How We Redesigned Our Website

The old homepage felt like a utilitarian B2B SaaS template and relied on general headlines, company logos, and claims without enough specifics. Evard and the host wanted the redesign to tell a story and put more emphasis on the founders behind YC companies. They also wanted to express positive benefits more directly instead of listing things YC does not do.

The new site aims to inspire visitors rather than sell them a program. It shows founders’ early beginnings alongside their later success, highlights the combined valuation of YC companies, and keeps most of the original YC description. Founder interviews provide firsthand accounts of the batch, while partner photos from their own YC days make the partners’ founder experience visible.

The team used lightly animated event photos to make the site feel more alive, and added hover interactions that reveal partner photos from their time in YC. They chose a minimal, airy style that keeps attention on the founders and story. The final application message addresses a common hesitation: founders do not need revenue, a finished product, or even a settled idea to apply.

After exploring visual directions and a few frames in Figma, the team moved into a new code project and used Cursor with Opus 4.5 to explore ideas section by section. They tried live prototypes of interactions, including ways to show founders’ transformations, and iterated on suggestions that sometimes began as rough concepts. The process gave them more time to focus on storytelling and on using animation where it clarified the message.