This post was originally published on The Macro and is reprinted with permission. You can read the original here.
Reading applications to Y Combinator is like having access to a crystal ball.
Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.
When Twitter was new and rapidly growing in 2010, there were many startups doing Twitter-like apps and tools for Twitter users, who were appropriately concerned that Twitter might compete with them. Very few applications mention Microsoft – Paul Graham has written about why that may be before.
Some startups are now making the top lists of competitors too. Uber and Airbnb are more than halfway to Google by number of mentions.
Other companies have completely dropped off the grid. Remember MySpace?
The rest of these graphs are based on the answer to the question “What is your company going to make?”. Let’s look at what this can tell about the platform shift from websites to apps.
While the trend in this graph is old news, it’s not obvious that it would take until 2016 for apps to overtake websites.
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. Interest in the Kindle was never very strong.
In the early days of Y Combinator, founders often pitched free and ad-supported business models. Throughout the startup world, that business model has become less common, replaced with companies charging customers directly. We always suspected this, and you can see it in this graph.
The term “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service, aka, people pay for it) has increased in usage by 400% since 2008, while “Advertising” has decreased by more than 60%.
Startups related to blogging used to be very fashionable — many applications suggested tools for bloggers, better blogging sites, or search engines for blogs. This space is no longer popular.
There are still a lot of ideas aimed at improving or disrupting email, but not as many as there used to be. Messaging is now more popular.
Buried in the above chart is the exploding popularity of the messaging service, Slack.
Let’s take a closer look at Slack’s ascension by comparing it to the number of applications that mention other popular enterprise terms like “GitHub” and “Docker”:
Many startups believe that Slack has created an unmatched distribution opportunity. The interest in Slack-related concepts, mostly bots and concierge services, has exploded in the last year.
Next, let’s take a look at how has Bitcoin fared over the years.
Bitcoin-related ideas were briefly very popular, but fell off rapidly. These days, building things on top of the underlying blockchain is on the rise, and seems set to surpass bitcoin itself.
Hardware and biotech are all increasingly popular. Some of this reflects changes in the mix of startups applying to Y Combinator. Y Combinator originally focused on software companies but in the last few years has expanded to fund companies in every space. The rest of it reflects the overall hardware renaissance, and the surge of interest in biotech now that lab work is so much more accessible to startups.
Within hardware, smartwatches and other wearables remain popular, though they have plateaued now.
Other hardware items have not fared as well. Mentions of tablets and e-readers have sharply declined in YC applications in recent years.
Not surprisingly, VR is hot and getting hotter. We recently tweeted a call for more VR applications and got a great response.
But the biggest trend in the last couple of batches has been the surge in interest in applying AI to everything. Even these graphs understate the extent to which AI is now playing a role in many companies’ ideas.
To conclude, we’ve compiled many of the more popular terms mentioned in this post on one table, where you can compare them with one another. This list ranks terms by the percentage of applications that mention them. All companies mentioned have been highlighted in orange for reference.
Though on the decline, Facebook (4.2%) and Google (4%) are still the most-cited companies in YC applications. Newcomers — particularly Uber (2.6%) and Airbnb (2.1%), and Slack (1.1%) — are rapidly on the rise.
What this table doesn’t show us is which terms are on the rise or declining. So lastly, we’ve broken down the technologies and companies that are losing favor with applicants, as well as those which are ascending the fastest. We limited this list to terms that were mentioned in at least 0.5% of all 2016 applications (and rounded each figure to the nearest tenth of a percent).
As we touched on, the term Bitcoin has not fared well in YC application mentions over the past year — to the tune of a 61% decline in mentions. Also of note, Bluetooth, Crowdfunding, and Websites are in similar decline.
Of every term we included in this article, one stood far above the rest in terms of popularity: Slack. Over the past year, the company has experienced an 850% increase in YC application mentions.
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Transitioning to a scale-up is proving difficult for startups within Canada’s tech ecosystem. There are many questions about how to better support startups in order to maintain competitiveness and longevity. The transition can be so difficult that Patrick Horgan, VP, Manufacturing, Development & Operations at IBM Canada refers to it as the ‘Valley of Death’.
