YC company valuations, aggregated by initial back-end language | Hacker News Reader

YC company valuations, aggregated by initial back-end language

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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, 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.

Those 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.

At 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.

Wasn'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?

Php 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.

The source link is equally interesting: https://charliereese.ca/article/top-50-y-combinator-tech-sta...

It's a fantastic write-up and amazing how it's still so out of date so soon.

Just Stripe and Coinbase have added more market cap than the entire top 50 including Stripe and Coinbase from when the report was published half a year ago. Of course private valuations fluctuate wildly but Coinbase in particular has been extreme.

Two more relevant links:

Stripe (currently on the HN front page) https://www.ft.com/content/b9949a88-6c09-4de5-92e7-73994bb2b...

Coinbase https://www.axios.com/coinbase-valued-100-billion-direct-lis...

If only they could contribute 0.01% of their market cap towards Ruby the language itself would be nice.

tldr; Based on the available data, about 3/4 of the total market cap is from companies whose initial back-end language was Ruby.

Python is a distant second place and then it trails off quickly.

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