Padlet YC Application

Winter 2013Active

Padlet went through Y Combinator in the Winter 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: Winter 2013
Industry: B2BProductivity
Team size: 65
Status: Active
Launched: 2012

Founders

Nitesh GoelFounder/CEO

What Padlet does

We are easily bored. It's the one thing that unites humanity in 2020. No one wants to read twenty paragraphs of text, or sit through forty verbose slides. Yet, we keep making them, boring everyone out of their minds. We are building more beautiful and fun alternatives to traditional documents. They're less of a pain-in-the-ass to create, and a lot less waterboard-y to view. Checkout a Padlet timeline ( or a Padlet map ( to see what we're talking about. Over ten million people all over the world use Padlet. Most satisfyingly, for millions of kids, Padlet is their first experience of creating things on the Internet. People say we are improving education. People say we are making them more creative. People say a lot of things.

Padlet's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Padlet, Winter 2013 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Padlet

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

A simple, visual, fun alternative to documents

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

We built Padlet to replace boring, text-heavy documents and presentations with something interactive, visual, and easy to create. Users - including millions of kids and educators - can create timelines, maps, and other media-rich boards that make information more engaging and less painful to read.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and would remain based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where we live and work, and it's the best place to build a productivity and education SaaS like Padlet. It connects us to users, early partners, and future hires.

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 Padlet YC application?

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