Bridges are being built over the Valley, though. Initiatives like IBM’s Bluemix Garage – which provides technology support, shares growth experience, and offers mentorship – aims to foster scale up success in the long-run.
To learn more about the challenges startups face in scaling up, and about initiatives that offer support, watch this video:
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TechPORTFOLIO interviewed investors, financiers, and academics and asked them what they look for in early stage startups – and how they define success. Here are their answers.
It’s sales and growth. But also the product
Chris Arsenault, managing partner at iNovia Capital, says that the most successful companies he has backed early-on have made sales and growth a priority: “It’s often easier for a startup to be 100% focused on the product, while sales take a back seat.” One of the biggest barriers facing startups is lack of sales-focused management teams, he says.
However, he stresses, the product roadmap needs to incorporate upgrades and new features according to customer needs. The best practice is to find your customers and then develop your product in the early stages with their feedback.
“You can fill faster and iterate better by leveraging customers early in the startup process,” says Dr. Sean Wise, Associate Professor, Entrepreneurship, Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University.
It’s the journey. But also the destination
“Success for me is not necessarily the same as what an entrepreneur defines as success,” says Matt Roberts, associate director at the IT Venture Fund at Business Development Bank of Canada. His aim is to build all the internal processes to allow the company to grow up and then get it set up to access series A funding.
“I want my companies to have the wherewithal to attract other outside capital, to continue to grow, and execute on the business,” he says.
Michelle McBane, investment director at MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, agrees. When the companies leave the stage of working on their key product and customers “then our companies are graduated, so that means they’ve passed the baton to the series A/B investors. That’s success for us.”
Your team, and the people around your team
“Diversity helps ensure there are different perspectives around the table, driving better decision making that will ultimately lead to better long term performance,” says Will Hutchins, Managing Director of Espresso Capital. “I believe this is true at all stages of a company’s growth–from startups to mature companies.”
“Startups have more needs than they have resources. Leveraging your community allows you to leverage what little resources you have,” says Dr. Sean Wise. A dense community offers cheaper and easier talent acquisition and, of course, more investors.
Startup founders need to think about funding options at all stages of growth. What kind of funding is available – or not – at which stages? We talked to investors, tech community leaders, and founders about the challenges attracting startup investment, cultural fit, and how some have negotiated funding issues.
While everyone we spoke to said there are challenges getting funding, there’s little consensus on where exactly those holes are – or how they should be filled.
There are still gaps in the ecosystem. The gaps have narrowed significantly over the past five years but they’re still there. So it’s incredibly difficult for startups to find the first $500K or $1 million of investment.
There’s a reason for that. A lot of what we would call super angels are small seed funds. After they’ve done one seed fund they want to raise another seed fund. And they want it to be a little bit bigger, so they can get bigger fees and get a better paycheque. Because of that they can’t do the number of deals they were going to do before. They need bigger cheque sizes so they need to do bigger deals, and they move themselves out of the early seed market.
There’s a bunch of us in mid- to late-seed, and companies post-revenue, who do deals there. But there’s not a heck of a lot of companies that do early seed.
Traditionally there’s been a perception that there’s a gap in what we call late series B, maybe series C investments, the $100m+ valuation. I’d say that’s not as pronounced as it was two or three years ago.
I think we’re seeing entrepreneurs consider the benefits of bootstrapping based on their business model. Given the time and effort it takes to secure funding, a startup could lose its competitive advantage by seeking venture capital.
We’re also seeing companies use government grants, accelerators, tax credits, and other monetary and non-monetary resources to reduce their burn rate.
It is always a better idea to bootstrap. However if you’re going to raise initial funding the best thing you can do is do it through crowdsourcing. By crowdfunding your venture not only do you save equity but you gain access to early adopters.
The right companies are getting funded. Will I say that they’re getting funded as highly as they should? No. They’re always undercapitalized versus our US counterparts.
A similar company in the US would raise one to two to three times more than a company at this stage would. They’d likely get a higher valuation, which mean they could get a bit more money in. The bigger issue is that we’ve chronically underfunded our companies.
Funding is challenging in Canada. There’s a government funding crunch – it’s not as abundant as in the US.
