Although I’m familiar with Mattermark, I only recently started using the service. As I got to play around with the functionality, I gravitated towards the metrics around number of employees and employee growth rate.
Given that startup revenue figures aren’t provided on any public databases that I’ve seen so far, the closest (but imperfect) way to measure the growth of a startup is by employee growth rate. If a startup is doing well, generally speaking, they are hiring. This is a broad statement but true in most situations. That being said, hiring a lot of people quickly, certainly doesn’t equal success and in some instances have actually driven companies out of business, due to spending too much money, but that is an entire blog post in itself.
I set out a few parameters in order to find the fastest growing midsize VC backed companies HQ’d in NYC, here was the search criteria:
- 100+ employees
- HQ’d in NYC
- VC backed
- Still private (haven’t exited)
- 20%+ employee growth rate in the past six months
- 2%+ employee month over month growth rate
The results (sorted by Employees Month over Month Growth):
One ratio I thought was particularly interesting, was (Employee Count / Total Funding). If this ratio is high, you COULD derive a few things: 1) they are more capital efficient 2) likely to be generating significant revenue. For example, look at Movable Ink, an enterprise software startup. They have 139 employees and only raised $12.3M to date. If you want to use this ratio, it would only be fair to compare apples (Enterprise SaaS) to apples (Enterprise SaaS), as opposed to apples (SaaS) to oranges (Hardware).
*Again, this is certainly an imperfect way to find the fastest growing startups or most capital efficient, but it can provide some insights on these two fronts.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally featured on Shai Goldman’s blog about tech and venture capital.