Superside YC Application

Winter 2016Active

Superside went through Y Combinator in the Winter 2016 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 2016
Industry: B2BProductivity
Team size: 750
Status: Active
Launched: 2015

Founders

Fredrik ThomassenFounder/CEO

What Superside does

Superside is the leading Creating-as-a-Service company, and today helps 450+ ambitious brands like Google, Meta, Amazon, Salesforce, Coinbase get great design and creative done at scale. Superside is a fully remote tech-enabled creative company with 750 team members in 72 countries and 17 time zones. Superside delivers more reliable creative performance than any other solution on the market, and helps the world's leading brands with advertising, brand design and video. At Superside, our goal is to be the best at finding top creative talent anywhere in the world, and our promise is to build the fastest possible way to accelerate creative careers. We build technology to make it simple for customers to submit and manage projects, and to increase the productivity of our creative team. With a highly efficient operating model where we never do pitch work, never submit for awards and where we ensure 90+% team utilization, we are able to keep prices at around one third of the price of traditional advertising and design agencies. Since going through Y Combinator W16, Superside has raised capital from Luxor Capital, Prosus Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Slack Fund, Sam Altman, High Alpha and Alliance Ventures.

Superside's YC application, reconstructed

Y Combinator application

Superside, Winter 2016 batch. The real form questions, answered from public data.

Founders2
Company7
Progress7
Idea4
Equity3
Curious2
Batch Preference1

Company

Company name

Superside

Describe what your company does in 50 characters or less.

Creative-as-a-service

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

We provide a platform that connects high-quality creative talent with enterprises in need of design, advertising, and video work. Our product streamlines the submission and management of creative projects, enabling brands to get consistent, reliable creative output at scale through a fully remote, tech-enabled service.

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

We live in Oslo, Norway, and Superside is based here but operates fully remotely across 72 countries and 17 time zones. After YC, we plan to remain distributed and remote-first.

Explain your decision regarding location.

Oslo is our home base because that's where Fredrik lives and started the company. Running a remote team globally lets us access the best creative talent anywhere, which is key to our model and competitive advantage.

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 Superside YC application?

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