CoreOS YC Application

Summer 2013Acquired

CoreOS went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2013 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: Summer 2013
Industry: B2BInfrastructure
Team size: 150
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2013

Founders

Alex PolviFounder/CEO

What CoreOS does

CoreOS is part of the Red Hat family. A leader in the open source community and an innovator of open source projects, CoreOS creates and delivers critical components for containerized applications that help fuel broad adoption of secure, scalable and resilient infrastructure. The team maintains several open source projects, including: Container Linux: the secure automatic updating OS; and etcd, the distributed data store for Kubernetes. Join us at and @CoreOS on Twitter.

CoreOS's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

CoreOS, Summer 2013 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

CoreOS

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Open source tools of modern distributed systems

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

We build open source software for infrastructure: Container Linux, a secure OS with automatic updates; and etcd, a distributed data store used by Kubernetes. These tools help developers run containerized applications reliably at scale.

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

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

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco has the engineering talent and ecosystem we need to build a platform-level infrastructure company focused on open source.

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 CoreOS YC application?

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