One thing we all love at Aptible are t-shirts. These versatile garments are more than just a piece of clothing covering one’s torso — they're an expression of identity and a canvas for creativity. T-shirts have a unique way of showcasing our passions and affiliations to the world.

So we thought, why not take our love of t-shirts and combine it with what we’re doing here at Aptible. Our mission is to enable developers to do more with less infrastructure. We’re calling it the No Infrastructure future. Imagine, what if you didn’t have to manage infrastructure? What if you didn’t have to deal with the complexities of provisioning, the challenges of scaling, and the burden of infrastructure maintenance? There’s very few (although they probably do exist) that want to spend more time dealing with infrastructure.

Introducing our initial collection of ‘No Infra’ shirts. This collection serves as a tangible representation of shedding the burdens of software infrastructure.

To share our love of shirts and the ‘No Infrastructure’ movement, we’re giving this initial collection of shirts away for free. 

And, this collection of shirts will not be reprinted. Once they're gone, they're gone for good. So experience Aptible's platform and claim your shirt before it’s gone.

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👕 Deploy your first app and get a ‘No Infra’ shirt.

For any first time users, simply sign up for Aptible, deploy your first application, and you’ll receive a t-shirt.

Deploy a Shirt 👕

Aptible has a new look. But more importantly, we want to talk about the future of platform as a service, and how we intend to rapidly expand the value our platform delivers to you. Also, it’s the Aptible platform’s birthday!

You might’ve noticed a few changes on aptible.com, in our docs, and in our product. Our visual design, how we talk about ourselves, our pricing page, and the product dashboard. What’s going on you ask?

Aptible has been fortunate to experience steady growth in our user base for the last 10 years, thanks primarily to the resilience and growth of our customers. Today marks the Aptible platform’s 9th official birthday. It also marks the beginning of the future for Aptible.

We’re proud of how far we’ve come since the platform launched on March 21, 2014. But there’s so much more ground to cover if we’re going to achieve our vision of making it possible for any developer and company to launch and scale products without building and managing infrastructure.

Over the years we’ve gotten countless suggestions and ideas on how to improve our PaaS. The most useful source of feedback has been the hundreds of calls we’ve had with existing customers, and the many we’ve had with prospective customers as well. We intend to continue these discovery processes and, in fact, we intend to accelerate our pace of learning further.

Today’s changes are just a step in that direction. While we plan to rapidly expand the value our product provides to customers, and to iterate quickly, what we are “soft launching” today is just the first in a long line of changes we anticipate making. All with the same end goal in mind: continually improving how we eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure for companies like yours.

Upcoming changes that we’re particularly excited about are:

But that’s just three changes. What’s guiding our focus moving forward?

While we’ve long delivered different user interfaces for our PaaS–CLI, Terraform, Dashboard–the developer experience, especially of our Dashboard, has become a bit dated. It certainly wasn’t the “magical” experience developers expect, or the one we want to deliver to make good on our promise to eliminate the pains of building and managing infrastructure.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey to deliver a magical developer experience. Our team is completely reimagining how developers use Aptible, making it more like this: 

At the same time, we continue to tackle the really hard scaling problems we’ve worked with hundreds of fast growing companies to solve. Problems such as: optimizing resource costs via autoscaling, right-sizing, and instance class tuning, deploying complex architectures just as easily as monolithic web apps, and finding and fixing performance bottlenecks in distributed systems.

Building for all startups–and every company

Hundreds of digital health companies have used Aptible to go from 2 developers in a garage to unicorn status, successful acquisition, and even IPO. But few outside of digital health know of Aptible. 

Aptible has great security and compliance benefits that are, in truth, industry agnostic. While we’ll continue to ensure we’re the best PaaS for digital health startups, we know our PaaS can be useful to every startup, regardless of industry focus.

Thinking longer term, the reason Aptible exists is to enable every developer to focus on ideas, not infrastructure. We want to empower all developers to build valuable products for their customers, without dealing with the pain of building or managing infrastructure. This goes for all developers, from those working at early stage startups to those on enterprise product teams.

We believe that “No Infrastructure” is the future of software development. You’ll hear us talk about our “No Infrastructure” vision of the future more and more as we go forward. 