It’s a lot easier to get seed funding. There’s definitely a series A crunch. There aren’t that many funds able to hand out that capital. Post series A there’s almost nothing in Canada unless you’re going private equity or public.
There’s a trend to alternative financing. Business Development Bank of Canada are creating some interesting structures. Business are forced to be creative because of the funding structures here.
Canada’s technology sector has long suffered from chronic underfunding with the vast majority of early-stage companies relying on modest sums from friends, family and angel investors, or bootstrapping growth. But not all companies are fully aware of their funding options.
Our firm seeks to provide alternative sources of capital – in the form of debt financing – to support early and growth stage companies to achieve their growth objectives. It’s important that companies assess all potential funding sources – equity and debt – in developing their funding strategies.
The funding cycles for tech companies across Canada have positively evolved over the last decade but still do not meet the startup to growth funding needs. To create a strong innovation ecosystem we need to be able to provide support, financial or otherwise, for startups and incentivize investment at all levels of their companies’ lifecycle. And we are not there yet–there is still a general lack of later-stage funding for Canadian tech companies.
We have upped the bar at the angel and early-stage funding levels, but when it comes to raising Series B round funding and upward to support growth for example, Canadian tech companies are still raising most of their capital from the USA. Canadian investors are missing out on generating returns by not backing the next generation of large high growth tech companies in their own backyard.
We will be that much more successful once we close this full-cycle funding gap.
We’ve all invested our own money. We are now at series A financing but we have a reverse takeover structure to become a public company in Canada. We feel that the markets are the most efficient space to value your company–not by some mechanism that obfuscates financials.
We went to the small VC companies in Canada and it just wasn’t a fit. I’ve been in the global capital markets for 20 years, and if there isn’t a fit with the shareholders, it’s not going to work.
[Investors] in the very early stages are no more than a bunch of people that are retired and have invested $10-30,000. The last thing I want is to talk to is some retiree every single day because they invested in 4D Virtual Space.
“Whenever a market or a technology changes, thereʼs a huge opportunity for new businesses,” author and entrepreneur Seth Godin said in The Bootstrapper’s Bible.
Godin’s comment from more than a decade ago, which addresses what’s now generally referred to as “disruption,” resonates among entrepreneurs more than ever. To address this, we asked each of our launch week interviewees what technology is going to be the most bankable in the next few years? Here’s a selection of their answers.
Artificial Intelligence
“We’re at that tipping point,” says Sonia Strimban, Manager of Venture Operations at MarS Discovery District. Artificial intelligence is already ubiquitous and will grow. “That tech is coming exponentially. Deep learning is really accelerating the pace of applications, not just the core but the application layer of what AI can do.”
“There’s a lot of public misconceptions. There’s already so much AI that some people don’t realize,” she says. Films such as Spike Jonze’s Her, for example, might talk about AI, but don’t really represent its real-life use.
Michelle McBane, director of the Investment Accelerator Fund, which is based at MaRS, noted that some entrepreneurs are deliberately adding machine learning to their startups to get noticed.
Virtual Reality
Matt Roberts, associate director at the IT Venture Fund at BDC Capital, says VR is worth watching in the longer term. “Everybody’s gotten a bit of a hype cycle going for it. We’re really going to start seeing excitement around VR in the next 2 to 3 years.”
“It’ll be like the Wii was for a generation,” he added. “A complete change of how people interact with technology.”
Self-driving cars
Bill Jacobson, founder and CEO of Boston-area startup space Workbar, says self-driving cars and the effect they have on transportation will be profound. “I have kids and I feel like they’re likely not going to own a car,” he says.
The technology could be coming a lot more quickly than we think, Jacobson added. “From a safety standpoint we’re in this middle ground where we have a driver that is highly distracted behind the wheel… that’s likely more dangerous than handing over control to a computer.”
Amir Azhari, president of AOMS – a Waterloo, Ontario-based fiber optic solutions startup, also identified self-driving cars. Azhari said AI’s rapid development is linked to autonomous vehicles’ success and regulations will catch up, even though “there are now just regulations and government laws that limit accessibility.”
To scale a tech startup, companies need to manage a complex set of variables: Finding product-market fit, getting funded, finding customers, hiring, being better than the competition, and a slew of little things in between that need to be managed to keep a company out of the deadpool.
