Our inboxes are overflowing with reports:
- The State of Startup Jobs
- The fastest-growing apps
- The Future of Payments
Here are a few takeaways from our skim:
It’s been rough, but there are positives for startup jobs
US startups hit harsh economic headwinds over the past year — job openings dropped 52% — but NGP Capital’s latest State of Startup Jobs report shows encouraging signs.
- Seed hiring — jobs filled at newly founded companies — saw a comparatively minor dip (14%).
- Healthtech and life sciences ran ahead of the pack, seeing high hiring rates in 2022.
- Last year’s decline in openings hasn’t reversed, but it has stabilized.
The apps that make the world go ’round
Expected winners headlined Okta’s annual Business at Work study, with Fitbit dominant among health apps, and PayPal, Venmo, and Stripe as the power trio in finance apps.
But it wasn’t without intrigue:
- Travel really boomed. Unique travel-app users rocketed up 197% YoY — quite the post-pandemic rebound.
- Fastest-growing app categories included collaboration (top grower: Figma) and security (1Password).
(Kudos to our colleagues: Our parent company, HubSpot, cracked Okta’s top 50 apps list.)
Money will keep changing hands — sans hands
Mastercard’s Future of Payments report had so many interesting morsels, we’re simply going to rapid-fire ’em right at you:
- Sick of NFTs? America isn’t. NFT sales topped $2.6B in 2022.
- 80% of US consumers now connect their bank accounts to other apps (think Intuit for taxes or Mint for budgeting).
- Digital wallet usage is growing — wildly. Expect more than half of humanity (~4.4B people) to use digital wallets by 2025.