

Top Technologies Used By YC Companies - alexwolfe
http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-usage/Y-Combinator

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jcromartie
The pie chart indicates that only 15% of companies use CSS? That's clearly the
wrong way to display this data. Very few of the technologies covered are
mutually exclusive.

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signalsignal
Also, noone uses Java and only one company uses Perl. Interesting or
misleading? You be the judge.

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truncate
I'm more amazed by the fact that PHP tops there. I expected something like
Python or Ruby there.

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coopdog
And if that's true, why aren't there more php articles and comments on HN? Are
php developers that uninterested and apathetic about their own language?

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jmathai
The PHP community isn't terribly vocal. Probably because it's been around for
ages and the dos and don't are very well understood by people who care to
know.

I personally don't read many PHP related articles because, well, there isn't
much new to learn. It's an old/stable language with well understood
constructs.

Part of the problem is that the Rails community being as vocal as they are
make it seem like everyone is using rails. In this case perception is not
reality.

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truncate
You do have a point. Pretty same is the case with perl I think. Libararies are
already there for ages and matured.

I'm not into web development stuff, but I thought currently big projects
prefer not to use PHP. People say PHP helps them to find cheap programmers,
but I dont think good PHP guys can be hired at low rate anyway.

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Matt_Cutts
Interesting to see which companies are savvy enough to sign up for Google's
free webmaster tools: [http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-
usage/Y-Combinator/Google-W...](http://trends.builtwith.com/tech-
usage/Y-Combinator/Google-Webmaster)

The list includes Dropbox, Scribd, WePay, OMGPOP, Loopt, and Weebly, but a lot
of sites are missing out on potentially useful information--only 18% of 136
sites were detected as signed up with webmaster tools.

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coderdude
I used to sign up for webmaster tools but after a while I just didn't find the
utility in it anymore. I'm able to control which domain Google sees as
canonical (bare vs. www) without using webmaster tools. That was why I started
using it in the first place. Though it's nice to see crawl errors or other
potential issues.

From what I understand GA isn't showing search keywords now for users that are
logged into their Google account (totally frustrating change as more of your
users seem to be logged in now). Webmaster tools does kind of show this
information but without any of the neat metrics that go along with a GA
report.

I've also heard horror stories. There was an article (or possibly just a
commenter) on here not too long ago that was describing how their position on
the SERPs dropped dramatically just a week after signing up for webmaster
tools. That kind of thing sticks with you, even if it's not true (and I do
suspect there were other variables involved that he wasn't telling us).

So, it's not all about whether someone is savvy or not. ;)

Edit: Almost forgot! A killer feature of WT that I think no one should do
without is that it shows you what pages on the web are linking to your site.
I'd forgotten how awesome that is.

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adambyrtek
> A killer feature of WT that I think no one should do without is that it
> shows you what pages on the web are linking to your site.

You can get the same information by simply googling for "link:example.com" (of
course with your domain instead of example.com).

~~~
coderdude
That information is not even close to being as complete as what they report to
you in webmaster tools. There might be 2000 pages pointing back to your site
and that query will return 50 (just an example, not hard numbers).

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garazy
It's nice to see builtwith on the HN homepage, thanks for submitting this page
Alex. I'm reading through everyone's feedback and will make changes
accordingly, thanks everyone for commenting.

A few notes and things I will clean up -

* The pie charts I admit appear misleading thanks for affirming this, for widgets and technologies they show the leading tool but for document based technologies like CSS/JS they don't look right. 15% of sites aren't using CSS, > 85% are, and I suspect the rest are either dead sites or some other issue. I'll look at swapping to bar graphs which some of you have mentioned might be a good alternative

* PHP usage is based on server side implementation so a server might support PHP it doesn't necessarily mean the site is written in PHP

* The source of the list is yclist.com from about 3 months ago

You can lookup individual sites at <http://builtwith.com> such as
<http://builtwith.com/lanyrd.com>

Thanks again!

Gary

~~~
jordo37
I think the pie charts aren't just broken for document based technologies,
they are wrong for anything where a user can have more than one of the tools.
For example on our site we are using multiple types of advertising (including
our own), multiple types of widgets, etc.

