Octopart YC Application

Winter 2007Acquired

Octopart went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2007 batch as a Industrials 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 2007
Industry: IndustrialsManufacturing and Robotics
Team size: 11
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2012

Founders

Sam WurzelFounder/CEO
Harish AgarwalFounder/CTO
Andres MoreyFounder

What Octopart does

Engineering tools should be as streamlined and smart as everything else in your life: as your phone, as your email, as all the apps that help you manage your day-to-day. Your work should be as efficient as possible so you can generate innovative ideas, design elegant technology, and manufacture at scale, all because you can focus on the right things. There should not be any distractions caused by poorly designed websites, unreliable data, or unwieldy spreadsheets of haphazard electronic component information. You should be able to compare components, find important technical information, and easily grasp the spectrum of parts that will be a match for your design. This is what Octopart strives for. Finding electronic component information should not be holding engineers back from bringing ideas to life quickly and efficiently. We believe that pricing, availability, technical specifications, and reference designs should be transparent, fast to find, and easy to understand. That’s why we create powerful, intelligent tools that streamline the engineering workflow and enable fast decision making. Octopart provides accurate and complete data for millions of electronic components in a way that makes it easy to find and compare parts. Focus on the important stuff: building the technology of the future.

Octopart's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Octopart, Winter 2007 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Octopart

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Search engine for electronic components

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

We built Octopart to solve the problem of finding accurate and complete data on electronic components. Our product indexes millions of parts with up-to-date pricing, availability, and specs, enabling engineers to quickly compare and select components for design and manufacturing.

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

We live and work in New York, NY, USA and plan to keep the company based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Being in New York puts us close to both hardware startups and manufacturing hubs. It's where we found our initial users and it fits our team size and culture.

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 Octopart YC application?

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