With a couple of thousand applications per year, each one of those small percentages is going to have a 95% bound in the neighborhood of +/-0.5%. The closer a f

With a couple of thousand applications per year, each one of those small percentages is going to have a 95% bound in the neighborhood of +/-0.5%. The closer a fraction is to 0 or 1, the more significant it is per given denominator. The bounds on some of these will certainly overlap y/y but the large swings over a few years are very much statistically different. Also, if this analysis is on the full population of YC apps, there's no statistical error if you take it for what it is: trends within YC apps. Not every metric needs to be extrapolated to the maximum feasible population to be interesting. Finally, the scales on the two graphs you resized shown changes of a factor of 5-7, not counting the first data points, otherwise even more. I'd argue that your scales are the ones that are misleading in this scenario. You'd be right if they had that scale for an 82% to 94% growth, vs. the 2% to 14% or .2% to 1% that they are illusrating.