2024 STOCKING STUFFER: A Year of Datapoints 📍🌐

Connect the dots!

December 2024

• 3 out of 5 – Of the world's largest companies received Series A funding from Sequoia. (Patrick Collison)

• #1 – Palantir’s ranking by market cap among defense companies, ahead of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing (and more than General Dynamics + Northrup Grumman combined) (Katherine Boyle)

• +1,700% – The percentage change since 2002 in the portion of U.S. high school seniors taking the ACT who received perfect scores (Harper’s)

• 21x greater – The risk of developing schizophrenia after an emergency department visit for hallucinogen use, compared to those without such visits. (JAMA)

• ~4.5 million – The number of deaths caused by water-related diseases this year (StatsPanda)

• 91% – The percentage of 16 to 24-year-olds in the US who have purchased creator-founded products and services. (Billion Dollar Boy)

• $77 billion – The global market size for the weight-loss drug market by 2030 according to Morgan Stanley, up from $15 billion in 2024. (Visual Capitalist)

• >1.1 million – The number of international students at U.S. colleges in the 2023-24 academic year, an all-time high. (Higher Ed Dive)

• $191 billion – The amount fraudsters cost the American taxpayer by taking advantage of the federal government’s unemployment system and exploiting individuals’ personally identifiable information during the COVID-19 pandemic. (Committee on Oversight and Accountability)

• 2.7% – Argentina’s inflation rate for the month of October, down from 25.5% when Javier Milei took office in December 2023. (Charlie Bilello)

November 2024

• 112 – The number of startups founded by SpaceX alumni (Alumni Founders by Live Data Technologies)

• $3 billion – The amount of venture funding invested into defense tech start-ups in 2024, compared to $0.3 billion in 2019 (Crunchbase)

• 42% – The percentage of U.S. public school teachers who say that the stress and disappointment of their jobs are “worth it”, compared to 72% in 2018 (RAND)

• 39,000,000 – The minimum number of deaths that antibiotic resistance is projected to cause globally by 2050 (Harper’s)

• 88% – the percentage of Salvadorans who say that it is safe to walk alone at night in their neighborhood, compared to 72% of Americans (Gallup)

• 40 – The number of Nvidia employees who report directly to Co-Founder & CEO Jensen Huang. (Tom’s Hardware)

• 50 – The number of times the S&P 500 has closed at an all-time high so far this year. (The Kobeissi Letter)

• ~$250 million – The amount of money the University of Michigan has poured into D.E.I. since 2016. (New York Times)

• 34 years old – The median audience age for podcasts in 2024, compared to 70 years old for cable news. (No Mercy / No Malice)

• >200,000 – The number of small businesses listed for sale each year, only 30% of which find a buyer. (Teamshares)

• 87 – The number of “megadeals” ($100 million-or-more rounds raised by U.S.-based startups) YTD in the Biotech/Healthcare category, compared to 26 in Artificial Intelligence. (Crunchbase News)

• $26.3 billion – NVIDIA’s data center revenue in Q2 2024, up from $4.3 billion in Q1 2023. (FinChat)

• >2x – The amount learned by students who were given access to an AI tutor compared to those who had in-class instruction, according to a study by two Harvard lecturers of 194 Physical Sciences 2 students. (The Harvard Gazette)

• 40.1% – The percentage of people in the US ages 18 and older who have trust in physicians and hospitals in 2024, down from 71.5% in April 2020. (JAMA)

• 19,000,000 tons – The amount of lithium that researchers estimate may be contained in Arkansas’ Smackover Formation region, more than enough to meet projected global demand in 2030. (Utility Dive)

October 2024

• 62% – The YoY uptick in 2023 in people starting new jobs as founders after being laid off from a Big Tech company (Live Data Technologies)

• 12% – The percentage of all of U.S. electric demand that will be made up by data centers in 2030, up ~4x from today (Power Engineering)

• 13.2% – The YoY gain in MBA applications for 2024, after trending negative four out of the past 5 years (Fortune)

• 15 years – The estimated amount of time until four essential drugs (amoxicillin, cefalexin, ciprofloxacin, and cloxacillin) are likely to be lost to resistance and require replacement (Center for Global Development)

• 42 years – The average age of operational U.S. commercial nuclear power reactors (U.S. Energy Information Administration)

