Predicting team startup growth

[ebarker]

Originally Posted by Richard

As Ed mentioned earlier, this graph is another fine example of the Pareto principle.

A couple of years ago, feeling geeky because it was my birthday and my new age was a perfect square, I proposed a metric based on teams per Electoral College vote. A plot of that metric vs. team rank would show the same trend as Ed's plot above.

In the generalized simplified case you would expect the teams per million students (tpm) curve to be identical to the teams per electoral vote (tpev) curve if electoral votes are distributed correctly. The obvious defect in that statement is the population numbers we choose was the teenage population, not overall population.

The delta between the curves or the lack of correlation should indicate a future trend ... of something.

the chart:



the data here

The blue curve based on teenage population should be more accurate because that is our target audience. So I vote we stay with that.

Another point to be made is that as the number of teams grow, even if it was ten-fold the natural tendency is for the blue curve to get taller, the tail wold get longer and the bend becomes much more pronounced.

The challenge is to keep the curve a 'flat' as possible and minimize the delta on the y-axis.

Translation: target is 500 tpm everywhere

Interesting observation: Here in the north Atlanta suburbs a typical high school can run 2,000 students. If every high school here had a team then we would be at 500 tpm.

District of Columbia already exceeds 500 tpm with only about half their high schools participating, meaning they have a different student density.



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