While it may not feel as substantial as our plans to deliver magical developer experiences and tackling the scaling problems companies face, we’ve also updated our brand look and feel. We wanted a new, bright look that complements our optimistic outlook and commitment to our No Infrastructure vision. 

Of course, we love the Aptible arrow logo and didn’t want to replace it. So we turned to our friends at 

, who helped us with our previous successful visual redesign. We went through several (SEVERAL) versions while we collaboratively iterated towards the look and feel that most resonated with our team and the value we want to bring to our customers. 

We hope you agree that this is a much needed improvement to our brand without straying too far from what worked well.

Aptible pricing has stayed consistent for about a decade. We’re investing in ways to help companies manage costs on Aptible. The first two changes, while smaller, are a strong platform we can use to continue to improve how we help customers manage costs. Initially, we are releasing:

With Limits, companies can be sure to limit their infrastructure costs without running the risk of downtime. If you select a Limit (today, you’d select a Limit by picking a Plan), Aptible will ensure you don’t provision resources that would raise you above the max limits–and the max invoice–you’ve chosen.

Plans are the primary vehicle we are (currently) using to experiment with Limits. The point is to make it easier for companies to “choose” where they want their infrastructure spend to be based on the size, scale, and maturity of their project. 

For now, all existing Aptible customers will be grandfathered on their current pricing plan, and will not have Limits enforced. Going forward, based on your feedback, we may make Limits accessible beyond the first set of Plans we’ve implemented, making them available across the customer base. Beyond that, we anticipate continuously releasing cost optimization tools to help you control your Aptible invoice.

We’re still the same Aptible that hundreds of companies and thousands of developers have trusted to run their infrastructure for the past decade. We’re just making some changes, seeking to accelerate investment in our PaaS, ensuring we are continuously improving on how we deliver our “No Infrastructure” vision, and being the best PaaS for both starting and scaling a company on, without the pain of managing infrastructure.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to any of us or your account manager if you have any questions, suggestions, or requests. We’d love to hear your thoughts, and any ideas you have on how we can better deliver the best possible PaaS.

And most importantly, thank you to all of our customers for their support, product usage, and continuous feedback. We love working with each of you and plan to continue to earn your trust and make good on our “No Infrastructure” vision so we can run your infrastructure (so you don’t have to) for many years to come.

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

, a customer trust platform born out of the insights obtained building Aptible Comply. Conveyor is a new company spun out of Aptible whose mission is to build a more trustworthy internet by creating a network of customers and vendors that makes it simple to build trust through data security.

Aptible will continue to exist and Deploy will operate unchanged. Customers of Aptible who only use Deploy will experience no change (other than even greater focus on improving the Deploy product). Comply will become the foundation of the compliance management functionality available in Conveyor. Customers of Aptible who used Comply will be contacted by a success manager to help you understand how this change may impact you and how to proceed.

In the decade since Marc Andreessen wrote his op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, “Why Software Is Eating the World,” his predictions about the effects of lowered startup costs and a massively expanded global market for software services have largely come true. It’s even more true today than in 2011 that more and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services.

At the same time, the old joke about how “the cloud is just someone else’s computer” also rings true in a different way, with terms like “supply chain attacks” coming into the mainstream from repeated large breaches like SolarWinds. With more businesses sharing more data with more cloud vendors, it’s never been more important to build trust with customers around data security.

So why is building trust more difficult than ever? Ten years ago, only a few enterprise SaaS vendors would have a SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification, but today customers routinely subject vendors to scrutiny based on the data they process, regardless of the size of the vendor. Even small B2B SaaS companies are now required to provide compliance certifications, pen test results, and answers to lengthy security questionnaires to close deals. Larger SaaS vendors find their teams replying to dozens or even hundreds of security questionnaires per month.

For deals that proceed to vendor risk assessment, the ways customers and vendors build trust together are deeply broken and painful for both sides. Sales deals crawl as customers and vendors go back and forth proving trust. Signing NDAs, getting documents watermarked, and responding to questions are actions that happen with every deal but are not standardized. Sharing security documents in cloud folders and completing questionnaires in spreadsheets creates an unmanageable sprawl of files. Companies have sales teams and security/compliance teams, but no one focused on proving data security trustworthiness to customers. The sales team doesn’t know enough about security and the security team has bigger priorities than “selling.”