• 1.05 million – The number of businesses in the United States that were less than 1 year old as of 2023 (Statista)

• 48% – The percentage of Americans who believe that politeness matters when interacting with AI (Lifewire)

• 59% – The percentage of 2024 college graduates who worry about covering basic expenses (Handshake)

• 6 years – The amount of time before the estimated ratio of pets to children under the age of 4 in China reaches 2:1 (Harper’s)

• 8.7% – The percentage year-over-year increase in the costs of at-home care for ill and elderly people (BLS)

• 65% – The percentage of Americans who had a “Great deal/Quite a lot” of confidence in Small Business in 2023, contrasting with a record-low 14% for Big Business. (Gallup)

• 77.8% – The percentage of programmers who believe AI code generators will improve code quality. (9vc9)

• 30% – The percentage of microschool founders who are neither currently nor formerly certified educators. (The 74 Million)

• 8 – The US technology IPO count for 2022 & 2023, compared to 229 for 2020 & 2021. (Coatue)

• 8 in 10 – The portion of people on Earth who will live in Africa and Asia by 2100. (Washington Post)

• 20 – The number of US startups that received a valuation of $1 billion or more in H2 2023, compared to 181 in H2 2021. (Carta)

• 10.1% – The percentage of Palantir alumni who are now in a founder role. (Live Data Technologies)

• #251 out of 251 – Harvard’s placement (dead-last) in the 2025 College Free Speech Rankings. (FIRE)

• 68.5% – The percentage increase in daily hours spent gaming by men ages 15-24 from 2019-2022. (Paul Graham)

• 11 – The number of states that include girl’s flag football as a varsity sport. (Athletic Business)

September 2024

• $14.8 million – The median pre-money valuation for seed rounds in Q2 2024, just under the all-time high of $15.0 million in Q2 2022. (Carta)

• 2,500 – The number of airplanes Starlink has under contract (CNBC)

• 43% – The percentage of U.S. adults who don’t know what a 401(k) is (Talker)

• 0 – The number of people connected to the Internet 1,049 days after the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act was signed, which provided $42.45 billion to provide broadband access to unserved communities, particularly those in rural areas. (Brendan Carr)

• >3,000 – The number of current and former Home Depot employees who started “pushing carts back into the store from the parking lot” who are now millionaires. (Forbes)

• $3 billion – the exit achieved by René Rechtman’s Moonbug Entertainment in less than three years raising $145 million to buy and grow children’s shows CocoMelon, Blippi, and Little Baby Bum. (Private Equity Guy)

• 16% – current E-commerce retail sales as a % of total sales, approaching its pandemic high (16.4%) set in Q2 of 2022. (Koyfin)

• >40 million – The number of U.S. learners who have started college but never finished. (National Student Clearing House Research Center)

• 1 in 9 – the fraction of children in the U.S., between the ages of 3 and 17, who have been diagnosed with ADHD. (NPR)

• 80% – the percentage of all ship-to-shore cranes in the United States that are made by just one company: China’s state-owned manufacturing and engineering firm ZPMC. (Art of Procurement)

• Nearly 200,000 – The number of businesses in the US that are worth between $10 million and $100 million (Financial Times)

• 58:2 – The ratio of employee arrivals (hires) to departures at Anthropic over the past 8 weeks (Live Data Technologies)

• 14,448 – The number of non-teaching employees at Stanford University in 2018, compared to 7,800 undergraduate students (Stanford Review)

• $10 billion – The total profits from Vinod Khosla’s VC investments between 1988 and 1998, which included a 2,500x return on his investment in Juniper Networks (Mario Gabrielle /The Generalist)

• Nearly 1/3 – the fraction of all startup capital that came from family offices in 2022 (PwC)

August 2024

• 6 out of the past 10 - the fraction of U.S. Presidents who had no significant business experience before taking office. (Dash Media)

• 97.5% – the percentage reduction in cost per 1,000 tokens for GPT-4o vs. GPT-3.5 (from $0.0200 to $0.0005) in just 1.5 years. (Sarah Tavel)

• 30 cents – the amount of wealth held by families headed by someone with some college education (but no four-year degree) for every $1 of wealth held by families headed by a four-year college graduate. (St. Louis Fed)