To determine what’s currently on the minds of Canadian tech entrepreneurs, we looked at conversation and social media activity around one of the county’s most established tech publications, Techvibes.
A close look at the social media data shows employment (“help” & “hiring”) and funding (“million”) conversations standing out prominently.
Jobs/Talent
Techvibes hosts a semi-annual event called Techfest, which underscores the importance of hiring. The networking event attracts more than 1,000 attendees and culminates in a series of 2-minute pitches by CEOs, founders and tech executives meant to attract the best employees.
Accelerators can put startups on a fast track towards growth-stage success, but founders shouldn’t be tempted to apply to a program simply on the basis of acceptance chances. Geography, funding, office space, and mentorship availability are all important, and there are still other factors to keep in mind.
We asked interviewees during our launch week about what’s most crucial for startup founders considering accelerators.
“It is very important to get the right accelerator based on the product that you have,” says Amir Azhari, President and COO of AOMS Technologies, a startup focused on fibre optic sensors for extreme environments such as oil and natural gas wells. The first accelerator he tried, which focused on software and app development, wasn’t meeting his needs.
Azhari joined the RIC Centre, in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, which he says worked better because of its manufacturing focus.“[They] introduced us to different potential investors who might be interested in our technology,” he says.
Sonia Strimban, Manager of Venture Operations at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, adds that accelerators help avoid isolation. “There’s a compounding network effect. If you’re not part, you’re missing out in introductions and meetings with potential investors. You have to be part of the community to receive the exponential effects of the momentum.”
Matt Roberts, associate director at the Business Development Bank of Canada’s IT Venture Fund, agrees that accelerators provide an important role, particularly with filling missing skills in your initial team. “They’re more often than not providing advice and feedback to allow founders to do some of that early sales and marketing themselves, or giving them advice and connections to make the first hires they need.”
But perhaps the best value you can get out of an accelerator is working with those already established. According to Strimban: “Founders like to learn from each other. There’s an element of trust they have with other entrepreneurs… It’s invaluable knowledge that will save you so much time and effort if you can benefit from the experience of others.”
“Venture capital matters” dominate the Montreal tech startup scene, according to what the data shows around Twitter discussion from Canada’s second largest city:
Montreal is home to some of Canada’s largest VC firms, including Real Ventures, Rho Canada, BDC Capital and iNovia Capital. The city also made Compass’ list of top startup ecosystems globally:
Montreal, ranked at number 20 in Compass’ 2015 Global Startup Ecosystem Ranking https://t.co/fBURm4I5vd
After funding, physical accommodation for startup activity shows up prominently in the Montreal social media discussion in the last 90 days. Notman House – a startup campus providing office, event, and communal space for entrepreneurs, investors, technology partners and community groups – has attracted 3.3 million Twitter impressions from nearly 1,000 mentions in the last 3 months.
Notman House aims to contribute to Montreal’s startup ecosystem by “producing companies that contribute to the social, economic and cultural fabric of [Montreal] while shaping the future of our global society,” according to the organization’s website.
Opportunities to work at, or with, Notman House drive the social media discussion:
Notman House has a very international view to its place in the world, saying its vision is “predicated on the beliefs that not only do startups make cities great, but that great cities need great startups.”
Want a look inside Notman House? Here’s a 3D tour:
In addition to Notman driving Twitter discussion around the Montreal tech #startup scene, is one person: Sylvain Carle, a Partner at Real Ventures and General Manager of FounderFuel.
Known as “@froginthevalley” on Twitter, Carle has proven to be both a supporter of Notman House, and a driving force of Twitter discussion in Montreal recently.
Pushed by surging demand for tap-and-go everything, banks are embracing fintech startups as channels to innovation instead of engaging in an all-out war to shut them down. This race for fintech solutions doesn’t stop at specific partnerships; it’s leading to fintech ecosystems.
Bill Jacobson, CEO and Founder of Workbar, a coworking network across the Greater Boston area, has created a relationship with Digital Credit Union, one of the largest credit unions in the US. They have a space that hosts fintech companies for six months.
The arrangement is a quid pro quo.