So far, the compliance software industry has only responded with ever-more complex ways to determine trustworthiness; Conveyor exists to make it more simple. Previously, the team behind Conveyor was building Aptible Comply, a GRC automation tool. Over and over again customers said the underlying reason to achieve compliance certifications, respond to questionnaires, share security reports, and perform all the other work around trust building were motivated by the desire to answer a simple customer question: Is it safe for us to do business together?

Conveyor believes there is a better way. Providing security information should be as easy as sharing a link. Questionnaires should be answered before questions are even asked. Building trust with customers should be fast and effortless. By enabling customers to connect with their vendors on Conveyor it’s possible for customers to instantly access security documents, get answers to questions, and build trust in their vendors, without vendors having to do extra work.

Many of the most trusted companies in the SaaS world are already using Conveyor to build trust with their customers. For example, Datadog, PagerDuty, and Sift each have thousands of customers and are all using Conveyor to streamline responding to security questionnaires and provide customers self-serve access to their security documents.

Conveyor exists to fix the broken process and speed up building trust around data security. It’s a customer trust platform that makes it easy for companies to build trust with their customers (and for customers to determine the trustworthiness of their vendors). Sign up today and join some of the most trusted SaaS companies in the world, as we make the internet more trustworthy, together!

Today, we’re excited to introduce Conveyor, a customer trust platform born out of the insights obtained building Aptible Comply. Conveyor is a new company spun out of Aptible whose mission is to build a more trustworthy internet by creating a network of customers and vendors that makes it simple to build trust through data security.

Greater focus on Deploy as Comply becomes Conveyor

I’m happy to announce that Aptible raised a Series A led by Maverick Ventures with participation from Thrive Capital and WTI!*

Aptible’s mission is to build trust on the internet. If it’s true that software is eating the world, and that every business will be a software business in the future, it’s equally true that every business will be a security business. Every business that uses data will have to account for how it protects that data.

Today, the norm for this kind of trust-building involves completing compliance audits like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. But compliance is often a poor approximation of security, and has a tendency to replace security as the goal. Compliance itself is treated like a series of checkboxes barely connected to how the business operates or produces value: policies that nobody reads, training nobody remembers, and controls that look good on paper but don’t actually work. Thousands of dollars and hours later, the result is a lot of compliance theater and a gnawing sense that even with your audit report in hand, you’re barely more secure than when you started.

Our vision for Aptible Comply is a world where compliance is not the end goal, but a byproduct of the true goals of security and business growth. We aim to give every company access to great information security – security that enhances growth – from Day 1. We’ll use the funds from our Series A to work towards this mission.

Over the coming weeks and months we’ll be sharing more about the future of Aptible and how we are working to reimagine a world where trust-building goes beyond compliance. I’m incredibly excited for our product roadmap, and look forward to sharing it with you! We’ll soon be releasing tools that help companies manage security workflows, producing compliance documentation as a result of executing everyday business operations. We’ll also be building more ways for companies to connect with others, building trust by communicating their security efforts internally and externally.

Whether you’ve been an Aptible customer since we launched, or you recently signed up, thank you for your support! We wouldn’t have gotten this far without you; and we won’t be able to achieve our mission of building trust without your help.

 to try Aptible Comply or Aptible Deploy

*Coincidentally, we closed the round over a year ago the day GDPR enforcement began. Based on our experience with the surge of customers needing help with GDPR, we opted to spend the last year studying the market, talking to customers, and rebuilding our HIPAA-focused Gridiron product into a framework-agnostic security management platform: 

I’m happy to announce that Aptible raised a Series A led by Maverick Ventures with participation from Thrive Capital and WTI!

Announcing Aptible’s $12 million Series A funding!

Goodbye Enclave and Gridiron, hello Aptible Deploy and Aptible Comply

Aptible was founded to build trust on the internet. We do this by making it easier for companies to go from having an idea to releasing it to the world safely and securely. Protecting data online can no longer be an afterthought. Saying “we take data security seriously” isn’t good enough. Customers, partners, investors, shareholders, and vendors are all demanding proof that you’re authentically investing in data security.

Over the past 9 months, we’ve been working behind the scenes with our amazing partners at Focus Lab to update our brand to help us better articulate this vision. We’re pleased with the results, and we’re so happy to finally have the opportunity to share them with you.

