Brace YC Application

Winter 2012Inactive

Brace went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2012 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 2012
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Status: Inactive
Launched: 2011

Founders

Cole Krumbholz

What Brace does

Brace is the new way to host your website. We believe that website hosting shouldn't be complicated. With Brace, updating your website is as simple as saving files in Dropbox. Brace gives you two versions of your website, a Draft version and a Production version. The Draft is for iteration and collaboration. The Production version is optimized for performance and scale.

Brace's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

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

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Brace

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Backlift lets front-end devs build full websites

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

We built Brace, a hosting platform that simplifies website updates by letting developers deploy changes just by saving files in Dropbox. It gives users a Draft site for collaboration and iteration, and a separate Production site optimized for performance and scale. This way, front-end developers can handle entire site builds without backend expertise or complicated deployment workflows.

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

We live in San Francisco, and we plan to base Brace here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where we are now and the natural place for a startup focused on web infrastructure and software developers. Being close to potential early users and investors matters.

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 Brace YC application?

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