• $2.58 billion – the proposed amount of Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) backpay that would be paid to 400,000 eligible athletes who competed in NCAA Division I sports from 2016 to 2024, as part of the House vs. NCAA lawsuit. (Sports Illustrated)

• 23% – the percentage of U.S. adults who have chosen not to call an ambulance during a medical emergency due to the potential cost (YouGov)

• 71% – the percentage of Gen Zers who say they have taken on a side hustle in the past 12 months, along with 68% of millennials (Marketwatch)

• 80% – The percentage of all private R&D that is conducted by U.S. venture-backed companies (NVCA)

• 97% – The percentage of kindergarten and pre-school teachers who are female (Forbes)

• 40% – the percentage of major infrastructure projects in the Inflation Reduction Act that have been delayed or paused indefinitely (Financial Times)

• 195% – the percentage increase in the supply of rental housing in Buenos Aires since President Javier Millei's repeal of rent control laws took effect on December 29 (Newsweek)

• 5,481,437 – The number of new businesses started in the US in 2023, a record (Commerce Institute)

• 90% – The percentage of commercial drones in the United States that are Chinese-made (Noah Smith)

• 7.2 million – The number of Americans over 50 who hold student debt (Inside Higher Ed)

• 89% – The percentage of transplant recipients who reported personality changes after undergoing transplant surgery (MDPI)

• 200,000 – The number of New York households being added to the waitlist for the state’s Section 8 Voucher program after 600,000 households applied during a 1-week window in June (Gothamist)

• 65% – the percentage of small businesses in the US that are profitable. (Hubspot)

• 32% – The portion of global R&D expenditure that comes from the U.S., more than any other country. (American Association for the Advancement of Science)

• 270,000 – the number of teaching posts currently filled by underqualified teachers in the U.S. (Teachers of Tomorrow)

• >180 zettabytes – The amount of data the world will have produced by 2025. (Grepsr)

• 52% – The percentage of bachelor’s degree holders who are unemployed a year after graduation (Strada Education Foundation)

July 2024

• 12 million – the estimated number of businesses that will be sold in the United States in the next 10-15 years (Score)

• 16 minutes – the amount of time between Joe Biden’s resignation announcement on X (which has 425 million views) and the first reporting on the event by a legacy media company (Linda Yaccarino)

• 32% – the percentage of Americans who report feeling “little or no confidence” in higher education. In 2015, that number was 10%. (Lumina Foundation)

• 50% – the percentage of advanced STEM degree holders working in the US defense industrial base that are foreign-born (IFP)

• $8,435 – the average annual health premium for single-employee coverage in the United States in 2024, compared to $2,471 in 2000 (Statista)

• 50% – the percentage of 16 to 25-year-olds who want to start their own businesses (Samsung / Morning Consult)

• $23 billion – the price of Google’s potential acquisition of Wiz, an AI cybersecurity company founded less than 5 years ago (Fortune)

• 17% – the estimated percentage of Johns Hopkins University’s funding in the past decade that came from tuition and fees, compared to 19% from the Department of Defense (Harper’s)

• 48 years – the amount of time since the US has had a presidential election without a Biden, Clinton, or Bush (Bruce Mehlman on X)

• 70% – the percentage of global investment in longevity clinics that happens in the U.S. (WSJ)

June 2024

• #1 – Nevada’s national ranking in business creation rate by state (U.S. News)

• 700 – the number of full-time customer service agents' workload handled by Klarna's AI assistant, which processed 2.3 million conversations over the past year (Forbes)

• 1.6 out of 5 – the average K-12 teacher “AI Comfort Level” (Frontline Education)

• 53% – percentage of U.S. adults (who have heard of Ozempic, Wegovy and other similar drugs) who say they are “good options” for weight loss for people with obesity or a weight-related health condition, compared to only 12% who say they are “good options” for people who want to lose weight but do not have a weight-related health condition (Pew Research)

• 1.5 billion – number of pounds of clothing discarded by Americans each year (Washington Post)

• 1 in 10 – of all small businesses in the US are in the state of Texas (USA Today)

• $160 billion – what SoftBank's NVIDIA shares would be worth today if it still held them instead of selling its entire position for $3.6 billion in 2019 (Fortune)

• 2 per month – the rate at which private colleges are closing nationwide (AP)

• 100 years - the amount of time for which the energy in U.S. nuclear waste could power the entire country with clean energy (CNBC)