Introducing Aptible Deploy and Aptible Comply

Today, we’re excited to announce our new brand identity. The biggest and most important change is that we’ve renamed our products to Aptible Deploy (Enclave) and Aptible Comply (Gridiron). We like the simplicity of these names because we know they’ll be easy for our customers to identify with. If you need to deploy assets securely and in an audit-ready way, use Aptible Deploy. If you need to run a Security Management program that complies with SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR, NIST CSF, among others, use Aptible Comply.

The names Enclave and Gridiron have always been special to us, the Aptible team, because we like the sports, team, strategy, and security metaphors that they engendered. But over the last five years of working with hundreds of companies, we found that they often led to confusion, which contradicts our vision. Protecting data--security and compliance--can feel like a confusing, esoteric topic. Why compound this by going to market with product names that rely on metaphors to tell their story?

Our brand identity is more than product naming. We’ve designed the new Aptible brand to represent how we want to communicate with our customers and prospects. More broadly, the Aptible brand should guide every touchpoint we have with a prospect or customer.

We believe the visual and verbal components of our brand give us a strong foundation for engaging with our customers, and telling the story of using security management to build trust on the internet.

Our new logo was designed around the motif of an arrow. This arrow is significant for us; it emerged early in our brainstorming. We want to communicate to our customers that we guide them through the process of security, both at the outset during onboarding and an initial audit, but beyond as they look to continuously improve their security.

The idea of following the arrow gives rise to our new tagline, “Beyond Compliance.” Of course, we help companies with compliance--these are the things you have to do--but what we really want is not just compliance, it’s security. We want to help guide companies Beyond Compliance towards real security. The journey to real security is never ending, and as a result our work with our customers is never ending. But we are committed to helping each of our customers travel in the right direction.

Our language and colors are designed to evoke the emotions and ideas of accessibility and navigation. The yellow in our style guide is patterned off of road signs. The language we use in our marketing, sales, and customer conversations is designed to be welcoming. We showcase how our security and compliance knowledge can be helpful without being arrogant, boastful, or threatening. We try to eliminate jargon. This is also the reason you won’t often hear us talk about the many damaging data breaches that occur across the internet each month, except where our customers need to take action, or when a breach can be educational, such as those showcased in our 

Since Aptible was founded in the wake of the release of the 

, through our experience in Y Combinator in the Summer of 2014, and in the years since as we’ve worked to make Aptible Comply and Aptible Deploy the best tools for companies to use to manage their security efforts and to deploy audit-ready assets online (respectively), we’ve been a quiet company. Our investment in telling our story has been limited. We’re looking to change that.

We’re committed to releasing resources that teach companies how to improve their security, regardless of where they’re starting. To that end, we’ll be releasing our first Security Management Guide in the coming days. We’re excited to share it with you, so be sure to 

Our customers have helped us so much; we are so grateful for the extraordinary level of feedback that our customers give us, which has helped us to make rapid progress on our mission. As a thank you, we’ve sent each customer for which we had a valid shipping address a swag box with some gifts bearing our new branding. If you didn’t receive a box, and would like one, don’t hesitate to let us know!

As we continue to get to know our customers better, we’ve realized that each has a unique and compelling story. We’ve started to capture our 

 in videos, in the hopes that we can use our customers’ own experiences to communicate the value of investing in security. Later this month, we’ll be continuing this conversation with a live webinar we are cohosting with our customers.

We’ve also taken on projects to help define and illustrate our team culture to help potential Aptible team members (some of us like to call ourselves “Aptillians”) learn about the company and new Aptillians to get comfortable quickly. Our People Operations team will be sharing some of this work through our blog over the coming weeks.

There’s much more to come, including more announcements about the future of Aptible that we’ll be ready to share with you in the coming weeks.

Overall, we expect to be a bit less quiet than we have been in the past. You will hear from us more often, but we will work to ensure that each time you hear from us we provide you with valuable and exciting information. That said, it would be out of character for us--against our brand identity--for us to be too noisy.

For now, we’d love your feedback. Don’t hesitate to let us know how you feel about this brand change by writing to 

. Or, if you feel so inclined, please help us to share our new branding a bit more broadly by hitting one of the social share links on this blog post!