“The [startups] get to work with DCU and see real problems. It’s a great way for them to develop beta customers, accelerate the effort to work on real issues. It gives them space and access to the Digital Credit Union management team as well,” Jacobson says. Meanwhile, Digital Credit Union is “doing this to get closer to startups and new ideas..”
The fintech division of Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District – a startup incubator – is another example of the cooperation growing between banks and startups.
“There’s not necessarily a threat, or friend-or-foe sort of mentality” among banks sponsoring programs at MaRS, says Adam Nanjee, head of MaRS’s fintech division. “They want to work with the startups.”
Financial institutions are wrestling with the competitive implications of fintech. The PwC report says 20% of their business is at risk by 2020, so many are already partnering with more nimble, innovative startups. Funding of fintech startups last year reached $12.2 billion.
Gregory Melchior, a startup co-founder who previously worked at Bank of Montreal and Merrill Lynch, says: “If you’re standalone you’re not going to survive. You need to have a white-labeled solution and work with the banks.”
Startups have ended the industrial era and have become the net job creators in many major markets across the globe.
To follow this disruptive change, /newsrooms has launched TechPORTFOLIO, a social media-driven destination that covers the economic value and financial benefit of startup ecosystems as they emerge locally, nationally and internationally.
“TechPORTFOLIO will explore the most important transformations impacting technology, business and economic growth,” says Robert Delaney, VP Managing Editor, TechPORTFOLIO. “We’re researching and writing about many layers of the ecosystems. TechPORTFOLIO will compare and contrast geographies, approaches, companies, and investment trends in order to understand and evaluate how startup ecosystems are changing.”
TechPORTFOLIO combines journalistic coverage and data analysis to profile startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academia and governments shaping startup ecosystems.
TechPORTFOLIO will use IBM Cloud and cognitive technologies, including data and machine learning, as part of its journalistic approach to deliver insights relevant to the companies, startups and governments involved in the global startup ecosystem.
“IBM Cloud is the leading platform for data-driven cloud and analytics that enables organizations to meet market demands and open doors to more responsive and innovative ways of doing business,”says Nevil Knupp, VP of Cloud, IBM Canada. “By providing the best cloud and cognitive technologies, we are helping TechPORTFOLIO connect to the developer and startup audience and transform the way news is delivered.”
“The Canadian startup space is thriving and supporting a culture of innovation with organizations, like TechPORTFOLIO, allows IBM to contribute to a thriving tech environment that can strengthen Canada’s position as an ideal place to research and develop new technologies,” says Lila Adamec, Program Director, Developer Ecosystem & Startups, IBM Canada.
“TechPORTFOLIO will be a new kind of publication that incorporates data, social media and technology into its operating model and ongoing publishing,” says Leigh Doyle, Managing Editor, TechPORTFOLIO. “Editorial instinct and subject matter expertise will take us a long way in our analysis and storytelling around tech and startup ecosystems. When we combine those with our data and social media expertise, we’re able to go deep into subjects in ways that were not possible before. That’s exciting.”
About TechPORTFOLIO:
TechPORTFOLIO covers the economic value and financial benefit of startup ecosystems as they emerge locally, nationally, and internationally. TechPORTFOLIO combines journalistic coverage, data analysis, and profiles startups, entrepreneurs, investors, academia and governments shaping startup ecosystems. The site is available at http://techportfolio.net/
TechPORTFOLIO is owned and published by /newsrooms, a network dedicated to providing continuous content marketing and social media coverage for brands. Our managing editors, writers, correspondents, creative producers and analysts draw from the insights and experience of the world’s best newsrooms to deliver content and coverage across a wide range of industry categories.
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/newsrooms
Past and Future Trends of Startups in Y Combinator’s Data
Friday, June 3rd, 2016This post was originally published on The Macro and is reprinted with permission. You can read the original here.
Reading applications to Y Combinator is like having access to a crystal ball.
Twice per year — once in the winter and once in the spring — thousands of men and women apply to Y Combinator. Each of these bright minds has his or her own vision of the future of technology. They pitch ideas related to Bitcoin, drones, new drugs, virtual reality, and nearly every other topic you could imagine.
Since 2008, we’ve received tens of thousands of these applications. Collectively, they provide insights into the ideas smart people are working on and how it’s changed over time. We’ve never talked about these publicly before.
