Samuel

Imagine

[Konstantine Buhler @Konstantine]

Should you chase hype or ignore it? The tech industry has been debating this for decades. So at @Sequoia, we dug into 20 years of hype data.

This summer, I worked with Sequoia intern @ochonaut to measure hype over the past 2 decades. The chart below ranks the most hyped topics on Hacker News for every year since 2007. Under each year sits the most valuable company founded that year.

Here are a few observations:
1/ The top company founded in a given year is rarely related to the hype of that period. Airbnb was founded in 2008, when the top topic was Google. Uber arrived in 2009, while the conversation revolved around low-level programming. Anthropic came in 2021, while the internet was consumed by crypto. Chasing hype rarely leads to enduring outcomes. The top companies of recent years have yet to be decided.

2/ New trends announce themselves five to six years early. LLMs first cracked the top 15 in 2016 and took until 2022 to hit #1. AI coding entered at #12 in 2021 and tops the list in 2026. Crypto entered in 2011 before 2017 and 2021 peaks. “New” trends don’t appear out of nowhere, and internet subcommunities are often the first to know where the puck is headed.

3/ Long-term “hype” is a durable signal. The “Musk-Verse” has been a top 15 topic for every one of the past 14 years. Sustained attention on the internet is rare and tends to mark something real.

Next up, we want to run the same analysis with sources like X and LinkedIn. If that's of interest, give us some encouragement and we'll share the results.

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

Indie electro pop is underrated

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

Gemini at it's best

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@arnestrickmann @ycombinator @rabanspiegel Congrats!

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@jiatongshi Would love to chat

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@Christi29229134 Hey! Exciting event! Do you still have space? Our voice dataset got accepted as a NeurIPS Spotlight paper, so I think there is a strong fit! I am on the waitlist (Samuel Pfisterer) https://t.co/dEg687YFTy

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@j_asminewang Down

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@fadeladib @threadreaderapp unroll

[Tiago Pimentel @tpimentelms]

LLMs are trained to mimic a “true” distribution—a reducing cross-entropy then confirms they get closer to this target while training. Do similar models approach the target in similar ways, though?🤔Not really! Our new paper studies this, finding 4-convergence phases in training🧵

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

Die db sollte starlink of den ice Dächern haben.

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

reading a book is such a constrained activity

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

i don't understand the hype about OpenAI's Munich office. openai really wants to sell to German companies, and help their German customers with integration? no shit sherlock.

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@onetwoval What are the best things we have cooked/ are cooking in your opinion?

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

difficult to understand = lack of clarity or implicit assumptions/ prerequisite

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

exciting times ahead! :)

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

🇪🇺🚀

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@nikitabier @isabellacomelli i think there is a general trend back to "indirect dating", see running clubs etc.

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@nikitabier @isabellacomelli not sure. "dating" could be the basic human need many seek on this app. but its way harder to market a dating app (different tikotks/ crowded). also, people might desire indirect dating, i.e., you meet not for the sake of "dating" directly but its an option – how it used to be.

[Samuel @sampfisterer]

@HeyToha whats the source?