Davi: