Startups in London

Size and funding

There are many definitions of startups, and one I like is that “a startup is a company that is designed to grow fast”. This means we’ve looked at companies as small as Klydo (8 employees) and as big as Deliveroo (5,304 employees)

Deliveroo is our largest startup by number of employees, and Klydo is the smallest

There are many early-stage companies in London, but the majority of companies we looked at had significant amounts of funding and many employees.

Deliveroo is also our largest startup by £ amount of funding, and Silkfred is the smallest (with 10,000x less funding)

There are opportunities to learn whether you join a 5-person or 900-person startup. When thinking about joining a startup, it’s helpful to think about what you’re looking for:

Smaller companies tend to have more ambiguity and your role may be less defined. You should have opportunities to work with the founders, but learning is likely to be ‘on-the-job’ rather than through formal training. There is more risk that the company won’t succeed.

Larger companies tend to have a product that’s working in the market and they are on a path to serving more customers. Roles are typically well defined (e.g. there is already a UX designer to own that area of work). You will likely be working in a team led by an experienced executive, who will be able to train you in best-practices.

Locations

The majority of startups are in two clusters.

Shoreditch & Spitalfields is the hub. There are many coworking spaces that have made it easy for companies to expand without committing to long office leases

is the hub. There are many coworking spaces that have made it easy for companies to expand without committing to long office leases Farringdon & Clerkenwell is particularly well serviced by public transport, and has a number of food markets such as Leather Lane

You will find startups in areas such as Hammersmith, Stratford and Croydon. However, they are fewer in number.

Most startups are clustered north of the river. There are other clusters with fewer than 3 startups that aren’t on the map above

Sectors

I’ve included our top 21 tags here. London is one of the leading cities in the world for fintech, and therefore it was no surprise fintech is one of the top sectors (48 startups with this tag).

We also tag companies based on whether they were selling to consumers (61 startups), businesses (60 startups) or enterprises (20 startups). As an employee, it’s often a very different experience building a product for these three types of customers.

Some tags are not included above (fewer than 5 companies). These include cars, femcare and cryptocurrency

Benefits

One of the big selling points of working at a startup is the difference in working culture: casual clothing, regular drinks and office dogs. These are all hard to codify, and often aren’t explicitly talked about on careers websites, so I’ve left them out. The following analysis is based on those startups who publicly talk about their benefits.

There is a big difference between the lowest number of days offered (21) and the highest (30). Make sure to check whether the number quoted by the company is including the UK’s 8 bank holidays. The UK minimum for full-time staff is 20 days holiday excluding bank holidays.

I want to point out the trend towards offering unlimited holidays. At first glance this sounds exciting! Take as much time off as you need, even if it is 40 days a year!

However, we found that plenty of companies have some fine print (e.g. limited allowance until your 1 year anniversary). There have been plenty of studies showing that there are psychological barriers to taking holiday in a company where it is ‘unlimited’, sometimes leading to employees taking fewer days off. CharlieHR wrote an interesting account of how it didn’t work for them.

The majority of startups are offering comprehensive benefits packages. I didn’t find any trend that smaller companies offer fewer benefits. It really depends on whether the startup believes that benefits are a core pillar to attracting and keeping great employees.

Company quality

I looked at three publicly available ratings to gauge company quality: Glassdoor, Trustpilot and iOS reviews (if the company has a mobile app as a core product). The results are very positive!

The majority of startups have Glassdoor scores between 4/5 and 5/5. An incredible 27 startups scored a perfect 5/5. This compares to large companies such as GSK (3.8), BBC (3.9) and Amazon (3.8).

The majority of startups had Trustpilot scores between 8 and 10. This is no surprise as startups need an incredible product to grow fast and disrupt the large competitors.

The majority of startups scored between 4.6 and 5.0 in the iOS store. This is testament to the quality of the teams building products. (E.g. Revolut has over 250,000 reviews and a score of 4.9) These companies are fantastic places to work if you want to build high-performing and loved mobile apps

The output is very similar when looking at Play Store (Android) ratings

Founders

One of the excellent parts about working at a startup is that in 95% of cases the founders are still there. This cannot be said for long-standing corporates (where founders have retired or passed away)

Founders know their product, business and customers incredibly well. It is also value-adding when the founders have built another business before: it allows them to find similarities, learn from their mistakes, use analogies from other industries, etc.

Should you look for founders who have done it before? The data would suggest no. Only 25% of the founders I looked at had started companies before. The remaining 75% (first-time founders) are still running successful companies with many employees and great products. You’d be limiting yourself quite a lot by looking for founders who have done it before.

Unfortunately there is a big difference in the number of male and female founders. In the companies we looked at, there were 19 founders named Ben or Tom. There were also 19 female founders.

If this is a topic you care deeply about, check out Diversity.vc. They are doing some fantastic work to create a fairer and more diverse venture capital (VC) industry.