Introducing Aptible’s new brand identity

I am happy to announce that Aptible has earned ISO 27001 certification for our Enclave and Gridiron products! This is the result of a lot of hard work by the Aptible team, and is good news for you if you’re an Aptible customer: You can use Aptible’s ISO 27001 certification to show your customers that your cloud computing stack meets an international standard for security.

ISO is an organization. In English, the name of the organization is the “International Organization for Standardization,” but usually people just call it ISO, like International Business Machines Corporation is just IBM.

ISO produces “standards:” documents that outline requirements, specifications, and guidelines.

Requirements, specifications, and guidelines for what? Lots of things. There are over 20,000 standards, and they can be very specific.

. This can be strangely fascinating: pick a random noun and search for it.

“Avocado?” Boom: ISO 2295 is a guide for the storage and transport of avocados. ISO 3659 has instructions on how to ripen avocados after cold storage. And so on.

ISO standards also cover more abstract concepts. One of the best-known standards is ISO 9001, which sets out criteria for a quality management “system”, or set of principles and business processes.

ISO 27001 is also a “system” standard. It defines requirements for information security management systems. The main body of the standard outlines a governance structure that you have to adopt: requirements for determining what counts as in-scope or out-of-scope for your “system,” assigning security roles and responsibilities, security planning activities, risk management activities, monitoring/metrics, and improving the system itself.

ISO 27001 also has an annex of reference controls relating to areas like cryptography, operations security, asset management, incident management, and more. The reference controls are normative, in the sense that if you don’t implement a given control, you need to be able to convince your auditor that your decision was reasonable, or otherwise explain yourself.

What does ISO 27001 mean for software development teams?

Think of ISO 27001 as a baseline for good security management processes. “We take security seriously” is a cliche. Many developer teams know they would benefit from an organized approach to security, but don’t know where to start. Hiring someone full-time for security is a stretch for small teams, and managing security just gets more complex as you scale.

Teams seeking ISO 27001 certification need to be organized. Like most of the major information security protocols (SOC 2, HIPAA, PCI, etc.), ISO 27001 requires:

Most teams will end up investing in secure software development practices, such as test coverage, continuous integration/continuous deployment, code review, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing. On a practical level, you’ll probably get serious about MFA, require everyone to use a password manager, start using mobile device management to secure laptops and phones, do criminal background screenings, stuff like that.

What does ISO 27001 “certification” mean?

ISO standards are voluntary. Unlike the Department of Health and Human Services with HIPAA enforcement or the PCI Security Standards Council, the ISO organization itself doesn’t have any ability to enforce the standards. In fact, anyone can claim they “comply” or are “consistent” with any of the ISO standards.

The gold standard is a certification performed by an “accredited” certification body, or auditor. Being “accredited” means the auditors have themselves been audited against an ISO standard for how they conduct audits and certifications.

Aptible has been certified by Coalfire ISO, an ISO/IEC 27001 Certification Body accredited by the ANSI-ASQ National Accreditation Board (ANAB).

How does Aptible’s ISO 27001 certification benefit you?

Getting organized about security helps us protect your data. ISO 27001 lays out clear best practices for security management. With developer teams, huge problems can come from seemingly little things like not sanitizing inputs, not patching vulns, accidentally pushing sensitive data to the wrong system. ISO 27001 certification means we’ve spent time thinking systematically about risk, and have strong controls in place to manage it.

In turn, you can use Aptible’s ISO 27001 certification to show your customers that your cloud computing stack meets an international standard for security.

How can you get your own ISO 27001 certification?

The traditional way is prepare is to use consultants or full-time hires. This usually involves a lot of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, takes a long time, is extremely expensive, and makes you feel slightly let down, like you just spent all that time and money and not much really changed. You may have this nagging feeling that you’re not actually that much more secure, but at least you have antivirus on everyone’s laptops.

I think there’s a better way. At Aptible, we make Gridiron, a set of tools for managing security, designed specifically for software development teams. 

 if you want to get ready for ISO 27001, HIPAA, SOC 2, PCI, NIST 800-53, 21 CFR Part 11, or any other security framework.

Announcing ISO 27001 Certification for Aptible Enclave and Gridiron

Over the last quarter, we released a number of new features and updates for the Enclave deployment platform. We also began helping customers deployed on AWS to manage their organization’s security and compliance using Gridiron.