• 0.6 milliseconds - the latency per prompt token for on-device inference on iPhone 15 Pro. (Apple Machine Learning Research)

• $600-700 million – the amount of revenue Mr. Beast brings in annually (TIME)

• 97% – The share of real estate investors, developers and operators who plan to increase their investment in data centers this year (CBRE)

• 50% – The percentage of Americans with low financial literacy who say they “don’t have sufficient savings to cover 1 month’s living expenses, compared to 10% of those with high financial literacy (Global Financial Literacy Center)

• $32 million – the total amount that the island nation of Anguilla earned in 2023 from .ai web domain registrations, more than 10% of its GDP (The New York Times)

• $11,600 – the average cost of childcare per year in the United States (Scott Galloway)

• 111 - the number of colleges in the US that offer a major in Entrepreneurship (College Vine)

• 53% – the percentage of people in the USA who have heard of OpenAI/ChatGPT (Reuters)

• 142 million – number of registered learners on Coursera (Coursera)

• 23rd – Rank of the United States among countries in terms of happiness in 2024, compared to 15th in 2023 (World Happiness Report)

• 2/3 – the portion of Americans who say they are worried about their memory (Harper’s)

May 2024

• $312 billion - the amount of dry powder amassed by US VC Funds as of Q1 2024 (Pitchbook)

• $447 billion – the total amount of investment in the semiconductor industry that has been announced in 83 separate projects across 25 states since the passing of the CHIPS Act in 2022 (Financial Times)

• Nearly 5 billion – number of free or reduced-price school lunches served to over 30 million public school students during fiscal year 2022. (USA Facts)

• $230 Billion – total assets held in Donor Advised Funds (DAFs) as of the end of 2022 (Ohio State News)

• 78% – the percentage of AI users who are bringing their own tools to work (Microsoft)

• 35,315 – number of AI patents granted in China in 2022, compared to 12,077 in the US (Visual Capitalist)

• #3 – Apple Pay (507m users) is the 3rd most popular digital wallet in the world, behind Chinese platforms WeChat Pay (900m users) and AliPay (1.3b users) (Genuine Impact - Charting Finance, Investing & Tech)

• 32% – rate of chronic absenteeism in the country’s poorest school districts in 2023, a 68% uptick compared to 2018. (New York Times)

• 2x – the number of students enrolled in Community Colleges (10.2 million) vs. Private Colleges (5.1 million) in the US as of 2021 data (Ed.gov, Statista)

• $100T – The amount of wealth of generational wealth set to be handed down to the younger generation over the next 25 years (Pitchbook)

April 2024

• 16% – Share of US home listings that are “affordable” on a median income, down from 45% in 2020 (Visual Capitalist)

• 70% - percentage of Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 batch that were AI startups, up from 32% in YC W23 (Drake Dukes)

• 2 years – amount of time before AI businesses run out of harvestable “high quality-data” (Wikipedia entries, scientific papers, etc.) on the internet (Morning Brew)

• 7% – percentage of US students who are “high performers” in math (Hechinger Report)

• $101 million – size of the award the XPRIZE will give to any team that can restore 20 years worth of muscle, brain, and immune function in older adults (MIT Technology Review)

• 15% - increase in New founders in Q1 2024 vs Q1 2023 (Live Data Technologies /Human Capitalist)

• At least 3 - High-level Meta AI employees that have departed the company in the past several weeks to “strike it out on their own” (Yahoo! Finance)

• 47% – portion of the world’s top AI researchers that earned undergraduate degrees in China (NYT)

• 25% – percent of Gen Z that said they’ll need a therapist to deal with tax filing stress (CNBC)

• 21,300 – number of 5+ unit apartment buildings granted in Austin in 2023, more than LA and SF combined (CoStar)

March 2024

• 61% – percentage of teen girls who have thought about starting a business, 7% more than teen boys (Alaska Business)

• 18.4% – average IPO pop from 1980 through 2020 (Jay Ritter)

• 63% – the percentage of US parents who are dissatisfied with the quality of K-12 education (Gallup)

• 84% – the percentage of Americans who believe that businesses have a responsibility to bring social change on important issues (CSR)

• 57% – the percentage share of the top 35 companies in the Fortune 500 that were founded by either immigrants or children of immigrants (Brookings)

• 249% – increase in aggregate revenue from AI companies on Stripe (Stripe)

