Y Combinator Funding Application
Summer 2014

Application deadline: 8 pm PST on March 28, 2014.

Please try to answer each question in less than 120 words.

We look at online demos only for the most promising applications, so don't skimp on the application because you're relying on a good demo.

Though we don't make any formal promise about secrecy, we will try to avoid disclosing your plans to potential competitors.

If you're about to answer a question by saying you can't tell us because the answer is classified or controversial, please tell us instead about an instance that isn't.

We recommend you save regularly by clicking on the update button at the bottom of this page. Otherwise you may lose work if we restart the server.

Your YC username:

ramitarora

Company name:

Company url, if any:

Phone number(s):

Please enter the url of a 1 minute unlisted (not private) YouTube video introducing the founders. (Instructions.)

YC usernames of all founders, including you, ramitarora, separated by spaces. (That's usernames, not given names: "bksmith," not "Bob Smith." If there are 3 founders, there should be 3 tokens in this answer.)

YC usernames of all founders, including you, ramitarora, who will live in the Bay Area June through August if we fund you. (Again, that's usernames, not given names.)

What is your company going to make?

If this application is a response to a YC RFS, which one?

For each founder, please list (separate line for each item): YC username; name; age; year of graduation, school, degree (unfinished in parens) and subject for each degree; email address; personal url, github url, linkedin url, facebook id, twitter id; employer and title for previous jobs. List the main contact first. Separate founders with blank lines. Put an asterisk before the name of anyone not able to move to the Bay Area.

Please tell us in one or two sentences about the most impressive thing other than this startup that each founder has built or achieved.

ramitarora: 1) Co-founded apt-hire.com(now out of business) and led a technical team comprising of 5 people to develop a Recruit Management System. Was able to get about 6-7 customers to use it. The project fell apart gradually as the other co-founder graduated from UIUC and went to grad school somewhere else.
2) While on my Junior Year internship, I acted as the project owner for a full-fledged Microsoft Internal app store for dogfooding iOS builds. 
Gathered  requirements, guided both functional and technical design, coordinated with the designers, developers, testers and a localization expert and delivered the project before the deadline. 
The project completed in the July end timeframe and I left Microsoft soon after. But as far as I know, it has been in use internally since then and is used by more than a 1000 people everyday.

anantxinix: Developed the first phase of Sensor-based Gesture Library for Android Smartphones. The library enables the user to use gestures such as tapping, swinging, shaking to complete small tasks, such as ignoring a call by tapping multiple times on the phone while inside the pocket. Ref: https://github.com/anant-singh/Gesture-library/

Please tell us about the time you, ramitarora, most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage.

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet? Have any of the founders not met in person?

Why did you pick this idea to work on? Do you have domain expertise in this area? How do you know people need what you're making?

I (Ramit) recently developed an Arduino wifi-based peephole camera to monitor my college apartment (mainly coz. there is just too much robbery going on in Champaign these-days) and found that there is almost no cheap and easy way to do so. Arduino Uno, CC3000 wifi-shield, SD card and a TTL JPEG camera cost me more than $100 along with about 6 years of coding knowledge to make everything work. If I had gone for something like a Dropcam, more would be spent on the hardware itself, plus the subscriptions.
So, Anant, who has worked extensively with Android phones(mostly inexpensive ones made by Chinese and Indian manufacturers) and I came up with this and are soon starting to work on this idea. 
We are basically undergrads, so we don't have any particular expertise in multi-media systems, however Anant has previously hacked on various Android projects and I was able to pull off a Gstreamer and GTK based usable audio-video player and recorder a few months back.
As of now, the biggest reasons that we believe something like this might work, are: 
1) Apps like "Wifi-Home Surveillance IP Camera" (Kalavision Inc.) are decently popular on the Google Play store despite them not being extremely user-friendly(and using technical terms like IP on their Interface)
2) Dropcam and HomeMonitor doing well despite their relatively high price-point
3) The CCTV market is already pretty big around the world
4) A bunch of friends at college(people who have junk phones, as they are always changing handsets) who said they will be willing to use for monitoring their college-apartments in the wake of crimes.

What's new about what you're making? What substitutes do people resort to because it doesn't exist yet (or they don't know about it)?

Who are your competitors, and who might become competitors? Who do you fear most?

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

How do or will you make money? How much could you make? (We realize you can't know precisely, but give your best estimate.)

If you've already started working on it, how long have you been working and how many lines of code (if applicable) have you written?

How far along are you? Do you have a beta yet? If not, when will you? Are you launched? If so, how many users do you have? Do you have revenue? If so, how much? If you're launched, what is your monthly growth rate (in users or revenue or both)?

If you have an online demo, what's the url? (Please don't password protect it; just use an obscure url.)

How will you get users? If your idea is the type that faces a chicken-and-egg problem in the sense that it won't be attractive to users till it has a lot of users (e.g. a marketplace, a dating site, an ad network), how will you overcome that?

If you're already incorporated, when were you? Who are the shareholders and what percent does each own? If you've had funding, how much, who from, and at what valuation or valuation cap?

If you're not incorporated yet, please list the percent of the company you plan to give each founder, and anyone else you plan to give stock to. (This question is as much for you as us.)

If you have already participated or committed to participate in an incubator, "accelerator" or "pre-accelerator" program, please tell us about it.

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?

For founders who can't, why not? What level of commitment are they willing to make?

Do any founders have other commitments between June through August 2014 inclusive?

Do any founders have commitments in the future (e.g. finishing college, going to grad school), and if so what?

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

Are any of the founders covered by noncompetes or intellectual property agreements that overlap with your project? Will any be working as employees or consultants for anyone else?

Was any of your code written by someone who is not one of your founders? If so, how can you safely use it? (Open source is ok of course.)

Are any of the following true? (a) You are the only founder. (b) You are a student who may return to school when the next term starts. (c) Half or more of your group can't move to the Bay Area. (d) One or more founders will keep their current jobs. (e) None of the founders are programmers.

(Answering yes doesn't disqualify you. It's just to remind us to check.)

If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, please list them. One may be something we've been waiting for. Often when we fund people it's to do something they list here and not in the main application.

Please tell us something surprising or amusing that one of you has discovered. (The answer need not be related to your project.)

(Clicking on update doesn't submit your application; it just saves it to disk.)