Yesterday, on a brief webinar, our team reviewed the updates to the Enclave platform and showed how Gridiron helps software developers build and maintain strong security management programs.

In case you missed it, you can download the slide deck and get the transcript in 

, or watch the full event below. We also provide a quick recap in this blog post.

We intend for Enclave to be the best platform for developers to deploy regulated and sensitive software products. This quarter, we focused on improving Enclave in three ways: security and compliance, database self-service, and general usability improvements.

We launched new ways to secure apps and meet compliance goals while improving the security of Enclave itself.

We’ve previously detailed these improvements on our blog. Here’s the list:

Self-serve database scaling is coming soon. The 

, and we will launch self-service database scaling soon.

We launched a few small improvements that should make developers’ lives easier when deploying with Enclave:

Gridiron is our suite of tools that helps developers build and maintain strong security management programs. Gridiron makes the administrative side of protecting data easy and helps to prepare you for regulatory audits as well as customer security reviews.

In the webinar, we gave a short talk-through of how Gridiron approaches security management. This starts with the Gridiron Data Model: an API that integrates data from your business, our experience working with hundreds of customers in securing sensitive data, and industry-wide security standards provided through NIST Guidance, vulnerability and attack databases and shared intel.

Gridiron ingests data about your business through a series of straightforward and relevant questions that are easy to answer but have important implications for your internal security program.

Gridiron uses that data to create deliverables that help you show security and compliance as well as improve your business operations.

If you’d like to improve your organization’s security and compliance and simplify the process for working through customer security reviews and regulatory audits, please 

. For a limited time we’re offering early access pricing for customers who have deployed on AWS.

Register Now for July 2017 Aptible Product Update Webinar

Our next product update webinar will be hosted on July 25, 2017 at 11am Pacific / 2pm Eastern.

All registrants will receive a webinar recap and the recording shortly after the conclusion of the webinar.

Recap: Aptible April 2017 Quarterly Product Update

Having just come through Y Combinator, we frequently get asked whether it was worth it. The answer is absolutely yes, no hesitation. While the experience is still fresh, I want to encourage you to 

You have a early-stage startup, or at least an idea for one. You know Y Combinator is fantastic: the network is legendary, the terms are fair, the other founders are incredible, and it provides an amazing lift for customer acquisition, fundraising, and recruiting.

The catch is that acceptance rates are brutal. Somewhere below 3% of applicants get an offer.

Should you skip this application cycle and apply later, when your company is more mature?

You should apply now, even if you don’t think you are ready.

The application process itself is valuable. Preparing the application requires you to think carefully about your idea, your company, your market, your team, and the obstacles in your way. Forcing yourself to reflect honestly is painful, but extremely beneficial. Seize the opportunity to do it now.

You have a better chance than you think. The traits YC looks for in companies and founders are well-known and addressable. By “well-known,” I mean go read PG and Sam’s essays. By “addressable,” I mean you can improve your chances with focused work and practice. If your company doesn’t have the ideal characteristics, you can acquire the important ones. If you have the right ingredients, you can learn to convey that clearly and concisely.

“Make something people want” is YC’s motto. It’s also what they look for in companies. It’s not always sufficient, but it is necessary. If you do it, the rest can fall into place. If you don’t do it, you’re toast. Or Clinkle.

Others have written about how to find something to make that people want. I won’t get into that here, but I will add that most of the YC application process reduces to proving you’ve made something people want.

How do you prove it? Having paying customers is convincing. Having a lot of users is also convincing.

Showing that people want something similar to what you made or that you could make something people want are not convincing.

Sign contracts, take preorders, get LOIs, fill a waitlist, collect emails from customers saying how they can’t wait to pay you. Stop reading this and go do whatever you can to prove people want what you make. Now!

Now, armed with proof that you make something people want, you are ready to apply.

Spend time thinking carefully about the questions. Don’t spend any time trying to 

The application questions are a subset of the questions you may be asked at an interview.

Writing your answers out will help you formulate concise, consistent responses.

To test our fluency, we did mock interviews with each other, with our startup/tech friends, and with YC alums.

Mock interviews are the best way to practice. You will be shocked and disappointed by how incompetent you sound at first. Don’t worry, you’ll improve dramatically with repetition.