But recently, we commissioned Priceonomics (YC W12) and their data studio to analyze eight years’ worth of our anonymized application data. After breaking the applications down into keywords, they calculated the percentage of applicants that mentioned any given term.
So let’s review the data, starting with a simple example.
There’s a question on the Y Combinator application “Who are your competitors? Who are you most afraid of?”. Looking at the answers to this question, we can see what companies founders have on their minds.
When Twitter was new and rapidly growing in 2010, there were many startups doing Twitter-like apps and tools for Twitter users, who were appropriately concerned that Twitter might compete with them. Very few applications mention Microsoft – Paul Graham has written about why that may be before.
Some startups are now making the top lists of competitors too. Uber and Airbnb are more than halfway to Google by number of mentions.
Other companies have completely dropped off the grid. Remember MySpace?
The rest of these graphs are based on the answer to the question “What is your company going to make?”. Let’s look at what this can tell about the platform shift from websites to apps.
While the trend in this graph is old news, it’s not obvious that it would take until 2016 for apps to overtake websites.
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. Interest in the Kindle was never very strong.
In the early days of Y Combinator, founders often pitched free and ad-supported business models. Throughout the startup world, that business model has become less common, replaced with companies charging customers directly. We always suspected this, and you can see it in this graph.
The term “SaaS” (Software-as-a-Service, aka, people pay for it) has increased in usage by 400% since 2008, while “Advertising” has decreased by more than 60%.
Startups related to blogging used to be very fashionable — many applications suggested tools for bloggers, better blogging sites, or search engines for blogs. This space is no longer popular.
There are still a lot of ideas aimed at improving or disrupting email, but not as many as there used to be. Messaging is now more popular.
Buried in the above chart is the exploding popularity of the messaging service, Slack.
Let’s take a closer look at Slack’s ascension by comparing it to the number of applications that mention other popular enterprise terms like “GitHub” and “Docker”:
Many startups believe that Slack has created an unmatched distribution opportunity. The interest in Slack-related concepts, mostly bots and concierge services, has exploded in the last year.
Next, let’s take a look at how has Bitcoin fared over the years.
Bitcoin-related ideas were briefly very popular, but fell off rapidly. These days, building things on top of the underlying blockchain is on the rise, and seems set to surpass bitcoin itself.
Hardware and biotech are all increasingly popular. Some of this reflects changes in the mix of startups applying to Y Combinator. Y Combinator originally focused on software companies but in the last few years has expanded to fund companies in every space. The rest of it reflects the overall hardware renaissance, and the surge of interest in biotech now that lab work is so much more accessible to startups.
Within hardware, smartwatches and other wearables remain popular, though they have plateaued now.
Other hardware items have not fared as well. Mentions of tablets and e-readers have sharply declined in YC applications in recent years.
Not surprisingly, VR is hot and getting hotter. We recently tweeted a call for more VR applications and got a great response.
But the biggest trend in the last couple of batches has been the surge in interest in applying AI to everything. Even these graphs understate the extent to which AI is now playing a role in many companies’ ideas.
To conclude, we’ve compiled many of the more popular terms mentioned in this post on one table, where you can compare them with one another. This list ranks terms by the percentage of applications that mention them. All companies mentioned have been highlighted in orange for reference.
Though on the decline, Facebook (4.2%) and Google (4%) are still the most-cited companies in YC applications. Newcomers — particularly Uber (2.6%) and Airbnb (2.1%), and Slack (1.1%) — are rapidly on the rise.
What this table doesn’t show us is which terms are on the rise or declining. So lastly, we’ve broken down the technologies and companies that are losing favor with applicants, as well as those which are ascending the fastest. We limited this list to terms that were mentioned in at least 0.5% of all 2016 applications (and rounded each figure to the nearest tenth of a percent).
As we touched on, the term Bitcoin has not fared well in YC application mentions over the past year — to the tune of a 61% decline in mentions. Also of note, Bluetooth, Crowdfunding, and Websites are in similar decline.
Of every term we included in this article, one stood far above the rest in terms of popularity: Slack. Over the past year, the company has experienced an 850% increase in YC application mentions.
Tags: Comment, Y Combinator
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