Blog · Makersclaw
The actual YC applications real founders got in with — reproduced in full.
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OpenPhone's S18 application shows 1,500 users, 32 paying customers and $320 of revenue in the last month. In September 2025 the company renamed itself Quo, raised $105M and reported nearly 90,000 businesses. The thesis that got them there is in the application.
The Muse's W12 application names one wedge: a community of job-seeking women, built to rival The Ladders. The company outgrew it, reached a peak Minshew puts at 70 million annual users, then in 2022 paid cash and stock to buy that market back.
Cruise applied to YC's Winter 2014 batch with a bolt-on box that deliberately solved only 90% of driving and left the rest to you. The box was never shipped. GM bought the unconstrained version instead and sank $10 billion into it before shutting it down. Here is the original application.
Prolific applied to YC in 2019 already profitable, 13 people, no funding taken. The application says they want to be the infrastructure layer for human responses — and names scale.ai as a thing someone else could build on them. Read it knowing how that turned out.
The application says it plainly: no one is combining LLMs yet, and this is the future of LLM usage. Both halves came true. Routing became normal, then became a feature — and the company that called it now sells the thing the router was sitting on top of the whole time.
Asked who they feared, the application skips every competitor it has listed and names the regulators. Two years later Standard Treasury could not raise a Series A, on regulatory and geographic risk. Right threat, wrong delivery mechanism — and the mechanism is what decides whether you continue.
Three weeks full-time, no revenue, four unpaid pilots, and a product called Foobar. Asked how far along they were, they answered “Not far.” Asked about competitors, they admitted anyone could clone them. Read the application that ended in an acquisition by a public company.
Two students from a discrete math class pitched YC on one sentence: stop tracking page views, track what people actually do. They named Google Analytics as the thing they feared most, and listed four startups already in the race. Read the application that became a $1.05B company.
Cruise applied to YC in 2014 as a $3,000 kit that bolted self-driving onto a car you already owned. GM bought it for over $1 billion and spent $10 billion more — until it all collapsed in 2024. Here's the original application, before any of that.
GitLab applied to YC in 2015 already at ~$1M revenue, growing 60% a month — and turning down a $10M acquisition offer. Six years later it IPO'd at ~$11B. Here's the actual application, reproduced word for word, with where it landed.
Drew Houston got into YC with a screencast and a few paragraphs — and most of the company is already visible in the answers. This is the 2007 application, reproduced word for word, with where Dropbox actually ended up.
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