As one of our investors puts it, “You’re going to be telling people what you do eight times a day for the rest of the company’s life. Get good at it.”

Below are the questions we used to prepare. I don’t remember where we found each one, so apologies to the original sources. I’ve grouped them into categories by how important I think they are. The groups are my own and do not reflect YC’s views.

Remember: One or two sentences each. If you prepare longer answers, you’ll be flustered when the YC partners cut you off to ask another question. James Cunningham and Colin Hayhurst (GoScale, S12) built a 

These are the most important questions. They are all different ways of determining if you make something people want. You need to have a good answer, or an excellent reason for not having an answer. Many of these are in the application itself.

These questions concern narrative, team, and tactics. They are important, but only if you make something people want first.

These are questions that have a correct answer.

If you get asked these in an interview, either you’re not doing well or you’re being tested. Try to preempt them with good answers to the more critical questions.

Have answers, but don’t stress about these questions.

Step 3 might be “Accept”, but if you interview, you should have already decided. You give up ~7% of the company for $120k in funding. YC will increase the value of your company by much more than 7%, without question. You will not get a better deal from fairer, more transparent partners anywhere.

You will only have about 100 days between getting accepted and Demo Day to make the most convincing case possible to investors. If you don’t get in, you have about 200 days to prove you can make something people want before you can apply again. Start now.

Good job on making it to the end! Feel free to ping me on 

 or with the contact link above if you have questions. After interview invitations go out, I’ll volunteer a limited number of mock interview spots on Twitter.

You can find the Hacker News discussion for this post 

Update - October 29, 2016: Formatting edits.

Having just come through Y Combinator, we frequently get asked whether it was worth it. The answer is absolutely yes, no hesitation. While the experience is still fresh, I want to encourage you to apply for the next cycle and give some advice for getting in.

How to Get Into Y Combinator

YES! Finally! The Aptible team and I are very happy to announce our public launch.

Frank and I started Aptible because we saw how difficult it was for technology companies to navigate the regulatory environment in healthcare. We believe that many of the most intractable problems in healthcare can be addressed with great technology, and we are working to empower smart, dedicated people to tackle them.

For the last few months, we have been working closely with a group of companies that represent the future of digital health. We are looking forward to telling you their stories in the coming weeks.

We are also excited to announce our relationships with three fantastic organizations:

Aptible is proud to be part of Y Combinator’s S14 batch. All of the partners have been amazing - YC is one of those rare organizations that is every bit as great on the inside as you hope it would be from the outside. Thanks especially to Justin, Garry, Kat, Jon, and Aaron for helping us prepare for this launch.

We are also part of the seventh Rock Health class. Rock Health is the premier advocate for digital health. Their entire team has been wonderful and made it a joy to come to the office every day. We are particularly grateful to Mollie, Halle, and Malay for their help so far.

Cooper is the top user experience design firm in the country. Through a partnership with Rock Health, they are helping us turn some incredibly complex regulatory and technical applications into beautiful, usable, intuitive tools that delight our customers. Lauren Ruiz and Doug LeMoine have been especially generous with their time, and we thank them!

Today is the beginning of something very special. With an incredible team and the support of our customers and partners, we are going to rapidly accelerate the adoption of technology in healthcare, and help a lot of people on the way. If you want to be part of this, 

Blog: Company

Deploy a Shirt 👕

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

Greater focus on Deploy as Comply becomes Conveyor

Announcing Aptible’s $12 million Series A funding!

Introducing Aptible’s new brand identity

Announcing ISO 27001 Certification for Aptible Enclave and Gridiron

Recap: Aptible April 2017 Quarterly Product Update

How to Get Into Y Combinator

Hello World

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

Blog: Company

Deploy a Shirt 👕

Aptible’s New Look, and the future of PaaS

Greater focus on Deploy as Comply becomes Conveyor

Announcing Aptible’s $12 million Series A funding!

Introducing Aptible’s new brand identity

Announcing ISO 27001 Certification for Aptible Enclave and Gridiron

Recap: Aptible April 2017 Quarterly Product Update

How to Get Into Y Combinator

Hello World

Focus on innovation.Not Infrastructure.

Product

Resources

Support

Company

Focus on innovation.
Not Infrastructure.