YC Software Startups: Value and Initial Programming Language Used

Fascinating to see how heavily Ruby and Python feature. The things that surprised me by their absence and near absence were languages I love: JS and C#<p>That said, this is taking now well established startups that will have begun their lives 5+ years ago in general. If I was picking a back end stack then I&#x27;d probably hesitate before picking the .NET Framework. But these days I&#x27;d easily pick .NET Core.<p>Likewise, I&#x27;d want a statically typed back end and 5 years ago I&#x27;d probably have hesitated before using TypeScript and node together. Now I do it regularly.<p>Would be super interesting to see the same chart in 5 years with companies starting now.

The page doesn’t list the year the startups were founded. I wonder if you’d see a good correlation to the founding year.<p>More startups on the list use Ruby than any other language, and it accounts for over fifty percent of the valuation. It was very popular with startups ten, twelve years ago, but may since have slipped?<p>On the other hand among younger companions es one might expect to see more Go, Node and maybe Rust?<p>Still, an interesting analysis.

This serves as an interesting counterpoint to Paul Graham&#x27;s Beating the Averages[0] essay (which argues for using a powerful programming language as a secret weapon to allow a startup to outperform its competitors).<p>Reading this list, I&#x27;m struck by just how <i>mainstream</i> the languages are. I don&#x27;t have anything against Python or Ruby, but it&#x27;d be hard to describe either as a secret weapon — indeed, about the only &quot;secret weapon&quot; languages on that list are Lisp and Elixir, each of which shows up only once.<p>[0]: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;avg.html</a>

Archive link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200826060913&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;charliereese.ca&#x2F;article&#x2F;top-50-y-combinator-tech-startups" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200826060913&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;charliere...</a><p>Looks like HN brought it down.

Just depends entirely on what you are doing. If you are ecommerce you can basically stick to really slow languages forever as the request volume is so small it should be a small fraction of your application. For consumer scale you end up scaling with caching and eventually migrate or severely optimize - like writing your own language runtime like FB. None of this accounts for all the analytics they are doing which is mostly written in Java and C++.

Seems like age is a factor: ruby had its day and companies of that vintage have been around long enough for some of them to be worth bucks. Python is more perennial (over the lifetime of YC itself).

Even though it says &quot;initial back-end language(s)&quot; it looks like the information is often pulled from the startup&#x27;s current career pages. Mixpanel is listed as using Go as one of their initial back-end languages, even though Mixpanel was founded in June 2009, several months before the first version of Go was released.

This is a really good time to remember correlation does not equal causation. :)

I&#x27;m curious what&#x27;s going on with the languages that seem to harm a company&#x27;s value. Adding PHP or Java to your stack appears, from these data, to be a poison pill for company valuation.<p>It could just be a statistical fluke, given this sample size and all the selection effects at play, but I still have to wonder.

The only thing that stands out for me, not a single one of these startups use Microsoft tech, even though DOT NET apparently is quite good to work with, from what I hear.

There&#x27;s a correlation but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s the one drawn from the article (programming language). I think that you have to consider the background of the person who would typically opt for these languages to start a new business&#x2F;project. This might inform you of their thinking and perhaps a language like Java, where the developer is likely an Enterprise developer, leads to more brittle thought and execution. &quot;Move fast and break&quot; vs &quot;thoughtful OOP and architecture&quot; -- It&#x27;s possible to do that in both languages but you&#x27;d rarely encounter a &quot;move fast&quot; Java developer while you&#x27;d probably quickly encounter &quot;move fast&quot; Ruby developers.<p>That&#x27;s perhaps down to experience having the effect of hardening oneself. You&#x27;ve made the mistakes, you don&#x27;t want to make them again, so you create solutions that are more robust and by definition &quot;better code&quot; and &quot;better designed&quot;. Unfortunately, this can cause you take longer to get to market and if you do have to pivot, can be a harder effort pivoting off of a larger, purpose-built codebase.

I bet there&#x27;s at least one company on this list who says they use a flash programming language because they&#x27;re too embarrassed to tell the world they&#x27;re running autohotkey scripts over an excel spreadsheet.

Reddit was Lisp for a rather short time before being rewritten in Python. Isn&#x27;t the story that HN was written in Arc as a response to Reddit&#x27;s Python rewrite?

Ruby certainly seems to have advantage in terms of spinning up a basic working product, which matters more than developing a well engineered solution.

I&#x27;d be more interested in <i>failed</i> startups vs programming language.

Start up year likely correlates. But also it would be nice to know how many startups failed and what languages they used?<p>Did using Node.JS or Typescript correlate with business failure or is it just more recent?<p>I&#x27;m also particularly interested if trying to use Kubernetes correlates with failure. Kubernetes, for all its good, is a rats nest of complexity.

So the use of C# dooms my startup? I feel really out of touch having never used python or ruby.

Some of these are wrong: Rappi used PHP exclusively for it&#x27;s first year, for instance

This is a lagging indicator. If you did this in 2010, the top companies would all be PHP.

I know a little about Coinbase. The CEO did the initial MVC with ruby on rails. He was somewhat technical so it was a natural choice.<p>Then they moved forward with ruby for the whole platform, maybe as that&#x27;s what he understood and what was the alternative back in the day.<p>However for any of these businesses the language of choice if starting today for me would be rust.<p>I really feel you get a much more maintainable codebase than a ruby project,

i&#x27;ve always wondered why the Whatsapp acquisition didn&#x27;t spawn a bunch of startups using Elixir, since a lot of noise was made about how Elixir helped Whatsapp scale with so few people. isnt that how tech cargo culting starts?

Interesting that all of them which have &quot;Y&quot; for category &quot;LowLv&quot; incorporated one or more of c++, go, or rust[0]. Many which have &quot;Y&quot; for &quot;DataSci&quot; similarly use strongly typed&#x2F;compiled languages (including Java). However, for general ecommerce &#x2F; service-oriented offerings, there can be no dispute, given this list, whether ruby or python by themselves are up to the task.<p>[0] Dropbox is listed as python only, but it is well known (and documented) they have re-written key elements of their back end in rust. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dropbox.tech&#x2F;infrastructure&#x2F;rewriting-the-heart-of-our-sync-engine" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;dropbox.tech&#x2F;infrastructure&#x2F;rewriting-the-heart-of-o...</a>

The title seems to insinuate there’s a correlation between a startup’s value and dev language. While I think our “inner geek“ all likes to think so - is that really the case?

Is there a list of what they have changed their programming language to? Like... Reddit indeed used to have their initial implementation in Lisp, but it is now Python.

The fact that JS barely makes the list indicates to me that YC companies tend to have entirely separate frontend and backend codebases. That either indicates separate teams of frontend and backend developers, which I think is unlikely in a young company, or that there&#x27;s an expectation that developers in early YC companies are expected to use (at least) two languages. Something to think about if you&#x27;re starting out as a dev and thinking of looking for a role in a YC startup.

This would be more interesting if YC didn&#x27;t have a strong inherent bias toward these particular languages. In other words: these are the results because this is what YC picks and filters for, not because of any inherent meaningfulness about choosing these languages, or qualities of the languages.