Internapalooza
Category: History / Events Host: Cory Summary: The Bay Area intern networking event where Jack met Leo Zhang Last updated: 2026-04-06
Overview
Internapalooza is a recurring Bay Area event for interns, students, and early-career founders — a mixer designed to get the cohort of people who showed up in San Francisco for the summer into the same room. It operates on the principle that the best connections happen when you put ambitious people together informally and let the conversation happen.
Jack attended Internapalooza hosted by Cory Levy Levy — co-founder of Z Fellows. It is where he met Leo Zhang.
The Event Format
Internapalooza is a social event — not a conference, not a hackathon, not a pitch competition. No keynotes. No panels. Just people in a room, mingling, comparing notes on what they’re building, where they’re working, what they think.
This format is unusually productive for filtering signal from noise. In a formal conference setting, people perform. In a mixer, they’re more likely to say what they actually think. That’s the environment where Leo saying “prestige is bullshit” lands as a conversation opener rather than a presentation bullet point.
Cory
Cory hosted the event. He is a connector in the Bay Area intern/founder ecosystem — someone who organizes the kind of informal gatherings that are more socially valuable than most formal networking events. Further details about Cory are not yet documented in Jackipedia.
What Came Out of It
The meeting between Jack and Leo Zhang at Internapalooza produced one of the more interesting friendships in the archive — two people who connected immediately on the basis of a shared rejection of prestige as an organizing value, both operating in the most prestige-dense environment in the country.