Ark YC Application

Winter 2012Inactive

Ark went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2012 batch as a Consumer 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 2012
Industry: ConsumerContent
Team size: 11
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2011

Founders

Jonas TemplesteinFounder
Yiming LiuFounder/Chief Platform Officer
Patrick RileyFounder

What Ark does

Ark.com is a search engine for people. With Ark, you can search for new people, old classmates, new business contacts, and even your friends. With over a billion social network profiles indexed, and using a modern architecture, Ark provided the most comprehensive people search engine in the world. Prior to founding Ark, our team has experience at Google, AOL, Symantec, Lithium, Yahoo! Research and Y-Combinator.

Ark's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Ark, Winter 2012 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Ark

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Ark organizes the world's social information.

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

We built Ark.com, a search engine for people. It indexes over a billion social network profiles so users can find old classmates, new contacts, or friends. Our architecture handles wide-ranging social data to make people search comprehensive and fast.

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

We live in San Francisco, and the company is based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

We live in San Francisco because it's the best place to build a consumer social product and connects us to investors and talent.

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 Ark YC application?

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