• 0 – public SaaS companies expected to grow faster than 40% over the next 12 months (Gokul Rajaram)

• 60% – percentage of employers who will require corporate etiquette classes for staff this year (Morning Brew)

• 23% – startup employees hired in 2022 who were gone before their 1-year work anniversary, up 77% since 2018 (Peter Walker)

• 25% - increase since 2018 in the portion of American fifteen-year-olds who are not proficient in math (Harper’s)

• 58% – unicorns that don’t have a founder with a Computer Science degree (Forbes)

• 96% – Chinese children who believe that humans will eventually live in outer space or on another planet (CNBC)

• 67 – schools in Illinois where not a single child is proficient in math (Wirepoints)

• 47% – Americans who are “very satisfied” with their personal life, down from 65% in 2020 (Gallup)

• 87% – American businesses that are family-owned or controlled (Fortune)

• 55% – percent of Americans who work for an SMB (Jeff Richards)

• 31% – percent of 2023 US venture capital that went to companies in the Bay Area (Peter Walker)

• $38,000 – spending per K-12 student in NYC in 2024 (Chalkbeat)

• 8 in 10 – Gen Z and millennials who expect to shape the future through their work (Engage for Good)

• 6X – high achieving students from low-income families are 6 times less likely to enroll in highly selective universities compared to high-achieving students from high-income families (Inside Higher Ed)

February 2024

• 60% – Unicorn founders who were not first-time founders (Marker)

• 45% – 18-34 year olds who would want to live on Mars in a colony (YouGov)

• 20% – OpenAI’s engineering staff who either attended Stanford or Berkeley (The Economist)

• 63% – ESG professionals who changed jobs in 2023 left the function (WSJ)

• 84% – Americans who believe that “before America can truly be united, we need to give equal opportunity to the have’s and have not’s” (Carr Center)

• >5x – increase in Stripe Atlas incorporations in January 2024 vs. January 2019 (Patrick Collison)

• 1 million – patents granted in the U.S. in 2023, an all-time record high (USPTO)

• 250,000 – students enrolled in AI and machine learning university courses in 2023, doubled since 2020 (HolonIQ)

• 88% – percent of countries that have set net-zero emissions targets (UN)

• 17% – percent of Americans who say that the American dream is “out of reach” for their family (Pew)

• 47% – percent of new business owners that were women in 2022, up from 29% in 2019 (CNBC)

• 350M – Roblox Monthly Active Users, more than the Nintendo Switch, Xbox, and PlayStation platforms combined (Matthew Ball)

• 43% – percent of DC high school freshmen who have missed at least 21 days of school (John Arnold)

• 86% – percentage of US investors who believe companies frequently overstate or exaggerate’ their ESG progress when disclosing results (Governance Intelligence)

• 55% – percent of Ivy League graduates believe that the U.S. "provides too much individual freedom" compared with just 16% of ordinary U.S. voters (Committee to Unleash Prosperity)

January 2024

• 40% – the percentage of the 532 U.S. unicorns trading at valuations below $1 billion in the secondary markets (Cowboy Ventures)

• 199 million – number of hot dog & soda combos sold in 2023 (Quartr)

• 31% – the percentage of Americans with graduate degrees who think they will always live paycheck to paycheck (Harper’s)

• 23% – amount of future lifetime earnings that American workers are willing to give up to have a job that was always meaningful (HBR)

• 68% – percentage of Americans who think the affirmative action decision in higher education is “mostly a good thing” (The Hill)

• 30% – percent of IPOs over the past five years that were founder-led companies (Schroders)

• $4.6B – inflows into Bitcoin ETFs on first day of trading (Reuters)

• $29,307 – spending per student at Chicago Public Schools (Wirepoints)

• 80% – percent of Gen Z and millennial workers that are stressed out (Fortune)

• 10.5% – outperformance of woman-owned hedge funds over the last 16 years (BlackRock)

• 79% – GDP in India that comes from family firms (The Economist)

• 38% – Global population that still hasn't used the internet (Zippia)

• 67% – Americans aged 18-24 agree that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors” (Harris Poll)

• 25% – Americans aged 40 who have never been married, up from 6% in 1980 (Pew)

• 38% – increase in revenue for companies with higher diversity vs. lower diversity in management (BCG)

  

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