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I'd argue that there is are two hidden variables that cause ruby to be such a good predictor. Ruby was "the go to web language" in the cabrian "web 2.0" years,
by j-pb 6y ago
I'd argue that there is are two hidden variables that cause ruby to be such a good predictor.
Ruby was "the go to web language" in the cabrian "web 2.0" years, where the web tranformed from a "space of personal websites" into a "space of commercial servives and monopolies dependent on the network effect".
So the actual predictors are, "web" and "2000s", which give the startup a high probability of being the first one to fill an ecological niche.
- AlchemistCamp 6y agoWasn't "PHP the go to web language"? I'm pretty sure Ruby has never matched its popularity for web. Maybe it did for sysadmin kinds of tasks. Or do you mean that those using PHP just didn't get into YC?
- j-pb 6y agoPhp is "old world" tech in that it's great for web pages, but not so much for web apps. Ruby was the first "webapp" language before node.
- zumu 6y agoThose are good ones. I'd imagine there's many other relevant dimensions as well. As we all know, correlation does not imply causation. To your point, I'd like to see when these companies were founded, their lines of business, as well as what kind of competition they were facing when they went to market. The space Stripe in seems extremely lucrative, for example.
- yen223 6y agoAt the very least, this shows that using Ruby is not an impediment to success. I don't think I can say the same for some other languages.