Breakout Startups for 2020 by Xpo Network
About Xpo
Xpo is a talent network built for Engineers by Engineers. We help ambitious engineers find breakout companies to work by researching startups from them.
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Why We Started Writing Breakout Startups
Here’s what Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, told Sheryl Sandberg when she was hunting for a job,
Get on a rocket ship. When companies are growing quickly and they are having a lot of impact, careers take care of themselves. And when companies aren’t growing quickly or their missions don’t matter as much, that’s when stagnation and politics come in. If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.
Sheryl has a knack of finding rocketships. First, she found Google, then helped Facebook become a “mature company”.
However, finding a rocketship company is not easy. It usually requires two things(As Naval Ravikant says)s:-
- Research
- Networking
Out of these two points, Networking has become relatively easier with the advent of Twitter.
It’s the research that matters.
Breakout Startups Is an attempt to solve for research catering to people who want to get in on rocketships.
Andy Rachleff, Cofounder of Benchmark & Wealthfront, says something similar,
I prefer to see them take their first jobs after graduation at midsized companies with momentum, not startups, because they are the companies most likely to be big successes.
How do you find startups with momentum? How do you find startups that are doubling employees every year? How do you find startups who are growing at the speed of a rocketship YoY?
How do you define a Breakout Startup?
A Breakout Startup is something which is growing fast and fits into any of these descriptions-
- It’s at the forefront of a growing industry. Example; Webflow, Zapier
- It’s disrupting the normal way of doing things. Example; Superhuman, Mercury
- It’s building an entirely new thing for the Internet and is growing fast. Example; Fast.
So far, we have covered over 25 startups who are doing stuff ranging from making Bitcoin Decentralization to competing with industry heavyweights such as JIRA.
Here are some of our favorite startups 👇
Superhuman
Superhuman is the fastest email experience ever made. It’s what Gmail would be if it were built today, not 15 years ago.
Read Our Memo 👇
Substack
Substack is building a subscription platform for independent writers to publish newsletters.
Read Our Memo 👇
Linear
Linear is an issue tracking tool aiming to replace JIRA.
Read Our Memo 👇
Mercury
Mercury is disrupting banking for startups.
Read our Memo 👇
Retool
Retool enables you to build internal tools in minutes instead of hours.
Read our Memo 👇
Fast
Fast is planning to eliminate passwords on the Internet.
Read Our Memo 👇
Clarisights
Clarisights is helping marketers make sense of data in a beautiful manner.
Read Our Memo 👇
Layer1
The Startup solving Bitcoin Centralization
Read Our Memo 👇
Postman
The Startup building the future of API first software.
Read Our Memo 👇
Zapier
The tool helping you automate all the things
Read our Memo 👇
Outschool
The startup building the Netflix of Education
Rippling
The company building the OS for Employee Management
Read our Memo 👇
Pitch
The startup aiming to replace the Microsoft Powerpoint
Read our Memo 👇
Descript
The product taking over the Podcast Community.
Read Our Memo 👇
Coda
The company disrupting the document.
Read Our Memo 👇
Figma
The Startup which brought Google Docs-like Collaboration to the Design Process
Read Our Memo 👇
OneSignal
The Number 1 Push Notification service for Websites and Mobile apps.
Read Our Memo 👇
Webflow
The company that heralded the No-Code Revolution.
Read Our Memo 👇
GitLab
GitLab is an open-core billion-dollar company 850 Member company without an HQ.
Read Our Memo 👇
Notion
Notion is an all-in-one workplace app aiming to become the hub for all knowledge work.
Read Our Memo 👇
Clearbit
Clearbit is aiming to become AWS for Data.
Read Our Memo 👇
Mattermost
If Slack is Goliath, Mattermost is David.
Read Our Memo 👇
Odoo
Odoo is an open-sourced competitor to SAP and perhaps the most underrated open core company out there.
Read Our Memo 👇
Over the last few months, we have got some amazing love from our audience and we couldn’t be more grateful for that 😄
Not just this, we also got to Front Page of Hacker News twice and that was perhaps our breakout moment 😄
