Segment YC Application

Summer 2011Acquired

Segment went through Y Combinator in the Summer 2011 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 2011
Industry: B2BAnalytics
Team size: 550
Status: Acquired
Launched: 2012

Founders

Ilya VolodarskyFounder

What Segment does

Segment is one place to collect customer data and send it to your tools for analytics, marketing automation, and raw data access with SQL. Implement all of your event tracking with Segment’s single API instead of wrangling a new API for every new tool or database. Segment's integrations let you send your data to hundreds of tools and databases.

Segment's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Segment, Summer 2011 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Segment

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Software and APIs to collect customer data

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

We built Segment to simplify collecting customer data and sending it to different analytics and marketing tools. Instead of implementing separate tracking APIs for every tool, companies use our single API to instrument event tracking on their websites or apps. We then route the clean data to hundreds of integrations, from analytics platforms to data warehouses, making it easier to control and use customer data consistently across their stack.

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

We live in San Francisco, CA, and the company would continue to be based here after YC.

Explain your decision regarding location.

San Francisco is where our team and our early users are, and it's the center of the startup ecosystem and the analytics tools we integrate with. Staying here keeps us close to our customers and the broader developer community we rely on.

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 Segment YC application?

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