
The Startup Zeitgeist - loyalelectron
http://macro.ycombinator.com/articles/2016/05/the-startup-zeitgeist/
======
minimaxir
While 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)

~~~
Alex3917
> I'm sure the mention of "Slack for X" is a golden flag for some VCs

It's crazy how many people in the industry believe that Slack is already more
popular than email, is close to overtaking email, or is growing faster than
email.

The stupidity in tech has reached the level of being a moral hazard, where it
really just incentivizes everyone else to be bad at their jobs.

~~~
ritchiea
The NYC Ruby users group just replaced their email list with Slack, it's
great, it's cut down participation by about 80%, messages that are not seen
immediately go forever unread, and what was once a valuable community for me
to reach out to as a freelancer is now worthless. But at least we're on the
coolest new billion dollar valuation closed source tech. And we have some
great new channels like #general that no one ever posts to. I can't imagine
anything better.

~~~
nihonde
This made me laugh because it's also exactly my experience with free community
Slack. I suppose there is an argument for a more transient means of
communication, and Slack's interface is certainly an improvement over IRC or
awful, awful Google Groups, but...

Of course, if you want a better Slack experience, you can shell out an unknown
multiplier of thousands of dollars per month for a paid version (which is
never going to happen). The pricing gap for free/paid community Slack is just
nuts.

~~~
stephengillie
Slack amplifies "fishbowl" workplace environments. Imagine if you're only
allowed to discuss certain topics in certain channels, but what you can say in
each channel changes often. And your boss can't cut you any...slack...about
these changes, because his boss is watching all of these channels too, telling
him who should say what where.

We've been coping by hanging out in private channels. And so the tribal
knowledge remains hidden among a small cabal because management doesn't want
it discussed. They prefer the illusion that we are...all-knowing or psychic or
something.

~~~
fsloth
What? Managament controlling information dispersal _within a company_?! How
can any place work that way? NDA and GAAP rules limiting discussions to third
parties but within companies...?! (shudders). Either the process would need to
be trivially linear or the management need to be psychics to know what
information is actually needed where.

~~~
annnnd
Happens more than you would think... Key phrase is usually "on a need-to-know
basis". It is difficult to argue with such phrase as it seems completely
reasonable on the surface, but what happens is that someone has to decide
which information someone needs to know. Such decisions are not without
mistakes, and to top it off, there is even incentive to keep people out of the
loop because information gives the holder some power. So it often happens that
people do not get the whole picture and operate on limited knowledge, leading
to bad decisions.

~~~
fsloth
Crazy. I've worked in companies ranging from 10 to thousands of employees and
never heard before of such a self immolating idea gaining wide acceptance. I
must be lucky.

------
alain94040
Two 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.

~~~
Rauchg
Also 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
Same 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
I 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
> 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
Well, 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
Got 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
It'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/ful...](http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/138907-john-
mccarthy/fulltext)

It's not meant to be a serious definition but IMO the phenomena is very real.

~~~
bayonetz
The version I'm familiar with: "today's AI is tomorrow's computer science"

------
cageface
_Within 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.

~~~
samsonradu
My 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

~~~
therealdrag0
Yeah, I only use my ipad for reading ebooks.

------
refrigerator
I'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.

~~~
bayonetz
How awesome would it be if the dataset was made available? We've seen some
great stuff already done with the HN Api.

------
rdl
I 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.

~~~
wj
I 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.

------
cperciva
I'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.

------
gtrubetskoy
What 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.

------
noahmbarr
Caution 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.

------
dxbydt
AI 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
Others might read that as 600% change, not 1.5%.

~~~
forgetsusername
Only if your agenda is to show growth. Context is important.

------
ericjang
This 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
Of 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
But that means that these trends actually are predictive, and not just
constrained to the SV echo chamber.

------
zanalyzer
'drone', 'drones'

'vehicle', 'vehicles'

are counted as separate terms. Joining them would make more sense to me.

~~~
timdellinger
It's almost like they'd never heard of a Porter Stemmer.

~~~
AznHisoka
A porter stemmer has disadvantages too as it would combine 'training' and
'trains' (freight).

~~~
Retra
Maybe you just need something that trains your porter stemmer to avoid such
mistakes.

~~~
Domenic_S
guys, I just had a great machine-learning startup idea...

------
gbog
I'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
Most 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
Because 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.

------
isaacn
I'm shocked that I do not see Amazon or AWS in these lists.

~~~
rpgmaker
I'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
Hence, 'fallen _giant_ '.

------
lowglow
This 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.

------
Dagwoodie
FYI, 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.

------
tnorthcutt
Somebody 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)

------
alecco
So hype analytics? How is that useful?

------
r3bl
I'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).

------
it_learnses
I am curious about why India - the only country is in there and why it's at
#30.

~~~
rdl
Probably "X for India" (for essentially all values of X which exist anywhere
else in the world).

------
vit05
I'm curious if next year we will have a third player in the graphic web vs
app.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I'm guessing at least a third and a fourth.

Maybe not next year, but not far off.

------
asitdhal
Very 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).

~~~
ex3ndr
React + Electron? And eventually replace Electron with react-native.

------
tdaltonc
I'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).

------
hbhakhra
It 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
Wow the momentum of Slack is crazy. 850% increase closest to the next highest
increase which is 211% (vehicles).

~~~
statictype
I 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
Groups within IBM use and generally like it.

------
sskates
This 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
Next 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)

------
nxzero
It'd be more interesting to see analysis of the 1000+ startups YC has funded,
not the apps.

------
paulsutter
This is best read as a way to stand out from the crowd and avoid overhyped and
tiresome areas.

------
gavanwoolery
Not 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. :)

------
Denoay
What? Some people in 2016 said, that MySpace is their competition? Srsly?

~~~
pedalpete
I 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.

------
davemel37
I would be much more interested in contrasting the applications of teams
accepted and teams rejected from YC.

------
RA_Fisher
Wish there was a representation of uncertainty in the graphs.

~~~
fullshark
There's no need. The sample is the population (all applications).

~~~
RA_Fisher
Ah, let me rephrase variance.

------
uptownfunk
What did you guys use for those plots?

------
benhamner
Are you in a position to share a raw, granular form of the data (potentially
with more anonymization)?

------
tassid
lots of info.

------
mozumder
Why do people believe VR has any potential? Aren't its design flaws obvious?

Nobody would actually want to use it.

~~~
rboyd
We 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
If 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?

~~~
sgarman
What is wrong with targeting niche markets? Even if only "nerds" were targeted
(the gaming market) that would be HUGE.

------
LAMike
"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
I think this means building things on top of block chain technology, not
specifically the bitcoin block chain.

~~~
LAMike
"I think this means building something with HTTP, but not using the Internet"

~~~
philrapo
"I think this means building something on the internet, but not using AOL"

