Strikingly, BuildZoom and Bitnami Lead Hottest Y Combinator Winter 2013 Startups

I've finally put my finger on what's been rubbing me the wrong about these. Although these are mostly factual and non-sensational, they smack of cable-news disease. The sort of preoccupation with a continuous update that has people glued to news and stock tickers.

For some things, a stream of information is useful. But for this sort of stuff I feel it fosters a climate of more short term thinking and concentrating on the wrong things in the community at large.

In a year, releasing and examining these numbers is going to be really valuable. But right now, I feel like it's CNBC for Startups (hint: that's not a good thing).

Title needs an Oxford comma. (I first read "Strikingly" as a comment on how surprising it was that Buildzoom and Bitnami were leading.)

Without a mapping of a company's score to its value, these ratings are non-sensical. Considering probably only public data is the input and the actual function isn't open, there is great reason to doubt the rating.

I've made a similar exploration of W13. My scoring is my personal biased judgement. The whole effort isn't to get a US News Top 100 list, but to better understand the rating system itself. http://blog.kirigin.com/angel

A simple thought experiment: how is this different from a random ranking? How would you know?

Alexa is the last place you want to get data from.

This dataset you're compiling gets less interesting with every new lens we look at it through. You're YC and you're 500S and there must be a way to get data nobody else has access to that really indicates growth and success - like headcount, who's hiring, the 'true' positions they're filling (vp of nobody?).

Danielle, have you heard about what Paul Singh is doing with dashboard.io? He basically has made a product out of diagnosing this shit realllllly in depth.

Why does this matter? Who cares what happens 1 month out?

half of these companies don't do anything other than conglomerate information and present it nicely. How are they supposed to make money?

Zenpayroll was W'12