What makes a startup truly great?

Well, it isn’t how cool their office is or how many twitter followers they have. And it certainly isn’t the number of lines of code written. So how, then, do we measure the success of a startup?

Capitalization & growth are two indicators that we like to look at for startups in the Verge community. But those two factors don’t tell the whole story. There’s also social, cultural, and industry impact to consider.

What’s the value of a technology or brand in its community?  What is its lasting impact on the world?

These are tough things to measure, so our team set out to sort through more than 906,000 companies that could have been considered a startup at some point in time. We used resources like BrandZ’s Top 100 brands lists to narrow our search and combined multiple data sources to create our definitive list:

The Top 20 Startups of All Time

Sifting through the financial data of the public companies was the easy part. Placing a value on qualitative areas was a bit trickier.

To learn more about our methodology in creating The Top 20 Startups of All Time, check out the video at the top of the interactive infographic below. We’ll be launching more videos on the Verge YouTube channel with deep dives into each of the Top 20 Startups. Click through to subscribe to our channel if you want to keep up with us.

If you want to fact-check us, or contribute to The Top 20 Startups study, you can click through to our citations spreadsheet and checkout the resources we utilized to determine these ranking.

Do you think we’ve got these companies listed in the right order?  Did we leave anyone out?  Let us know what you think in our comments section or tweet out your observation with the hashtag #VergeStartups.

Top 20 Startups of All Time [Infographic and Video Below…]

The infographic below is interactive and pulls a lot of data. Thanks for being patient while it loads 🙂

Want to post this on your own site? Grab the embed code below:

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