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.
by Jared Friedman,Y Combinator | Read more:
Image: Pricenomics
