The Fastest Growing Startups in Boston, Seattle, and SoCal
Wade Roush7/27/09Follow @wroush
Behind the stubborn economic clouds, there may be a few hints of blue sky. A few companies, in other words, are hiring rather than firing—and a new report from StartUpHire, a Vienna, VA-based job board that specializes in advertising open positions at venture-backed startups, has the lowdown on which ones (see the lists below).
As measured by the number of open positions tracked by StartUpHire, Xconomy’s home regions are among the top six fastest-growing job markets in the country. (The San Francisco Bay Area is at the top of that list, followed by Boston, New York, Southern California, the Washington DC-Baltimore region, and Seattle.) There are more than 700 positions open at venture-backed startups in the Boston area, according to the company. The number of openings tops 500 in Southern California, and in Seattle there are 258 positions open.
“This information from StartUpHire is a strong indicator that even in the current economic climate startups continue to provide tremendous growth opportunities and are a collective force in regional and national job markets,” Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said in a StartUpHire announcement. Nancy Saucier, executive director of the New England Venture Capital Association, added that she expects venture-backed companies “will help lead the way to a robust job growth recovery.”
The fastest growing companies, as measured by job openings in the second quarter of 2009:
Boston
Acceleron Pharma
Acquia
CambridgeSoft
E Ink
Gomez
ITA Software
Kronos
Senior Whole Health
Turbine
Zipcar
[lists continue on next page]
Southern California
AccentCare
Covario
Demand Media
eHarmony
GreatCall
LRN
MyLife.com
ReachLocal
Rubicon Project
SpaceX
Seattle
Liberty Dialysis
The Cobalt Group
SeaMobile
Genoa Healthcare
WhitePages.com
We noticed a few interesting points about these lists. The Boston companies are mostly the usual suspects among the region’s highest-flying startups. Ryan wrote about Acceleron’s acceleration in May. But Senior Whole Health is a bit of an outlier—it’s a health insurance plan for senior citizens that is indeed venture backed, but is so far off Xconomy’s beaten path of infotech, life sciences, and energy startups that I wasn’t even aware of it. And I was a bit startled to see Kronos on the list, considering that it cut 250 workers in January.
For Seattle, Greg says the companies on StartUpHire’s roster are not necessarily the ones you’d expect to see on this kind of list, as they’re not companies that have been making a lot of news in our pages. And several of the companies are growth equity-backed, rather than venture-backed—Ignition Partners’ growth fund backs both Liberty Dialysis and SeaMobile, for example—though that may be splitting hairs. WhitePages.com just engineered a $2.5 million relaunch of its website, which may explain all its open positions.
As for Southern California, by which StartUpHire means both Los Angeles and San Diego, most of the companies listed are actually in Los Angeles. Only Covario and Greatcall (the parent company of Jitterbug, which JP wrote about in March) are in San Diego. Which may say something about the lagging state of the venture industry in San Diego.
