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The Startup Zeitgeist
- alain94040 10y agoTwo observations: web vs. app data seems to be missing something. According to that graph, about 15% of startups are building either an app or a website. Where are the remaining 85% doing? That sounds strange. I can't underscore enough the "crystal ball" effect of receiving all those pitches. By hearing every idea out there, you get a free crash course in the future. While founders don't like to hear it, a similar idea has already been pitched 10 times. So investors focus on how you are different from those 10 similar ideas. And often, investors will have "amazing" insights for you, just by repeating what those 10 other founders have told them already. It's like being prescient without being especially smart. A very strange feeling.
- iambateman 10y agoI was wondering the same thing for SaaS Mentions. Has got to be above 3%.
- Rauchg 10y agoAlso notable: app likely to match for web, but not vice-versa. If you build an app, you say you're building an app. If you're building a web site, you might say web app. It'd be interesting to know if this was taken into account.
- Pils 10y agoSame with the artificial intelligence graph. "Deep" seems to be the most popular category of AI, even more popular than "artificial intelligence," up until 2014. Considering deep learning is a subset of machine learning (which only starts appearing in the graph in 2012), I'm confused what "deep" is supposed to represent. Is there another meaning to "deep" in an AI context?
- taneq 10y agoI think it originally just meant "deep neural nets" ie. neural nets with more than one hidden layer. Now it's code for "I'm making magic AI, please fund me".
- duaneb 10y ago> Now it's code for "I'm making magic AI, please fund me". Isn't that just AI? The term has never meant anything but "the future".
- taneq 10y agoWell, no, AI has always meant "making computers do something that, right now, only humans can do." Of course, the term only applies to work-in-progress, because once it's working, it's not AI by definition.
- duaneb 10y agoGot a citation for that? Or is that just your definition? As soon as we understand a problem there are better terms that are actually meaningful.
- mlinsey 10y agoIt's a variation of a famous John McCarthy quote: "“As soon as it works, no one calls it AI any more.” http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/138907-john-mccarthy/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/138907-john-mccarthy/ful... It's not meant to be a serious definition but IMO the phenomena is very real.
- snowmaker 10y agoIt's because it's keyword analysis based. For example, you might call your product a "platform", and not use the words "website" or "app", in which case you wouldn't appear on the graph.
- minimaxir 10y agoWhile there certainly is a lot of data, and it is presented very well, the analysis falls into the same traps as analyses of Google Trends data, particularly in the keyword analysis. Causation of changes in trends is ambiguous. For example, YC applications are optimized for the highest probability of getting into YC by definition, and so it would be expected that terms on the application would be optimized for getting venture capital, not necessarily what is happening in the marketplace today. (The "Slack: King of the Enterprise Tools" slide is a good example; I'm sure the mention of "Slack for X" is a golden flag for some VCs) A question about the chart presentation: why are some lines straight, and some lines smooth? (e.g in the Startup Competitors slide, Instagram, Airbnb, and Uber have curbed lines but Tinder, Whatsapp, and Snapchat have straight lines)
- jsprogrammer 10y agoThe analysis is limited to statements of what was observed in YC applications, not what is happening in the larger marketplace. This is exactly what you get when you look into a crystal ball: a warped view of your local environment.
- taneq 10y ago> This is exactly what you get when you look into a crystal ball: a warped view of your local environment. I love it. I'm stealing this. :)
- deprave 10y agoFully agree. It's unfortunate that these "trends" are actually trailing and imitating recent successes. It only goes to show that VCs (YC included) don't shape the future of technology, but rather try to squeeze money from their own investors by pitching ideas that relate to things they hope the latter are familiar with thanks to news coverage.
- imacat 10y agoYes, it also shows how volatile people are when it comes to doing a startup. I understand the usefulness of pivoting, but as it stands, people are pivoting across entire industries (into industries where they are completely inexperienced) for the sake of getting funding. Some cross-pollination between industries is beneficial, but right now you have too much of it - It turns everyone into a snake oil salesman - All bling no substance... Everybody knows a bit about everything but nobody knows everything about anything. YC encourages a breadth-first mentality which is subpar when it comes to encouraging deep innovation. The YC decision process should be seen like a decision tree with the minimax (adverserial search) algorithm switched on... Applicants are YC's opponents, not their ally and they are always looking for ways to subvert the system.
- Denoay 10y agoWhat? Some people in 2016 said, that MySpace is their competition? Srsly?
