📊 Startups’ hire power

Welcome to our eulogy for the stretch limousine. (Dims lights, cues “The Long and Winding Road.”)

Once the ultimate status symbol — even if just for a one-night rental — society has evolved beyond the stretch limo. The National Limousine Association says they comprise less than 1% of limo company services today, down from 10% a decade ago.

RIP, but why?

There are a few culprits for the stretch limo’s demise, per The New York Times:

• The Great Recession rocked the primary client base and changed their spending habits.
• Coming out of the recession, affordable chauffeur services expanded in the form of Uber and Lyft.
• Two prominent deadly crashes, in 2015 and 2018, soured public opinion and led to stiffer regulations.

To that, we’ll add: the internet happened.

• Attention was at a greater premium pre-social media and the limo was a reliable eyeball magnet — when one pulled up, most passersby craned their necks to see who was inside.
• Now adulation is available on demand — and not at the cost of easily navigating cities. Enter the inconspicuous black SUV, the new standard in luxury transport.

Limos’ future as a novelty act

It’ll be interesting to see how stretch limos fare with Gen Z. For a generation that runs on surprise, they may be too cliche.

• Kids in Portland, Oregon, set a new standard last weekend, arriving at prom in a rented World War II tank.

But even if there’s just one prominent limo left in the end, it’ll be a badass one — US presidential limo “The Beast” isn’t going anywhere.

BTW: It’d be hard to de-stretch The Beast, a veritable Bond car full of weaponry and gadgetry, which requires space for a fridge carrying a supply of the sitting president’s blood type. Yes, really.

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.