The best way to record your YC application videos on a Mac

Vijayraj HNovember 4, 2026 · 8 min read

Y Combinator asks for two different things: a one-minute video of the founders talking, and, in a separate place in the application, a demo of your product. They do different jobs, and the most common mistake is mixing them up. I’m Vijayraj, and I build Drishti Studio, a Mac screen recorder, so I have a stake in the second one. Here is how I’d record both on a Mac, with YC’s own rules quoted as of November 4, 2026.

Video 1: the founder video

The video should be 1 minute long and should contain nothing except the founders talking.

Y Combinator, The Application Video

• Every founder appears. If you are not in the same room, YC says to screen record a video call.
• No written script. YC asks for bullet points and talking as you would to a friend.
• Introduce yourselves and explain what you are doing and why. YC says it wants to hear how the founders communicate.
• It is not a demo or a promo. YC says the demo has its own place in the application.

Turn the polish off for this one

Most of what makes a screen recorder like Drishti useful is wrong for this video. No zooms, no music, no slides, no captions styled for social. A partner is judging how you think and talk, and production gets in the way of that. What still matters is that you can be heard clearly and seen properly. That part is worth ten minutes of setup.

Founders in the same room

1. Sit side by side, close to the camera, with the light in front of you. Use the Mac’s camera or an external one; Drishti supports DSLR and mirrorless cameras.
2. In Drishti’s source picker, turn on the camera and choose your microphone. If you want macOS Portrait or Studio Light, set them in Video Effects before recording. They are baked into the camera footage. The recording docs show each control.
3. Write three or four bullet points, glance at them once, and record in one take. Do two or three takes and keep the most natural one, not the most polished.
4. In the editor, add a Camera Only cue across the whole clip so your faces fill the frame. The camera docs show where the cue menu is. Trim the start and the end. That is all the editing this video needs.

Co-founders in different places

Start the call in your usual app with both founders on camera. In Drishti, pick the call’s window on the Windows tab and turn on System Audio, so your co-founder’s voice is recorded along with your microphone. Leave Drishti’s own camera off, because your face is already in the call. Then record a ten-second test and play it back. If you can hear only yourself, System Audio is off, and finding that out after the real take is painful.

Video 2: the product demo

YC’s public pages do not give a length or file format for the demo, so open the demo field in the application form before you export and match what it asks for. If you have something working, my recommendation is one real task, start to finish, in about one to two minutes. A partner should see the input, the product doing its job, and the result.

Masks deserve one extra minute. A demo for an investor is often recorded in a real workspace, and zooming in can make an API key or a customer’s email readable that you never noticed while recording. Our guide to blurring sensitive information walks through it. Replay the first and last frame of every mask before exporting.

Before you submit

• Founder video: about one minute, every founder visible and audible, nobody reading.
• Founder video: nothing in it but the founders talking. No product footage.
• Demo: the product visibly does its job, on data that looks real.
• Demo: watched once muted, with the captions proofread.
• Demo: every mask checked at its first and last frame.
• Both: exported in the format the form asks for, and played back once on a phone.

For the export, Drishti renders H.264, HEVC, or ProRes 422 up to 4K at 60fps on your Mac. H.264 at 1080p is the safe choice for an upload form. If the same demo will also go on a launch page, our Product Hunt launch video guide covers framing and a vertical cut.