The Startup Tapes #021 — Did NOSQL Fail or Succeed?
Signal trajectory
realSignal 6.1 → 9.6 across 26 readings (+3.6). Composite of press, GitHub velocity, community heat, liveness and funding.
Cross-sectional profile
percentile rank vs 79,105 modeled productsPercentiles computed over the modeled cohort (embedding + signal + tags). Sparse dimensions — network and press — reflect that most products have zero, so a single edge or mention lifts the rank; read those with the coverage flag.
Mortality outlook
model estimateThis is a model estimate, not a verdict. 78,505 of the 79,105 modeled products are unlabeled and scored by the model only.
- LightGBM · binary mortality (dead vs surviving)
- Held-out AUC 0.71 · CV AUC 0.79 ± 0.05 · Brier 0.21
- Trained on 600 verified labels (150 dead / 450 surviving)
- Leakage-guarded: excludes status, discontinued_year, profile_maturity
- Top drivers: tag breadth, signal, vintage, liveness, business model
n=600 is thin → 95% CI on AUC ≈ ±0.10. Treat as a directional signal, not a calibrated probability.
Analyst read
generated from the metrics above · no external narrativeThe Startup Tapes #021 — Did NOSQL Fail or Succeed? sits in the 1th percentile of Launch Sentinel's 79,105-product universe by signal, ranked #2,933 of 6,636 in Education. The mortality model puts its probability of going inactive at 80% — a model estimate with a wide confidence band. It has no curated competitive-alternative edges yet, so the comparable set below is functional tag-similarity — read it with the confidence flags. Signal momentum is positive (WoW +58.9).
Comparable set
curated alternatives → functional tag-similarity| Company | Basis | Signal | P(dead) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Software Engineering Daily — Internet Future with Vint Cerfentertainment | tag-overlap | 15.7 | 64% |
| EP.37 How to Digitise Bank Regulation (EXPLAINED)⎜#MakerZoneentertainment | tag-overlap | 15.7 | 65% |
| Software Engineering Daily: Data Warehousing with Mark Rittmaneducation | similar | 15.7 | 31% |
| Software Engineering Daily: Where Machines Go to Learn with Auren Hoffmaneducation | similar | 15.7 | 30% |
| EP.27 e-Wise CEO David Hamilton: How Banks Can Leverage PSD2 to Catalyse Innovation⎜#MakerZoneentertainment | tag-overlap | 15.7 | 46% |
| Podcast.__init__ Episode 41 - RPython with Maciej Fijalkowskieducation | similar | 15.7 | 59% |
| The Startup Tapes #015 — Why Does Technical Recruiting Suck So Much?education | similar | 15.7 | 71% |
| Seedcamp Podcast: Werner Vogels, CTO & VP at Amazon talksentertainment | tag-overlap | 15.7 | 62% |
Confidence reflects source and category coherence: curated = an editorially linked alternative; similar = strong functional tag-overlap in the same category; tag-overlap = shared tags only and may be noisy. Signal & P(dead) are real / model.
Structure
observed attributesFunding & team
not in sourceNo disclosed funding in our sources. Funding data covers only ~1% of the corpus (462 rounds across 79K products), so absence here is unknown, not zero— we don't estimate a number we can't source.