Industry Data Trends in NYC Start-ups
The skills I demoed here can be learned through taking Data Science with Machine Learning bootcamp with NYC Data Science Academy.
Introduction
In this project, data was scraped from the website Builtinnyc.com., a job search site for NYC based start-ups and tech companies.
The site contains almost 3,500 unique company listings. Because new industry trends and technologies are often first tested out in the start-up community, the information should be useful for venture capital investors looking for new investment opportunities, job seekers trying to determine which sector to target, and start-up companies looking to hire new employees. Information scraped includes company name, address, founding date, industry sector, description, total jobs available, total employees, and investor funding
Data
Top Sectors
The chart above shows the top job sectors by the total number of employees. eCommerce and Fintech are the top tech employers in the region. More recently, the trend is towards the formation of companies in Artificial Intelligence and Healthtech.
A parameter "growth rate" was defined as the total number of employees divided by the number of years the company has been in existence. As shown in the figures above, the top sector for growth rate is Natural Language Processing. This is dominated by companies formed during 2019. The plot below shows that the number of job listings also correlates with growth rate.
Population Of Company
One interesting question is whether the job site data can say anything about the natural lifetime of a start-up company. It is known that many companies follow an S-shaped growth curve, where growth increases initially, but then flattens out due to market saturation and increased competition.
Looking at the start-up company data, we can see that this is indeed the case. The plot below shows the median number of employees versus the year the start-up was founded. Employee number increases as the date decreases from 2020 to 2010. However, companies formed before 2010 show a much more scattered distribution of employee numbers. Over the first ten years of a companies life, a stable trajectory of growth is observed, but beyond this companies are split between those that fail, and those that continue to succeed.
Conclusion
In conclusion, data from start-up company listings provides size and growth information on tech sectors in NYC. The insights here should be useful for job seekers, employers looking for workers, and investors identifying top trends. Future analysis possibilities include NLP on company descriptions, companies by location, desirability of company perks, and other ”Builtin” city sites.
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