- pedalpete 10y agoI think this could be the result of 2 things. 1) This is looking at mentions, so you don't have the context of how 'MySpace' was used, just that it was mentioned. 2) There are, I'm sure, many applications that are completely not well thought out, don't make any sense, from people who don't know the industry and still think MySpace is a thing.
- zeemonkee3 10y agoThe context might have been "X is like comparing MySpace to Facebook" or some other historical reference.
- louprado 10y agoIt would take just one mention for that blip. The y value looks to be 0.02%.
- cageface 10y agoWithin mobile devices, the iPad was mentioned specifically very often after it first came out. Now it’s mentioned rarely—probably not because people don’t build apps for iPads anymore, but instead because it’s simply so obvious that you will support iPads that people don’t even mention it. I'm not so sure about this. Outside certain niches developers don't seem to have much interest in iPad apps these days. In three years of building iOS apps for clients I haven't had anyone ask me even once for an iPad version of their app.
- zippergz 10y agoI agree. Snapchat doesn't have an iPad app. Instagram doesn't have an iPad app. It's far from obvious that apps will support iPad (other than in "enlarge the phone version" mode). As a heavy iPad user, I wish this weren't the case, but it sure seems to be.
- guelo 10y agoAn analysis around iphone vs android vs web strategy would have been more enlightening.
- tdaltonc 10y agoI think the ipad pro could could shape this up a lot. A good ipad app (even if just for slide-over) could become a must for most utility or communication apps.
- pavlov 10y agoMatches my experience. And it's the same for Android tablets: the form factor is barely an afterthought. I think one of the reasons is the "phablet" convergence. When the iPad came out as a 10" device, the iPhone was a 3.5" device. Today you can get an iPhone in a 5.5" size or an iPad in an 8" size. The physical difference has blurred, but the use case difference is clear. The phone is the personal device that you use by default for everything. The tablet is a media consumption device at home, or a specialized data entry tool. There doesn't seem to be much market for apps between those extremes.
- samsonradu 10y agoMy tablet has been a piece of furniture on my desk for nearly a year (received as a gift). I have absolutely no use case for it. Why would I get an iPad when I can get a 10" laptop and bruteforce any OS/app that I need into it. Tablets feel so restrictive, not to mention typing takes ages
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dxbydt 10y agoAI going from 0.3% to 1.8% is not a trend unless you adopt some Clintonesque redefinition of the term. Similarly for the other graphs. If such tiny percentage changes were actually trends, the stock market has millions of such trends every single day & any of the numerous trend trading systems would have minted millions of millionaires by now.
- harlanlewis 10y agoOthers might read that as 600% change, not 1.5%.
- forgetsusername 10y agoOnly if your agenda is to show growth. Context is important.
- ericjang 10y agoThis is really fascinating. An quick eyeball glance suggests that Google Trends lags behind this data by 1-2 years (correlation isn't strong, but seems to be present). http://imgur.com/a/shgmG http://imgur.com/a/shgmG One could have used this data to long shares of public companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and short Ebay, Yahoo, and Myspace. Crystal balls have many uses ;)
- mahmud 10y agoOf course Google Trends lags behind, it tracks waves of trends as they ripple through the public consciousness. YC applicants are a small, and a very technically advanced, minority of the larger population.
- nl 10y agoBut that means that these trends actually are predictive, and not just constrained to the SV echo chamber.
- hbhakhra 10y agoIt would be very interesting to see a split of these applications vs those that were accepted and those that are still around/exited successfully.
- dfischer 10y agoWow the momentum of Slack is crazy. 850% increase closest to the next highest increase which is 211% (vehicles).
- daveguy 10y agoNote the raw percentage values. Slack went from being mentioned in 0.14% of applications (0.14% not 14%) to being mentioned in about 1.2% of applications. If you start out by being mentioned in 1 of 100 applications to 1 of 10 applications that is a 1000% increase, but it isn't necessarily significant. The increase from the year before that was infinite! (No mentions to some mention) Percent increases can be misleading. Not that there hasn't been a significant increase with Slack, but everything looks like a hockey stick when you start from zero. The significance can be hard to quantify initially.
- statictype 10y agoI wonder about it though. The valley seems to be touting it as "The King of Enterprise tools" yet from my experience virtually no enterprise would actually use it. It's a tool for small and medium businesses.
- Terribledactyl 10y agoGroups within IBM use and generally like it.
