Editor’s note: To see this year’s updated list, visit The 2021 Wealthfront Career-Launching Companies List.
If there is one thing we have learned from Wealthfront’s clients and our own experience in Silicon Valley, it is that picking the right place to work is the key to success.
Getting equity in a mid-size, high-growth company is one of the best ways to launch your technology career and perhaps generate some wealth in the process.
So today, we are proud to announce Wealthfront’s list of 100 Career Launching Technology Companies.
Compiled through a survey of top venture capitalists, all meet our criteria of being mid-size high-growth companies. We believe these are the companies that will generate the greatest career opportunities and the most significant potential for equity wealth in the near future.
Specifically we sought out private companies we think are on a rapid growth trajectory and that are likely to continue that growth for at least a few years and that have revenues of at least $20 million but no more than $300 million.
The list includes some very familiar and well-covered names including DropBox, Box, and AirBnb but it likely includes at least 10 companies that you’ve never heard of. Among these are Aerohive Networks, MapR Technologies, CipherCloud, Delphix, Nutanix, Acronis, Plex Systems, Qualtrics, Datastax, and Sencha.
Within the list you will find a brief description of the company’s mission and its location as well as a link to the website of each, all conveniently aggregated in one spot.
An interesting facet of the trend this year is that 60% of the companies on the list are building enterprise — rather than consumer products. There are even five companies dedicated to building payments products including Boku, Square, Braintree, Stripe, and Trialpay.
As you might expect many of the companies are located in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area but other technology hubs are represented including New York, Boston, and Los Angeles.
In his various roles, first as co-founder of Benchmark Capital, through his current work as both a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and now as the CEO of Wealthfront, Andy has witnessed and lived through a lot of what makes the tech community tick.
Andy has already shared a lot of detailed career advice in a series of Wealthfront blog posts but we thought it would be a good idea to consolidate that content into a single, more concise guide — fully updated for 2013.
We believe that Andy’s 30+ years of experience — all of it spent working with entrepreneurs and technology companies — adds up to plenty of valuable and actionable career advice.
About the author(s)
Elliot Shmukler, Wealthfront's VP of Product and Growth, is an accomplished Silicon Valley “growth hacker,” having led the strategy and execution behind LinkedIn’s growth from 20M to more than 200M members. He joined Wealthfront from LinkedIn, where, as Sr. Director of Product Management, he also oversaw much of the consumer product experience, including Profile, Search, Endorsements and People You May Know. Previous to LinkedIn, Elliot held technical and leadership roles at eBay, About.com, Sombasa Media and Microsoft. Elliot holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was an Arjay Miller scholar, and holds a BA magna cum laude in Computer Science from Harvard University. View all posts by Elliot Shmukler