That being said, very cool that you were able to pull this together - the raw
data here is very neat and it would be cool if we could even dive in more and
end users could play with it in different charts, etc.

~~~
garazy
Thanks I've added a link to a CSV with the domains and technologies found in
the run (Which was a few months ago now).

<http://trends.builtwith.com/Y-Combinator.txt>

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nthitz
Adobe Dreamweaver is a framework now? News to me!

Seriously though: There is really too much noise in some of these diagrams to
get much out of them. What surprised me most was nginx overtaking Apache in
this sample group.

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guimarin
I thought it was very telling that out of the 136 companies surveyed, only 2
had a payment system. Speaks volumes about the sort of companies YC is trying
to incubate/build.

~~~
tzs
Only 2 were using a payment system that the reporting site tracks. That
doesn't mean only two were accepting payments.

Notice that both that showed up were intrusive payment systems. What I mean by
"intrusive" is that they take you away from the site you are shopping on to
enter your payment and shipping information on the payment system site. My
guess is that this is the only kind of system the reporting site detects,
because you can find it by noting the links to the payment system site.

If a site were using a transparent system, where the payment and shipping
information are posted back to their own server and they deal with it on their
own backend, it probably would not show up.

For instance, if your cart checkout just posts back to your PHP or Ruby code,
and that code uses Braintree's PHP or Ruby API to process the payment through
Braintree, there is no way the reporting site is going to know that you are
using Braintree. Same if you are using Merchant e-Solutions, PayPal's PayFlow
Pro, or something similar.

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kilemensi
"detected using at least one of the technologies we track in this group" -
does this mean some technology usage could be higher but it's absent because
they're not tracking it?

Frameworks - How the hell do they "track" some of these frameworks here
because the produced html/css/js could look exactly the same coming from say
flask on python and jersey/jax-rs on java?

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Killswitch
What baffles me is how this site users themselves seem to dislike PHP a lot,
yet it's the most used language of these companies... So why the hate?

~~~
coderdude
A couple reasons come to mind:

\- PHP might be the most practical choice for some of these companies. The
founder or lead tech might be most proficient in PHP for real-world
applications (even if he adores Python or Ruby).

\- PHP might be the language that everyone on the team knows so they choose it
to keep everyone equally involved in the production of the site.

\- The people commenting on HN aren't necessarily people who start companies
(truer now than it ever was).

Edit: Also, it might be the case that some of these servers purposely lie
about what language is used on the backend to thwart script kiddies.

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phillmv
Ruby on Rails Token =~ Rails 3/whenever the csrf token was introduced?
(2.3ish?)

~~~
coderdude
Yeah, they're splitting hairs on the Ruby count (not sure why). But I'm
assuming that at least the number of PHP installs is somewhat accurate which
is still a good number of the sites. Once you add the two Ruby counts together
it does win out over PHP (which is more in line with what people would expect
from SV types).

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archangel_one
The pie charts seem like an odd way of counting some of these; for example,
one site could use Facebook Like, Google +1 and a Tweet button all at once,
but showing them as slices in a pie chart implies to me that the options are
mutually exclusive.

~~~
msluyter
The pie charts also don't match the percentages in the tables. Took me a
second to notice, but the pie chart shows the relative percentage of usage by
sites using a particular category, while the table shows % sties out of total
# of sites.

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simonw
You missed our site, lanyrd.com (W2011) - out of interest, what was your soure
for the list of YC companies?

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josephcooney
Obviously this analysis is meaningless if the company isn't building an
internet-facing web application. And even if they are it isn't that
interesting, as it doesn't capture anything about the back-end. Stick a nginx
caching reverse proxy and change a few HTTP headers and you've got something
that looks completely different as well.

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nhebb
Two observations:

\- X-FRAME-OPTIONS: IMO, more people should know about and use this.

\- Adroll: Would be much more effective if it didn't keep showing me ads for
products that I already use. I wish it had an opt-out so I'd quit seeing the
same ads over and over again everywhere I go online.

P.S. I know others balk at the pie charts (for good reason), but for me it's
irrelevant. I go straight for the numbers and the charts add a nice visual
break so that it doesn't look like a wall of text. So at least they have that
going for them. :-)

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tpiddy
AdRoll does have an opt out, through the adchoices links on ads and through,
<http://www.adroll.com/about/privacy>

Most advertisers that do display retarget attempt to build segments and
suppress ads to buyers/logins from potential new customers. this can be
difficult though with cookie deletion and people using multiple
devices/browsers.

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alagu
Its interesting to note that nginx is overtaking apache.

Some data is highly misinterpreted. (mod_ssl as Operating system, Dreamweaver
as framework etc).

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littleidea
Interesting information that I'm genuinely interested in but the execution and
delivery leave me scratching my head.

The operating system and web server graphs make no sense.

mod_ssl? varnish? Makes me question what was asked and who was answering.

I'd also contend pie charts aren't the best way to represent this information,
especially in the categories where there are only a small number of responses.