- cperciva 10y agoI'd love to see information on founders over time: % applications with 1/2/3/many founders; % founders by highest educational qualification and university; % founders by city/state/country. And of course separate graphs for all applications vs accepted applications.
- asitdhal 10y agoVery less people think Microsoft is a threat. This shows, no body wants to build an office app(like Excel or Word). We don't really see a lot of innovation in slide show applications(I used powerpoint in 2006 and now I also use the same). The world also lacks innovation in Desktop App. Web Form and C# is very popular and Java Swing seems slow or not attractive. Qt has confusing Licensing terms. I guess someone should think about some good frameworks for Desktop(like a universal look and feel in Javascript or some open specification).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- ex3ndr 10y agoReact + Electron? And eventually replace Electron with react-native.
- it_learnses 10y agoI am curious about why India - the only country is in there and why it's at #30.
- rdl 10y agoProbably "X for India" (for essentially all values of X which exist anywhere else in the world).
- r3bl 10y agoI'm surprised to see Oculus being separated from VR. I can't figure out the reason behind it (other than it being the most known VR product to this date). Plus, I'm kind of disappointed personally to see the term "anonymous" dropping so quickly. I do fully understand the drop in the blogging-related tools (not that it's going anywhere, just that it became a technology where there doesn't seem to be any groundbreaking changes going on for quite a while).
- sskates 10y agoThis is awesome! I love the competition slide how more startups are mentioned than big companies. I remember back in 2010 a response investors (even YC!) had to almost any idea was "won't Google do that?" Now it's not strongly on people's radar.
- rdl 10y agoNext step is to just frontally assault anything Google does which isn't core to Google. (as in, don't go after Search or Ads, but I think anything else is fair game)
- rdl 10y agoI wish this were a continually updated thing after each batch. Some other trends I'd love to see: team sizes (mean/mode/median). Capital raised pre-YC. Revenue pre-YC. Years in existence pre-YC. Location pre/post YC.
- mlvljr 10y ago..ratio of "founders", who ran-with-money :)
- wj 10y agoI think you would need to have two separate stats: one for number of founders and one for team size. Some companies might already have employees that are not founders but the YC application only refers to founders IIRC. The data I would like to see would be industry related but there isn't a specific dropdown for that and would be hard to do with keywords. I'm surprised that more than 2.5% of applications are looking to enter spaces that Uber is either in or the applicant thinks Uber is going into. I suspect that is more due to Uber's distribution potential than their transportation business but really don't know. Definitely surprised it is half of Google in the fear factor. You have one seriously impressive HN profile.
- zanalyzer 10y ago'drone', 'drones' 'vehicle', 'vehicles' are counted as separate terms. Joining them would make more sense to me.
- louprado 10y agoThat was an odd oversight and would put drones at #3.
- timdellinger 10y agoIt's almost like they'd never heard of a Porter Stemmer.
- AznHisoka 10y agoA porter stemmer has disadvantages too as it would combine 'training' and 'trains' (freight).
- alecco 10y agoSo hype analytics? How is that useful?
- mozumder 10y agoWhy do people believe VR has any potential? Aren't its design flaws obvious? Nobody would actually want to use it.
- rboyd 10y agoWe saw the potential when Oculus Rift DK1 shipped and the improvements made in such a short span betweek DK2 and the consumer version. You don't have to be very creative to extrapolate that forward. Form factor shrinks, resolution increases, VR and AR merge. Seems pretty obvious to many of us that it has huge potential. Why do you think it does not?
- mozumder 10y agoIf it had infinite resolution and unlimited frame rates, would you use it? That is why VR's design is flawed: people prefer their physical freedoms. Nobody wants to be in a VR world. You could invest in it, but know that there's a very limited audience/market for something that would only appeal to a class of nerds, instead of the general audience. Do you see your grandmother using it like they do their iPhone?
- nostrebored 10y agoThere is a ton of potential application -- want to walk around Prague but can't afford the vacation time or expenses? Here's virtual Prague for 13.99. Have a blast. Educational experiences. Movies. Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic and think people want to use it to do things that they shouldn't irl.
- nostrebored 10y agoThere is a ton of potential application -- want to walk around Prague but can't afford the vacation time or expenses? Here's virtual Prague for 13.99. Have a blast. Educational experiences. Movies. Unfortunately, I'm pessimistic and think people want to use it to do things that they shouldn't irl.
