February Startups Report is out
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February Startups Report
2 MIN READ
Hey there Hope you're all doing well and not reading too many news headlines :) 🇺🇦 We've been pretty heads down on Employbl feature development. I'd like to share some info in this note about recent startup funding rounds and new capabilities of the Employbl dashboard. First, one list I've been keeping an eye on is companies that have recently raised Series A rounds, have headquarters in San Francisco and are backed by "top tier" Venture Capital firms (more on that later). It seems to me that right after a Series A is a pretty good time to join a startup. Companies at that stage are not super mature, they still believe in their people, the mission and the corporate culture. They pay pretty well. It's risky but it's not like joining a Seed stage company. By virtue of raising a Series A round the founders have convinced the monied classes that there's merit to the idea. As an employee there will be opportunities for advancement and interesting challenges to solve. Anyway, you may disagree with me about the best time to join a startup, but information for job seekers about startup financing stages is woefully inadequate. LinkedIn has a deal with Crunchbase so they show financing information right on LI company profiles, but you can't search or filter for that information. To do that you need to buy a Crunchbase subscription. Crunchbase as a product is primarily geared toward financiers and salespeople not developers looking to level up their careers. AngelList has a way to filter for companies based on their largest investment round, but not every startup is on AngelList. TechCrunch reports on funding rounds all the time, the data is public, but who wants to read TechCrunch all the time? The filters are crap. This month we re-launched the Employbl "Funding Rounds" dashboard where we can filter for funding rounds based on corporate information. For instance using these filters in the dashboard..
We can see that within the past six months the following SF based companies have raised Series A rounds and are backed by either Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, Accel or went through the YC program (links go to public facing Employbl company profiles):
This approach of relying on public web data instead of companies beholden to advertisers and corporate sponsors yields better results, more actionable data and empowers workers to take charge of their careers instead of relying on recruiters or adverts. How do you specify "top tier" VCs? I've taken a stab at a public list of "top tier" VC firms in this blog post but it's based on my own subjective experience in the tech industry. Would it be helpful to have a quick filter like "is backed by top tier" VC firm? What's Next? We launched some improvements to the job listings page this month too but honestly I feel like searching the internet for jobs by title and keyword is pretty well covered. That said we have over 70,000 active job listings in the Employbl database and could commit ourselves to fetching more if it's what the people want :) Our next focuses as a product are..
Maps: who doesn't love a good map? I've been waiting for like an Airbnb or Zillow but for startups for a long time. Gunna try launching something in that space.
Tech Stacks: what technologies do companies use? And no BuiltWith, I'm not talking about oh this company uses Google Analytics, Hubspot, Wordpress and Javascript. I'm talking let me find companies backed by a16z that use Ruby On Rails ✨
People: a corporation isn't much without the humans that make it run. Pretty soon I'd like to pull in information about founders and current employees so we can see in the Employbl dashboard the people that work at various companies and what their backgrounds are.
What would you like to see? What could a knowledge tool like Employbl do for your career? Are we barking up the right tree?
