The Application Video

Instructions

  • In the video please introduce yourselves, explain what you’re doing and why, and tell us anything else you want to about the founders or the project.

  • The video should be 1 minute long and should contain nothing except the founders talking. No screenshots or post-production wizardry please; we don’t want this to turn into a video making contest. If you’re going to spend time making something cool, put it into your product.

  • This is not the place to submit a demo or promotional video. If you have a demo for your product, there is a place in the application for that. However, we don’t want to see any promotional video. Here, we want to hear how the founders communicate.

  • If you have more than one founder, try to have all of your founders in the video. If you can’t be in the same room at the same time, you may want to record a video conference conversation instead.

  • Don’t mark it as private or disallow embedding on YouTube, or we won’t be able to see it. Please note that because of how our system is built, YouTube’s view count will not increase even though we do watch your video.

  • If you are in a country where YouTube is unavailable, you may use an alternate service, like YouKu for China. If you use YouKu, you may want to set a password on your video. You can provide the password in the application.

  • Please do not recite a script written beforehand. Just talk spontaneously as you would to a friend. People delivering memorized speeches (or worse still, text read off the screen) usually come off as stupid. Unless you’re a good enough actor to fake spontaneity, you lose more in the stilted delivery than you gain from a more polished message.

  • Please do not add any background music to your video. We regularly give up 10 seconds into a video because we can’t stand the random background music.

  • Watch your own video before you submit. Make sure you can hear what you are saying. A significant fraction of the videos we get are inaudible. If you’re going to apply at all, you may as well apply with a video we can hear.

Here are some successful YC application videos:


Campus Job (YC W15)


Flip (YC W15)


Zenefits (YC W13)


Teespring (YC W13)