280 North YC Application

Winter 2008Acquired

280 North went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2008 batch as a B2B company. Below: what the company does, who founded it, and its application to YC, reconstructed question by question in the real YC form.

YC batch: Winter 2008
Industry: B2BEngineering, Product and Design
Team size: 11
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2012

Founders

Ross BoucherFounder
Tom RobinsonFounder
Francisco TolmaskyFounder

What 280 North does

280 North is a web application company based on their proprietary application framework, Cappuccino. Along with Objective-J, Cappuccino provides a complete toolkit to develop rich web applications. It's modeled after a proven desktop development environment, and has been released as an open source project under the LGPL. 280 North's first application, 280 Slides, enables anyone with a web browser to quickly and easily create beautiful presentations. 280 Slides takes advantage of the web by making it trivial to find and include great media in your presentation. We also built in advanced features like importing and exporting PowerPoint documents, so your data is always portable.

280 North's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

280 North, Winter 2008 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

280 North

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Web apps framework and 280 Slides presentation tool

What is your company going to make? Please describe your product and what it does or will do.

We built Cappuccino, a framework for developing rich web applications, plus 280 Slides, a web-based presentation app that makes it easy to create and share presentations in a browser. 280 Slides supports importing and exporting PowerPoint files so users can keep their data portable.

Where do you live now, and where would the company be based after YC?

We live in San Francisco and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the engineering and design talent we need. It's also where the founding team lives.

21 more answers in the full application

Founders, Progress, Idea, Equity, Curious, Batch Preference are in the full version. Create a free account to open it in YC Insights, next to every other YC batch.

See full application

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this the real 280 North YC application?

No. Y Combinator keeps submitted applications private. This is a reconstruction: the real YC form questions, answered from 280 North's public data (launch notes, founder backgrounds, product description). It shows how a company like 280 North would present itself to YC, not the text they submitted.