~~~
molf
Most likely all information was gathered automatically. According to their FAQ
(on the right side of the page) they check the homepage and attempt to detect
the presence of any of the listed technologies.

I agree pie charts are probably the worst way to visualise the statistics. For
example, it gives no sense at all of the ubiquity of any technology.

Also the accuracy seems to be lacking. I was surprised by seeing their
(automated) claim that only 85% of the sites use CSS. That seems strange since
I can't actually remember having seen a site recently that _doesn't_ use CSS
on its homepage. Checking some of the unlisted sites confirmed my suspicion;
they just failed to detect CSS on those pages.

Finally, these statistics only give insight into what is used on the home page
of the given domain. The home page may just be part of a (separate) marketing
website, so don't be fooled into thinking these statistics represent the
products/services built by these companies.

Disregarding all the problems with these stats, it is indeed interesting to
see a comprehensive list like this. I find their list of technology trends [1]
even more interesting, though.

[1]: <http://trends.builtwith.com/>

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bss
Great having statistics like this, but for most of the statistics the pie
chart is rubbish. It only makes sense in the case where the companies really
only uses one of the technologies posible. Bar graphs would have been better.

EDIT: Seems like I need to refresh the comments before i post my own,
archangel_one beat me to it.

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michael_fine
I wish that they had also shown what hosting they were using. That would have
been the most interesting to me.

~~~
Matt_Cutts
I think <http://jpf.github.com/domain-profiler/ycombinator.html?2010> might be
close to what you want?

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BigTuna
IIS took a roughly 5% share on web servers but Windows doesn't appear on the
OS breakdown at all...

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fragsworth
These are startups. IIS may have taken some of the market for more stable
companies but it's not really practical for cash-strapped startups to use IIS.
Also, college talent typically has greater affinity for Linux.

~~~
jaredsohn
Cash-strapped startups can get the software for free (for a few years) via
BizSpark (<http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark>).

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zachgemignani
A visualization of this YC data as compared to technologies used across the
top million sites. [http://slice-publish.s3-website-us-
east-1.amazonaws.com/rnkj...](http://slice-publish.s3-website-us-
east-1.amazonaws.com/rnkjSHj873J/#)

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cocoflunchy
I find it hard to believe that 15% of these sites don't use CSS?

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pknerd
Its kind of surprising for me that PHP is popular among YC companies. I
thought RoR/Python is more demanding than PHP but I was wrong.

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dangoldin
Pretty interesting stuff - one thing that stood out for me was that the
Google+1 was more common than the Twitter Tweet.

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freshlog
Stripe's suspiciously missing from this list. I think there should be at least
one YC company using Stripe at least?

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dialtone
Only 15% of them are using advertising tools? Are YC startups averse to this
type of marketing?

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alex_lod
I'd love to see the breakdown of hosting providers -- Heroku, EC2, AppFog,
Rackspace, etc.

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fasouto
I am the only one surprised with the Django representation?

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mattlong
The way it's detecting Django (checking for the Django CSRF cookie) is false-
negative prone. For example, our site (crocodoc.com) uses Django but is not
registering for it; probably because we don't have any forms on our homepage
so no CSRF cookie.

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greghinch
3 using FrontPage?!

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ghurlman
Frontpage Server Extensions != Frontpage

That said, I too am horrified. Maybe some of the newer ASP.net deployment
stuff appears to be plain vanilla FPSE from the outside.

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mck-
Interesting that NO ONE uses Windows.

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praveenhm
Really nice collections

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blrblr
BOGUS!!!