- sgarman 10y ago
- refrigerator 10y agoI'd be interested to see whether there's any link between how an application is written (stylistically) and whether or not they get into YC. The writing itself plays quite a big part in many other "similar" processes, like applying for scholarships or research grants, to which there definitely is an "art", so I'd be curious to see whether this is the case in applying for YC as well. Could uncover some non-obvious bad patterns that future applicants could be warned against using when applying, and some non-obvious good patterns that can help people write better applications, but it might also uncover a subconscious bias within YC towards certain patterns/styles of writing that YC might want to try to remove. Would definitely be harder to do than this keyword analysis that Priceonomics did, but I'm pretty sure lots of people have worked on analysing styles of writing etc. over the years so it's definitely doable.
- Dagwoodie 10y agoFYI, the phonetic sound of a German 'z' is the English equivalent of 'ts'. I'd hate for such a novel word to be mispronounced by readers here, as it is on many Youtube videos.
- isaacn 10y agoI'm shocked that I do not see Amazon or AWS in these lists.
- jordanbaucke 10y agoGood observation. And also a disappointing.
- Strom 10y agoI'm not sure why you can't see it, but Amazon is definitely there, on the most popular terms ranking list. [1] [1] http://themacro.com/images/articles/startupzeitgeist17-0e6248d2.png http://themacro.com/images/articles/startupzeitgeist17-0e624...
- rpgmaker 10y agoI'm more shocked at ebay being listed as a "fallen giant" when most of those shitty startups would be lucky if their business at some point generates at least 1% of ebay's revenue.
- jiaweihli 10y agoHence, 'fallen giant'.
- noahmbarr 10y agoCaution flag: There might be a statistical significance issue on a good chunk of these graphs. (1) Particularly when the scale isn't fixed (.001 increments to 2% increments - a 200x difference!) (2) When making conclusions on relative trends given small small percentage movements year over year.
- tdaltonc 10y agoI'd love to see a contrast between apps received, apps invited to interview, and apps accepted (but I imagine that they're keeping that close to their chest).
- vit05 10y agoI'm curious if next year we will have a third player in the graphic web vs app.
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoI'm guessing at least a third and a fourth. Maybe not next year, but not far off.
- gbog 10y agoI'm surprised that apps are still so popular, I thought silicon valley had already realised that users do not want to download apps upfront and manage them later, they want web apps or pages for their mobile devices. Maybe the trend is there, but not very explicit in these curves.
- georgemcbay 10y agoMost people I know (admittedly biased towards tech savvy people) despise web apps on mobile, on account of how nearly universally terrible they all are.
- ativzzz 10y agoBecause even with the ease of making websites responsive, it's incredibly difficult to truly replicate the experience of a high quality web app that works wonderfully on desktop/laptop on a mobile device.
- RA_Fisher 10y agoWish there was a representation of uncertainty in the graphs.
- nxzero 10y agoIt'd be more interesting to see analysis of the 1000+ startups YC has funded, not the apps.
- uptownfunk 10y agoWhat did you guys use for those plots?
- davemel37 10y agoI would be much more interested in contrasting the applications of teams accepted and teams rejected from YC.
- LAMike 10y ago"building things on top of the underlying blockchain is on the rise" You'd still be using Bitcoin if your building things on top of the blockchain.
- vxNsr 10y agoI think this means building things on top of block chain technology, not specifically the bitcoin block chain.
- paulsutter 10y agoThis is best read as a way to stand out from the crowd and avoid overhyped and tiresome areas.
- gtrubetskoy 10y agoWhat I think is very curious is that Apple isn't mentioned even once on this whole page. And yet it's behind much of the trends and pursuing many a technology listed on it.
- benhamner 10y agoAre you in a position to share a raw, granular form of the data (potentially with more anonymization)?
- tassid 10y agolots of info.
- gavanwoolery 10y agoNot trying to be the least bit negative, but objectively speaking it feels less like a crystal ball and more like people reactively gravitating towards the hottest trends. Nonetheless, cool to look at the data. :)
- lowglow 10y agoThis is completely propaganda. "Zeitgeist", "Crystal Ball" -- These are all lagging indicators and gives no authority to YC as having some predictive capacity to the world of technology.
- tnorthcutt 10y agoSomebody got a little lazy when it came time to smooth the biotech graph, huh? http://i.imgur.com/3zdXwTN.png http://i.imgur.com/3zdXwTN.png
- Destreza 10y agoI agree with the article but no mobile app could overtake a web application. Mobile app is just a trend and users would prefer to use a mobile search engine via Google.
- saharo 10y agoThe data is interesting.